G Willow Wilson: The tensions surrounding the issue of Muslims in America and the way that we've been speaking about the Muslim community in politics made people take a step back and think and say, okay is this really a character that we'd want to show in a skimpy outfit or do we need to take a step back and say there's another way to portray this character. I think unfortunately for other characters in that same age range, nobody's taking that step back.
Jamie Broadnax: Welcome to Get It Right. You know us by now. We're the new podcast series from Rewire, analyzing pop culture through the lens of social justice. I am your host Jamie Broadnax, the managing editor of blackgirlnerds.com and the host of the Black Girl Nerds podcast.
Today we are incredibly excited to speak with G. Willow Wilson, one of the most important and prolific writers in the world of comics. She's currently writing the Hugo Award winning series Ms. Marvel for Marvel Comics, and her debut novel, Alif the Unseen, won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. She's also a practicing Muslim, like her character Ms. Marvel. We thought Willow would be the perfect person to talk to us about redefining what superheroes look like, believe in, and wrestle with, as well as the comic book industry's mixed report card on race and gender representation on the page and behind it.
Let's get into it.
Thank you so much Willow for coming on this show. This is so amazing.
G Willow Wilson: Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Jamie Broadnax: If you had to guess how many times you've had to recount your life story about how you got into comics in an interview, how many times would you have to say that?
G Willow Wilson: It's been a lot. If it helps other people pursue the comic book path and get excited about getting into the industry, then I don't mind talking about it. It's a great time to be in comics and I'm excited to see more voices in comics. If that helps people, then I'm happy to talk about it.
Jamie Broadnax: Would you mind terribly recounting some of those life stories one more time for us?
G Willow Wilson: Sure. Happy to. I've been a comic book person, reader, aficionado since I was 10 years old. In 5th grade health class they gave us this anti-smoking PSA starring the X-Men. You can find this thing online, I think it's called Smoke Screen. I'm not 100 percent positive about that. It features the X-Men rescuing this high school track star who's taken up smoking and it's going to destroy his athletic career. They swoop in and tell him to straighten out his life. It must've worked because I never took up smoking, but the thing that really stuck with me were these characters and their amazing costumes and abilities and their life mission of just making things
slightly better and using their powers for good.
I started reading the X-Men. I was super into the nineties X-Men cartoon, which was on Fox Kids.
Jamie Broadnax: Yes. The animated series. Yes.
G Willow Wilson: Yes. Oh my God I was so obsessed. It was like a religious experience every single Saturday to watch the new episode and those cheesy cliffhangers that they did. I would be on tenterhooks all week. It was just amazing. I've recently gone back and started rewatching it though and I don't recommend it. Keep it pristine in your memory.
Jamie Broadnax: I know because it was a really campy, cheesy show when you go back and watch those episodes.
G Willow Wilson: It was. Yeah.
Jamie Broadnax: Yeah. Did you ever read, because I was so hooked on the animated series, did you ever read the comic book that was based on the animated series?
G Willow Wilson: No. I read the comic books that the animated series was based on. Some of this since happened a few years earlier, but I went back and read the Chris Claremont X-Men, the Dark Phoenix Saga, all that stuff. Are you talking about X-Men 93? That one? The more recent one?
Jamie Broadnax: Yeah. It's called X-Men Adventures was the name of the comic book.
G Willow Wilson: Oh yeah. I heard about that one.
Jamie Broadnax: Yeah. That's how I got a huge major crush for Gambit. Gambit was like my first cartoon crush.
G Willow Wilson: Yes.
Jamie Broadnax: I know he came out-
G Willow Wilson: The accent.
Jamie Broadnax: His character was developed in 1990, so yeah, the X-Men Adventures put me onto Gambit.
G Willow Wilson: That's awesome. Yeah. Him and Wolverine, or specifically whoever that voice actor was for Wolverine, was definitely an awakening for me as a tween.
Jamie Broadnax: When I read Wolverine, I have that guy's voice in my head when I'm reading his words.
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G Willow Wilson: Right? Yes.
Jamie Broadnax: It really stuck with me.
