To read part one of this interview, click here.

Greg Rucka's comics are dominated by female leads, from WHITEOUT to FELON, from BLACK WIDOW to QUEEN & COUNTRY, from ELEKTRA to his forthcoming run on WONDER WOMAN. Why the preoccupation with female characters?

"Because I'm a great big girl's blouse. Is that the phrase?

"There are a couple of reasons. I like women more than I like men, for the most part. I think you get an immediate dramatic dividend, because whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it, we are still a predominantly universally sexist culture, and especially, I think, in comics, things tend to shift to a male perspective, and if you have any doubt about that, pick up any comic book and notice the chest size, and then notice the lack of a bulge on any male.

"I'm a guy, and I've lived my whole life as a guy, and the experience of walking down a street at two in the morning for a male, alone, and walking down that same street at two in the morning for a female are universally different experiences. That one fundamental can change everything. Exploring those things, that's something fairly compelling to me. I think I understand guys and I understand that I have very clear ideas of what it is to be a man and to try to be a good man and things like that, so for me there's a question of exploration, that's part of it.

"And there are other things. ... I like strong female characters, they appeal to me, I think they're sexy, I think capable women who are not afraid to speak, I find that very attractive.

As well as exploring gender, Rucka has often dealt quite frankly with matters of sexuality, such as in WHITEOUT's homoerotic undercurrents, Tara Chace's self-loathing pursuit of sex, the current storyline in GOTHAM CENTRAL and the bondage themes in BLACK WIDOW: PALE LITTLE SPIDER.

"BLACK WIDOW is not about sex," argues Rucka, "It's about what the nature of the bondage scene is. The bondage scene isn't about sex, it's about fantasy and it's about trust. The games are all trust games. If you talk to anybody who is involved in those games, one of the things they talk about is the freedom of the surrender, because you know that this person is going to take you only so far as you're willing to go - or only so far as you can go, which is probably farther than you think you're willing to go - and then they'll bring you back."

In WHITEOUT, Rucka and artist Steve Lieber created a homoerotic tension between his two leads, federal marshal Carrie Stetko and intelligence agent Lily Sharpe. He explains that it's a standard feature in the 'buddy movie' story.

"There's a moment in HARD BOILED where Chow Yun Fat and this Tony Leung character, they're in the morgue. Huge gunfight, they're sure they're going to die, and it's a quiet moment between more scenes of radical ballet super-violence. ... And they look at each other meaningfully, and it's one of those moments when you're thinking, just kiss him!

"There's all this homoerotic tension that we see in these buddy movies. BUTCH AND SUNDANCE - Emma is there as a beard, because it's a love story about these two guys and what they do for each other. ... Or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, the moment when Luke and Han at the beginning are saying, take care of yourself, and there's another of those meaningful pauses, and Han says, 'Hey Luke, man, may the force be with you'. Just say 'I love you', it's not going to kill anybody!

"WHITEOUT was very intentional. ... I was going to write a buddy story, and I had two women, and I wanted homoerotic tension. And it became a little more overt again because Steve and I were collaborating pretty openly. ... Steve started putting Easter eggs in. There are a couple of keys in the art early on that I remember people responding to. THE DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR coffee mug."

In MELT, however, Carrie buddied up with a man, and things got a lot steamier. "We got a lot of flak over that. I think there were two things. One was, I think there were a lot of people who had invested in her being gay - and incidentally, her having sex with a guy doesn't mean she isn't - number two, those are people who seem to have conveniently forgotten that she'd been married.

''I was going to write a buddy story, and I wanted homoerotic tension.'' "Nowhere did I say she's gay, nowhere did I say she's not. What I really wanted was the fight or flight effect. You put people under extraordinary stress, and ... our baser, more animal urges emerge. It was important to me that it be clear that Carrie initiates it and it's on her terms. That for me was important because that's who Carrie is. She's someone who will go after what she wants when she wants it, and if she's in the middle of an emergency shelter in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf in the middle of a blizzard nearly dying, and there's a guy next to her, I don't think you could really fault her for trying to get a little warm. But there were a lot of people that reacted really angrily."

In QUEEN & COUNTRY, lead character Tara Chace has shown a similar tendency to turn to sex under pressure, as with her one-sided romance with fellow minder Ed Kittering (he was the one in love), or the scene in MORNINGSTAR where she picks up a stranger in a bar after being blocked from a mission to Afghanistan.

"What I wanted in the sequence is two things. One, it's showing how much trouble Tara is in, and how desperate she is to feel something and to feel like she's exerting some control. The other aspect is that it's juxtaposed against this poor woman who is executed in the middle of a soccer pitch in Kabul.

"Her crime is, she showed an ankle - and that's an actual execution. I downloaded this avi file that RAWA [The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan] had smuggled out. This poor woman, shot through the head, and people running up and throwing bricks at her, including other women.

"In a story that I think liked women less, that would have been the foreshadowing part. She's now going to die because she's had sex. She's had sex on her own terms, therefore she must die, the libertine! And that's not what the message there was, the message there was, look at the freedom she has, and how in this instance perhaps she is abusing it by abusing herself, and then look at this blameless, guiltless crime that this woman commits in Kabul, that she dies for."

In GOTHAM CENTRAL, a police procedural book set on Batman's home turf, Rucka has 'outed' Detective Renee Montoya, a character he also wrote in DETECTIVE COMICS.

"Renee was always queer to me. From the moment I met the character, she was gay. And the story that is running now, I always knew I would tell it. ... She's outed because that's part of the story. Not the whole of the story, just part of it. Why did I 'make' her queer? I didn't. I know there are people who won't accept that, who won't buy it, but that's the only answer I have. As far as I'm concerned, she's always been gay."

