The news is real. YA comics are selling way more than your regular superhero titles. If you have not heard of Raina Telgemeier, you are missing out on the true makers and shakers of the comics industry today. Thus the corporate response by DC and Marvel in recent times - get the YA writers in to write their titles. It is not just for diversity; there is an economic imperative and it makes good business sense. This year's SWF sees the invitation of two YA comics writers - a sign of the times. I interviewed Mariko Tamaki in the previous post - she is edgy and she tackles LGBTQ issues in her work.
Margaret Stohl writes the Beautiful Creatures series and also Captain Marvel. I enjoy the Beautiful Creatures movie back in 2013. I wish there is more to the filmic series.
Her bio: Margaret Stohl is the internationally bestselling author of 12 novels, including Beautiful Creatures, which was adapted for film in 2013. She writes The Mighty Captain Marvel comics and Black Widow books for Marvel, and just released Cats Versus Robots: This is War for younger children – co-written with her husband and illustrated by her child. She is the co-founder of Yallwest and Yallfest, the largest YA book festivals in the US.
I had a great time reading Margaret Stohl's answers to my questions too. Her thoughtful replies confirm the need for us to invite and engage more comics writers to learn from them and to grow our industry. We have invited many artists for events like STGCC. We should get more writers, editors, publishers, critics and even translators in to build our ecosystem.
Margaret's events:
https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/programme-listing/festival-events/The-Power-of-Superheroines.html
https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/programme-listing/festival-events/Worldbuilding-in-Video-Games-.html
You can watch these videos featuring her and Captain Marvel too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0FIZIBf30c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP_T0tWsN5g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQQYuFn9pD4
Thanks to Tori, Letitia, Shauna and Leo for setting up the interview.
How did you end up writing for Marvel, and specifically, Captain Marvel?
From videogames, actually. After I became known as a YA writer from the Beautiful Creatures novels, an editor at Marvel Press discovered I had worked on Spiderman for the original playstation and Fantastic Four for the Playstation 2; that led to a job writing two prose novels for Marvel -- Black Widow Forever Red and Black Widow Red Vengeance -- which is how I got to know Sana Amanat, Marvel's VP of Content and Creative Development. I had never written an ongoing monthly comic at the time -- just a few standalone issues called "one shots" within comics -- but she had a lot of faith in me. And now we've done -- let's see, for Captain Marvel we've released Alien Nation, Band of Sisters, Generations, Dark Origins, and Life of Captain Marvel, so we've created more than four hundred and fifty pages of comics together. It's been a wild ride.
How different is it writing for comics, and writing novels and for games?
Sometimes very different, and sometimes no different at all. Some truths are always true -- like, hard things are always hard, whether in comics and books and games -- and hard things take time, in any genre. The best work I do always correlates painfully and directly to my greatest investments of time and greatest number of iterations. I wish there was some secret to getting to the good stuff, but there isn't. The secret is...that there is no secret. Important things are usually important across all genres; for example, characters are always the handle by which we hold on to any world, and readers only care about them if they feel real, which usually happens when you are feeling vulnerable and truthful and human, on the page. But still, some things are different. My first attempt at a novel, Beautiful Creatures (cowritten with Kami Garcia) was about twice as long as a usual YA book -- so try to imagine how many dialogue balloons covered my issue zero of Mighty Captain Marvel! I learned the hard way that no matter how beautiful or clever or funny I thought my dialogue was, my artists' panels were usually better. And comics taught me to think visually as well; for each comics script, I had to describe the general visual detail of every panel, even the basic "shots" as if I were defining camera angles for a screenplay. Before that, when I wrote novels, I would normally "hear" my characters tell me their stories. Now find myself writing out what would have been the panel descriptions for my comics scripts, even in my novels, before I let my characters open their mouths at all!
You tackled the refugee issue in Captain Marvel. How did the readers respond to it?
