Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
Many images had died, so I had to update it. This means that some of the images back in the original post, dated 2020, are from its future. I love that blog time travel.
Just this reprint today.
Thanks for tuning in.
Blog Vacation Two 2022 - Vacation II Post #94
I took a "Blog Vacation" in 2021 from August 31st to October 14th. I did not stop posting daily; I just put the blog in a low power rotation and mostly kept it off social media. Like that vacation, for this second blog vacation now in 2022, I am alternating between reprints, shares with little to no commentary, and THAT ONE THING, which is an image from the folder with a few thoughts scribbled along with it. I am alternating these three modes as long as the vacation lasts (not sure how long), pre-publishing the posts, and not always pushing them to social media.
above: From left: Alitha Martinez, Regine L. Sawyer, Sheeba Maya, Shamika Mitchell, Alice Meichi Li, Veena Matsalia, Sara Gómez Woolley
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1979 - Comic Book Sunday - Women in Comics - 2007.19
Hi, welcome to Comic Book Sunday, when I try to hunker down and read a bunch of comics, but I keep filling the day with other things, like work and writing. I try to reserve Sunday as one day in which I do no work for my jobs at all as everyone deserves two days like that each week, and I only take one. But this week things were just too busy during the week, and so I felt it would be best to make some progress on grading today so that Monday is a bit less harried, though it still will be harried and hopeless. I will need to really hit it hard. Many things to do.
Also, I found myself with some time alone, and so I spent time writing a new short story that I will share with the writer's workshop in which I find myself. So that was time well spent. And though not 100% relaxing, I find writing very self-satisfying.
And so, today is dedicated to women in comics, mostly women creators in comics, many of whom have shared their experiences lately in a toxic and sexually predatory work place.
I feel badly that the industry I love so much is beset with such problems.
And yet, my contributions here seem to exacerbate the situation some what. I find some of these pictures to be sexy. In fact, I chose them because they are sexy. I mean not immune to the sexualization of the women in the industry. Now, granted, usually I find the talent of the creators sexiest of all, the intelligence the really sexy thing, much more so than the physical appearance. But I cannot excuse myself. A beautiful woman catches my eye. I like to oggle. I can't help it. I like women. I like looking at beautiful women. I have not decided whether or not I think this is a bad thing or not.
I like to think that I have always tried to do the right thing.
I like to think that most of the time I have succeeded.
I respect women for their talent and afford them this respect and regard the same I as I do men. The difference is that I find some of them attractive.
Do I like them for any seeming expression of their sexuality?
That's a difficult question to answer.
However, I love that there women comic creators, I love that recent events have caused people to rethink how any one, especially women, enters and stays in the industry, how they get work.
I support many of them and their talents.
I speak out against trolls, toxic men and their hateful attitudes as expressed online.
I will continue to speak out.
Here's a collection of materials about women in comics.
Quarantine Week...4? 5 maybe? Not sure. april 14, 2020
But one thing that's been on my list for a while is to restart the #bgsdlist.
"BGSD" stands for "Bitches Get Shit Done," though we are inclusive of non-bitches as well. BGSD started... gosh, four or five years ago, probably? (Has it been that long?) Chris Sebela crashed with us for a bit between apartments and when he got into his new place he lamented no longer having me walk by his desk and ask him what he was working on -- effectively nagging him. I told him I'd be happy to nag him any time, and I volunteered to text him on occasion. This exchange took place on Twitter. Someone else asked if I could nag them too... I thought it was too funny not to, so I looked into mass texting services and, like, a year later we had 4000+ subscribers who called me Mama Shark.
Nagging isn't funny for long, so the list eventually morphed into something else. A way to send myself little encouraging messages in the guise of of sending them into the ether. Folks cross-posted the messages to Tumblr and Twitter with hashtags #bgsd and #bgsdlist and found each other and sent each other encouraging messages too. It was lovely.
And then the platform I was using pulled the plug. Totally fair -- it was intended for teachers, and the size of the list just became unmanageable for them. I posted the news to Twitter and we all just got on with our lives. Every once in a while someone would ask me if I had any interest in finding a new platform. I did, but the the task just felt overwhelming.
Long story... pretty long already, huh? Sorry.
End of the story: we got a new platform. It's called COMMUNITY and it's pretty great. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to revive the #BGSDlist. If you want in, text BGSD to (503) 738-1029. It doesn't cost you anything (unless you get charged for receiving texts, but most of us are on unlimited programs so you should be fine--check with your carrier if you're not sure). I won't sell your info and you can unsub at any time. That's it.
If you sign up, I'll text you. Never more than once a day. Usually much less. And you can text me back.
Do you like podcasts? One of my favorites is OLOGIES with Alie Ward. If you listen til the end, Alie always offers a secret. I kind of love that, so here's mine: if you don't want to be on the #BGSDlist, you can still just text me at that number. You'll only get on the list if you send BGSDlist, but I'll get the message either way. (If you just want info related to Matt and my comics work, text MILKFED to (503) 738-1029. You can sign up for both, by texting both MILKFED and BGSD to 503-738-1029... you get it, don't you?
I've gone and made it complicated now, haven't it?
Social media can be a savage place. This was proven once again over the weekend, when Marvel editor Heather Antos posted a selfie with her colleagues, showing the women taking a break and enjoying a milkshake together. It was a harmless post, but it brought out the trolls in force.
Sickeningly, Antos found herself harassed by (mostly) men. There are public tweets calling the women "fake geek girls," and "the creepiest collection of stereotypical SJWs anyone could possibly imagine." One commenter added "Gee, I can't imagine why Marvel's sales are in the toilet." Antos was apparently also bombarded with direct messages, and was clearly upset by the whole experience.
At this point, you could be forgiven for considering it a normal day on Twitter. And then, in a beautiful twist, the comic book community began to fight back.
MakeMineMilkshake
They fought fire with fire; or, in this case, they fought Twitter with tweets. Savvy fans launched a hashtag, #MakeMineMilkshake, and expressed their support for Heather Antos.
