There’s nothing like a perfect plan coming together. You need the right talent, the right timing and the ability to compromise against impossible circumstances. That’s the kind of tension that Greg Rucka, writer of Gotham Central, Wonder Woman, Checkmate and so much more, has always thrived under. This month, he’s returning for his latest job: Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Justice League, a supervillain heist comic the audacity of which the DC Universe has never seen before. We got the privilege of grilling him on how he got this crew together, the nature of the prize and his point of view on Wonder Woman’s most personal nemesis.

If there’s one genre I will always personally turn up for, it’s a good heist story. How do you approach creating the perfect heist?

That’s a good question because this was the first time I really sat down to write a heist story. I’ve written a lot of mystery and mystery-adjacent stuff, and espionage and so on. In that, I tend to be more of the American private investigator school, as opposed to the more British/European “cozy” school. Which leads to the investigation being a linear, procedural process that is less about puzzle solving, as oftentimes it is in some classic cozies. A heist is sort of a reverse mystery.  It’s got to be absurdly difficult to do this.

If it’s not enough to figure out how to rob the bank, the question becomes how are you going to rob the bank when the bank security system is an omniscient AI, when magic is something that exists in the universe and the good guys know how to leverage it, when the World’s Greatest Detective is on the board of directors of said bank, and next to him sits this woman who it’s next to impossible to lie to and has the wisdom of Athena, and next to her is this guy who can literally just look down and see what’s going on in the vaults? Your heist is only as good as the difficulty in accomplishing it.

What can you tell us about the score?

The first issue reveals what Cheetah goes to Cheshire with and says they’re going to steal—which is the Power Bank, the device from The Atom Project that allows heroes to back up their powers. Once you introduce the idea that you can take Superman’s powers and put them in a box as a backup, somebody’s going to hack that! And the second the villains get a whiff that something like this exists? They’re going to be falling over each other trying to get it.

This is Cheetah going to Cheshire and saying, “We have to move fast if we want to get in first. And then, once we have it, all bets are off. Think of what we can do with this thing.” Not simply withdrawing Flash’s speed for a few hours, but controlling the bank to rent you these powers. It’s such a great MacGuffin because it’s something everybody’s going to covet.

You’re returning to some past favorites here on this series, like Cheetah, who was the source of a tragically heartbreaking character arc in your 2016 Wonder Woman run. Where do we find your take on Cheetah now, and what can we expect from her next?

I’ve said before that good villains, especially in the DC Universe, have pathos. Your heart should break for them a little bit. Whether their original sin is of their own making or not, the decisions that lead them to villainy are understandable. They may not be what you and I would do, but we can see how jealousy would drive to certain decisions, pain, abuse and so on.

Barbara Ann’s sin is envy. She is so smart and so gifted, and then she met Diana and it wasn’t enough. She needed that. She needed to know what it was like to be touched by gods. And that ultimately places her in a situation where she’s manipulated into embracing Urzkartaga—who is this very poorly defined plant god who has a cheetah avatar. In canon, if you look at Urzkartaga, he wrote the book on abusive husbands. She’s supposed to be “married” to him—she is his wife, or one of them, and it is not an equitable relationship. She is a slave to his whims and his desires, and his whims and desires are such that she has to eat human flesh to survive. This gets glossed over a lot with Cheetah. People forget this bit. She has to engage in cannibalism and she’s not a fan of that, as you might imagine.

She is required to perform certain acts for his pleasure. It’s an intolerable situation, and that’s where we find her at the start of the series.

That brings me to the other half of the billing here. Cheshire is a character who is…a bit of a challenge to sympathize with. Usually, when she comes up, it’s in one of two contexts: she’s either Green Arrow’s ex-sidekick’s kid’s mom, or the mercenary who nuked a country that one time. How do you carve out her personal identity here?

Oh, I’m going to say something that’s going to piss people off, I’m sure. When I looked at Cheshire, I went, “So there’s really no character there. What there is, is a prop.”

She exists to service other storylines. Primarily storylines in the Arrow side of things. Primarily the storylines around Roy. Okay, that’s a fine place to start from. She’s Lian’s mom. And then you run into some really problematic things, like genocide. So, figuring out how to walk this tightrope with her, which is she can’t be crazy—we like Lian, who is also in many ways a prop, we mostly see her through that lens of Roy.

A lot of what this is, a lot of what we’re working from, is we’re seeing the stuff that we don’t get to see. Normally when we see the villains, we see them doing their villain things. We always see the villains in the context of the heroes. This is what the villains are doing when they’re not doing something in front of the heroes.

