Comic Book Writer Marjorie Liu On How Rejection Shaped Her Writing : NPR

Both writers have been shaped by feeling like outsiders. Growing up part-Asian American, they rarely saw people like themselves represented in books or tv or movies. For Marjorie Liu, that’s one of the reasons she gravitated — both as a reader and as a writer — to the X-Men, and stories of mutants who were ostracized from broader society.

“As someone who witnessed racism and experienced racism, to read these stories about people who didn’t belong — even though they were human beings, they weren’t quite considered human — and that resonated with me on a powerful level,” she says.

If you’d asked me ten years ago to describe the books I was writing, I would have said, ‘I write about gargoyles and mermen … but now with time and distance, I can say very clearly that what I was writing about were my experiences as a child.
Marjorie Liu
So Liu makes it a priority to put women of color, especially Asian women, at the center of Monstress, which takes place in an alternate version of Asia. The world she’s created is made up of women who don’t fit into neat little boxes.

“That was my goal through this book to show women in all their great and wonderful diversity. Women who are good, women who are evil, women who are in uniform, women in all straits of life and power — and that they are fully realized.”

Source: Comic Book Writer Marjorie Liu On How Rejection Shaped Her Writing : NPR