Mary Sue Interview: Jem and the Holograms Creator Christy Marx: Storyteller of Steel

This interview is in four parts, because there was so much to talk about! You can navigate through each section at the bottom of each page.

RG: Jumping back a little, since you were doing Jem and you were doing Sisterhood of Steel, I just have to ask what were your thoughts on She-Ra? Was She-Ra like the big competition?

CM: Naw, I never thought anything about She-Ra.

RG: (laughs)

CM: I just didn’t!It didn’t really enter my consciousness. If you want to know what my inspiration for The Sisterhood was—

RG: Yes!

CM: It was being unhappy, to put it mildly, about the origin that was created for Red Sonja for the Marvel Comics. The “I am raped, and the Goddess comes down to give me magical powers to be this really great fighter, but I have to be celibate.” And I disliked that so intensely.

RG: Yeah, I do too!Because the first issue of Red Sonja I read—wow, I don’t know how I skipped over that—when I first read Red Sonja, she said, “I have this vow of celibacy, and no man gets to have me until he can defeat me.” And of course, she’d always win because she was Red Sonja, which I liked a lot more, I have to tell you.

CM: Well, that particular origin, I’m not sure where that ran. It might have been in one of the Savage Sword of Conan books. But I objected to it strongly. It bothered me so much that I actually sat down and created the Sisterhood. Because I wanted to do a group of women that would function the way I thought a real group of warrior women would function. I wanted something that felt real to me, or as real as I could get, not just a bunch of Amazons or what have you, but women who had strengths and weaknesses, women who like to screw, women who have political rivalries and jealousies…I wanted to do something that represented to me something closer to a reality.

RG: You wanted to treat them as people, which is so novel.

CM: Yeah, which is why when I was done with the gig at Epic, and I was trying to sell it elsewhere, I was infuriated to have men say to me, “Enh, they’re just men with boobs.”

RG: Man, I have to tell you that is always one of the things I’ve hated most when people dismisses the fighter woman as a “man with boobs,” particularly in the ‘80s comics. I’d be all, well, I like them, so….

CM: It was just infuriating.

RG: What do people even mean when they say that?

CM: It means they have no fucking clue is what it means. You can quote me on that!

RG: It’s been recorded (both laugh). There’s been a strong reaction to the use of rape in comics, particularly since it seems to be the go-to traumatic defining event for so many female heroines—

CM: And if it’s a man, the defining event is the murder of the woman, the wife, the lover, the child, the women of the family. You know, that’s what seems to the easy go-to for the guy, oh, well, murder your wife and family, and then, yeah, I know, they are kind of easy go-tos. I don’t think it invalidates the validity of dealing with rape. I think rape is a very serious thing that can be touched upon and dealt with. I think it’s just a matter of how it’s used, how it’s put into effect.

RG: Well, you know when the first issue of Sword of Sorcery came out, the Amethyst story that we did, and there was the attempted gang rape in that. There was a lot of pushback from female fans who generally I agree with. It depressed me that rape had been overused in comics that this couldn’t be seen as a valid use.

CM: Well, especially since what I was drawing from were some real-life events that were fresh in my mind. There were a couple of different ones. There was a real-life event of a high-school girl who was raped for hours, repeatedly, right outside the school gym after the prom. And all these people stood around and watched and did nothing. It was a horrific event. That was fresh in my mind, and then there was a thing I had read very recently that was fresh in my mind about high school boys creating these lists of sexual conquests they were going to make. And it became like these hidden clubs where they were going down this checklist and trying to check names off of it, becoming this contest. That was kind of at the back of my mind too when I was thinking about this particular event. So, those were based on things I’d been seeing, hearing, reading about, that had impacted me and so I was drawing upon those.

