When I first came to comics, it was, like, dudes. The feeling, the air, the presence is overwhelmingly male.
— Marjorie Liu
I don't want it to be a mission, but of course I always love to see more diversity in comics. I always love to see more women.
My solo series, in some ways, have been rarely truly solo.
I'd like to go back in time and haunt Robert Louis Stevenson during his years in the South Pacific.
Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world - and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.
I love writing romance, along with science fiction and fantasy - and my books usually meld all three to some degree.
I don't think X-23's past is the most interesting thing about her, but it's not like she can escape it, either.
Timing is irrelevant when it comes to desire.
Every single girl in the world has had to fight to have herself heard, to have space, and to have a self in societies that try their best to deny them all three.
Male heroes are entitled to particular privileges, and why not the women as well?
Because there are almost no men in 'Monstress,' we're focused completely on women. It's removed from traditional structures.
We're not accustomed to giving women the space to express the full range of emotions and flaws that men are permitted. Anger and aggressiveness aren't part of the scale of what is acceptable behavior in women, whereas men - in reality and in fiction - are allowed a much fuller range of emotion.
We've been conditioned to be incredibly avoidant. 'I'm afraid I'll be called a racist if I say something wrong,' is the familiar retort. Well, okay, that's scary and difficult, but staying silent, avoiding the issue, doesn't mean that racism goes away.
As creators and as readers, we need to always be pushing it - by looking for the books, looking for the artists and people and stories to support what we feel to be a better representation of all women. Of real women.
Comics writing is for your artist. It's not for the general reader; it's for the artist. So I love writing scripts for artists.
If you tell people what everything is before they have a chance to experience it, then I feel like it's a much different experience.
I'm a writer and a feminist of color, and I've written complex, powerful women for my entire career. I'm just one voice, but there are many others like me.
Word of mouth is the saving grace of us all. If you love something and you think your friend will love it, just talk about it.
I think we worry way too much about where books should fit inside genres. In a romance, the hero and heroine are on a journey together, and no matter how awful it gets, by the end of the book they'll be in love, with the probability of a happy ending.
As a writer - and a romance novelist, no less - I've always found it a bit odd when characters in comic books remain in relationship limbo for years at a time.
We imagine 'the end' as a world-devastating event, but every time there's a terrible earthquake, a tsunami, an outbreak of disease - that's apocalyptic, on a micro-scale.
I don't write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they're a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You've only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?
It's great we have a female Thor. It's great we have a black Captain America. But those are just optics; it's optics of change... Unless you have the structural diversity, the structural change behind the scenes - more women, more people of color actually calling the shots and editing these books - those optics won't last.
My dad is Chinese, and my mom is a white American, and they married only ten years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Imagine that. Marriages between people of different races - now common and accepted - were illegal in many states up until the late Sixties.
As a writer, I find that a good way of evolving a character is through an examination of his or her defining relationships - and what's more defining than a relationship with someone you love?
Sana Takeda is a genius. It's really that simple. Her vision and sense of story and beauty is beyond compare. I loved working with her on 'X-23.' I knew, though, that she could do much more beyond the constraints of a traditional superhero story.
I wanted to be her; I wanted to write her. Red Sonja became anchored in my imagination like a mountain.
Take 'Ex Machina.' Everyone said it was one of the great feminist works of science fiction. But what I found disappointing is that everything about the main female character is defined by men.
In my solo series, I feel like I've often dealt with groups of people.
We like to imagine that women would do a better job of ruling the world - and I'm one of those optimists - but women aren't a superior kind of life form just because of our gender. We're awesome but not perfect. We're human. Just like men.
A novel is 400 pages; it's an endurance race. There's no artist, so I have to describe everything. It's all prose. Whereas with comics, I can rely on the artist. It's really wonderful to have that collaboration and to not always feel the burden of describing everything myself and also just to have someone who can paint the world.
I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.
Individual writers can certainly make a difference, but they are working within a system, an institution, that still holds tremendous power over whose voices are heard and whose voices are rewarded.
Finding the voice of a character, no matter who it is - from Black Widow to Han Solo - is the first and most important hurdle for me to cross in any work of fiction.
I think when you look at the diversity of the readership, all the different people who love comics, I want comics to reflect the real world, and I think Marvel does a good job of trying to do that, but I don't think there's ever an end point when it comes to creating diversity and creating stories that people can relate to.
We all know that I love writing Gambit.
It's very scary to become someone new, to take that path less followed.
The greatest enemy one ever faces is one's own self.
There are many different ways to express intimacy - a look, a touch - and I think it enriches the characters and stories when you create those moments and then build on them.
I could be shooting myself in the foot, but in some ways, I feel I've said all I've needed to say when to comes to, say, the 'X-Men.' I think I've hit the bright points, I think I've hit what I wanted to hit, and I can be happy moving on doing other things.
Marriage isn't the end-point of a relationship. It's just a stepping stone, one aspect of a long-term evolution between two people who have, for whatever reason, decided to take a leap of faith and say, 'Well, hey, this is a person who I want to try with for the rest of my life.' Which is not a guarantee of perfection - far from it.
Every single girl, whether we want to recognize it or not, is a warrior.
A dark, fantastic adventure set in an alternate 1900s Asia, 'Monstress' is buried deep in the supernatural. It's a story I've wanted to tell for a long time - it just took me awhile to put all the pieces together.
I was always into fantasy characters, stories of magic, but after Red Sonja, I became obsessed with the persona, the image, of the warrior woman - the sword-wielding, defiant, fearless woman.
As women, we have to deal with constant threats of violence. And it's in our media and fiction, too. So we internalize it.
I can't control what a reader takes from a story.
If men disappeared tomorrow, we'd still be having the abortion debate. If men disappeared tomorrow, there would still be racism and conflicts over religion.
I love writing comics too much.
I don't think of myself as having any freedom when it comes to how 'Monstress' is structured and how the story is going because a comic book has to be even more tightly structured than a novel, because there is no room for mistakes. Once the art is done, the art is done.
Women have been writing strong women characters for a long time - hello, Maxine Hong Kingston! - it's just taken mainstream comics a really long while to catch up.