G Willow Wilson: Absolutely.
Jamie Broadnax: Let's talk about Ms. Marvel. Your comic Ms Marvel is headlined by Kamala Khan. She's an awkward teenage Muslim girl of Pakistani decent and it's broken so much ground. Can you tell listeners who might not have read it a little bit more about her?
G Willow Wilson: Sure. Kamala Khan, as you've said, is a 16 year old Pakistani American Muslim girl from Jersey City who literally one night wakes up with super powers, which is the result of something called the Terragen Mist which causes people with inhuman genes to go into a cocoon and when they come out they change and they've got powers. You don't have to remember any of that, or know anything about it, to enjoy the series.
She, having these powers, has to figure out what they are, how do they work, and what do they mean for her, what is she meant to do with them. It's very much a coming of age story. It's about a girl figuring out not only who she's going to be as an adult, who she's going to be as a person, but also who she's going to be as a superhero and figuring out her persona, her costume, who she tells, who she keeps it a secret from. We get to all go along with her as she does all that and also battles mutated clones of Thomas Edison with the head of a cockatiel and various other bad guys who plague her home town of Jersey City.
It's fun, it's specifically meant to appeal to a broad age range and not to rely to too heavily on continuity so that people who might not be into the big superhero events can still get into it hopefully.
Jamie Broadnax: You've added a lot of cultural details to Kamala's story. What were some of the ones that you felt strongest about including?
G Willow Wilson: This was something that Sana Amanat, the editor, and Adrian Alphona, the original series artist, and I talked about a lot before the first issue even hit stands. We knew that this was something we had to get exactly right. There was a lot of attention on the book, there were a lot of varying expectations about what it was going to be.
what we all decided that we wanted the series to be very early on was authentic. Part of that was building in Kamala's flaws, the things that make her imperfect, to try to make her experience reflect as closely as we could and as compassionately as we could the real lived experiences of non-superpowered, but still awesome, Pakistani American girls growing up in our modern era.
That came with some choices. I wear the hijab, the head covering, but the majority
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of young Muslim American women, and particularly young Pakistani American women, do not wear the hijab so that decision was made early on that she would wear it in situations where it was religiously and culturally appropriate. You see her wearing one in the mosque, but that she wouldn't wear one in her day to day life.
Then there was the back story of her family and their relationships, which were also very important because we wanted her to be grounded, we wanted her day to day life to be a big part of the series. There's plenty of punching bad guys and whatnot, but there's also a big emphasis on her relationship with her friends and her family and how that changes over time. We needed her parents to be fully fleshed out, we needed her brother to be fully fleshed out.
What was important to me and to Sana was to show that American Muslims are not monolithic, that there is no one stereotype that fits everybody, and that, like all families, not everybody in the same family believes the same thing or behaves in the same way and that you can get arguments about what's right, what's wrong, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, but that it's done with the same kind of love and oftentimes hilarity that happen in all families. That was a big part of it as well, and also to just ground her in her environment.
We wanted this to be real Jersey City, not Jersey City that looks like it could be Vancouver. We, whenever possible, were using real locations, sometimes even real cross streets with the actual things that occur on that cross street, like the bus station at a certain place and a sign on a certain corner. It had to really be as real as we could make it within the context of this sci-fi fantasy world.
Jamie Broadnax: Wow that's awesome. This book is so popular with fans and it's one of Marvel's top selling books. Have you heard from fans who have been especially inspired or helped by Kamala's story at all?
G Willow Wilson: Yes. In fact that's been one of the most life affirming, wonderful parts of writing this book is to hear from fans and readers for whom Kamala has been especially meaningful. Sometimes those are young American Muslim women and sometimes those are people that I would never expect.
One of the most surreal and amazing experiences I had shortly after the book launched was I did a signing in a shop in Boulder Colorado. This super tall blond Viking looking dude came in with a big beard and he had tears in his eyes. He said, "I was Kamala as a kid." I was like, "That's interesting. Tell me about that." He said, "My parents were Polish immigrants. I had an accent as a kid, I went to school and I brought lunches that had a lot of things that nobody else was eating. There was a lot of cabbage, people told me my food smelled and that I was weird. In the scene where she says, 'Why am I the kid with the weird food at school?', I broke down crying because that happened to me."
