Gail Simone, best known for her most excellent run on Batgirl, has announced that she will be relaunching The Secret Six. 

“It’s so fun to write these characters that are really poor role models,” Simone told Hero Complex in a recent phone interview.

Rather than “brightest heroes or the darkest villains,” the book lives in the gray area between, with “private detectives, mercenaries, bounty hunters, failed heroes,” she said.

Prior to the launch of the New 52, Simone wrote a Secret Six title that can only be described Shameless in tights, with a group of a dysfunctional miscreants that have no business being in each others lives, but manage to have meaningful, if complicated relationships in spite of their own toxic personalities. Details on the cast of our new Secret Six are sketchy at the moment, but we do know that former Batman villain Catman and goth magical teen Black Alice, a character described as “more powerful than she is mature,” will be in the mix. Catman, who Simone revealed on her Tumblr in October 2011 as bisexual, vowed at the time when she brought him back it would be part of the canon. Gail confirmed that this would indeed the case.

“You’re going to see right away kind of what Catman’s about,” she said. “I don’t want to reveal too much just because it is part of his character and part of his story to unfold these things through the story.”

Simone expressed excitement for the opportunity to work with Dale Eaglesham whose character designs are “so smokin’ and so hot,” and Ken Lashley (Superman: Doomed) who will be responsible for the book’s interior art.

“He draws the fiercest heroes, the creepiest villains, and that whole spectrum from Metropolis sunshine to Gotham’s deepest shadow,” she wrote in an email Wednesday, after DC confirmed he would work on the title. “I can’t wait to see what he does with comics’ dirtiest wild bunch!”

Starting December 3rd, Simone will bring her special brand of dark humor to a new rag-tag group of rakes and rogues. We can’t wait to see what kind of shenanigans they get up to, but Simone did hint that they would be facing a major question that she describes as the “Twin Peaks of superhero comics.” What is the secret?

[Source] Hero Complex