Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Yes, the Bechdel Test. It's named for Allison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes.
I used to be good at clothes shopping and whatnot - at least ,I think I was! - but at some point after two kids and a career that worked out better than I ever could have imagined, I looked up from my desk and realized that I wore the same three t-shirts and 15-year-old jeans every day.
I don't think working in superheroes is slumming it. I'm proud of this form. I like this. There's nothing inherently masculine about power fantasies. There's nothing inherently masculine about superhero comics. There's nothing inherently masculine about mythology. About science fiction.
I'm not particularly good at page layouts. I make an effort to stay out of the way of the artist. What I'll try to express instead is, 'What we're going for here on this page is the idea of the containment of these women's bodies. So I want them framed as though they're bursting out of the panel borders.'
Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.
Everything that feminism stands for is everything American, white, red and blue democratic. It is all the same stuff. So, I am boggled that I should have to give up this term that encapsulates what I want for my children, for my world, culture, brothers and sister because someone else thinks it means I don't shave my armpits.
Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.
If there was any creature in American culture more derided than the young girl... I know people will argue with me about that, but everything girls are into gets ridiculed. I have a lot of compassion in my heart for girls in their teens and twenties who are going through this particular passage, because I get it. It makes sense!
With Marvel, I obviously don't own the characters, so there are levels of approval to go through. But I'm very seldom told no, and never without reason. Maybe I've just been lucky; I don't know, but I don't think it's as frustrating as people generally imagine. I act as though I own it all while I'm writing, I think. I hope, anyway.
I do make some conscious efforts to write female friendships, intergenerational female friendships. I make a conscious effort to include things that I see as important real parts of my life that are not reflected as much as I think they should be in popular culture. We very seldom have the opportunity to see women compete and remain friends.
One of the things I enjoyed when working in manga was when I couldn't tell where anything was going because there weren't narrative tropes and structures I was used to. After doing it for seven years, I got to the point where I did see structures. I did start to learn, but at first I didn't know where it was going. It was very exciting for me.
What I worry about is working in this serial medium, where people are talking about your stories before they're done, we have this instant feedback loop now. I'm very active on Tumblr and I have a very active engagement with readers and I love it, but I don't want to start writing to try to please someone else. I don't want my meter to get skewed.
I was asked in an interview once: You're writing another book with a female lead? Aren't you afraid you're going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as? Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads?
I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed!
When I'm looking for a strong female character, or a strong character at all, I'm looking for a character that has a purpose in that story, that has an interior life of some sort. They don't have to be physically strong; they don't have to be morally strong or ethically strong, because men and women come in a huge variety of all of those things. Emotionally, ethically - I'm less concerned with that. I just don't want them to be props. That's the only thing that offends me.
There's a thing that creeps into this conversation ... that if you complain about the depiction of women [in comics], it becomes, 'Well, but ladies - the dudes are idealized too.' And the thing is that the dudes are idealized for strength and the women are idealized for sexual availability. It's very, very different. The women's costumes are cut in such a way that I could give a cervical exam to 90% of our heroines. And I don't have a medical degree! So if I can find it, that's impressive.
The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard.
Comics are reflective of what's going on in larger culture. Wonder Woman came to be in her position when women were first entering the workplace in numbers during the war. Then Wonder Woman had another rise in the '70s when Gloria Steinem latched on to her as an icon for the [feminist] movement. I think we're seeing another wave of feminism today, a fourth wave characterized by intersectionality and the internet. And I think it falls right in line that we would see another wave of superheroines coming to the fore.