[Kidman] Women have compelling stories, and women are compelling creators.
[Amanat] There was something about the superhero world that just felt like me.
But I did not look like any of the girls and the women that were featured in there.
[Magruder] This whole notion that you can identify with a character,
I couldn't really understand.
I can't even imagine the impact that might've had.
I need to write women, 'cause there aren't enough women,
and there aren't enough women writing women.
I thought to myself, "I wanna read a story that's about a girl
because if it's about a girl then the girl can't lose."
People are drawn to characters where something about them resonates.
[Amanat] Superheroes are supposed to be these positive ideals.
Those are the images we internalize and we compare ourselves to.
The hardest thing is choosing to look like yourself.
[Amanat] I grew up in a small town in New Jersey.
I had three older brothers, a really big family,
and we were probably the only Muslim family in that town.
It was a predominantly Caucasian community.
It was a great childhood, but it was still one where I was a little bit shy
and definitely very awkward and definitely felt like an outsider
in so many different ways.
I very much was an introvert.
I was in my room drawing, writing my own stories,
playing with my Barbies
very much in my own world, in my own imagination.
I tried to play with my cousins and my brothers a lot.
You know, I was the girl,
and I couldn't, sort of, do the play-fighting that they would do,
and I couldn't really tackle like they would be doing.
So they'd say that I could be on the side and be the cheerleader.
And that made me real mad.
I got into the superhero world and the comics world through my brothers,
mainly my oldest brother, who was a big sci-fi fan, big comics fan.
And he had a collection of comics. Like, just stacks and stacks of comics.
There was something about the superhero world.
As fantastic and high-octane they are,
there was something about it that just felt so much like me.
I discovered the X-Men cartoon in the '90s,
which was, like, the big awakening for me.
It was about these young people
who were still coming into themselves, figuring out who they were,
but also had these struggles, and they found a way
to make their insecurities into these really incredible strengths.
And when I was very young, that's something that deeply connected to me.
I didn't realize at that point that it was a thing that really boys only liked.
I just loved that they were cool characters
with really amazing stories that I connected with.
[Robbins] Starting in the late '40s, my girlfriends and I all read comics.
All kids read comics.
So, as soon as I was old enough to cross two streets
with my allowance clutched in my hand, I would go to the corner candy store.
And they had a rack that said, "Hey, Kids! Comics!"
And I basically bought any comic that had a girl on the cover.
But not a girl being rescued by a guy, but a girl in command.
A girl starring on the cover.
There were so many comics to choose from.
Sometimes when my mother would go to the store
I would read comics off of the spinner racks.
So I would read cowboy comics and the occasional Superman.
But I found that Lois Lane irritated me because she was constantly trying to prove
that Clark Kent was Superman instead of getting out and doing reporter things.
There were 70 million regular comic book readers in the late 1940s.
That was over half of the US population were reading comic books,
and they were reading a lot of comic books.
And the readership was really 50-50 male-female at that point.
And this was largely because the genres were really, really wide-ranging.
[Kidman] Women played a significant role in the workforce in the 1940s,
particularly during World War II.
This country relied on the labor of women to keep the home front moving forward.
And you see that in comic books as well.
[Robbins] There were amazing women of comics but who nobody knew about
because when the guys write books about comics,
they just wanna write about Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the Hulk.
Timely Comics was what became Marvel Comics,
and they had a whole group of superheroines
who each had their own title.
Tarpé Mills was a newspaper cartoonist,
and she drew the first really important superheroine,
costumed action heroine, Miss Fury.
Marla Drake was a socialite
who puts on this panther skin and becomes Miss Fury.
It's very film noir, and Marla Drake looked exactly like Tarpé Mills.
She put herself into her strip.
It was like her own fantasy life.
It's kind of a cliché to say it opened a new world to me, but it did.
It opened a world to me.
Then the industry crashed, pretty intensely, in 1954 and 1955.
Comic books were accused of endangering America's youth.
The only way that you can really stop this kind of thing
is to arouse public opinion.
If the people in a section decide they don't want
these horror and crime comic books sold, read by their children,
if they will become adamant and vigorous about it, that is the best guarantee.
So they brought comic books up in front of Congress.
There were hearings.
[radio host] Good afternoon from the federal courthouse
in Foley Square in Downtown Manhattan.
WNYC is about to bring you the afternoon session of a Senate subcommittee
on juvenile delinquency investigating the effect of comic books
on the increased rate of juvenile crime.
[Kidman] And after that, a code was created to restrict comic books.
And that is pretty much when everything changed.
Readership dropped by about half over the course of just a single year.
And the industry was really struggling to figure out what to do from there.
These publishers had to figure out how to stay afloat.
And because Marvel had its own distribution company,
they were able to actually stay in the business
longer than a lot of these other companies who were falling left and right.
They had to think about which comic books were the most important to them
and the most likely to succeed.
So they decided to focus on a demographic they could count on,
and this ended up being young or teenage boys.
And they found tremendous success with superheroes.
And as they focused on these Silver Age superheroes,
all of these other genres gradually started to fall away.
I like Spider-Man and Avengers,
Flash, Iron Man and Hulk.
They're nice comics.
[Magruder] I was always that kid in school that was drawing.
It was something that became a vocation for me.
My mother took us to the library, like, all the time,
and I would just get out stacks and stacks of drawing books,
and those were instrumental for me in learning how to draw.
It was such a fight when I was younger and I wanted to take this art path,
and my mother really didn't get it.
And she was also experiencing a lot of pressure from our community,
from friends and family who didn't understand and who were telling her like,
"When are you gonna make Nilah stop with this art hobby of hers?"
So we fought a lot leading up to high school graduation.
You know, my mother wanted me to major in accounting or computer programming,
but that first year after I graduated, I didn't go to college,
because I was so adamant that I had to get into an art program.
Eventually I got into Ringling College, into their computer animation program.
And it afforded me the opportunity to do things with art
I'd never done before, and it was pretty cool.
But I didn't actually start reading comics until manga started coming over.
And as much as I loved them, I noticed this trend
in that there's usually one female character,
and if she were to fight,
if she were to go up against a guy, specifically, she would always lose.
And the expectation for a woman in comics
is that they're bubbly and likable and upbeat,
so that when the male character is experiencing doubt
and when the male character is having all his angst and feelings,
it's the woman who supports him and helps him to save the day or whatever.
So, you don't get to see very many female characters be vulnerable
and be unlikable and have depth like that.
And that's, kind of, what interests me about female characters.
And I thought to myself, "I wanna read a story like these
that's about a girl because if it's about a girl then the girl can't lose."
["It Would Take A Miracle" by Otis Mable playing]
Twenty-five years ago, 1961.
Now there's a notable year. John Kennedy became president.
Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
The bikini became fashionable, and Marvel Comics made its debut.
[Duffy] There's the story that Stan's wife, Joan, said to him,
"Stan, why don't you just write something for yourself that you're going to enjoy?"
And that's when Stan first did the Fantastic Four.
[Robbins] The early '60s was when the Marvel renaissance happened,
with these new superheroes who really were new and amazing.
You know, there had never been superheroes who had issues, who had problems before.
I mean, Spider-Man's costume would rip, and he would have to sew it up by hand.
I loved the Human Torch because he was a teenager,
he drove hot cars, he was blonde,
Jack Kirby made him look crazy, crazy handsome,
and he was just somebody I could relate to more,
plus being able to fly and have fire powers.
So cool.
I had no idea they were considered to be for boys.
That was quite a shock to me.
When I got to a teenager and girls would be like,
"Oh, you have to talk to my boyfriend. He likes comics."
I was like, "Well, why can't I talk to you?"
"Well, I don't read comics." It's like, "Yeesh."
And, uh, it didn't occur to me, even when I got into the business,
that I was getting into a field
where almost none of the creator credits were girls.
There was a token woman here,
there was somebody's girlfriend there, there was somebody's wife there,
but women weren't doing this.
[Steinberg] Oh, Stan. Do you have a few minutes?
[Lee] For our fabulous gal Friday, sure. Say hello to the fans, Flo Steinberg.
[Steinberg] Hello, fans. It's very nice to meet you.
As Marvel's corresponding secretary, I feel as though
I know most of you from your letters.
[Robbins] Flo was there from the beginning.
Everyone adored Flo, and she was like a fixture.
She would personally answer the letters. She took care of all that.
With her adorably unique voice and her absolutely charming manner,
everyone loved Flo.
She lives forever in the memory of Marvel fans.
So everyone knew Fabulous Flo Steinberg.
[Duffy] Back then, there were only a handful of women in comics.
There were none of them writing or drawing any regular superhero books at the time.
You know, Paty Cockrum and Marie Severin, two of the greatest artists,
and they were both doing production art in the office,
instead of out there on regular series where they belonged.
[Robbins] You know, they called her-- I don't know what they called her,
Mirthful Marie, or something awful like that,
and she did always put on this happy face, and she didn't push.
She would not have even drawn comics for them.
She was just doing erasing and fixing of pages until 1966,
when Esquire wanted to write an article and they needed someone to illustrate it,
and all the guys were too busy drawing the Hulk.
So Marie said, "I'll do it."
And when it came out, Martin Goodman saw it and said,
"Hey, she can draw. Stan, give her work." And he did.
She never pushed. She never asked for work.
[Brigman] Marie was really versatile,
and I think she did a lot of design work for Marvel
that she's never really been given credit for.
And I think she was just too busy doing what she did
to really be concerned with any kind of gender politics.
Even if there had been gender politics,
I think she would've just been like, "Eh. I've got deadlines."
[Simonson] Marie was just extraordinarily talented.
It's mind-boggling to think about the number of characters she worked on.
What sort of career is this for a grown woman?
It's a riot. It keeps me young. [laughs]
Getting the idea is easy.
The tough thing is saying to yourself, "Okay, I've got an idea for a character,
but now what can I do to this character to make the readers care about 'em?
What haven't we done?"
Publishers were trying to do whatever they could to build an audience.
So there were lots of experiments,
lots of efforts to reach out to different audiences,
to do different kinds of genres.
[Duffy] In the 1970s, comics were in the doldrums.
The companies were not really supporting the comics.
There was no money to be had,
and the only people doing them were people who just loved comic books so much.
[Robbins] In the early '70s,
Stan Lee did make an attempt to bring back superheroines.
And most of the writers were women.
He did The Claws of the Cat.
And, oh, my God, Night Nurse.
And he did Shanna the She-Devil,
and also, um, there was one other-- Oh, Ms. Marvel, of course.
[DeConnick] All right, so Carol Danvers.
So 1968, Carol Danvers makes her first appearance in Marvel Superheroes #13.
She is a supporting character that later moves to the Captain Marvel title.
She is a woman security officer for the air force,
and she stays that way for a number of years.
And then, in 1977, Gerry Conway and his then wife, Carla,
launched Ms. Marvel #1 which elevated Carol Danvers.
Carol is caught in the blast of a Kree Psyche-Magnitron machine,
and it transfers the powers of Captain Marvel
into the body of Carol Danvers, and she becomes Ms. Marvel.
And so she has all of his power set but also amnesia and a "seventh sense,"
which is my favorite.
I think it was supposed to be women's intuition.
We just kinda let it die away.
For Carol, her formative wound was
her dad is a construction foreman, and he has two older boys and her,
and, basically, can afford to send two of them to college
and figures Carol's just gonna get married anyway,
and he doesn't wanna waste the money.
And so, she actually joins the Service in order to get college paid for,
and that's where she kind of finds her agency.
That's where she learns to fly.
And so, that was really good because the thing about Carol is just--
She's like, "Higher, faster, further", right?
She's always pushing herself.
Reach always exceeds grasp.
She always wants to do more than she can, and she's trying to prove to her dad
that she's just as worthy as the boys.
When I got out of college and was ready to look for that all-important first job,
the people at Marvel knew perfectly well who I was
because I was an obnoxious letter-column person
who was always dying to tell them how to do their jobs better.
They hired me in December of 1976, which was six months after I got out of college.
What they needed was somebody to return artwork to the artists, and I was like,
"Job at Marvel Comics? Ding, ding, ding, ding! Sold."
So while I was doing art returns, I wrote some little five-page stories
that were auditions for me, and I would get my try at writing.
And then one of the assistant editors left,
and the job opened up, and I kinda slid into it.
The agreement is always an assistant editor will get to write a book.
And, somehow, that was never me.
Finally, when I was like,
"Hey, there are assistant editors you've hired since me
who've got one or two books a month to write each.
When am I gonna get mine?"
And that day they said,
"Well, who's the most over-committed writer we have?
Oh, that would be Chris Claremont."
"Well, Chris is writing Ms. Marvel.
So, Jo, how about if you take over Ms. Marvel?"
And Chris said,
"You're not getting Ms. Marvel away from me. I love her.
Give Jo Power Man and Iron Fist."
And I was like, "Suits me fine."
"Ms. Marvel I could take or leave,
I love her costume, but I've never related to her as a character.
But Power Man and Iron Fist I'm crazy about.
I loved Bruce Lee. I love big, strong, tough guys.
I never missed an issue of either of their books when I was a fan.
Give me Power Man and Iron Fist."
Under my run, it became quite successful.
It went from near cancellations bimonthly to healthy monthly.
And, suddenly, Power Man and Iron Fist was maybe better handled by somebody else.
So, as a result, after Power Man and Iron Fist,
suddenly it's like, "Jo, Star Wars looks like it's moribund.
How about if you do that next?"
But how I coped was by never trying to get near anything
that was some boy's childhood best friend he would kill me if I tried to write.
-[Amanat's mother] Hello, Sana. -Oh, my God!
-We are moving in. -Oh, my...
-Are you ready for us? -I don't want you to move in.
Look at the luggage.
Why did you bring so much?
-I told you I had everything. Come. -No, it's, uh... [stammers]
-You know... Wisdom. -We have plans.
Okay.
And this is all your pictures...
-Oh, wow. -Hopefully, hopefully.
All right, so, Abbu, do you want tea or something?
[Amanat's father] Anything that you give.
-[Amanat] Can you tell? Where is that? -Brilliance of the Seas. This was in...
-Mediterranean, some years ago. -Okay. You have chance here to talk a lot.
So I thought I'll put this picture here so she can--
She put our picture of the wedding day over there.
[Amanat's mother] We grew up in a very international environment in India,
in Bombay.
You know, this was just when the riots of partitions were just over.
It was very multicultural, very British-style everything.
That's how we grew up. Accepting everyone.
I think I somehow, directly, indirectly,
I passed on to my children in story forms,
know your identity yet appreciate others.
[Amanat] There was a moment.
It was the first World Trade Center bombing back in the '90s.
And, afterwards, this kid came up to me, and he was just like,
"Hey, can you tell your people to stop bombing us?"
And I was so confused, 'cause I'm like, "Who? My what? Who are you talking about?"
And I realized that there was
an actual issue when it came to Muslims in the West,
at a very young age.
I must've been 11 at that point, maybe 12. Eleven or 12.
And I think that was the moment where I was like, "Oh, I am different.
And not only am I different, I think that people don't like it.
I think that people don't like that I am who I am."
[Amanat] I went into college thinking I was going to be a journalist
or be an international lawyer.
I was gonna change the world, heal the divide between the East and West.
I had this really innate desire to change people's perceptions
and change people's perceptions of Muslims,
and I thought the only way to do that was if I was a part of the media
and I was telling the stories and building the narrative.
[food sizzling]
My parents were always very supportive of everything that I wanted to do.
I think my mother has always been like, "Try to do something practical."
She was the one who had told me,
"Don't depend on a man. Get a job."
Which is the polar opposite of probably every South Asian mother out there.
And my father was always more about the broad mission statement of
always doing something good, whatever it is that you're working on.
And so I thought,
"Okay, be an international lawyer. Start affecting policy in a real way."
I was studying for the LSAT, and I'm like, I'm doing something
that I think I have to do to be able to make these big, impactful changes,
but it's fundamentally not who I am.
Thank you.
I got a job at a small indie comics company called Virgin Comics.
My first job was technically, like, editorial assistant.
I had a tough experience because
I genuinely did not feel like I was good at it.
And a lot of it was because some of the feedback
I had gotten by people in the community,
because I didn't grow up reading comics the way that they had
or I didn't have this sort of comics IQ that was necessary to be a comics editor,
perhaps I didn't have what it takes to be a good editor.
And that was hard because I internalized that a lot,
because I didn't know if I had what it took.
I didn't read everything. I didn't know everything.
And quite frankly, I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in comics.
MacKenzie Cadenhead is who mentored me in my first job in comics,
and she really wanted me to stay in the industry.
She's like, "You just have a natural inclination to storytelling,
to visual storytelling, to comic book storytelling,
that I haven't really seen before, and it would be such a waste for you
to just do away with that and forget about it."
Her husband, Dan Buckley, at the time he was publisher at Marvel,
offered me a job, but I told him.
So I said, "Look, I'm a little nervous because I don't think I can do
what some of the editors who've been around forever can do.
I don't know everything. I don't know if I'm gonna be able
to be a strong enough editor."
And he's like, "Look, that is totally fine with us
because you're gonna give us something completely different
than someone who's been around for 20 years,
who's edited comics for 15 years.
You will add a different kind of voice to Marvel Comics' editorial,
and that's exactly what we need."
And so, I had that support from the get-go and really kind of decided,
"Okay, let me do this and see where it takes me."
And I couldn't have imagined where it took me. [chuckles]
[woman] Who's that that you're drawing right now?
[Magruder] Abbie.
I was always more drawn to the side characters
in any media that I consumed, and one day it kinda hit me.
"You know, you're spending all your time on these side characters.
Why don't you make the side characters main characters?"
And so, Abbie was, kind of, one of my first instances of that.
She's introverted, sarcastic and kinda mean sometimes,
and that's her identity.
It was one of my first experiences of having a main character that I loved.
Around the same time, I'd also been having this conversation with my parents
in which they would look at my art and ask me,
"Why do you draw so many white characters?"
Like, a lot of my characters were pale, and this is something
that I've actually talked with other artists of color
'cause we all have experienced this same phenomenon
where when we dream up our own stories as children, at least,
those characters are often white or, you know, light-skinned.
And so I started having this very honest conversation with myself
in which I was asking, "Why does dark skin make you uncomfortable?"
And so, when I started developing M.F.K.,
I realized this was an opportunity to kinda confront that discomfort.
And so my goals were to make a female character and make a black character.
I started putting M.F.K. online.
The great thing about webcomics is it's a very accessible way
to show what you can do.
All you need is Internet access, and you can view them anywhere
on any device in any country.
For me, it was a way of showing that
not only can I draw, but I can write as well.
M.F.K. had always had, kind of, a small following
because I didn't go out of my way to advertise it.
I kinda let it spread by word of mouth.
So, the followership was pretty small up until the Dwayne McDuffie Award.
When I saw the finalist list
and saw that I was up against Shaft by David Walker and Ms. Marvel,
I did not think it had a chance at all. It's just my dumb little webcomic.
When I received the award and the ceremony broke,
and I finally checked my phone, it was just blowing up.
I feel like that was kinda a turning point.
All of a sudden, I had all this media attention,
and it was the level of attention that I had been wanting for the comic
and suddenly I had it. It's kind of a trippy experience.
-[Nocenti] Hello, how are you? -[Simonson laughing]
-It's so funny because I was-- -Isn't it kinda like...
Now this is funny. Look at all these girls.
These are women that worked at Marvel.
So I don't remember the story
-because the words are gone, -[Simonson] I don't remember it either.
[Nocenti] But this is from the Fumetti, and it must've been a story
where it's like, "Let's get all the women that work at Marvel into an office,
and then Stan comes in?"
-[Simonson] I don't-- -[Nocenti] There you are, right?
[Simonson] Oh, yeah, there I am. Wow.
[Nocenti] Oh, my God. Look what I found.
-[Simonson] Oh, there you go. [laughs] -[Nocenti] The welcome mat. [chuckles]
[Nocenti] The Bullpen, and we were all working there,
has a history of ruthlessly making fun of everyone.
-[Simonson] Yes. -[Nocenti] And one day I came in
and there was this blank-eyed idiot on my door.
I was like, "I guess that's me."
And then the next day I came in, and someone had turned it into a doormat.
And you know what it was all about?
Because Barry Windsor-Smith
-was drawing the X-Men... -[Simonson] Uh-huh.
...and people thought I was letting him go wild.
And so somehow that translated into my face on a doormat
-at the entrance of my editorial office. -[Simonson scoffs]
First of all, I think that's rude.
Second of all, you were actually able to get work out of Barry Smith,
which is a first-class miracle right there.
And Barry's work is always beautiful.
[Nocenti] It's always good.
By the time I got to Marvel in the '80s,
I think we happened to hit at the sweet spot
when the people were really welcoming to have females in comics.
Everybody was like,
"Oh boy, there's a girl here. Let's help her."
It was the opposite from what I hear people talking about in the '70s.
[Kidman] At that time, in the 1980s,
comic books were still a very male-dominated space.
But then it started to open up again.
In the early 1980s, both DC and Marvel shifted
from bigger distributors to specialty shops,
and it was through those specialty shops
that they were able to cultivate a loyal audience of fans
and actually flourish in the late 1980s.
-[man] You read the Marvel Age? -[boy 1] Yeah, totally.
[boy 2] Where, like, three people die? Well, issue #210...
Marvel is more, like, realistic.
[Nocenti] The first time I walked into the Marvel Comics office,
I wasn't that aware of what a superhero was,
and the magic of what Marvel Comics was up to
became apparent really quickly.
I mean, you walk into the Marvel Bullpen and there's Marie Severin,
and she's telling you stories and drawing,
and she's pulling out her guns for reference.
You had Archie Goodwin, who was considered the master of plot mechanics.
Denny O'Neil, who was a journalist.
If you were having trouble with a plot, you'd go in and there would be Denny.
The spirit of the place was so playful and so much fun,
and you had a constant sense of being mentored.
Louise Simonson taught me everything that I know about editing.
[Simonson] I think I was the only editor who was a mother then.
I had a daughter that I had to drop off at school.
So my daily routine was not what the suits would have liked.
And I was told by, I think it was the comptroller
just riding up in the elevator, he said, "You know what?"
He said, "You have this terrible record for coming in on time."
But he said, "You do more pages than anybody else,
and they're making more money than everybody else is.
So, just keep doing what you're doing."
I mean, I thought it was actually kind of cool.
Now, honestly, as far as the amount of money the books I was making went,
I did have the X-Men. So, duh.
I mean, yeah, I was just lucky.
[Nocenti] I was Louise Simonson's assistant, and when she decided to leave,
the X-Men were actually, I think, the best-selling books.
And Weezie asked everybody, you know,
"Do you want the X-Men? Do you want the X-Men?"
Everyone said, "No, we don't want the X-Men"
because people tended to love what they were doing.
You know, you're the Avengers editor or you're the Spider-Man editor.
So nobody wanted the X-Men,
and I had already gotten to know Chris really well
and sat in on all their story meetings, so it was a really seamless transition.
I started getting little short stories,
and then I got the assignment to kill Spider-Woman.
That was my first big assignment.
I was excited at the idea of killing Spider-Woman.
Maybe I was too naive and stupid to realize
that killing a character is not something you want to do,
and that Mark had probably asked every other writer
if they would kill Spider-Woman, and they all went, "No."
Look at this. This is the first drawing of Longshot.
This was like him saying what kind of stuff he would like to have in Longshot,
-what the theme should be. -[Simonson] That's great.
-[Nocenti] Isn't it sweet? -[Simonson] I know.
-[Nocenti] Look, "To Louise and Anne." -Aw.
I love Arthur. I had totally forgotten about this.
When Annie started writing Longshot,
and I saw what a strong point of view she had,
and how well she expressed it, I thought, "Wow. She's really something."
She had a real distinct way of thinking about things,
and I think that that's... that was such an advantage for her.
It's really important to read works by people who have points of view
because it expands my own point of view of somebody who sees things differently,
and Annie saw everything differently.
Her stuff was just brilliant.
[Nocenti] I remember just sitting on the subway every day going to work
and wondering what everyone was thinking and taking that to the next step of,
"What if the train went to hell,
and then Daredevil gets to go to hell and meet Mephisto?"
That's like fun. That's like an opera.
[man singing opera]
[Nocenti] There's a lot of fun to choreographing a fight.
I mean, when I was writing Daredevil, I started taking karate classes.
It was like I wanted to learn how to fight.
I started boxing.
So, I got into it, and I enjoyed the choreography of a fight,
but at some point you have to say,
"What am I saying about the world that everything has to escalate into a fight?"
People talk about why there aren't more women in comics.
I've always thought it had to do with that narrative itself.
Women relate to feeling powerful, feeling emancipated, having agency,
but do they relate to people smashing each other?
I don't think so.
Back then I wasn't thinking,
"How do I draw females into being interested in these stories?"
[Simonson chuckling]
-It's so good seeing you. [chuckles] -Oh, I know. [chuckles]
I avoided female characters like the plague for years.
[Nocenti] Why?
Because I didn't want to get typecast as a woman who writes female characters,
-'cause those characters never lasted. -Yeah.
And no-- And then you were out of a job.
I think I was just trying to write like a man back then.
-Yeah. -I was just like,
"Oh, let me be one of the boys.
I'll write Punisher, Wolverine, Daredevil."
-And then I thought that you... -[Simonson] Mm-hmm.
...and Trina Robbins were the first people that were kinda like,
"Wait a minute. Let's try a comic that isn't for men."
[Simonson] I thought, maybe, I wanted to write something,
and I had this idea of four little kids who are superheroes.
[Brigman] Weezie said, "I have an idea for this comic book called Power Pack."
The stories she wrote were really more like classic young adult stories.
I don't think there were any other comics like that.
It appealed to a different sort of audience,
from the 13, 14-year-old-boy audience.
[Simonson] I like stories that have power, if I'm doing one of the superhero stories,
but Power Pack was a little different, and it wasn't just about power.
It was about family, about interaction.
[Brigman] She looked at my portfolio, and she said,
"Do you know how to draw children?"
And I said, "Yeah. I can draw children." And I could.
What did you do before Power Pack?
-Nothing. [chuckles] -Nothing?
-That was it. -[laughs] Nothing really.
[Brigman] It's remarkable that this book came along when it did,
because I was not good at drawing superheroes.
It was really hard for me to exaggerate
the way you needed to exaggerate the human body and anatomy,
-but I could draw children. -[Simonson] She was just brilliant.
The characters became even more themselves when she drew them.
[Brigman] I was really lucky that I worked with a writer who knew what she was doing,
because I was just starting out, and I really didn't know what I was doing.
We were at a convention, and this young woman came over,
and she had graduated from SCAD Savannah,
and she goes, "I just wanted to meet you 'cause we studied you in class."
And I was like, "What class was that?" And she said, "History of Comics."
-[Simonson] Oh, God. [laughing] -[Brigman laughing]
[Robbins] Most women I know who draw comics, and there are very few of us,
don't really draw superheroines, and I come the closest to it.
I draw strong women, but they don't have superpowers.
They're victorious in the end, and they're strong
because I like women who are like that, and I wanna be like that.
In fact, this woman I'm drawing right now has thigh-high boots.
But I decided against making them high-heeled
because it's very hard to fight crime in high heels.
I brought my idea for a comic to Jim Shooter,
and the idea was to tie it in with Marvel and their past,
that my heroine Misty would be the niece of Millie the Model.
And so he said, "Let's do a six-part miniseries."
And that's what I did. Meet Misty.
And unfortunately, what happened was that, at that point,
you could only buy comics in comic book stores.
And the comic book stores were all superhero,
and so they didn't wanna carry our books, and they would order maybe two copies.
And when those two copies sold out, they'd go, "Phew, got rid of those."
And they wouldn't reorder.
But that's what killed the books.
My editor, Ann Nocenti, every week she would mail me
a manila envelope stuffed with letters and designs from little girls,
and they would not write to me, but they would write to Misty.
"Dear, Misty. I love your book, but I can never find it."
Karyn Bryant here at Marvel Comics talking with some more guys.
Now, exactly how many comic books are in the Marvel library?
Oh, you mean currently put out?
-[Bryant] Yeah. -About 200.
[Kidman] In the late 1980s and the early 1990s,
we saw the rise of the graphic novel.
And the graphic novel made space for comic books in bookstores,
which is not a place that comic books had ever been before.
[male editor] In the '80s,
I know that you'll probably remember, where did we buy comic books?
[Kidman] And once comic books were in bookstores,
they were accessible to women again.
So, all of a sudden, this female market arose
that just hadn't been noticed before.
And I think that that really caught the attention of comic book publishers.
That there was the potential for this girl comic book audience,
a potential that had always been there,
but that they had been really just overlooking.
An editor from Marvel e-mailed me one day and said,
"Hey, we have this anthology we're working on
and we have this story.
It's a Rocket Raccoon, Tippy-Toe Squirrel team up.
Would you be interested?"
And first I just stepped away from my computer and screamed for a while
'cause, you know, it was like...
I'm just this random webcomic creator.
An e-mail from Marvel is beyond anything that I anticipated.
And, of course, when I finally settled down,
I went back and said, "Yes, of course." Like, "I will do this."
This story is mine.
I think it's really hilarious that they offered me Rocket and Tippy-Toe.
The editor was Kathleen Wisneski, and I wonder if she looked at my portfolio
and was like, "Oh, yeah, she loves animals."
Like, I really appreciated that, actually, because I do love talking animals.
I was like, "Yes. This is totally my jam."
Marvel, actually, gave me a lot of freedom.
A lot more freedom than I expected.
They kinda just said, you know,
"Here's where Rocket and Tippy are in the current continuity and go."
When the conversation turned to the first black women writing for Marvel,
you know, Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, me,
it was just, I don't know, this surreal feeling of, "No way.
Like, that can't be possible.
Marvel has been in existence for over 70 years.
How are we the first?"
So Marvel's Spider-Man department came to me
and told me about their Spider-Geddon event,
and they basically asked me to pitch some ideas.
They told me, "We want you to do a character that you're excited about."
And so, I had pitched Spider-Byte,
and that's B-Y-T-E, as this digital Spider-Woman.
I thought it was a really cool concept
because we have all these spider characters in the real world,
and we didn't really have a superhero for the virtual world.
And it was also an opportunity to make a black woman as a spider character.
Putting any story out there is always, kind of, a leap of faith.
It's always a huge risk.
In particular, a character that the Marvel Universe had not seen before.
And so that kinda felt like...
putting my imagination on the line with thousands of people.
[Amanat] Working at Marvel is actually--
It's like a pretty standard office job in a lot of ways,
except you get to wear comic book T-shirts and sneakers,
and you have all this incredible artwork around you.
-Hi. Do you need me? -[worker laughing]
[Amanat] So the job of a comic book editor is very similar to, like, a producer.
It is very much a relationship with the creators
that you have on a particular series,
and really bringing out, I think, the best of everyone, individually,
into one collective story.
Ooh!
Captain Marvel was the first, I think, female-led title that I edited fully.
We didn't really have any other female-led comics.
Like, women were on team books,
but we didn't have any solo series featuring a female character.
[DeConnick] When I came to Ms. Marvel,
it was this really Machiavellian choice, to be honest.
I had no particular like, "Oh, I have a passion to write this character."
It was, "I need an ongoing."
Carol Danvers is Ms. Marvel for a number of years,
but during that time she doesn't have a lot of agency.
Not a lot of women characters in comics had a lot of agency at the time,
and, so I pitched Carol Danvers as Chuck Yeager.
Someone out there pushing boundaries, taking chances,
walking away from the burning plane.
I called up Steve Wacker, and was like, "I wanna pitch you a Ms. Marvel series."
And he was like, "Okay."
Steve was into it, and he championed it up the chain, and then he called me
and he says, "Yeah, so, you're not writing Ms. Marvel."
"Okay, well, that's, that's cool. You know, I mean...
We'll move on to the next series."
And he's like, "'Cause you're writing Captain Marvel!"
I was like, "Really, dude?"
And then he was like,
"And as long as we're going to do this, we should put her in pants."
And actually, that was in an e-mail,
and I have the e-mail I wrote back to him, and I was like,
"I can't tell if you're kidding."
[Amanat] Kelly Sue DeConnick, who's the writer on Captain Marvel,
did such an incredible job creating this amazing female character
that is so much more relatable.
She was no longer created in a way that was inherently misogynistic.
She wasn't sexualized.
Her rendering was more about her being a strong fighter-pilot than anything else,
which was so much more closely linked to her identity.
This was not a Sana note.
It came from somebody else, but was delivered through her.
There's a monologue I wrote for Carol where it's like,
"Have you ever seen a little girl run so fast she falls down?
There's a moment before she hits the ground,
a moment before all of her doubts and fears catch up to her,
and in that moment, she flies. In that moment every little girl flies."
And the note was,
"Could we change it to every little kid? So we don't alienate the male reader."
Uh, and I, like, lost my mind.
So I'm like, you know, "Can you call me?"
And so Sana calls. And I'm like, "Yeah, I am not changing that."
She's like, "Okay."
[Amanat] There's so many things that make a difference
when you have a female writer and a female editor,
where you can get away with pushing back on a line that says,
"Hey, look. I understand the need to be more inclusive,
but the focus right now is on women
because we have not focused on women in a very long time,
or in a way that we should be focusing on women."
