Superheroes, Feminism And Incurring A Debt To Black Women: A Conversation With Comics Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick

Kelly Sue DeConnick didn’t plan a career in comic books, nor did she imagine that writing for the visual medium would lead to collaborations with cultural luminaries like the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

“I grew up on Air Force bases, and I read a ton of comics,” DeConnick told The Skanner. “My theory is that the same people who would be drawn to service would be drawn to the dominant genre in comics: superheroes. I could go to the swap meets where GIs who were shipping out were selling stacks for a dollar.”

Despite her love for comics, DeConnick said it didn’t occur to her that anybody made them, let alone that women would be welcomed into the field. Since then, the Portland-based comics writer has forged an impressive career that spans industries: At Marvel, she took on the “Captain Marvel” series and ultimately saw her depiction of the Carol Danvers character projected on the big screen in the blockbuster 2019 film. She has authored two bestselling comics series, “Bitch Planet” and “Pretty Deadly,” and last year released the first issue of FML, a Dark Horse-published series that follows a group of teens as they navigate an increasingly bizarre Portland landscape during a pandemic. 

DeConnick has become a leading voice for women in the comics industry, and was recruited to sit on the board of the Urban League of Portland, in part to serve as a representative from the arts. 

“Something I feel strongly about is that middle-class living in the arts is not a pipe dream, it’s not irresponsible,” DeConnick said. “It is a career path, and it’s absolutely a thing that you can do. There aren’t as many of those paid jobs, but it’s not like the presidency. There’s a lot of us that have a normal middle-class income. My husband and I are both full-time writers and we have a mortgage and two cars and two kids. That should be available to everyone.”

The Skanner spoke with DeConnick about her multifaceted career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Skanner: How did you break into the comics industry?

DeConnick: I never had a grand plan. I had good grades and no direction. I have a theater degree and I did a lot of theater and improv in high school and college, and then I moved to New York to pursue that, but honestly just didn’t have the temperament for it. 

Comics are a medium, not a genre, but within comics, our biggest genre was superheroes. Comics were very big in base culture. Later, when I was in New York, I ended up meeting some folks who worked in the industry. It was just kind of a lark. There was an online comic book posting board, which is actually where I met my husband, oddly enough. The funny thing is that a number of my cohort – a lot of the professionals who came up at the same time as me – were also readers on that board. We started putting together little anthologies of our own, and kind of almost accidentally made our way into the industry. 

When do you first remember discovering comic books could go past the superhero narrative?

We have a sort of short cultural memory about this. The way that we thought about comics in the 80s and 90s, where it was like, well, they’re superheroes and they’re for boys – that really was only true of the 80s and 90s. 

Superheroes didn’t really come into being until the 40s, but before that, comics were kind of like any other pulp fiction. They were on newsstands and there were western comics and there were romance comics and sports comics. Then during the Red Scare, there was a gentleman named Frederick Wertham who actually faked some of his research. He testified before Congress that comics were making kids into juvenile delinquents, and the publishers were so afraid of there being outside restrictions on them that they were like, no! We’ve got this! We’re going to self-police! And they came up with this thing called the Comics Code. And what it ended up doing was sort of infantilizing our industry. 

So then all comics had to be safe for kids, and so specifically superheroes that were very friendly to an all-ages audience became overwhelmingly the dominant genre. But that’s very different in other parts of the world. For instance, in Japan or in France, you can go to a Barnes and Noble-sized bookstore that is all comics. Instead of there being the floppy pamphlet comics that we tend to think of when we use that word, they’ll be bound with spines. 

Early in my career, the default comic reader was a 35-year-old man, and even though we still thought of comics as being for kids, it was actually hard to find comics that were kid-friendly. It’s not hard to find comics that are kid-friendly anymore because they have made their way now into mainstream culture.

I have a 14-year-old and a 17-year old, and each of my kids has had a comic as required reading for school every year since fourth or fifth grade.

So during your career you’ve seen comics become a prominent part of education?

The thing that makes comics so powerful for schools is that that combination of words and pictures is really sticky in your brain. And comics have been used as propaganda for many, many years, because they are that powerful and also, we make comics and drop them – the CIA made comics and dropped them over the Sandinistas. 

I got to work with Congressman John Lewis in the last few years of his life. He loved comics, in particular because the MLK comic “The Montgomery Story” was a big part of his introduction to the movement. And the “Lowndes County” comics that were getting folks to run for office in the south in the 60s. They’re very amateur, but it is a really powerful way of communicating ideas. 

Reading is reading. Sometimes there is a resistance to bringing graphic literature into the classroom because there’s this idea that somehow it’s not legitimate reading. It absolutely, 100% is. For learning, it is particularly effective. It can be so persuasive, which is why the CIA makes comics, it’s why the Navy has a comics publisher. 