The Montoya story follows a number of gay themed stories in comics, including the hate crime story in GREEN LANTERN, the addition of Northstar to UNCANNY X-MEN, and Marvel's controversially stereotyped reinvention of THE RAWHIDE KID. Isn't there a danger that audiences are going to get sick of it?

"God, I don't know. One of the things that really worried me was the firestorm that surrounded RAWHIDE KID. I'd been planning this story - writing this story - for almost five years. And it seems to have reached the page at a moment of, I don't know, I suppose universal gestalt.

"But, you know, if audiences are sick of it, well, they can always read something else. Asking that, saying, 'isn't it time to give it a rest', that's bullshit. That's like saying, hey, don't we have enough black characters? Enough women? The answer is no, we don't. Fiction reflects life. Life is not het. Life is not white. Parts of life are het and white and male. Not all of it."

In addition to GOTHAM CENTRAL, Rucka is about to take over writing WONDER WOMAN at DC. So why is he adding an outdated pseudo-feminist fetish icon to his repertoire?

''As far as I'm concerned, Montoya's always been gay.'' "That's a fairly simplistic way of looking at the character. That's the 'adolescent power fantasy' argument. Why write Wonder Woman? Because the character has merit. Because she is iconic, and for more reasons than the prurient ones. And as for that 'fetish' being outdated... not by a longshot, bub.

"My goal - and my job - on the title is to show you how I see her. She is the most political character in superhero comics today. The only character so well positioned to speak about the world, about how we live, how we treat one another.

"And she is a hero, and there is always room for stories about heroes. Wonder Woman stories are not easy stories, and the character fails when writers try to make them easy stories. Her stories are not - and should not be - about beating up bad guys, about deflecting bullets, her stories are, ultimately, stories about... those people who tell us what we don't want to hear. Martin Luther King Jr. Ghandi. Christ.

"Yeah, I know, I'm gonna take a hit for that last one. But Diana's mission is an altruistic one, and unlike, say, Superman, it's a Hearts and Minds mission. She wants to change the way the world acts."

Rucka is also adding a male lead to his repertoire; none other than the ultimate macho man, Wolverine. What persuaded him to get caught up in the X-Men mess?

"Well, I'm not in the X-Men mess. That's one of the appeals. Axel Alonso made it clear from the start that what happened in X-Men continuity wasn't going to be my concern. So that was a big help. The greatest appeal, honestly, was the team. Axel editing, Darick [Robertson] drawing... I really couldn't say no to that. So that was the first factor.

"And then there's the honest-to-God cool appeal of Logan. It's the same thing as being given the opportunity to write a Sergio Leone western, to write Eastwood's Man With No Name.

"I think, topically, Logan appears as a pretty shallow male-power fantasy. Not that there's much wrong with that, as long as we see it for what it is. But if you really start to look at the character, what's been established, what's been said, there's some incredibly compelling, incredibly rich material there. ... At his core, his issues are very Traditional Male Iconic Issues. Or so it seems to me.

"There's a het male paradigm - certainly an American one - that I suppose is best summed-up by that John Wayne line, 'A man's got to do what a man's got to do...' - though when I think of Logan, I don't think of John Wayne, I think of Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON. The need, and the desire, to step up and speak for what is right - be it moral, ethical, legal - and the conflicts that come from trying to maintain a sense of honour, even when it would be far easier to stay silent. Logan, for me, is all about his actions, very little about his words."

Rucka's interpretation of the character will be battling in reader's minds for a place alongside Hugh Jackman's fan-pleasing performance in X2. Does he feel the actor did the character justice? "He's a fantastic actor - and I love the fact that he's a song and dance man, as well - and he plays Logan sincerely. My only complaint with him is that he's too damn good looking. Logan, to me, isn't handsome... he's sexy, but he's not handsome."

''Topically, Logan appears as a pretty shallow male-power fantasy.'' As Greg Rucka is working on high profile characters at both Marvel and DC, he inevitably has his own views on the revived feuding between the two companies. "I think it's great for the industry. I think DC needed a kick in the pants, I think Marvel provided it, I think Marvel will continue to provide it. I think anything that gets the two largest companies into a position where they have to take risks on what they're publishing is good. That's how we get new readers. That's how we keep the industry and the art alive. We have to reinvent.

"Do I personally have opinions on certain people's behaviours at both companies? Of course I do! Is there any need for me to comment on it? No. Suffice to say; they both know what they're doing. In particular there's a real urge to paint [Marvel president] Bill Jemas as an idiot. Bill Jemas knows exactly what he's doing, every time he does it. Mouth does not open without him knowing exactly the result he's going for. Now, whether or not he gets the result he wants, I can't speak to that, but he is a very smart man, so is Joe Quesada.

"Dan DiDio, who has come on board at DC, is one of the smartest people I've ever met in the industry, and what he's talked about doing at DC is terribly exciting. So, in that environment, I think the only people who are gong to lose are going to be the readers, and that's because they're going to want to read more books."

Rucka is concerned, however, that the risk-taking could take a back seat at both companies thanks to the recent movie successes. "Because of the success of the SPIDER-MAN movie in the states, Marvel is going to find themselves settling into a position where their response is, that would be great, but we'll have to see about the media rights.

"You can only go so far with Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman, because all those characters are owned, and they're owned out in Hollywood. It's all well and good to chop off Aquaman's hand, it's much harder to chop off Diana's, especially when Joel Silver is producing a Wonder Woman movie. You cannot do things to the characters when there are people who are thinking about spending literally thirty, forty million dollars on those characters.

"And in that sense I'm very small, I'm nobody, why should they listen to me saying, 'I know what's best for the character'?"

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

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