"The storm of allegations against writers including Warren Ellis and Jason Latour is not a sign that the comics industry is broken. It’s a sign it’s running precisely as designed," explains @asher_elbeinhttps://t.co/ZnOXwmndPu
The term “cancel culture” comes from entitlement - as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience,& one is a victim if people choose to tune them out.
Odds are you’re not actually cancelled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.
I have an entire TV network dedicated to stoking hatred of me. A white supremacist w/ a popular network show regularly distorts me in dangerous ways, & it’s a normal part of my existence to get death threats from their audience.
I love these videos of Janelle Asselin, whom I fully support and feel sadness and rage for how the industry and certain hateful people in fandom treated her...
by cbldf • • Comments Offon She Changed Comics: Modern Age and Manga
Happy Women’s History Month! All through March, we’ll be celebrating women who changed free expression in comics. Check back here every week for biographical snippets on female creators who have pushed the boundaries of the format and/or seen their work challenged or banned.
Fiona Staples
The multiple award-winning Canadian comic artist, Fiona Staples has become one of the most recognizable and influential artists in the industry today. Voted top female comic book artist by Comic Book Resources in 2015, the co-creator of Saga has helped reshape modern comic art and storytelling. Her distinct style, design sense, and sometimes controversial content is not only pushing the boundaries of the modern industry to become a space more welcoming to other female creators, but also helping to open the doors to new era of independent, diverse, and creator-driven works.
Staples’ first foray into published comics was part of About Comics’ 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2005. Quickly recognized for her unique style and approach to character building, from there the artist would work on North 40, Mystery Society, and assortment of titles with DC. Staples has also done cover art for numerous other titles and contributed to independent projects like Beyond: An Anthology of Queer Sci-fi/Fantasy Comics.
In 2012, though, with the release of Saga—Staples and Brian K. Vaughn’s epic sci-fi space opera—the artist rose quickly to dominate numerous top creator lists and win dozens of comics awards. “The series’ wide appeal rests in no small part on Staples’s gorgeously organic and painterly artwork,” writes The Guardian. “Which brings a believable humanity to her fantasy environments and is about as far from stereotypically muscular comic art as can be imagined.” Her emphasis on the human experience, characterization, and world-building made her the perfect candidate to illustrate the new Archie reboot which the creator is currently working on. The whirlwind career that Staples has experienced since 2005 is a true testament not only to her immense talent, but her determination to remain true to her unique voice.
Despite the immense success that Staples has experienced, her work hasn’t been left unscathed by critics. In 2013, Saga #12 was temporarily pulled from the Apple App Store due to a controversial image that led to a misinterpretation of Apple’s content policies. In 2015 the series was listed by the American Library Association as one of the ten most challenged books of the 2014. A man at an undisclosed Oregon public library petitioned for removal of the first volume over sexually explicit content and “anti-family” themes, but the library stood behind the book.
“It’s definitely changing,” said Staples in an interview with Heroic Girls with regard to the state of the current comics industry. “Although maybe not as quickly as we’d like.”
All the corners of the comics world except mainstream superhero books have pretty much agreed that diversity is a positive thing. I think the important thing to do now is create women-friendly books, and that will lead to more female creators in the next generation.
In an industry dominated by such a variety of artists and writers, Staples has cemented herself as an admirable icon that will inspire generations of future artists. As The Guardian notes, “Staples is one of only a few women artists whose work and name can sell a book on its own.”
—by Caitlin McCabe
Author Nnedi Okorafor with her cat Periwinkle Chukwu at her home. She is a longtime Flossmoor resident who has become one of the buzziest science fiction writers in the world, and she debuted "Shuri," starring the tech genius Wakandan princess, in October. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
At December’s Pocket Con, the youth-centric Chicago comics event focused on diversity, exhibitor First Aid Comics didn’t display a single copy of Marvel Comics’ “Ironheart” — curious in that the book features a black female teen superhero from Chicago’s South Side, and is written by Eve L. Ewing, a black woman who also is a South Sider.
Actually, it’s not so curious at all.
The book was beyond popular, said Kenny Taylor, First Aid’s social media manager. So much so, they didn’t have a copy to bring.
People lined up at the Hyde Park shop an hour before the store opened for a signing the Saturday after the first issue dropped. Taylor at the time was scouring the city to try to buy additional issues, as the store had sold out the first day it was available.
The city showed out for Eve Ewing like nobody’s business. She had young women, young boys, old, young, everybody, wanting to talk to her about the character,” Taylor said. “We had people who weren’t sure about it but talked to her about it and were going to give it a chance.”
As more diverse creators enter the comics pool, more black women are coming into shops and inquiring especially about books written and drawn by other black women. Joshua Kelly, manager of Graham Crackers Comics in the Loop, has seen this firsthand at his shop.
Author Eve Ewing, at right, and the cover art of the first issue of the "Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man" team-up series. (Marvel/Stefano Caselli/Nolis And / CTMG)
“People do come in and specifically ask for them because they heard about it,” he said.
That seems to be the case particularly in Chicago, which is dripping with black female comics creators — a group that was pretty much nonexistent on the main stage 10 years ago.
Ewing is one of two local black women recently tapped by Marvel — which didn’t even have its first black female writer until Roxane Gay in 2016 — to write titles featuring black female superheroes.
Award-winning novelist Nnedi Okorafor’s “Shuri,” starring the tech genius Wakandan princess, debuted in October and follows her work on “Black Panther: Long Live the King” and the “Wakanda Forever” three-parter featuring the Dora Milaje.
Meanwhile, Hyde Park artist Ashley A. Woods recently penciled the four-issue limited series “Tomb Raider: Survivor's Crusade” for Dark Horse Comics and will have her work in the Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams-produced HBO show “Lovecraft Country,” based on the drama/horror novel.
And C. Spike Trotman, who runs Chicago-based alternative comics publisher Iron Circus Comics, released “Delver” in February. She co-wrote the fantasy series for the Originals section on Comixology, Amazon’s digital comics service.