Predictably, some readers were moved, while others accused us of being social justice warriors. That's comics for you, especially as a girl creator. I actually love how passionate Marvel fans are, comicsgate bots notwithstanding. But Sana and I wanted to do that story even before the refugee crisis was getting much attention, and it was horrifying to watch how the real life version of that crisis unfolded. Marvel has always been really brilliant at telling the human side of superhuman stories, and I think alien stories are always stories that investigate the nature of humanity. And Bean, the Kree "Hala Child" refugee that Carol discovers, is really just a foreshadowing of the larger storyline that inscribes Carol's whole personal identity. It's a story that took two years to tell, so I do really love that my time began and ended with Captain Marvel on this same theme of what it is to be alien and what it is to be human.
(Margaret's appearances at this year's SDCC)
Was it difficult to navigate the Marvel continuity? (keeping track of the history and what happen to Captain Marvel in other books)
Yes, so difficult! For Captain Marvel and for Black Widow, before that, when I was writing the books. I always started by sitting down and reading every single issue I can get my hands on -- single issues, trade paperback collections, digital issues. Then I picked the brains of all my editors over the years -- Sana, Mark Basso, Sarah Brunstad, and especially Charles Beacham, who was like a Captain Marvel encyclopedia. After a while, you eventually get your own sense of the convoluted comics timeline, and how you fit into it. But until you do -- it's very intimidating!
You are the second female writer to attend the Marvel creative summit. What was the experience like?
Those creative summits were sort of incredible, like a crash course in modern comics, especially listening to Mark Waid and Tom Brevoort, who between them can recite the entire storyline of every Marvel (Tom) or DC (Mark) hero. Until Kelly Thompson arrived, I was the only girl creator in the room, and aside from Ta-nehesi Coates, the only novelist, so that made me a little nervous at first. But honestly, the guys were great, my brothers from another mother, right off the bat, and it took maybe a day until they were scrapping with me just like I was one of them. Gerry Duggan, who wrote Deadpool -- Nick Spencer, who now writes Spiderman -- and Mark Waid, who has done everything -- they're my neighbors in LA, and we became great friends as a result of the room. The comics community is really tight. They're just good people -- and yeah, totally brilliant.
(NB: Mark Waid was a former SWF guest while Nick Spencer visited Singapore before for STGCC)
Female comics writers are in the news these days. Marjorie Liu (who we invited for SWF last year) won a Hugo and an Eisner for Best Writer for Monstress and the book also just won the Harvey Award’s Book of the Year. These add diversity to the creative pool. Eg. Black Panther (Ta-Nehisi), Mockingbird (Chelsea Cain) and the previous run of Captain Marvel (Kelly Sue DeConnick). So putting it to you - who else would you want to write?
Everyone at Marvel knows my bucket list is Tony Stark. He's my favorite character to write in the whole Marvel universe; I have a bad Tony Stark sitting on my shoulder telling bad Tony Stark jokes the way some people have an angel or a devil there. But I also happen to love Dan Slott, who currently writes Iron Man, just as I loved Brian Bendis, who wrote it before him. So I've made peace with writing Tony into most of my comics as a side character, as well as both of my Black Widow novels. I think Sana cut about seventy pages of extra Tony Stark dialogue out of my first book; I was so excited to be writing him I may have gone *a little overboard :)
More published writers are engaged to write comics now. What are the pros and cons of this arrangement?
So many of my YA friends are now writing graphic novels, I think it's amazing. It's not as easy as they expect, so there's a little bit of learning there for everyone, just as there was for me. But I do think the YA community is incredibly diverse in comparison to the mainstream comics community, so hopefully this will help.
Will there be a Beautiful Creatures movie sequel?
Never say never! In this world of streaming content, who knows? I still keep in touch with the actor who played the main character in our movie, Alden Ehrenreich, so it was especially fun to see him play Han Solo this year; he's building an amazing career for himself, but still, I'll probably always think of him as our "Ethan Wate.”
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