Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.
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.
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.
If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions.
'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.
I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.
It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.
'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The censors don't bother with fantasy books, especially old ones. They can't understand them. They think it's all kids' stuff. They'd die if they knew what The Chronicles of Narnia were really about.
'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.
In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.
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.
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.
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.
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 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.
I discovered I was a monotheist... That rules out polytheism. I have also had a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or leader who claims to be God's representative on Earth.
Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.
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.
My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.
I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'
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.
An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.
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.
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.
I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.
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 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.
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.
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.
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.
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 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.
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.
In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.
I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.