Most of these black women in comics will be speaking or exhibiting at C2E2 at McCormick Place this weekend.
That includes Yorli Huff, who turned her experience as a Chicago undercover drug agent facing discrimination into the comic series “Superhero Huff.”
“I wanted to share my stories with black and brown teenage girls, but she’s appealing to every race and every age group,” Huff said.
“I have been humbled and grateful by the reception No. 1 has received, from hardcore comics fans to folks who have never been inside a comic book store before now,” Ewing wrote in an email of “Ironheart.” “I'm especially moved by how many parents are copping it for their kids. That's just an amazing feeling.”
Aquil Charlton reads "Ironheart" to his son Hassan on a CTA bus. "We like to read comics on our way to school. Hassan loves Ironman," Charlton says. "I know Eve is from Chicago and I really respect her work and want to support her.” (Cheryl V. Jackson)
It’s significant that both black teenage characters created by men — “Ironheart” by a white man and “Shuri” by a black man — have been turned over to black women writers, said Regine Sawyer, owner of Lockett Down Productions and founder of the Women in Comics Collective NYC International.
“It makes a huge difference in the sense of having authentic voices that write different comic books that have black female characters in it,” she said. “For years, these have been written by white heterosexual men. The rest of us would read the stuff and say, ‘No, as a black woman, I would not say that about my hair.’ It’s about representation. It’s about inclusion.”
Cultural anthropologist Stanford Carpenter, a sometime comics creator who chairs the board of the Institute for Comics Studies, agrees.
“We talk about diversity on one hand, but not what that diversity could look like. For a while, it was, ‘We need more black and brown characters,’” he said. “Now, we’re starting to ask questions about who’s creating the stuff.”
Hyde Park artist Ashley A. Woods recently penciled the four-issue limited series “Tomb Raider: Survivor's Crusade.” (Courtesy Ashley A. Woods)
Okorafor’s latest character for the new Dark Horse Comics “LaGuardia” series — a pregnant Nigerian-American doctor in a story of alien immigration issues — is an example of a black woman bringing a unique perspective to the medium, Stanford said.
“We actually get a story where the main protagonist is a woman who’s pregnant and that’s part of who she is. It’s not a major plot point. In our society, we tend to represent pregnancy as an illness; something that a woman has to overcome,” he said. “I can’t think of too many men who would come up with that idea.”
Afrofuturist writer Ytasha Womack debuted the “Eartha 2198” book series in February and in May will launch a Kickstarter campaign — where she’s a creator-in-residence — for the Afrofuturist novella series “A Spaceship in Bronzeville.” She sees women driving demand for diversity in science fiction and comic books.
“It’s a zeitgeist moment. You have these incredibly talented creators and you have an increase in demand in the perspective that they bring,” said Womack. “At the end of the day, people want to tell stories. And being able to tell a story infused with your cultural perspective is a very natural thing to do.”
Those types of stories, frequently with nods to black experiences — are a sweet spot at Amalgam Comics and Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, which is owned by a black woman.
“For us, those books do really well. People will come in and say, ‘I have a little girl and I want anything with a young black girl as the center of the story,’” said founder Ariell Johnson. “There are books we sell out of constantly and are constantly reordering, and those books aren’t even present in other stores.”
The popularity of movies and shows like “Black Panther” and “Luke Cage” have brought more attention to black creators, said Karama Horne, a Syfy Wire contributing editor and operator of The Blerd Gurl website.
And writers from other genres are getting the chance to write comics, previously considered less lucrative and prestigious, as the industry looks to cash in on their large followings. Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates now writes both the “Black Panther” and “Captain America” comic series, for instance.
“They recognized the fact that we would buy a character,” Horne said. “And social media sort of pushed the curtain back and let people see behind-the-scene how comic books are being created. In the past year there was an outcry and I think their marketing departments are responding to that.”
Writer Cheryl Lynn Eaton recently revived website The Ormes Society. It highlights black women creators in comics following a dustup over the lack of women of color writing comics at Marvel and DC.
There’s a nuance that black women will bring to the story of a black girl that young black kids and women need to read,” said Horne, who keeps a list of black women creators in case she runs into those looking to hire from the demographic. “In addition to more black female writers and artists, we need more black female editors. They make the decision who’s on what book.”
Amandla Stenberg
AP Photo
Known mostly for portraying Rue in the 2012 film “The Hunger Games”, Amandla Stenberg co-created the Niobe books with Sebastian Jones, founder of Stranger Comics. The graphic novels merge fantasy and exploration of modern issues like racism and religion. In 2015, it was the first internationally distributed comic with a black female author, artist, and central character. Stenberg and Jones released “Niobe: She Is Life” and later “Niobe: She Is Death.”
The organizers of ComiqueCon, a comic-book convention spotlighting female talent, hadn’t really planned beyond a single event when their convention debuted last year in Dearborn.
But their inaugural group of attendees left them no choice but to start working on year two.
“They were just like, ‘OK, that was great. You’re doing a second one, right?’ ” says ComiqueCon organizer-sponsor Katie Merritt, the co-owner of Dearborn’s Green Brain Comics.
Prompted by what Merritt calls the “overwhelming” response from last year’s 500 attendees, ComiqueCon returns Saturday to the Arab American National Museum. This year’s most notable guest is Mariko Tamaki, author of “This One Summer,” which won a Caldecott and an Eisner award (respectively the top industry honors for picture books and graphic novels). The convention will feature more than 30 other female creators from Metro Detroit and across the country.
n the first panel of Marjorie Liu’s recently released comic, Monstress, Maika, the heroine of the series, faces the reader in a full-page portrait, her expression somewhere between a scowl and a dare. There’s a shackle and chain around her neck, a whip threatening in the distance, and what is either a tattoo or a brand between her breasts. Maika is also a partial amputee; her left arm ends at her elbow. And she’s completely nude. All in all, it’s a visual sucker punch. And yet, the image projected is not one of fragility or fear; even without reading the text, which tells us she’s exactly where she wants to be, Maika’s body and gaze emanate confident defiance.