How did you come to work with John Lewis?

I did a series with Canadian artist Valentine DeLandro called “Bitch Planet.” It’s a feminist science fiction satire. I met Andrew Aydin, who was a staffer in the congressman’s office. He was a comic book guy, and Andrew convinced the congressman that he should do a comic of his story, because “The Montgomery Story” had meant so much to the congressman. They worked with an artist, Nate Powell, and they did “March,” which was the first part of the congressman’s comic biography. 

It was incredibly successful, and the congressman was interested in doing more. When we were in Atlanta for Dragoncon, Andrew set up a dinner. We answered a lot of questions for him about comics and the industry. It was really lovely. 

The congressman is such a lovely man. As it happened, my husband’s father died that evening…I got a text during dinner that he had passed. Dragoncon is a huge convention, and you have to wait a long time to get an elevator, and I was wondering aloud how quickly I could get downstairs. The congressman stood up and took me by the hand and walked me to the maitre d' and asked to get me down on the service elevator. Like, this is a human thing that needs to happen. And they just whisked me out of there. It was amazing. Then my husband ran into him at San Diego Comic Con, and said, “I’m not sure if you remember me,” and the congressman remembered, “Your father passed.” 

They wanted to try to do the next volume of his autobiography with a different artist because Nate had some work of his own he wanted to do. They wanted to do “Run,” which would be part two of the autobiography, and also more comics that fulfilled his mission. And we had the congressman’s blessing to name it Good Trouble Comics.

So for five or six years now, Valentine and myself, my husband, Andrew and a friend of Andrew’s have been doing comics for libraries and schools mostly…Because most of our books have been done through the New York City Public Schools system with the idea of highlighting hidden voices of people that have been erased from history, with the current (presidential) administration, that funding is being eliminated. 

Bitch Planet is an original series about “non-compliant” women who are sent to prison on another planet. How did you develop the concept?

I met (artist) Valentine (LeAndro) at a comic convention in Canada. I tend to fall in love with my artists, and I want to do the thing that’s going to be the right thing for them. I sent him a list of ideas, little thoughts or characters. “Bitch Planet” was on there, and I think I had written something about it being exploitation that was bad girls sent to a prison planet – that’s really all I had.

We were trying to figure out, what’s my way into Bitch Planet? What do I want to say? I was taking a lot of shit at the time for inserting my “woke agenda” in “Captain Marvel.” When that book came out when I was eight, Carol Danvers was “the female fury,” and at one point, when Chris Claremont was writing it, it was straight up Gloria Steinem fan fiction. Carol had a middle part and glasses and was editor of “Woman Magazine.” 

Because the “Carol core,” the fandom, was really big and really present and it was a lot of women and it was folks that had been left out of mainstream superhero comics for a while, it was really influential. That challenged a lot of people who were afraid that their comics were going to be taken away from them or something. I became a lightning rod I never really intended to be. And I thought it was so weird because it was like, this is not heavy-handed feminism. This is a light, blue sky, uplifting superhero book. You want to see angry feminist, I’ll show you angry feminist. 

And so with Bitch Planet, the thing that we landed on is Val and I both love exploitation films, and they’re deeply problematic. So it was like, can you do exploitation that is not exploitative? And will it work? I don’t know. That feels very unsafe. That’s where the art is, is where you’re unsafe. Let’s figure it out. That book launched huge. 

How did you approach writing for Black characters?

My friend Danielle Henderson – she wrote a memoir called “The Ugly Cry” – she said, “You know, Black women are incarcerated at three times the rate of White women. Most of these women have to be Black.”

I was like, but I’m really uncomfortable and I don’t want to be an interloper. You need to have a person in your life who will have the courage to call you a coward, and Danielle said, no, you don’t get to just chicken out. And then it felt like, ok, I’m a White woman, Val’s a Black man, and we are writing this book that is largely about Black women, which is a space neither one of us inhabits. That incurs a debt.

I don’t think it can’t or shouldn’t be done, because I don't want us to become a culture of narcissists who can only tell the stories of people who look exactly like us. That’s the death of empathy, and that’s stupid. But at the same time, White folks have been telling the stories of people of color…so what we started doing was making sure that we were hiring not exclusively but mostly Black women to write essay pieces for us for the back of the book. We basically just created a little feminist magazine that ran in the back of the singles of the comic, and none of that was reproduced in the collections because we do that as a way to incentivize buying the single issues.

We also produced an anthology of short stories based in the world of “Bitch Planet” where we privileged giving Black women opportunities to get a published sample of work that they can then take elsewhere, as a way of saying, ‘Here, I’m published in the comics industry. Hire me to do more comics.’ It felt like kind of off-setting that debt.  

A selection of Good Trouble comics are available to download free here.