Kelly Sue and I would try to figure out what are the elements that we need to do
to make sure that we are telling a story
that is obviously going to sell like gangbusters
but at the same time keep pushing Carol's story forward
and her character forward.
Because we needed to start telling those human elements of Carol
because I think that's what really makes her work.
[DeConnick] I wanted Carol to have friends that were older than her,
that were younger than her and that were her same age,
and I also wanted Carol to be able to compete with other women
in a way that did not destroy their relationships.
We usually see women competing in a way
where they're pretending that they're not competing.
Right. It's all very, like, "Oh, you." "No, you."
And usually competing for the attention or approval of a man,
and it's always very, like, backhanded and conniving,
and the fact is, that is not my experience of the world.
That is not my experience of the women in my life,
and yet I never see it reflected in my culture.
So I wanted to see Carol competing with female colleagues
the same way that I compete with female colleagues,
but we support one another, and we're happy when somebody succeeds.
[Amanat] As soon as Captain Marvel came out,
and Kelly Sue started nicknaming her fan community the "Carol Corps"
in a very loving way,
I really witnessed the transformation of what a Marvel fan was.
It was really more about supporting one another.
We were supporting them because we were creating a version of Carol Danvers
that women really wanted to see, young girls wanted to see.
And they were supporting us by buying our comics
because people really believed that women weren't reading comics,
women didn't like comics.
And it made us realize, as a company, that there was this audience out there
who was paying attention, and, finally, there was a character that was for them.
We saw this really great spike in excitement
and love and passion with Captain Marvel.
And it really, sort of, inspired us to do more
because we knew there's a fan community out there that's activated.
We can create more content for them.
You know, Captain Marvel was, sort of, that signpost of change.
I had a conversation with my old boss, Stephen Wacker.
We were talking a lot about my childhood and talking about the experiences I had,
how I went to prom in a piece of cloth I had wrapped around myself
because I couldn't find any clothing that was appropriate
for a young Muslim woman to wear to prom.
Prom, which, by the way, I went by myself because I was not allowed to date.
And running, like, doing track while I was fasting, and just--
He was just really interested in the fact that I lived such a distinct experience
that not many people really talked about.
And he walked in, and he's like,
"You know, I was really thinking a lot about your stories,
and it would be great if we had a character that was based on you.
Based on the young Sanas of the world."
And I was like, "Are we allowed to do this?"
Like, just the concept. I didn't think that anyone would be interested.
And he was like, "Let's do it."
We went straight into pitch mode,
and the first person that I thought of was G. Willow Wilson,
who was a comic book writer and a novelist and a Muslim.
She called me out of the blue, and she said to me,
"Hey. We want to create a new, young American-Muslim superheroine
and put her on her own ongoing series.
Do you want to write this book and help develop this character?"
And I was pretty convinced that they were joking.
[chuckles]
Because I said there's no way that you ran that past Marvel Comics
and they said, "Yes." How often does that happen?
I didn't say yes right away.
To be called up by two editors at Marvel and told,
"Yes, we want to put a Muslim editor and a Muslim writer
on a book about a Muslim character,"
I was like, "You're going to have to hire an intern
just to open up all this hate mail."
You're gonna-- It just seemed like waving a red flag
in front of all of the people who thought that people like me and Sana
should not be in comics at all.
But Sana was so driven about this series.
She was so prepared to usher it through, to make sure that it was done right,
to oversee all the nitty-gritty, to run interference if necessary,
that I was just, kind of, swept along. I was like, "Yeah, absolutely.
If you're this committed, I'm this committed. Let's do it."
[Amanat] She was like, "All right. Let's try this out."
And me and her kinda went back and forth with different iterations of Kamala,
who would become Kamala Khan.
What we realized was telling those stories
about being young and feeling different and feeling like an outcast
and then suddenly being activated
and having powers and finding that you have powers,
that's such a great story about growing up,
and that's an important story to tell about being a minority at the same time.
We were trying to figure out ways to tie this character
into the broader Marvel Universe that would increase its chances of success.
Because, especially at the time, the understanding was
that new characters do not do terribly well.
And if you add on any kind of modifier,
if they are female, if they're from an unusual background,
it just gets worse and worse and worse, and this was just, sort of, the math.
And so we've decided to make her a legacy character,
to, sort of, tie her to the legacy of Carol Danvers.
[Amanat] Kamala Khan is this young South Asian Muslim girl
living in Jersey City, and she looks across the river every single day,
and she sees these beautiful, strong heroes saving the world every single day,
and one of those characters is Captain Marvel.
And Captain Marvel is this tall, beautiful, blonde woman
who makes saving the day look so easy
and kicking the butt look so impressive.
And for her, that's the ideal.
And when you're, of course, a young brown woman...
that's, kind of, all you see out in the world,
is this ideal that does not look anything like you.
And I think the first time that Kamala Khan gets powers,
her go-to is to be become exactly like Carol Danvers,
to the point that she transforms into the literal version of Carol Danvers,
the version of Carol that was popular for so long, and that was intentional.
The hardest thing is choosing to look like yourself
because you don't feel like it's impressive enough
or beautiful enough or strong enough,
because that's what you're always told,
and so her challenge and her journey is kinda coming back to herself.
When we were, sort of, gaming out the first year of the series,
the one question that Sana would ask me over and over was,
"What is the 'With great power, comes great responsibility' moment
for this character? And how is it different because of who she is?"
"What is the Muslim 'With great power, comes great responsibility'?"
And it drove me nuts.
I mean, I spent months trying to figure out even what the heck she was asking.
[chuckles]
And really drilling down and getting to that point,
trying to figure out how it would look and what it would sound like.