Like Maika, Marjorie Liu is also a force to be reckoned with. A bar-certified lawyer trained in biotech and international law, Liu has published more than twenty novels, novellas, short stories, and comics, making both the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Liu is highly prolific, her work inarguably popular; that she has found success as a young woman of color in the white and male-dominated world of comics is especially noteworthy. While working with Marvel, Liu wrote Astonishing X-Men, which featured comic books’ first gay proposal and wedding, earning her a GLAAD Media Award nomination for “outstanding media images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.” Her own comics are similarly bold, her characters robust and complex, and her worlds richly imagined.
Monstress is set in an alternate Asia, in the uneasy aftermath of a long war between humans and Arcanics (a.k.a. monsters). Its world is rendered by artist Sana Takeda in fantastical yet gritty detail—an aesthetic Liu describes on her website as “art deco-inflected steam punk.” The first issue, released in November, follows Maika’s search for information about her mother’s murder. True to genre, the panels are action-packed and often violent, moving through history and the present, across devastated post-war landscapes and thriving cities that have rebuilt themselves from dust. But, in stark contrast to mainstream comics, the population of Liu’s world is predominantly female: there’s Maika’s half-fox, half-girl prison mate; Tula, Maika’s close friend; Lillet Ho-Yum, a wily, bloodthirsty matriarch; and a band of witch-nun-engineers.
The themes Liu explores are invariably more universal, more fundamental, than the fantastical quality of her work might suggest. Through the intricacies of her characters’ relationships and experiences—whether a paranormal romance between shape-shifters, mermen and extra-abled-humans (Dirk and Steele series), a tattoo-covered demon huntress’ mandate to defend life as we know it (Hunter Kiss series), or a young girl’s battle to discover and define her identity (Monstress)—Liu asks again and again what it means to be human, and how we might go about the task of loving those different from us, as well as our own composite, faceted selves.
In Monstress, the age-old complexities of war—propaganda, the anxiety of borders, unchecked and unjustifiable cruelty—provide a rich backdrop for these questions. In a note to readers following the final panel, Liu admits that she wants to “confront the question[s]: How does one whom history has made a monster escape her monstrosity? How does one overcome the monstrousness of others without succumbing to a rising monstrousness within?” As the mirror worlds of Marjorie Liu’s creation offer possible answers, they also—perhaps most importantly—allow us to glimpse both the flaws and possibilities of our own self-made, or inherited, monsters.
On a gray November morning, Liu spoke to me over Skype and by phone from her home in Boston. We talked about what it means to be a woman of color in America; the products of immigrant culture; and renegade writers finding fulfillment, a sense of self, and a home in words.
—Lauren K. Alleyne for Guernica
Guernica: Can you tell me the story of your history with stories? How did you start writing?
Marjorie Liu: One of my earliest memories is of the children’s book, Pat the Bunny—a classic where babies and children can touch the rabbit in the book. I remember being held in my mother’s arms in a doctor’s office, seeing that rabbit, watching her flip the pages. My mom was always taking me to the library, giving me books and paper and pens to play with. A love of reading fueled my imagination in really powerful ways. Words were beautiful.
From a young age, too, I always told stories to myself—again, reading inspired daydreams—and as I got older I started writing things down. But it was terrible, awful, all my stories sucked. Really, just the most terrible clichés of purple prose. I think the words “shadow” and “soul” showed up about a million times in my high school fiction and poetry. So much angst!
But I kept at it. Books, words, were my most treasured escape. I lived inside stories, I breathed them. I felt like they made me more human, or a better human. My parents encouraged all this reading, though as I got older—closer to college—my dad became incredibly concerned, rightfully so, with me doing well in school. He’s an immigrant; this is part of the tradition. Reading for pleasure was another way of being lazy. As a kid, he’d read all the time, lived inside his head, and didn’t get into the best college. He didn’t want that for me. Writing, to some degree, was a similar sort of impractical pastime—nothing that could ever feed me, or put a roof over my head.
I joke sometimes that I had to fulfill the educational requirements of becoming either a doctor or a lawyer before I could actually pursue my dreams of anything else. Chemistry and biology were too much, so I went to law school. And it was there, in my last year, that I had a revelation: I loved law school, but I didn’t want to be a lawyer for the rest of my life. At all.
But I was stuck—I’d already gone that far, and didn’t want to just give it all up. That would have been crazy. So I graduated, was accepted into the bar, and I thought, “Okay, while I’m looking for work, let me just sit down and write.” I had written before; I’d published here and there, very small things, but never seriously, and I had never actually finished anything that was novel-length. But there was this voice inside my head, an instinct, telling me, “You have to do this now! You’re never going to have another chance again. You won’t have the time!”
And so, being a crazy, type-A personality, I sat down, did the numbers game, told myself, “Marjorie, if you write 3000 words a day you’ll have a novel in a month.” And I did it!
Guernica: So you just wrote every day for a month? You did your own NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month]!
Marjorie Liu: Yes, except I didn’t know what that was back then. I’d get up at 6 a.m. every morning, write all day long, and go to bed at 3 a.m. And it was the best time of my life. I’ve never felt so happy and so free. Like, really, absolutely deep in my soul, joyful. Even though what I wrote wasn’t perfect, it was pouring out of me in ways that felt right, like I was finally owning my life, taking up space for myself. Only in the last couple years have I been able to talk about what it means to take up space. The concept was completely foreign to me, and what I began to realize is that so often we’re compelled to give ourselves up, compelled to make room for others. Especially as women, we’re taught from a young age that we’re supposed to help people, to act a certain way.
And for me, the act of writing—putting aside the practice of law, even for a month, to sit down and write a book, to indulge myself—was a great act of rebellion. I was saying for the first time in my life that it didn’t matter what anyone said, or if it was impractical—I loved it. I loved it, and I was going to take it. I was going to do it, and it was mine.