What that really drove home for me is that you can't always tell what's going to resonate with people. You can't always guess what the audience for a book is going
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to be. I think it really pushes back against this notion that comic books about minority characters are only for that specific group or that they don't have a broad appeal. I think really what books like this are about is finding the universality in the specificity, it's finding those universal moments in that very culturally specific thing, which is really what all literature is. I think we put blinders on when it comes to books about non-traditional characters like this one.
Jamie Broadnax: That's so important, especially in this current political climate. Kamala Khan is really needed right now in comics. Has any of the rising tensions in the US impacted the way that you're writing Ms. Marvel?
G Willow Wilson: Yeah. I think it has. I think all art in some way is autobiographical, which is not a quote by me. I can't remember who said that originally, but I think it's really true. Whether you mean to or not, the things that affect you in your real life are going to come through in what you write or what you draw or what you act. I think that's certainly true for this book.
We've got issues baked into the series that are directly or indirectly connected to the larger issues that we see in our culture today, not just politically, but socially and economically as well. We had an arc about the gentrification of Jersey City that really seemed to resonate with people who are actually living in Jersey City where this is a very real issue. We try to deal with politics in a way that will be familiar to people who are reading the book right now, but also remain relevant to people who might be reading it 10 years from now, I hope, or 20 years from now.
It's really been about finding a balance between speaking directly to the things that are happening in the political sphere now, the xenophobia, the rise in various forms of racism, and the ostracism of people who are not part of the traditional political elite. It's capturing that and making it feel relevant and at the same time keeping it in the world of fantasy has been a really interesting tension and a really interesting line to try to walk. It's one of the challenges about this book that I really enjoy, but that also keeps me on my toes.
You want to react to what's going on in the world, but you've also got a six month lead time. A lot of the times something will happen in the news or on Twitter and I'm like, oh man this would be a great issue of Ms. Marvel. I'm like oh but I can't write it for another six months. It's an interesting juggling act for sure.
Jamie Broadnax: Kamala Khan is such a popular Marvel character for women of color. A new character that was recently developed, Riri Williams, for Iron Man has caused a lot of conversation on social media. I know you're on Twitter a lot. Recently there was a variant by J. Scott Campbell of Riri Williams. Many people, including myself, thought that the image looked very sexualized. I wanted to get your opinion on this since Kamala is around the same age as Riri and she's never been drawn that way.
G Willow Wilson: Yeah. I have been paying attention to this because it is an interesting issue. I think what it really shows is that for a long time in comics there was a default mode
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about how people, and women in particular, were portrayed. There's a rut that's very easy to get into and hard to get of where this is just how they look, this is how comic book characters look. They've all got DDD breasts and they're always running around in midriff tops and that's how it is and they've all got eight packs.
I think the difference with Kamala, because of the tensions surrounding the issue of Muslims in America and the way that they're portrayed and the way that we've been speaking about the Muslim community in politics, made people take a step back and think and say, okay is this really a character that we'd want to show in a skimpy outfit, or do we need to take a step back and say there's another way to portray this character. I think unfortunately for other characters in that same age range, nobody's taking that step back and saying is this really how a 15 year old girl would look, is this really the kind of image that we want to portray? I think it's being stuck in that rut and not asking those questions.
What's tough, I think, about situations like this is that these portrayals I think are often not done out of malice. When questions about them arise there's a tendency on behalf of certain people to get very defensive and to say they didn't mean it, it's not meant to be offensive, it's not meant to be objectifying, it's just what we do. It's how comics are, it's how everybody in comics looks.
I think one of the things that we all really need to be conscious of right now is that things are changing and that the audience is changing and that this is not just a default anymore, that people want to see books that reflect something real and something genuine. When people get called out about this stuff, reacting defensively doesn't really help. It doesn't further the conversation. Yeah.
It's an interesting position to be in because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus and be like somebody is a terrible person for having a specific idea about how a cover should look.
