Words matter. These are the best G. Willow Wilson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Most people know Muslims in their community but don’t realize it.
The Qur’an is God’s property, not mine.
The Qur’an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.
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.
Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it’s not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms.
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.
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.
My synesthesia is mostly gone – it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you’re trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist – flat is all I see.
In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.
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.
So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.
A lot of my writer friends – some of whom are brilliant – work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.
Anytime you’re writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there’s a lot of guesswork.
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.
What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who’s been a teenager. We haven’t all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we’ve all been 16 and awkward.
The great thing about Cairo is the vast majority of women wear some kind of head scarf, but they are also very fashion-conscious. They love bright colors.
The ‘Islam vs. the West’ dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
Choosing a spouse with religion in mind is not always a mistake, especially if your heritage and your faith are important parts of who you are. The trick is, as always, to recognize a good thing when you see it – and never mistake the bad for something more.
Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
I do hope the success of ‘Ms. Marvel’ will open doors for other characters and other creators.
‘Lost’ seems to be the inverse of ‘Air’: It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart.
I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish.
There’s a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren’t enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.
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.
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, ‘Cairo,’ sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!
People love to talk about new and different. They don’t always love to buy and read new and different.
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.
The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.
In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman’s body, Heaven.
To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.
I think any time you have a super team, whether it’s all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren’t always totally compatible.
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.
When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride – I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.
I don’t think there’s something inherently irreligious about comics.
I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.
When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven’t seen through before. That can be very powerful.
In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.
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.
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.
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.
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.
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’ve wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.
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.
Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.
‘Butterfly Mosque’ came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.
Ninety percent of the comic books I’ve written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.
Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there’s a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.
Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.