I find it wild and sad that this notion, this idea that I’m permitted to have a life and take up space and be who I want to be no matter what anyone says, is something that took so long for me to understand on a conscious level. And there’s no small amount of guilt attached to it. It’s something I’m still wrestling with, this feeling of remorse, that if I’d been a good girl, I would be practicing law right now, would have a professional career. And I live with that—I live with the feeling that I should have been someone else.
Guernica: It’s interesting, though, because the notion of guilt implies that you’ve done something wrong, that you’ve taken something that belongs to someone else. But in this case, the “something” is yourself.
Marjorie Liu: Exactly, yes. And it feeds into the notion that my life is not my own, Rather, it was something I was always snatching at; I had to compulsively steal it—steal my own life, for me. And over the last ten years, I’ve been dealing with the ramifications of that, and feeling, at times, that that was not my right. I don’t know if that’s related to being part of an immigrant family, I don’t know if that’s related to gender, maybe it’s a combination of both. But it’s powerful! It’s so powerful and so trans-generational that for me to act outside of it, I felt, required something really traumatic—that’s why I talk about writing as such a huge act of rebellion. I was born into a very particular set of expectations, and those expectations were non-negotiable, and they were so non-negotiable that I didn’t even realize they were non-negotiable. They were just life. It’s a very difficult and weird thing to wake up from that, and say, no, actually, that’s not true.
Guernica: How do you see that immigrant background transfer into your work?
Marjorie Liu: I’m mixed race; my dad is Chinese and my mom is white. On the one hand, I felt that I had, you know, this very normal childhood. We didn’t have a lot of money, but there was a lot of love; I felt loved. I grew up in Seattle, and every weekend, we would go up to Vancouver to see my grandparents, and so I spent a ton of time with the Chinese side of the family. My grandparents owned a laundry—I mean, talk about stereotype—and I would spend my weekends in that laundromat hanging out with them, all my Chinese cousins and aunts, and that was natural, that was my life. But then, during the school week, I’d be back in Seattle and I’d be going to schools—I went to a public elementary school and transferred to a private school in the fifth grade—that were very white. The kids of color were mostly mixed race kids, like me.
It was an interesting phenomenon, being of mixed race, especially in the eighties. And actually, things haven’t changed all that much, because people still don’t like to talk about race. The inhibition around discussing racism and what it means to be a person of color in this country is profound. Growing up, there was no space to talk about racism. If anyone brought that up at school, suddenly that person was a troublemaker. And as a mixed race kid who had a lot of mixed race friends, if anyone talked about racism we were held up like little trophies. Literally, people would point to us and ask, “How can there be racism? Look at all these biracial kids running around. How is there racism when we see a melting pot?” We were the biological representatives of a post-racial society, and that created an incredible silencing effect.
I saw racism against my parents. My parents got married in 1977, less than 10 years after the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Growing up, my parents would walk into a restaurant with me in tow and people would stare as if we were weird. My dad faced racism at work, too. He had a good job as a chemical engineer in a paper mill north of Seattle, and he was the only Chinese guy there. Other employees would draw caricatures of him and hang them up all over the place—wearing the cone hat, mouth full of buckteeth, the slanted eyes. To them, that was funny.
My dad was very stoic about the whole thing. “Don’t make waves, don’t talk about it,” he said. He never outwardly expressed any anger, never really expressed disappointment and the loneliness of what it meant to be the only Chinese guy in the mill. I think, in my dad’s mind, and my mom’s, too, everyone would come around eventually, so it was okay to endure the ignorance.
It’s taken me all these years to wrap my head around all those different forces surrounding me, what that was doing to my sense of self. But I see it most clearly in my work, because I was obsessed with the “other,” with telling stories about monsters that are misunderstood, monsters that are incorrectly judged, that are vilified because of the way they look.
As a kid, this felt completely natural. Beauty and the Beast was my favorite fairy-tale for a reason. And now, as an adult, I look back and realize this was my way of dealing. Every story I wrote as a kid, and as an adult, was my way of negotiating this part of my life, that didn’t require me to face racism head-on but allowed me to integrate it in the ways that fiction allows people to handle difficult topics. It allowed me to address these ideas without having to… name them.
Guernica: Do you think that’s also why you write fantasy, as opposed to a more realist genre?
Marjorie Liu: Absolutely. It’s funny, because I’m in my late thirties, and even now, I’m only just beginning to find a voice within myself that will allow me to write about these issues outside a fantasy framework. I actually tried about five years ago to write a non-fantasy contemporary novel about a character who is biracial. But as soon as I began, it was as if a wall came down—a barrier between myself and the words that was so impenetrable I couldn’t imagine a way to the other side.
At the time I thought, “Well, you know, I’m a fantasy writer, so whatever.” I didn’t think about it too hard, what it might mean—but now I realize, no, the inhibition was powerful; it was too painful. I couldn’t. It was still too much for me to actually face head-on. And, you know, we tell ourselves all kinds of stories to deceive ourselves, to explain who we’ve become—but the truth is that sometimes there are pains and grievances that are too much for us to think about. We bury them, and we have ways of handling them that won’t force us to deal with the actual wound. Writing fantasy novels was my way. I wrote eleven paranormal romances about monsters and gargoyles, mermen, shape-shifters, psychics, all of them looking for love, acceptance, family, friendship, home.
Guernica: I want to hear your thoughts on the romance novel as a genre, because on the one hand, they establish and perpetuate certain norms for women, but on the other hand, I think the way you write romances is quite transgressive. So why romance? What do you see as the value or potential of that particular genre?
Marjorie Liu: For the most part, romance novels are stories about women finding and taking up space for themselves. And not just taking up space, but daring to find happiness. And yes, romance novels are about the fantasy—the heterosexual fantasy—of having the perfect relationship with a man, but it’s also about women taking power over their sexuality, women taking control over their lives, women making themselves vulnerable to all the intimacies of love. Love can be devastating. It’s hard, actually, falling in love. It requires making yourself vulnerable, and romance novels are all about women making themselves vulnerable, and finding strength and happiness from that great act of courage.
