I first met Reverend Susie the Floozie at the Comic-Con International: San Diego in the early 1990s. Here was this short redhead with a killer body and a verbal delivery that demanded attention. As she waved a chiffon scarf in the air and snuggled up to me like a spoiled Persian cat, I knew I was in the presence of a true original. And I'd see her the next year, and the next, but only briefly. I'd hear this husky voice and there she'd be, with the same chiffon scarf, wisecracking and utterly charming and when she'd hug you - well, those boobs got my attention and the envious stares of every damn man in the room. Then she'd dash off and I'd have to wait another year to see her.

I always wondered what the hell she did, but when I found out she was writing the text to the new Paradox Press book, The Big Book of Wild Women, I was on that phone so fast to Heidi MacDonald you wouldn't believe it. She isn't just Susie the Floozie, she's a professional and has worked really hard on the research for this book. Ya gotta love 'er!

FLEENER: We're going to talk a little bit about you and a little bit about this Paradox Press book, The Big Book of Wild Women -- is this your first comics project?

FLOOZIE: Oh no, no. I've been involved in comics since the Earth was cooling, almost -- but from the other side, as a letterer and editor. I've done some writing for magazines but this is my first stab at comics writing. I must've picked it up from osmosis or something, because I didn't exactly know I could do it.

FLEENER: Who were you lettering for?

FLOOZIE: Yikes! This is like a Carbon-14 dating -- why not just chop me down and count the rings around my trunk? [Laughter.] I was in the vanguard of the graphic novel thing that happened in the 1980s, the early 1980s. I worked on Lightrunner in 1983, for Donning/Starblaze. Then on Micra for Comics Interview publications... that was just in time for the black-and-white comics bust of the late 1980s. I must be the queen of timing.

FLEENER: Who was the brains behind The Big Book of Wild Women? Did you pitch it or did they come to you?

FLOOZIE: Brains? Me, brains?! I don't know about that... [Laughter.]

FLEENER: OK, then: who was the boobs behind this idea?

FLOOZIE: It was, appropriately enough, a wild hair on my part. I go galloping off on tangents with ideas and then I wake up suddenly in the middle of a whole big magilla -- "Oh shit, what am I into?" -- and then it's time to put up or shut up, and this is like that. But desperation's always been a rich source of creativity for me, so it was the perfect climate to work in. I was a big fan of the Big Book series, and ate them all up. They're the best toilet reading on the market.

FLEENER: I know, I own them all myself. I love 'em -- you can just open any page, it's like the Bible, you can open a page to a passage...

FLOOZIE: It's like the Bible of toilet reading. You can go from "Jesus wept" to a whole chapter - it's in these nice palatable increments. [Laughter.]

But even with the amount of stuff they've covered, I realized they were missing a lot of opportunities. When I considered what the opportunities had in common, I realized they didn't have a lot of wild women in the Big Books line. Now, first and foremost, I'm not a feminist, y'know -- although as far as medical science can tell, I'm pretty damned female. But XX chromosomes are apparently as far as it goes, because I'm sui generis -- yep, ol' one-of-a-kind Susie Generis [laughter] -- and as such, I've been treated as an outsider among women, so I have a unique, detached perspective on them. I don't think I've ever found my sex, and not being accepted by either gender and being a little crazy and having had a past as a stripper, by virtue of -- right, "virtue" [laughter] -- of a lot of other factors, I have been a penny-ante wild woman in my time, and I thought, this is exactly what the Big Books line needs, some really big broads. So I sent in a proposal out of the blue and to my utter shock and horror, they went for it.

FLEENER: What was your criteria in selecting your subjects?

FLOOZIE: For Wild Women, the standards had to be iron-clad -- and low: off the radar of respectability. This isn't a book about feminist heroines, the women in this book are... well, I had to totally cut out the ones that were just too flat-out noble. My editor, Heidi MacDonald, has been an utter saint in dealing with this book because in many ways, some of these women violate her principles, I mean some of these hell-bitches absolutely ream out the feminist ideal - especially the strippers. But in a way it's fitting, because this illustrates the dichotomous relationship between wild women and their own gender. The fact is, while they're irritating to feminists, wild women are still women, and we're all still basically going after the same goals against the same repression. The wild women have just resorted to a different kind of ammunition.

FLEENER: Sex.

