We spoke to Chris Ryall at Boston Comic Con about his work on Onyx, a comic he’s writing about an alien warrior woman who wears plate armor and defends planets from hostile parasitic takeover. He discussed the process of writing unconventional woman characters, as well as how he takes cues from his daughter and his female editor when it comes to writing outside of his own experience.
Please feel free to explore the rest of our Boston Comic Con interviews with comics creators, as well. The transcription of Chris Ryall’s interview is below.
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My name’s Chris Ryall, and I’m the Chief Creative Officer and Editor-If-Chief at IDW, and I’m also the writer and co-creator of this book Onyx that we just launched last month. It’s me and artist Gabriel Rodriguez. It’s basically the story of a warrior that comes from an alien world to Earth to try to help stop — there’s this alien spore that destroyed her planet. It’s this planet-destroying thing; she’s been trying to get out in front of it, but keeps failing, trying to get to Earth in time before it would basically have the same effect on our planet. As it’s infiltrating the planet, it’s mutating humans, and there’s already some mutated animal-humans on the planet. So it’s bits of Rom: Space Knight meets Island of Dr. Moreau meets any number of other influences, with our own spin put on it. So, that’s the starting point, and then from there we get a little bit weirder with it.
One of the characters is a female telepath who — she’s basically tortured all the time, because all she has is other people’s thoughts coming into her head, and she just can’t stop them. So she’s kind of a loner, just because she just can’t stand to be around people, which sort of sets her off from the team. There’s a lot of characters like that, that sort of take the starting place of stuff that might feel familiar to people, then move it into hopefully unexpected directions.
Everybody’s in her head at all times, and I know with telepaths, a lot of times they’re in other people’s heads and they’re doing things. All she wants is out, and so her and Onyx develop an unexpected bond in that Onyx is the first person — she’s very humanoid, you know — who she can’t get a read on. So, that’s the first character, the first person she can be around and have a sense of peace, because she’s not being bombarded by her thoughts at all times.
It drives me nuts when characters in spacesuits or astronauts are fitted and it’s boobs and hips — spacesuits would not be that design! They would be designed to fit the humanoid form, and they wouldn’t be fitted like that. So, we kind of play off of that in the Zero Issue that we did, and then in here, where people look at the suit and they assume it’s a male, because it’s just sort of that easy shorthand of, “Oh, well, it’s probably a male.” [The camera pans over an excerpt from a page on which another character misgenders Onyx, and she corrects them.] And she goes, “No, no, it’s not!” Again, we’re trying to just play off of what have been conventions for too long, and show that she can be a strong, kick-ass alien that’s not a male and that’s not an archetype that you’re used to, and hopefully it’s something that’s a little bit different.
Especially since having a daughter, all I do I pay attention to gender stereotypes, and when movies do not offer my daughter somebody to identify with, and books do the same. The LEGOs aimed at her are pink. All of these things. I want to write a character that she can read and be proud of, and it’s a strong female, and it’s not stereotypical, and it’s not what is offered up in way too many ways in comics. It was fun to do that, and I think just between the many females that I know and interact with — we have a good female editor named Sarah Gaydos in our office, and she keeps everybody on point with this stuff. It’s the kind of thing where, like I said, we took great pains to develop the character in ways that would ring true to people, and not feel like something that is just perpetuating a bad stereotype.
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