The other thing is that women and their sexuality are often painted in a very negative light, not just in popular culture and other media, but on a societal and cultural level. In romance novels, though, a woman’s sexuality is always incredibly positive. There’s nothing more positive in a romance novel than a woman embracing her sexuality and being fulfilled sexually. There’s nothing shameful about it.
It would be a mistake to say that romance novels are perfect, but in these books, women are getting everything they want. They’re getting perfect love, in which they’re appreciated; they’re getting great sex that they’re not condemned for or made to feel ashamed of; they’re pursuing careers and adventure, and while they’re on their own adventures they’re coming alive to themselves. It’s beautiful, uplifting, escapist fantasy. As someone who had never read romance novels before I was in my early twenties, it was a revelation; I ate them up like crazy because I’d never seen such positive and uplifting messages around women’s sexuality. I’d never seen such a positive portrayal of this desire to be loved and to live a full, unapologetic life. I felt a lot of hope and constant reinforcement that sex is healthy and sex is good, and that we’re permitted this part of our lives in ways that have nothing to do with shame.
Guernica: The body seems to be central—critical, even—to all of your work. There’s that attention to the sexual body, there’s shape-shifting to change from one body to another, and I also noticed the number of differently-abled characters—major characters who are missing an arm or a leg. I’m curious about these various presences of the body, and what you’re trying to accomplish when you address embodiment in your work.
Marjorie Liu: I’ve always been super-aware of bodies, of my body. I was bullied in school because I was overweight and not athletic. When your body is always being compared to other bodies, when your body is always being called out for its deficiencies, it makes you very aware of such things.
Then, there’s the racial side, where bodies of color are always being singled out. You can’t be an Asian woman, growing up in a society that fetishizes Asian bodies, and not have thought about that.
But the racial element goes deeper, and is more disturbing. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed how people will look away from you? I saw this growing up with my family, with my dad, where seeing a person of color would cause white people to look away. It’s not something you might pick up on immediately, especially as a kid, but eventually as you get older you start to notice how people turn their gaze, as if the sight of a person who is different is too much. Like, they just can’t do it. Or maybe they want to stare, but don’t want to be seen looking. Whatever the reason, it’s a thing—white people actually trying to erase us from their line of sight, because whatever it is about us is just too unsettling.
The same thing happens to people who are differently-abled, where, you know, you get someone who is missing an arm, a leg, is in a wheelchair, and suddenly they don’t exist. People see them, and then look away. It is something that has really bothered me my whole life—our inability to hold the other, to hold difference, to acknowledge and see it, is really disturbing to me. And so when I write characters who are missing limbs, when I write characters of color, I am trying to fight that. I’m trying to create a character who is seen.
Guernica: I mean, yes, if we look that first panel of Monstress, there’s no escaping Maika’s gaze; you’re confronted with her entire body, and what that means for her is that she’s missing a part of it. It’s a wonderful encounter.
Marjorie Liu: Thank you. It was a very deliberate choice. So often we’re not forced to actually look. We’re not forced to acknowledge, and we must. It’s incredibly important. And I think it’s harder in our culture now, with our phones. This is the crazy, scary thing—that it was hard enough back in the eighties, and we didn’t even have social media or smart phones then. People had to engage each other face to face, and they were still looking away. And now, with people glued to their phones, they have a perfect excuse to look away, to not see. They’re living lives of not seeing, period. I find that disturbing.
Guernica: There’s a lot of violence in the worlds you create, and I wonder, do you think there can be world-making, or can there even be narrative, that doesn’t have violence at the core? Is it possible to write or to envision a world completely without violence, or do you think it’s really all about managing how, against whom, and for what reason violence is deployed?
Marjorie Liu: I’ve never liked watching horror movies, but I have no problem whatsoever writing horror. And I don’t know what it says about me that I’ve always been drawn to writing violent stories. I don’t know if it’s a kind of anger management. Women, after all, are so often not allowed to express rage. People are wary—deeply, deeply wary—of female anger. We’re taught to always be pleasant, and that’s not healthy. I think of myself, and whether or not I can acknowledge that I have a lot of anger, and the answer is no. I suspect I have a lot of rage buried deep inside, and the only safe outlet for me is in my fiction, as if a slasher flick is playing in my head, and lands on the page.
With Monstress, however, I’ve been very conscious of the violence I’m writing. The choices are deliberate. I’ve been thinking a lot about WWII, and war in general, its tremendous cruelty, and all the terrible things we do to one another in the name of righteousness, and the superiority we bestow upon ourselves. Like, ‘I’m entitled to rape you, because not only are you a woman, you’re of this class, you’re an enemy, you’re just a thing, and I’m going to do this to you because I have a right to.’
I’ve been very conscious of that while working on Monstress—the experimentation, people being hacked apart to serve science, slavery, even cannibalism… None of these are new inventions that I created for the story. These are all practices committed in wartime, and I didn’t want to shy away from them. In Issue 3, for example, there’s a very disturbing scene that was not easy for me to write, but one that was taken directly from the history books: the Rape of Nanking. It is not a rape scene—I want to clarify that—but it is a scene of potentially horrific cruelty. And it’s not new. It’s there because it happened. Again, this is all about compelling readers to see and to hold.
Guernica: Another question about world-making: your vision of diversity or inclusivity, in building a world where everyone is seen, is clearly important. What do you try to do in the writing to enact that idea of inclusivity?
Marjorie Liu: When I’m working, I’m dealing with my personal obsession with monsters. The debilitating, profound unfairness of people being judged by their appearances is something I feel deep within me. That, more than anything else, guides my hand and my mind as I write. Sometimes it’s unconscious—I look back to see what I’ve written in a day and think, “Ah, there we go again.” It is a deep impulse within myself that requires me to tell stories in which these ideas are addressed. So far, the pull has been inescapable.