RG: What was also interesting about it was in the original Amethyst series, Amethyst herself is momentarily threatened by her rape. When she first gets to Gemworld, these ogres find her, and they’re trying to drag her off to Dark Opal, who’s the Big Bad. And one of them’s like, “Well, we can have some fun first!” Now, when I was first reading that, I was a kid, you know. It flew right over my head then. I didn’t know what they meant. In retrospect, I’m like, “now, wait a minute, people. That’s actually worse than what happened in our book.”

CM: And the whole point of that event was to demonstrate the nature of the character Amy, of what she was about, and how she felt protective and wanted to help someone. It was really more to be illustrative of her character than anything else. And also, to be honest with you, I thought to myself, “If a young girl reads this, and it makes her think twice about getting into a situation like that, that would be great too.”

RG: Who’s—what’s the situation like that you want her to think twice about?

CM: Someone say, “Oh, meet me behind the bleachers. Alone at night.” Or something that seems dicey. Something that should be suspicious, but because this girl wanted to believe it so desperately, she didn’t stop and think.

RG: I don’t want to put the onus on the girl there.

CM: Well, not exactly, but I’m just saying, if it makes someone think twice, it would be great.

RG: To a certain degree, sometimes I think that feminism and fandom—because it keeps going through so many evolutions—you know, my mom heard this story and said, “Well, that’s like sisterhood.” You know, Amy jumping in there to protect her female friend, her reaction was, “sisters!” Whereas to the more contemporary fans, they’re like, “Oh god, more rape. Why are we doing this again?” It’s interesting to me to see how like they’re both right in a way, but they’re coming at it from such different points of view of feminism almost.

CM: Yeah, very definitely. It’s an interesting generational divide.

RG: As a child, you didn’t really have friends to share your comics love with. Did you eventually find your own tribe?

CM: When I moved to L.A., and I started meeting all the comic book people, they were my tribe.

RG: I’ve definitely enjoyed watching the rise of female visibility in fandom, comics fandom in particular, because I always knew I couldn’t be the only one.

CM: I think it’s wonderful. I love seeing it, I think it’s the greatest thing ever, because I was such a loner and such a freak when I was getting into comics. It simply wasn’t what a girl did (laughs). Even when I was very young, I wrote to DC Comics, asking how I could get into making comics, and I actually got a personal letter back from someone, but it was addressed to “Mr. Marx.” It was just—even though my name was Christy, the assumption was this had to be a boy who was writing. It couldn’t possibly be a girl.

RG: You know, the funny thing is I still see that. Like Nicola Scott, I have seen people go, “Wow, I wonder where Nicola Scott is from with a name like that, HE must be Italian.”

CM: I would say most of the women I got to know, I got to know on a professional level.

RG: That’s good too, because there have been a lot of female professionals in these types of things, like animation and comics and computer games, and so on. And history always seems to overlook them.

CM: Yeah, I’d like to see that change.

RG: You and me both!It’s actually why I really liked the Jill Lepore Wonder Woman book because she actually mentioned so many previously overlooked female artists and editors, especially who were from DC Comics, who even I hadn’t known about.

CM: Oh, neat!

RG: If you could, why don’t you just talk some about your work process? Particularly, as I’ve said before, when we worked on Amethyst, your creator bible was the most comprehensive thing I’d ever read, and we sent it around internally to show how fully developed you could really make a concept.

CM: That would be due to my training in animation. Because in animation, I spent time developing materials and creating bibles for these series that had to be used by all these other writers who would write for the series. So, for Jem, for example, I had to create a comprehensive bible for those other writers for the 65 half-hours we would be doing. The same with Conan; I created an extremely comprehensive bible for the Conan series because I had to have writers writing 65 half-hours, so those writers had to be able to look at this material and know who the characters were, and what the setting was, and everything that they needed to know about writing the series had to be there. To me, it’s second nature.

Plus, I absolutely love world-building. I absolutely love sitting down and thinking about how to structure a world and how to build [it], and the societies and everything that makes up creating a new world. The politics, the geography, the environment, everything from the religion to economics to what their art would be—I just love the whole act of world-building. But to me, I think it’s important that it be cohesive and coherent, and having to create bibles for other writers is a good way to achieve that.