That was the other thing I was really entranced with. Cheshire and Cheetah are friends, and how and why that happened is a different story. But it is a given that they know each other, they are parts of each other’s lives, they trust each other, they like each other, they hang out when they have the opportunity. They get together and have coffee.

Let’s talk more about this heist crew. Much like Cheetah and Cheshire, you personally must have gone through a long list to figure out who does and who doesn’t make the cut.

Oh, I was in Australia when I was putting together the team. I was staying at Nicola [Scott]’s. Literally sitting there with her Encyclopedia of the DC Universe, flipping pages, going, “Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.” And then, typing up a list to send editorial to ask, “Can I use? Can I use? Can I use?” and getting back, “Can’t use, is dead, is off-planet, is doing another thing.”

There were some choices made. The one we fought for was Klarion. I got Nicola on the book with Cheetah. She was intrigued by Cheshire, but she’d done that. The second I was like, “We need somebody for magic,” she was like, “KLARION!”

Who happens to also have a cat familiar!

Yes, and there was a moment where, in the email chain with [editors] Rob Levin and Jessica Berbey, Nic and I were going through the roster, and Rob came back with, “So, if we don’t use Klarion—” and Nic’s next email was, “I am doing this book for Klarion.” And with Klarion, we get Teekl.

We have Hazard. I thought initially I was going to use Gambler and Hazard. I was going to have grandpa and granddaughter, but it actually wasn’t necessary. And looking at what Becky can do and thinking, “We can tweak powers, coming out of Absolute Power and the All In stuff. What if we tweaked her just a little bit?” And then I realized I might have made her one of the most dangerous people in the DC Universe.

We’ve got Lian in the crew.

But there is a question of how involved she is, for obvious reasons. Cheetah is sort of the cool aunt to Lian.

You establish that really nicely by Cheetah having a nickname for her that nobody else uses.

Yeah. One of the things I really like about Lian at this moment is she’s already costumed up. She’s already fought crime. And she’s how old? Maybe sixteen? So maybe, a little teenage rebellion? Maybe a little curious what it looks like over here?

And finally, we have a new character. Her name’s Alya Raatko.

That’s a familiar last name.

We’ll let people do the math there. And she goes by the name “Featherweight.” Because when Cheshire sees her for the first time she goes, “She can’t be 100 pounds soaking wet.” She’s the muscle and I’ll leave it at that.

This series has some of the best art I have ever seen from Nicola Scott. I’ve got to know how you were able to pull this out from each other.

We’ve been collaborating very tightly on this. I wrote the first three issues in Australia, and I think I wrote all three of them while living in her house. So, she would be in her studio doing her thing, and I would be in the front room at the dining table working and I would literally walk into the studio and go, “So what about this? How do you want to do this?” Nic sits there and perks up like, “What about this idea?”

For no other reason, people need to pick up this book just to watch Cheshire’s wardrobe change. Nicola literally made the decision at the word go that Cheshire has a sense of style, and she is always wearing a different outfit.

What really impresses me is the level of texture she brings to Cheetah’s fur, for instance.

That was one of the other things that she responded to pretty strongly. There’s an undeniable sexy factor to the cat-woman. But Nicola really wanted the feral character back. The edge of that savagery needs to show because otherwise it takes away that sense of a curse. It’s a horrible situation she’s in!

That actually does bring me to my last question. Whenever I interview talent for DC.com, I like to solicit the official DC community on Discord. I try to figure out what their most burning question is and I ask it. Here’s what everybody wants to know:

How do you believe Cheetah really feels about Wonder Woman?

Oh, she’s madly in love with her. And she will never, ever be able to recognize it or articulate it because the jealousy, the envy and the reminder of “I am never going to be that” is always going to blur her vision. The tragedy is that if Barbara Ann ever went to Diana and said, “Please help me,” Diana would drop everything to do it. In a heartbeat. But Barbara Ann will never ask her for help. She will never ask her for a thing.

Diana is her Icarus story. She flew too close, and she got burnt. And she continues to get burnt. That relationship should be as tragic as the Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne relationship. It should be, “We’re so close, and so capable of such great things together.”

And it’s a flaw in, arguably, both of them because Diana doesn’t see it. She has the wisdom of Athena, so if she doesn’t see it, it’s maybe because she doesn’t want to. She didn’t want to see jealousy in Barbara Ann, so she never addressed it. She never found a way to confront the green-eyed monster that was eating Barbara Ann up. So maybe there’s a tiny bit of guilt on Diana’s part too, that only makes it more tragic. You absolutely can hate someone you’ve never loved. Let’s just say it’s a specific kind of hatred that arises from a love that has been broken, corrupted, denied, or in some way perverted.
 

Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Justice League #1 by Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott and Annette Kwok is now available in print and as a digital comic book.