FLOOZIE: Yes, quite often... and even though they were utterly devalued and degraded because of it, you can't argue that it wasn't skillfully used! [Laughter.] In a lot of ways, people are regarded as throwaway items in our culture and treated with smug, dismissive contempt, especially the wild women. Geez Louise, they even call us "trashy" -- how much more obvious can it get?!

I've got a weakness for our culture's discards, things that are regarded as throwaway items. A case in point is in the radio show I do -- I exclusively use records from thrift stores, ones that people figured were utterly worthless and just tossed... that's where the real gold is, for me, the stuff that's been dismissed and shoved into some dark, forgotten corner, whether it's people or music.

So the book became a mission for me -- I wanted to give these poor unsung broads a fitting pedestal from which their monument would moon the whole damned world. Now there's a soundbite for ya.

FLEENER: Let me ask you, what makes a woman "wild"?

FLOOZIE: What makes a woman wild? It's basically... sometimes wild women by themselves don't have much power, but you put them in an easily shockable climate with people who just have the brakes on too damn much, and then--!! Wild women don't have a brake pedal! [Laughter.]

It's the ability to upset the status quo that gives them their power, and what unites them is their discontent.

FLEENER: It's like this: a woman goes to a party, she puts on the tightest dress she has, she knows it's gonna attract attention and piss off the other women but at least someone's creating a buzz and doing something outrageous -- livin' a little!

FLOOZIE: Yeah! And for some dumbass reason, other women take it personally, like it's a shot fired across their bows -- and instead of inspiring abandon on everyone's part, the wild woman gets stabbed in the back and ostracized while everybody tightens up even more. Talk about stupid! It's not a fucking competition - we're all window-dressing, so let yer freak flags fly!

And wild women fly 'em with a vengeance, baby! They're not willing to exist in just boring, black-and-white terms. They want to go into the infrared spectrum; they want to make a splash. Spike the flatline.

FLEENER: I enjoy being around these kinds of women because they usually have a very good sense of humor. They can laugh at themselves.

FLOOZIE: That's the difference with wild women. The ability to laugh at the things that hurt. The pain, the discontent -- goddamn, but it hurts like a motherfucker!

But wild women aren't gonna sit back and bitch about it, they're going to get out there and kick some ass to break out of that pattern and not care about the response of the society they're stuck in. The stakes were unimaginably higher in, say, the Victorian era -- God, then you get someone like Victoria Woodhull, who campaigned for the presidency on a platform of free love, short skirts and vegetarianism--! You know she was out to tear down some damned walls!

FLEENER: I read her biography. In the late 1800s, chicks could be arrested for wearing pants in public.

FLOOZIE: No kidding! They were trying to slow us down, but it didn't work! [Laughter.]

Like Lola Montes -- she went out of her way in the 1820s to smoke wherever she wanted and to screw her way through every royal court in Europe, getting kicked out of every country in the process. She was the mistress of mad King Ludwig and Franz Lizst -- the list goes on. She blazed a white-hot trail of scandal and shame through the early 1800s and then wound up reforming at the very last moment. She became a Christian and tried to convert prostitutes and she's buried in Brooklyn! [Laughter.] Let that be a lesson to us, Mary!

And then we've got the trailblazers from the Sexual Revolution that happened within our memories, like Rusty Warren. That was a time when a woman really put herself on the line to be branded a slut -- you know, the dangerously loose women who actually dared to say, "Hey, I enjoy sex!" Gasp! [Laughter.] "I don't care, dammit -- I'm gonna wear this, I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna smoke this -- I don't care!"

And after everybody was getting done clucking their tongues at them, they'd been elevated to Goddesses, in my eyes. They're absolutely iconic.

FLEENER: They sure are, because they're doing what everybody else wants to do -- let's be honest!

FLOOZIE: And my reaction to that has always been to join in.

FLEENER: Me, too!

FLOOZIE: I live for creating an atmosphere of abandon where other people can just follow my example and say, "Fuck it! Whoo-hoo!!" It's been my lifelong heritage, and I wanted to put this lore in book form to pass along before it's all swept away in the trash of the pre-Millennial past.

FLEENER: Describe your research method to me. How did you find out all these things about wild women?

FLOOZIE: Like pulling teats. [Laughter.] It was sometimes an uphill fight. I had a real bug up my ass to prove something with this, because if I dropped the ball, everyone would blame it on my genitals for some stupid reason. [Laughter.]

