When I'm looking for a strong female character, or a strong character at all, I'm looking for a character that has a purpose in that story, that has an interior life of some sort. They don't have to be physically strong; they don't have to be morally strong or ethically strong, because men and women come in a huge variety of all of those things. Emotionally, ethically - I'm less concerned with that. I just don't want them to be props. That's the only thing that offends me.

One of the things about comics is people can linger on images and words as long as they want.

There's a difference between feeling like I don't need to explain and deliberately confusing you. If the impression is that I'm deliberately confusing you, that is not what I am trying to do at all.

My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn't as interesting as I'd like it to be.

There's a thing that creeps into this conversation ... that if you complain about the depiction of women [in comics], it becomes, 'Well, but ladies - the dudes are idealized too.' And the thing is that the dudes are idealized for strength and the women are idealized for sexual availability. It's very, very different. The women's costumes are cut in such a way that I could give a cervical exam to 90% of our heroines. And I don't have a medical degree! So if I can find it, that's impressive.

What I worry about is working in this serial medium, where people are talking about your stories before they're done, we have this instant feedback loop now. I'm very active on Tumblr and I have a very active engagement with readers and I love it, but I don't want to start writing to try to please someone else. I don't want my meter to get skewed.

I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed!