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.
Marjorie Liu
I love writing novels, but there is something deeply invigorating about the comic-book medium.
Every single girl, whether we want to recognize it or not, is a warrior.
The greatest enemy one ever faces is one's own self.
Han Solo has always been - and I think for a lot of people, too - this iconic character who's the absolute definition of cool.
Timing is irrelevant when it comes to desire.
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.
I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.
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 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.
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.
In my solo series, I feel like I've often dealt with groups of people.
I'd like to go back in time and haunt Robert Louis Stevenson during his years in the South Pacific.
I love writing romance, along with science fiction and fantasy - and my books usually meld all three to some degree.
Growing up as Chinese-American, as someone who experienced racism, questions of 'otherness' are always at the forefront of my mind.
I wanted to be her; I wanted to write her. Red Sonja became anchored in my imagination like a mountain.
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.
The thing about Gambit is that he's a man who knows how to adapt to survive. He plays things by ear, depending on the situation, and never feels obligated to follow the rules, because the only rules that matter are his own sense of honor. Ultimately, that sense of honor includes 'doing no harm' - at least, not to the innocent.
I think that comic books have appealed to female readers for years.
I was going to be a lawyer, and I had studied hard, but then it suddenly occurred to me in a very deep, profound way that I didn't want to keep practicing law for the rest of my life.
I don't want to give people the wrong advice to follow their dreams no matter what, because it's not fun to be a starving artist. But on the other hand, life is short, and if you are burning with a passion to do something, then do it. Work hard, study hard at it, and don't give up.
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.
At his heart, Gambit is a good man who believes in taking care of his friends, and his friends are what's most important to him. People are his home. He will do anything for those who matter to him.
I'm really bothered by questions of humanity, questions of war, questions of slavery.
Part of the reason why my folks - why any immigrant family - wants their kids to go into law or medicine is because there's the promise of reliable work. That's a powerful idea that got hammered into my head growing up: Be this thing, or else you'll starve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 feel like the character of Han Solo is irreverent. A very serious, precious story about Han Solo would not be that enjoyable.
I had my dreams, and even though everyone told me that they weren't practical, I knew in my heart that this is what I had to do. Even if it ended up being a failure, I had to make the attempt.
Superheroes are the best of us. Never mind all those powers or the crazy costumes. The heart of a superhero is meant to inspire.
Most of the female 'superhero' role models of my childhood came from novels, and they rarely had powers. Take Dorothy, for example, from 'The Wizard of Oz;' or Laura Ingalls and her sisters in the 'Little House on the Prairie' novels.
Muscles are fleeting. Bodies give out. But integrity, honor? The confidence to be oneself, to follow one's heart? The compassionate drive to help others, even at great risk? That's strength.
People either fall into two camps, where they're pro-fanfic, or they're anti-fanfic. I would not have had the skills to write and publish my first novel if I hadn't been writing fanfic.
To all the young kids of color - and not so young - people who want to use their voices, who are thinking, 'This seems difficult because I don't see myself out there,' I tell you, you must be persistent because we need you. We need you so, so badly.
'Monstress' has been hard because I want to keep writing longer, but I can't.
I didn't know how to write comics. I had to teach myself.
I had never been a comic book person before, really, because I had no access to them. Once I had access, I thought that these are just another avenue for telling stories and delving into the imagination.
When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.
I got into comics because I wrote an 'X-Men' novel for Pocket Books, and I introduced myself to the head of recruitment at Marvel. I'd heard through the grapevine they liked the book, so that gave me the courage to go up to them and be like, 'Hey, if you ever need a writer, here I am.'
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.
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 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.
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.
I love writing comics too much.
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.
