Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

More than 40 years of writing and drawing comic books has won George Pérez a slew of fans and countless compliments.

One of the greatest came when he was doing Wonder Woman, which he worked on for five years beginning in 1987. He met a female reader new to comics who enjoyed a recent story of his but expressed surprise that it had actually been written by a man.

Back then, he only had one wondrous woman to focus on — now he has nine.

Pérez's Sirens, a new six-issue Boom! Studios series launching Wednesday, marks his first original comic in more than a decade. It also has all the Pérez hallmarks: big-time adventure, an epic cosmic landscape and a group of great female characters.

Since Wonder Woman decades ago, he's wanted to tackle a book since with a strong female lead again, and his Sirens are "caught in a futuristic war that hopefully will allow me to explore a lot of themes from the POV of all these women: environmental destruction, genocide, prejudice, imperialism, love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, heroism, sacrifice, politics and even some commentary on the comics industry itself."

Sirens is a space saga with connections to various eras in history and the heroines from them, including the Roman gladiatrix Agony, gunslinging Wild West school marm Ammo and 20th-century maid/computer-construct Sherita.

They and the other Sirens once teamed to fight off a threat to their Terran home world of Earth, and they're brought back together in the future in order to change a reality that takes out humanity — although the rest of the universe has labeled them as terrorists.

The main plot takes place in space but he intends on using the time-jumping element to challenge himself to drawing certain historical settings, from Victorian England to feudal Japan to pre-statehood Arizona.

"I've never been particularly keen on drawing horses, so I deliberately put myself out of my comfort zone by setting part of the story in the old West," Pérez says. "I used to say that if I cursed the name of a writer while reading a script, I would likely become a better artist when I finish drawing it. George Pérez the artist hopes to curse out George Pérez the writer as many times as possible."

All the Sirens are based on real people, according to their creator, and while the characters they portray are totally fictional, some traces of the models' personalities may tie into how he handles the characters.

The design of the character Fanisha, who possesses magical abilities and a penchant for talking to dragons, was inspired by Pérez's wife, Carol, being a belly dancer and his niece Camille's recent work as a Mormon missionary inspired the backstory of Ammo, a former assassin whose religious conversion makes her reluctant to jump headlong into the galaxy-threatening battle of the first story arc.

Beyond that, Pérez says, many of the models are "dedicated cosplayers, those wonderful fans who dress up as comics and fantasy characters at conventions, so knowing that these folks will want to create costumes and play their own characters at conventions was a major motivator for the way I planned out Sirens. Talk about built-in promotional opportunities!"

The Sirens' leader Highness has a past relationship with the main menaces, the alien baddie Perdition and the enforcer Niada, Pérez adds, yet "they are a product of a bigger problem stemming from the colonization of alien worlds by the earth populace, and vice versa."

Large-scale stories such as this as well as his major mid-1980s DC Comics event Crisis on Infinite Earths are one of his claims to fame, so much so that he guesses "it's a Frankenstein monster that will forever control my destinies."

The hardest aspect about doing these is that, while he'd love to draw each panel as large as a widescreen movie, Pérez says, "I'm often forced to draw a lot of tiny panels due to the limited number of pages and the complexity of the story.

"To tell you the truth, while I do enjoy the grand-scale elements, it's the personal scenes, the character moments that I really find satisfying," he adds. "That's where I get to delve into the characters' minds and hearts. That's where they become living, breathing beings to me. That's what makes me care for them. Hopefully, the readers will, too."

When it comes to his secret for great female characters, he chalks it up to never having much interest in "stereotypically male pursuits — sports, carousing, bar-hopping," Pérez says. "Most of my best friends ended up being women, most notably my wife, and I learn a lot by simply listening. I find the female sex utterly fascinating and I love exploring what makes them tick."

Sirens is the first comic coming out of an exclusive deal that Pérez inked with Boom! a year ago. For him, the publisher offered him the chance to be creative again after beginning to feel unfulfilled with his former homes, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, becoming more and more driven by a corporate mentality.

"I was not recognizing the characters I grew up with and it seemed like the perfect time to branch out," admits Pérez, who's worked on A-list series over the years such as Superman, New Teen Titans, Justice League of America, The Avengers and Fantastic Four.

"Thanks to the substantial royalties I've been receiving due to all the merchandising and licensing of characters I helped create in my 40 years with the majors, I can afford to dedicate as much time as I want to making Sirens the book I hope it will be without fear of losing my house in the process. Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it — that's true bliss."