G. Willow Wilson

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.

Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.

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.

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.'

I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.

The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.

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.

'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.

'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.

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.

In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.

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?'

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.

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.

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.

'Lost' makes a lot of sense to me, philosophically.

I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

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.

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.

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

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.

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.

Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.

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.

I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.

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.

There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.

I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.

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.

Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.

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.

Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.

'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 Qur'an is God's property, not mine.

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.

The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.

For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.

The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.

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.

Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.

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.

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.

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.