I had much more than a mere man's job to do when I woke up and realized, "Oh shit, they went for it, now I've got 175 pages to deliver!" I knew I'd have to do a crippling amount of research on this and thanks to the local library -- for some of this I didn't have a car, so I was walking three blocks and just living up there and carrying books. My butt was up to my shoulder blades from carrying books, but in the middle of all this I ruptured my disk, not from the mountains of library books -- but between that and the surgery it slowed me down because I really wanted to be able to turn out a book that would kill and in record time, too, but I managed not to do that.

FLEENER: You've been working on this for about a year and a half, right?

FLOOZIE: About two years. The back surgery took about a year out of my schedule. Some of this was done while I was in agony -- and/or totally bombed! [Laughter.] And since I went into debt doing this project, now that everyone thinks I'm rich, I'm going to have to go out and get a job just to catch up on my bills.

At least I got paid something for this, since everything else I do seems to be a labor of uncompensated insanity on my part.

FLEENER: I wanted to ask you about this radio show you do...

FLOOZIE: Ah, yessss... my preferred medium... radio!

I love it because I don't have to dress for it -- I can do it butt-ass naked and no one can stop me! [Laughter.] Actually, it's probably one overweening reason I've become such a total recluse in recent years, because I can be alone in a room with safe, recorded company, and I don't have to deal with mixing with that dangerous human element out there... damn, I love it!

For the past eight years, I've done Bob's Slacktime Funhouse every other weekend for Georgia Tech's station WREK Atlanta 91.1 FM. The show and I are both connected with The Church of the SubGenius, the only true saucer-cult out there -- hey, we've got a faith that's strong enough to sit on! [Laughter.] Plus we go to a pagan nudist colony every July to party and wait for the saucers to come down... and then when we regain consciousness, we think up excuses as to why the fuckers were late and prepare for the next year. I tell ya, those alien bastards'd better show this year. Hey, I ain't getting any younger in this damned gravity here!

The Funhouse is zooming up on 400 shows by now -- and I've done fully half of those by myself, alternating each week with a succession of co-hosts. I don't know how I do it any more than I know how the fuck I wrote the book -- I'm Rain Man with tits. I just keep slugging away.... And as long as I have 100 feet of thrift-store LPs to plumb, I'll keep editing together those evil little shows of mine. It's like a session on the shrink's couch for me, combined with beating off with the curtains open.

FLEENER: Oh, that's a showstopper!

FLOOZIE: Yeah -- I don't care if they look in, just don't let me know or it'll break my concentration. I don't go out of my way to get listeners, so it gives me the freedom to do some really visceral stuff. The show is definitely an acquired taste... kinda salty, now that I think of it.... [Laughter.] But my real target audience is local drunken pseudo-hipsters going from bar to bar who get in their cars at 1 a.m. Saturday nights and turn the ignition and this Godawful shit pours out of their speakers, stuff they can only half-remember the next day, like some horrible repressed memory. Now that's radio! [Laughter.]

I don't get RealAudio myself, but it's kept in the archives for a week at a time -- you can check out on the web at www.WREK.org... if you dare. I don't just do a Susie DJ-type thing; every show is a different premise, a different set-up, some sort of horrible scenario to frame the material -- which was perfect training for this book, because there's 59 different stories.

FLEENER: How did you get hold of the artists for The Big Book of Wild Women?

FLOOZIE: Unfortunately, I didn't have much latitude there -- most of that has been done through DC. I've made suggestions, and sometimes they've gone for them, sometimes they haven't. I'm on tenterhooks about some things, like Tura Satana's story -- I want that one to be so perfect because Tura is just so--!! [Speechless laughter.]

I'd really wanted Mitch O'Connell to do the Tura story, since he's been the artist on all the other projects I've done with her and she loves his stuff. It just killed me when I found out he didn't get the Tura story -- but on the other hand, it's because Mitch is doing the cover.

FLEENER: Perfect! Perfect!!

FLOOZIE: Mitch is just, so--!! [More speechless laughter.] It knocked me out to find out he's doing the cover. He's the fucking master. His innate understanding of wild women just shines.

FLEENER: I think he understands wild women 'cuz he's a very good-looking guy. He's not the typical 40-year-old virgin comic geek.

FLOOZIE: I understand he's been nailed by a fine woman but, hey, the rest of us can still whoop like brazen animals at him! [Laughter.] You know, things have changed now, and in this millennium, men are going to be our sexual objects. The high heel's on the other foot, dudes! Hey, if they didn't want the attention, they wouldn't dress that way! [Laughter.]

