Zitat des Tages von G. Willow Wilson:
I don't know that Islam has ever been a subject of anything that I've written. I think Muslims have often been, but those are two very different things.
To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.
There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.
In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.
That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.
In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.
Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.
So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.
Leaving your country at a tender age really rearranges the way you perceive the world. So I feel marginally attached to many places rather than deeply attached to any one place.
I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.
The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.
I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.
I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.
I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.
The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam.
I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.
It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.
We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.
Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me.
The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.
I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'
The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.
I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.
There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.
There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.
'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.
The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.