You bring up an interesting question when you talk about your work. I’m going to just do my best to honor the tradition and the world I am writing into while telling the story of the Dora Milaje, as I want.
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Marvel knew who I was when they hired me and I have to trust that they hired me for a reason-because I know how to tell a story. In truth, I don’t want to read too much work by way of influence. I also read two books on how to write comics that were interesting but not super helpful because they were so basic in what they had to say. Certainly, I read Ta-Nehisi’s Black Panther.
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I also read some Ultimates, The Wonder Woman Rebirth and I have Monstress and Sex Criminals queued up.
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I found the Milestone Comics archive online! In terms of reading-I read some Saga, which I will continue to read because I am enjoying it. RG: I will definitely check out Icon and Blood Syndicate. What sort of things are you reading-comics or otherwise-to inspire your World of Wakanda writing? A very short lived experiment but it really did leave a mark on me. I was so used to being insulted whenever a black character entered a comics panel. My favorites were Icon and Blood Syndicate, particularly for the range of humanity the writers gave these characters of color. Some black creators got together to create a diverse comics universe and, at least early on, it was excellent. I know you’ve been bombarded with people telling you about things they think you should read while working on World of Wakanda, but Roxane, if you haven’t already, you really must read some of the Milestone Comics line from the 1990s. I plan to go to a lot of different places with this fictional world. I suppose Insurrections is a first salvo-an introduction to the world of Cross River, Maryland, a town founded by slaves after a slave revolt. It’s tempting to say that things are changing, but I don’t think progress is really a straight line-who would have thought voting rights would be an issue in the 21st century?-so it’s important to keep the pressure on. We tend to see a limited range of black representations in pop culture, which I think in turn limits everyone’s imagination. In my fiction I’m attempting to write about blackness in the varied and multitudinous ways that I’ve experienced it. Coates writes about this a bit in his second book. RAS: When I stepped on the campus of Howard University as a student so many years ago I was struck by how many different versions of blackness I’d encounter on a given day. What is the larger Rion project? And how does your short story collection, Insurrections, fit into that project? In fiction and nonfiction, I love to write women’s stories, so while this is an unexpected opportunity, it is well in line with the work I do. It is a thrilling opportunity and I took it on because black women and black queer women are so underrepresented in most forms of popular culture but especially comics. I never dreamed I would write a comic book but here we are. Roxane Gay: When Ta-Nehisi Coates emailed me and said, “I have a crazy idea,” I had no idea what would happen next. How do you see this project fitting into the larger Roxane project? into a greater and more complex visibility. On one hand it seems like an almost farflung and random choice given what you’ve published previously, but from another perspective it makes all the sense in the world given your focus on writing black women, queer women, etc.
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Rion Amilcar Scott: As a comics lover I became excited (probably unreasonably so) when I heard that you, along with poet Yona Harvey, had been drafted to be among the first black women to write for Marvel Comics with the upcoming World of Wakanda series. In this conversation, Roxane and I discuss our work and the problems of proper cultural representation. I could see it in their faces as we discussed Roxane’s work previous to the Skype call and in their questions and comments as they spoke to Roxane and after as we continued our discussions-I realized my students were gazing into a mirror in that reflection they found the permission to write the stories they needed to write.
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The class that semester happened to be made up entirely of black women. Once upon a time Roxane Gay spoke via Skype to my class of Bowie State University creative writing students. Or worse yet, any reflections they see are distorted, lopsided and malformed versions of themselves. Previous to this revelation said writer has looked and looked, but found few mirrors, few reflections of themselves in the popular culture. It’s common to hear writers of color speak of reading a particular book by a writer who shares their background or encountering a writer who shares cultural similarities and suddenly feeling permission to write the things they need to write.