FLEENER: I always thought the way guys dressed in the 1970s was so obscene, but no one ever addresses it -- they always talk about the bra-less look and the jiggle factor. What about the "sack factor"?

FLOOZIE: It sure helped kielbasa sales in heavy disco areas! [Laughter.]

FLEENER: Tell me about The Church of the SubGenius. Were you one of the original members?

FLOOZIE: Just about -- I read about them in Weirdo #1 and sent in my $10 ordination fee but I didn't run into anyone else connected with the church until 1991, so I ran rogue for the first 10 years of my Priestesshood, living the philosophy: "Pull the wool over your own eyes, and relax in the safety of your own delusions...." That beautiful philosophy actually helped me survive, gave me a feeling that somebody else was sharing the frustration, looking at life and saying along with me, "Hey, wait a freakin' minute -- this sucks, and nobody's pointing that out!" Discontent seems to rule my life, and discontent is a main unifying force of the members of The Church of the SubGenius. Life is just too fucking bleak to get through without hope of a punchline. But SubGenius does it right - Jim Jones tried to give the same thing to his flock, but the punchlines were just too goddamned long. [Laughter.]

FLEENER: Back to the book -- were any of your candidates too wild?

FLOOZIE: Yeah, darn it. Because of the -- ahem -- rarefied tastes of most mainstream distributors, I couldn't do some of the women I really wanted to cover, like Annie Sprinkle and Traci Lords, because I knew I was going to have to soft-pedal that content so much that it would've compromised everyone concerned, from the subjects, to me, to the readers. But I knew someone along the distribution line would've just shat ceramic over it if I'd done them, so regretfully, I had to X them off my list.

FLEENER: Traci Lords is understandable but Annie Sprinkle's famous onstage gynecological exam could possibly be tastefully drawn... couldn't it? [Laughter.]

FLOOZIE: "Hey, you didn't have to say it twice!" -- "I didn't, that's an echo!" [Laughter.]

Uh, I would've had to compromise myself too much with those chicks and... look, you can work blue, Mary, and I admire you for it, you tart! [Laughter.] But the fact that there were limits -- they just made me a little more insidious and subversive. I actually like having to think my way around restrictions. Like with my radio show, where I've actually thrived under FCC censorship rules. "Hey, thanks, guys!" I had some risky stuff to work around in the book, but I'm relying on the filthy minds of the more perverted readers to fill in the few off-panel blanks.

FLEENER: From when does the earliest story date -- Roman, Egyptian ...?

FLOOZIE: Man, all these broads run together in a bug squishy bunch -- even I have trouble remembering them!

It goes back to the dames at the dawn of time: Cleopatra, Hypatia, Tomyris -- the queen that slew Cyrus the Great, the ruler of the entire known world at the time, and they still don't like to mention her in history books. I found out about her by accident while researching some other subjects and her story kicked the required amount of ass to make the cut. When Cyrus slew her son and tried to take over her kingdom, she swore that if he did not retreat, he'd have his "fill of blood" -- and she made damn good on her word, too. She's not mentioned much in the history books, and the ways in which she's dismissed are very pointed.

The feminists are right that history is very prejudicial. I had a hard time finding out the truth about a lot of these women, and the fact that it was covered up just made getting to the real story that much tastier.

FLEENER: When you'd exhausted the library, did you turn to the Internet?

FLOOZIE: Hell, no! The Internet sucks! [Laughter.] I hate technology - give me books!

That's how I found Tomyris, for example, because I was thumbing through a book looking for something else -- and when I'm not looking for something is when I find it.

The Internet is like looking at a whole house through the goddamned mail slot -- sitting there like a freakin' vegetable, waiting for a screen to pop up, with no sidestream input coming in... that passive inactivity enrages me, and if I relied on the Internet for this book, there wouldn't have been the interconnective leaps that made it really special. The Internet -- don't talk to me about the Internet! [Spits.] Gimme a stick and some dirt any day -- I don't care if it doesn't make an acceptable carbon! I'm not ashamed of belonging to the past, because that's when things were really wild, damn it!

FLEENER: Did you want to say anything else, Reverend?

FLOOZIE: Yes, it's an ugly world and I'm here to document that in appalling, laughable detail. What higher calling is there?

FLEENER: Amen.