Monstress, however, was the product of many different ideas; my grandmother’s experience of the Japanese occupation of China, for example, my desire to explore what it is to be monstrous. But it also had to do with women—more precisely the representation of women. I watch a lot of television. I read a lot of books. I love my pop culture, but I watch shows in which you would think the female population of earth had been ravaged by a terrible virus that only allows one of us to exist for every five men. I mean, it’s kind of wild. I was watching Into the Badlands, this new dystopian show, and in the first thirty minutes there are literally hundreds of men and boys and just three women, two of whom are dead and one of whom is the evil, conniving wife of the villain. And that’s not unusual. I wish I could say it is, but in a lot of ensemble shows there’s one or two women and a gaggle of dudes. The Smurfette effect: a town of male Smurfs, and one lone female Smurf. What’s up with that? Really?
I wanted to reverse that and tell a story with five women for every one man, and not comment on it. There’s no virus that eradicated men; the book is just not about them. Instead there are a ton of women running around, ruling the world, making war, having adventures. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but what’s been interesting is seeing how surprised people are at the amount of female representation in the book. I knew there would be some commentary that Monstress has a lot of women—I wasn’t actually being deliberately naïve—but readers have been really taken aback. They keep saying it’s “bold territory” that men aren’t the focal point, and this says to me that the only feminist stories we’ve been able to consume and tell are ones in which the patriarchy is still front and center. What has been made clear to me after seeing the response to Monstress is that we’ve basically accepted this civilizational lie about women that we don’t have agency, that women on average don’t make an impact on the world, that women aren’t really that important. That’s the great lie of patriarchy—and patriarchy won’t accept that the average woman has made this world just as much or more than its greatest men.
Guernica: I noticed it immediately as I was reading Monstress—the villains are women, the witches are women, the prison guard’s a woman. There isn’t just one single depiction of womanhood, there’s a diversity, which I think is great.
Marjorie Liu: Well, yes! My God, half the world is women, and we all have amazing, unique, lives. We all look different, we have different personalities—gasp! How shocking! I feel that this should be natural in the media we consume: that there’s more than one kind of woman that can be present in a story as part of our fictional framework.
But have you seen the movie Ex Machina? It’s about this guy who creates this artificial intelligence and puts it in the body of a woman. And another guy comes to his mountain base to interview this female cyborg to see if she is convincing as a human being. This film was touted as feminist science fiction. But it’s not. It’s a film told through a very male gaze, where a man is the only one with the power to bestow upon a woman her humanity, where a doe-eyed white woman uses her sexuality to connive and deceive and kill men. That’s not feminism. That’s a standard trope of male fantasy in popular culture, the idea that women and their sexualities are monstrous; that the humanity and agency of women falls under male control.
Of course, that doesn’t even begin to address the messed-up racial problems in the film. There’s rampant Orientalism—one of the most intriguing characters is this absolutely silent Japanese woman who is only there to be a slave and a sexual object. She has no agency until the white woman cyborg whispers in her ear and tells her what to do. And later, this white woman cyborg literally flays, literally tears the skin off the other Asian robot and puts it on her body. She is literally wearing the skin of a person of color and taking everything but her face, because whiteness does not want to give up whiteness, but it does want our bodies.
I saw this film because I’d been reading reviews and everyone was calling it the best thing ever. I thought, “You guys are blind! We did not see the same film.” And why would we? As a woman of color, my read of things, my gaze, is very, very different. And that is why having women and people of color within the arts is so important. The lack of our voices, the lack of our vision, the fact that stories aren’t being told through our eyes, means that we’re bombarded with the same kinds of stories over and over again: ones that constantly reinforce a destructive and inaccurate picture of what our world is like, and who we are.
The optics of diversity is one thing—I love seeing people of color on television and in comics, but the majority of these characters are being written by white men. I’m talking about the need for structural diversity. It almost makes me speechless, the significance of it, because we live in a world in which we’re not being heard, our stories aren’t being told. Again, it’s this whole thing of not being seen. Of people looking away from us. Of us not existing, just being wiped away, out of existence. And things won’t change unless we actually start telling stories, and we’re able to mobilize and start using our voices. We’re at a point now where that has to happen. It must.
Guernica: You worked for Marvel, which has a reputation as the ultimate male comic company—is this perception accurate? What was your experience like writing mainstream comics versus writing your own, and working with a company like Image?
Marjorie Liu: This is not an easy answer, because there are a lot of women working behind the scenes at Marvel. My editor for many years was a woman—Jeanine Schaefer—and I was given tremendous opportunities to take on some wonderful and important properties, such as Dark Wolverine, X-23, Black Widow, and the X-Men. As a creator, as a fan, to be able to inject my voice into those stories was a really amazing adventure.
But I was one woman out of many, many, many male creators. At any given time, there was less than a handful of women writers working on a monthly title, and that’s still the case. For years I was the only woman on the X-Men panel at San Diego Comic Con or the only woman at the X-Men retreat. And for years I was the only woman of color, the only person of color, at these gatherings. I did fine, but that’s not the point. Why didn’t that ever strike anyone as odd or problematic?
Well, here’s the deal: being a woman or person of color in a space dominated by white men is like wearing a Klingon cloaking shield: as long as you don’t need to open fire, no one is going to notice whether you’re there or not. No one at these Marvel retreats noticed the absence of women because even the possibility of their participation didn’t exist. “Women can’t write superheroes,” I was told by a top dude in the company. You can’t get much more straightforward than that. My presence at these meetings was an anomaly and the product of a savvy male editor who put me on a hyper-masculine book—paired with a male co-writer—that happened to sell very well. But if I hadn’t been there it would have been business as usual.
That’s not a small thing.
It’s also not a small thing that all the people at the top who make the definitive decisions at Marvel are men—mostly white men. There’s very little structural diversity at Marvel, and in the same way that we see Hollywood refusing to acknowledge or take steps to fix the tremendous absence of diversity and gender parity in film and television, the comic book industry has similar failings that are reflected month after month in its line-up of creators and in the stories being told. Are things improving? I would hazard to say they are—but I’m very cautious. Without diverse voices at the executive level, long-term change will require constant, insistent pressure to maintain this upward tick in the inclusion of women, people of color, LGBT creators, and so on.