And, you know, I did eventually get there,
and it's, sort of, that moment in the first arc, when Zoe is drowning.
And Kamala has just gotten her powers.
She still isn't really in full control of them.
She doesn't know what she's supposed to do with them.
She doesn't know who she is now.
And she has to make a split-second decision.
And she thinks of a line that is very important to Muslims...
which is, "To kill one person is to kill all of mankind,
and to save one person is to save all of mankind."
And that, to her, is her motive.
That, yes, she has a duty to save this person.
You don't have to save the whole world. You can't save the whole world.
But you are responsible for the people in front of you right now.
[Amanat] When we were trying to develop Ms. Marvel and her power set,
Willow was really adamant that Ms. Marvel didn't have "pretty powers."
She would say, "Traditionally, a lot of our female characters
either had sparkly powers or some mind control abilities."
So that was incredibly important to her, to kind of break the mold in that regard.
And the decision for Kamala to figure out how she uses her powers
and how she embraces her powers and figures out her identity
was the journey of the story that we felt was the most powerful.
The response to Ms. Marvel has been incredible.
As soon as the series was announced,
and just the character of Kamala Khan came out in the world,
we had people sending us fan mail.
It was trending before Ms. Marvel #1 had actually ever come out.
[girl 1] My parents are from Pakistan. I love Kamala Khan.
All of the issues she's going through
are the same ones I was experiencing every day.
[girl 2] I am very much looking forward to this character
because it has never actually crossed my mind
that someone like me could be a superhero.
[girl 3] Thank you so very much for Ms. Marvel.
[Amanat] People had no idea who Kamala Khan was.
There was no concept of the story, no concept of the supporting characters.
And there was so much love in the idea of it,
and I realized there was a lot of importance
behind the character itself because of what it meant.
It was a stunning upset, not just of general industry expectations,
but of Sana's and my own expectations,
when that first issue went into a second printing.
And then into a third printing. And then into a fourth, fifth and sixth printing.
We were interviewed by The New York Times,
and there were people in cosplay after the first week that it had been on stands.
Shock doesn't cover it. Like, I still haven't woken up.
I'm convinced this is all a dream.
[Amanat] No way in my wildest of dreams
would I imagine that a young Muslim superhero
would be one of the most popular new characters that we would have.
I was very lucky to be invited to the White House,
when Barack Obama was president, for Women's History Month
celebrating different women from different fields across the country.
And they were like, "Hey. Would you be interested
in introducing the President of the United States?"
And I was like, "What?" And, of course, I said yes.
Thank you, Sana, for your incredible work.
Ms. Marvel may be your comic book creation,
but I think for a lot of young boys and girls,
Sana's a real-life superhero.
["On + Off" by Maggie Rogers playing]
[Amanat] I saw the impact that we could make
with the types of stories that we were telling.
And Kamala Khan was a very natural segue,
and I didn't even realize I was building to it my entire life.
It was everything that I had always wanted to do.
And I think once she came into the world, it opened up this door of possibilities.
And what that's really allowed us to do
is to connect with a lot of different creators that we never would have before.
[Magruder] Marvel Rising is a new series.
They're this new generation of superhero in the Marvel Universe.
We have these hyper-intelligent female characters now.
Getting to work on these characters just feels like a momentous opportunity
that I didn't expect to get.
Even when I first started coming to comics,
it was still very white and very male, and so a lot of this change
of having prominent characters of color,
especially women and girls of color, is very new,
just in the last five or so years.
I'm glad to be a part of this moment.
This is what I was waiting for.
The current state of comics is beyond my wildest dreams.
I really never dreamed
there would be so many women doing comics and so many girl-friendly comics.
[Kidman] Creativity and innovation
and access to new kinds of creators, to more diverse creators,
tends to come from the margins.
[Amanat] Women have been here. They've always been here.
Women helped build the legacy of Marvel.
It just stuns me when I look at how far society has come
and how far the industry has come.
These days I think there are just as many young women
as young men interested in careers in comics.
But I've certainly had women who took bullets so I wouldn't have to,
and I hope I've done that for the women coming after me.
[Nocenti] I think what's great about the women that are coming in now,
they are trailblazers in that they're writing narratives for females.
How can you relate to a story if you can't see yourself in it?
[Amanat] It took me a long time to find strength in my own identity
and to really feel more confident in who I am and what I belong to.
[Magruder] It's great to see women excelling at superheroes.
I think this conversation now about mirrors versus windows
and, like, seeing yourself in story,
it did an amazing thing for comics and for women readers.
But we could still do more to see more disability,
to see more open queerness in these comics,
more Asian and Latinx characters and writers.
Why settle for a little when you can just open the floodgates?
["Back In My Body" by Maggie Rogers playing]
[no audible dialogue]
[Magruder] My mother, she's so supportive.
She lets me have the freedom to do what I'm going to do.
And I can always call her for a pep talk if I need it.
Now, my mom, when she sees those old critical friends, she can say,
"Oh, yeah. My daughter's working for Disney,"
or "She's working for Marvel, you know. She's doing pretty fine."
And, you know, they didn't understand what I was doing before,
but they definitely know those names.
So, yeah. We had the last laugh.
[Amanat] My dad, when I was younger, always told me,
"Whatever you do, make sure that you are trying to help people."
What's really satisfying about having Ms. Marvel out there
is that it really directly impacts my family.
My nieces and my nephews,
they now have this character that reminds them of themselves.
Not even just for my nieces and my nephews.
I just love that any kid is going to see a character out there
and not just a part of everyday life.
["Back In My Body" continues playing]
[no audible dialogue]
[song continues]
[song fades out]
["Here We Go" playing]