After Hours at the Book Club: Female Muslim Comic Book Superhero

Kamala Khan breaks the comic book superhero mold. She is a woman – and she’s Muslim. The latest Ms. Marvel character was co-created by G. Willow Wilson, former Boulder resident, who has become a new voice in the largely male dominated area of comic books.

“I think this is a really great time to be coming into comics right now because these discussions are really at the fore front of the community. We’re really talking about representation, about what it means to be a woman working as a creator in comics and also what kind of stories are being told about female characters in comics. There is a lot of discussion surrounding the role of characters of color and how important it is to have creators who can accurately reflect their experience.”

Wilson says we’re in a time when public intellectuals, people more associated with news reporting and other forms of literature are embracing comic books and graphic novels. Wilson cites Ta-Nehisi Coates, Margaret Atwood as examples. “It used to be that you couldn’t really talk about those things, that you would be considered eccentric or combative if you even brought those things up. But now that we have these real intellectual heavy weights getting into comics and bringing up these issues, there’s a much more substantive discussion about this stuff than there was even 5 or 10 years ago.”

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