Writing my own comics has also been like trying to break up with a really hot, billionaire boyfriend who also happens to be a smothering control freak. I want to walk away, I know I should walk away—and hell, I have walked away—but it’s hard to stay away. The X-Men are better than a diamond necklace. The X-Men are a beautiful, false promise. And the attention that one receives for writing the X-Men, or any Marvel property, is equally as addictive. But in the long run it leaves you with nothing: no creative ownership, no retirement fund, nothing that is yours. The experience is amazing, but in the end, I had to forge ahead and do my own thing.
The reason isn’t entirely financial. As a writer at Marvel I didn’t have to worry about world-building—unless I wanted to. Characters already had existing histories and personalities; all I had to do was put my own spin on them—which was tremendous fun, and a challenge in itself. But what I realized, once it was time to write my own original comic, was that I’d fooled myself into believing that I knew what I was doing. I thought that because I’m a novelist, because I know how to write comics, that I’d be able to mash those two things together.
I was so wrong. The demands of writing the X-Men are very, very different from the demands of writing an original story like Monstress, which requires intense world-building and character development from the ground up. The good thing is, I learned a lot. I pushed myself. I stretched my abilities. As a writer, that’s all we can ever ask of ourselves—to keep pushing, and striving to do something new. To not rest.
Now that I’ve experienced the freedom of writing a creator-owned comic—which is a similar freedom to writing a novel—I can’t go back. I’ve got one more brief project at Marvel—hot billionaire boyfriend, remember—but then I’m done. For real. The freedom is so much sweeter. I’m telling stories that I can’t tell anywhere else, in any other medium, and I’m representing for all the girls of color out there who dream of doing this work, but aren’t sure how, or if it’s even open to them. I’m here to tell them it is possible, that we need their voices and their dreams. We can’t survive without them.
Guernica: What are you working on now?
Marjorie Liu: A couple things. One of them is called The Comfort Woman Project. I wrote a short comic about the comfort women, but I plan on expanding it to novel-length. It’s deeply personal to me because my grandmother, when she was fourteen years old, had to leave her village with her classmates because the Japanese army was coming. She had to walk across China—over 1000 miles, on foot—and if she had not done that, the chances are very high that she would have been kidnapped, and turned into a comfort woman, a sex slave.
Historians are still unsure of the numbers—anywhere between 200,000 to 500,000 women across Asia—who were conscripted into being sex slaves for the Japanese military. The Japanese government will barely acknowledge the crime, and the official line is that these women were volunteers; that they were all prostitutes, and willingly gave themselves over. But that’s a lie. Women were stolen, and all the documents prove that, as does the testimony of those who were kidnapped, whose lives were devastated—these girls, these children, who were raped by men every day, sometimes for years.
So that is a project I’m passionate about, that I’m working on now, that I’m trying to do something larger with, because it is what could have been. That could have been my family; that could have been my grandmother; that could have been her life.
One of the first female manga artists was Machiko Hasegawa. She created her own comic strip entitled Sazae-san in 1946. The plot focused on the current situations happening in Tokyo, centered around a family from post-War Japan, and ran from its inception in 1946 until Hasegawa retired in 1974. It was circulating nationally via the newspaper Asashi Shimbun throughout all of Tokyo. She also created another comic strip entitled Granny Mischief. Her comic strip was even turned into a radio series in 1955 and a weekly animated series in 1969, which is still running to this day. Since it’s been running for as long as it has, that means that it’s Japan’s longest-running anime program to date! Some of her comics were even translated into English under the name of The Wonderful World of Sazae-san. Without her influence, many of the other female manga artists wouldn’t have had the courage to step out and make it big in a male-dominated field like she did. There’s even a Hasegawa Art Museum in Tokyo dedicated to her work.
It’s hard out here trusting a white woman. After the recent election, I find myself side-eying a LOT of white women. And it’s not just me, many Black women I know say the same thing. We’re part of the 94% and we are looking at that 53% with more than a little bit of mistrust. So it’s refreshing to find a comic creator like Kelly Sue DeConnick.
DeConnick is known for her groundbreaking writing on comics like Captain Marvel (seriously if you’re wondering why Captain Marvel is going to be the first female Marvel superhero to get a solo film look no further than DeConnick’s run on the series). But it’s in her creator-owned series like Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet where Kelly Sue illustrates how you can use the comics medium to push an agenda that’s progressive and shows a commitment to addressing issues like race and sex. Most importantly, DeConnick sets herself apart as an ally who knows when to step back and admit what she doesn’t know.
Major News Stories include Three Mile island Nuclear Accident, China institutes the one child per family rule, General Knowledge Quiz Game Trivial Pursuit Launched, Pink Floyd release "The Wall", USSR Invades Afghanistan For the first time in history in 1979 a woman Margaret Thatcher is elected Prime minister in the UK. As technology becomes smaller Sony released the Walkman a worldwide success costing $200 which at that time was a significant amount of money. Also the first Snowboard is invented in the USA. The bombing by the IRA in England continues with Lord Mountbatten and three others assassinated. Following the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini Iran becomes an Islamic Republic and 63 Americans are taken hostage in the American Embassy in Tehran on 4th November Jump To 1979 Fashion -- World Leaders -- 1979 Calendar -- Technology -- Cost Of Living -- Popular Culture -- Toys
December 9 – The eradication of the smallpoxvirus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two human diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other).
The NATO Double-Track Decision: is the decision of NATO from December 12, 1979, to offer the Warsaw Pact a mutual limitation of medium-range ballistic missiles and intermediate-range ballistic missiles combined with the threat that in case of disagreement NATO would deploy more middle-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe, following the so-called "Euromissile Crisis".
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ - Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2007.19 - 10:10 - Days ago = 1843 days ago +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2205.29 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2522 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
The White Woman You Want to Fuck With
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