RG: When you did the Convergence stories in the Green Arrow issues, and they had Black Canary—I know how much you like to research and read everything that you can—what all did you read to prepare for those?

CM: I went back and read the Green Arrow stories from that time period leading up to those events. I read the stories that involved his son Conner [Hawke], who I wasn’t familiar with as a character previously, so I read those stories how he was originally introduced, and I had to read the Green Arrow stories to get a sense of what was that Oliver Queen’s mind like at that time period. Where was he coming from? I wanted to remain true to that, and I spent a long amount of time absorbing the Kingdom Come stories to get a sense of who that particular Black Canary was, and her Oliver Queen who was quite different, and their daughter. There wasn’t really much in Kingdom Come about the daughter at all. She would appear in some panels, but there wasn’t much of anything there, so then I had to come with what kind of character did I want her to be and what I could create for her.

RG: Did you discover things about Black Canary that were glad didn’t make it into your Birds of Prey run, or that you wish had made it into Birds of Prey?

CM: The one in Kingdom Come seemed to be a harder-edged character, a different sort of character than the one that I was trying to create. I was trying to create in my Birds of Prey version a Black Canary who was trying to do the right thing, and who kept making bad decisions in the process of trying to do the right thing. I was in the process of breaking her down, so that I could get her at rock bottom and build her back up. Unfortunately, I never got to do the building her back up part with the book because the book ended, so it felt like an incomplete cycle for that character. But she felt very different to me from the tougher, hard-edged character I saw in Kingdom Come.

RG: Well, she’s a lot younger in yours, so someday, she may become that later one.

CM: Yes, exactly, it’s possible.

RG: But in a way, it’s really good that you got to break her down because now she gets to rediscover herself in the new Black Canary series. I think by doing that, we left this foundation for this whole new series, which looks really cool.

CM: Oh, that’s good. That’s nice to hear.

RG: Have you seen any of that yet?

CM: No, I haven’t—I’ve seen some images here and there, but that’s about it.

RG: Now she’s going to be a rock star. Her band is Black Canary, and I’m sure wackiness will ensue. But you know, after having to do all that secret agent stuff, it must be nice to be able to say, “Fuck it. I’m going to sing and travel, because god, do I deserve it.”

CM: Oh yes, I did see some sample pages. I didn’t think it was a continuity character; I thought it was a reboot. I thought they were doing something completely different.

RG: No, I think everything has some sort of tenuous link to what was done before, but they certainly have permission to really take the story to wherever they want to go now.

CM: Yeah, it does seem that way.

RG: Which I think is great. We really did leave her in this position where your name is clear, but what now? What do you do with your life now? And they’ve picked that up and ran with it in a really interesting direction.
Lastly, what are you working on now?

CM: I’m at Zynga, making games with them as Narrative Director, which is all about how to tell a story in mobile games. I’m also working on a Jem memoir, which will be an eBook sold through my site.

RG: I’m sure everyone’s asked you this, but I’ll go ahead and do it anyway—any thoughts on the teaser for the Jem movie?

CM: I would ask that everyone judge the Jem movie for what it is and recognize it for what it is. It’s introducing Jem to a new generation and should be judged accordingly. I don’t have anything to do with it, but I wish them well, and I hope people give it that chance. And in the meantime, they can enjoy the Jem comic by Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell. They’ve done a superb job of capturing the spirit of Jem.

(images provided by Christy Marx and respective copyright owners)

Rachel Gluckstern is a New York-based editor and writer. After over ten years editing at DC Comics including Detective Comics, Batman and Robin, Sword of Sorcery, and many other titles for the DCU line, her nerd cred and love of Batman are both unshakeable. Follow her on Twitter @rgluckst if you feel like doing such a thing.

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