Jamie Broadnax: Right.
G Willow Wilson: I think it's worth thinking about. Everybody in the age of Twitter is going to meet up with questions that they might not have gotten 10 years ago or 20 years ago where it was you and your most hardcore base of fans in a room. You're going to get those outside questions and that's a good thing. That's a positive thing. I get them too. What it does is it refines your art, it forces you out of your comfort zone, it forces you to consider other perspectives, other opinions.
I think any artist or writer or anybody working in the arts is on a track of wanting to constantly improve, or should be on a track of wanting to constantly improve and refine and get better. I think it's a mistake to react to these things defensively.
Jamie Broadnax: Wow. Thank you for that answer.
G Willow Wilson: Sorry that was a long ramble.
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Jamie Broadnax: No no. I'm just like preach Willow, preach. Creators need to hear this and when fans critique and give their opinions, especially when these fans are women and women of color, you should listen instead of getting defensive. You nailed that. Thank you for articulating that to us.
G Willow Wilson: Absolutely, yeah.
Jamie Broadnax: What would you like to see change or improve in comics over the next five to ten years and how can the industry get it right?
G Willow Wilson: I think that the thing that most urgently needs to happen is not on the page but off. I think we need a greater variety of perspectives and people writing and drawing these books, and also editing and green lighting these books. We talk a lot about the need for diversity among creators, I think what we don't talk as much about is the need for diversity among the gatekeepers, the editors, the people who are saying yes and no to certain storylines. That really is where most of the magic happens and the decisions get made. I think remedying that will go a long way toward making comics more accessible to more people and telling stories that I think bring us into the 21st century and show us things that we've never seen before in the pages of comics.
I think, and I talk about this a lot, as great as it is to see diversity on the page, if it isn't creating opportunities for real flesh and blood people, then it's not doing 100 percent of what needs to be done. That to me is really the next step, is finding new storytellers to tell new stories. I'm happy to see that slowly but surely that's happening. As a result we're getting some of the most fantastic and thought provoking and wonderful public intellectuals in America who are now writing comics. With Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay and I hope there will be more. Naomi Klein if you're listening, please come write comics.
To me that's a great sign. That means that the medium is really evolving and coming into its own as an art form and being taken seriously as an art form. That's great. That's going to be great for everybody. I just hope we see more of that, more creators, more stories of perspectives that we have not seen before.
Jamie Broadnax: Thank you Willow so much for coming on the show. By the way guys, she said it was okay for me to call her Willow.
G Willow Wilson: Yeah. People who only know me on the internet often call me G because they're used to seeing my name instead of saying it, but I do go by Willow. I'll answer to anything though honestly.
Jamie Broadnax: Thank you so much. This was a great chat. I really appreciate it.
G Willow Wilson: Thank you for having me on.
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Jamie Broadnax: Thanks so much once again to G. Willow Wilson for taking the time to join us. I cannot recommend her work highly enough. You guys have to get it. Please check out Ms. Marvel. Trust me on this, it is one of the best books that are out right now. Vixen's Return of the Lion is a classic, as well as check out her novel Alif the Unseen. We'll have more on the world of comics in a few weeks too. Oh, and a quick note. That Iron Man with Riri Williams we discussed. After this interview was recorded, they pulled it. That's right. Thanks to everyone who spoke up about it online.
Now we've gotten an awesome reception for the show and we're so grateful, really really grateful, but we need more reviews and ratings on iTunes y'all. Go on iTunes, Google Play, and other podcast sites. Seriously go look. We have thousands of downloads, but only a handful of reviews. Please, if you like this show, we want to hear from you.
Also, you can check out my other work at blackgirlnerds.com and The Black Girl Nerds podcast. Check out some video footage that we have captured from New York Comic Con on our YouTube channel, which is blackgirlnerds.com/bgntv.
Get It Right is hosted by me, Jamie Broadnax. The show is produced by Marc Faletti, Rewire's director of multimedia. Editorial input provided by senior reporter Jenn Stanley and oversight by Jodi Jacobson, Rewire's president and editor-in-chief.
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