01x05 - Margaret Stohl & The Life of Captain Marvel

[bunniefuu]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOE QUESADA: Storytellers come in many different forms.

Some make comics.

Some write books.

And some help create entire interactive worlds.

But it doesn't matter what the form.

Every story needs a storyteller.

And if there's one person who knows

how to tell a story in any medium, it's Margaret Stohl.

You might know Margaret as the New

York Times best-selling author of the Beautiful

Creature series.

I know her as a collaborator.

We worked together at Marvel in a redefining story

for Captain Marvel.

So where better to talk about our favorite superpowered

Air Force captain than the Intrepid,

a decommissioned aircraft carrier.

I'm Joe Quesada.

I tell stories for a living.

Welcome to Marvel Storyboards.

[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]

Meet Margaret

Captain on deck.

Yay!

Good to see you, buddy.

JOE QUESADA: Margaret is a world builder.

I like the shades.

It's a Top g*n look.

JOE QUESADA: From the fictional town of Gatlin, South Carolina,

in the Beautiful Creatures franchise

to the interactive world she writes and creates

for video game developers like Bungee,

Margaret tells a story by creating whole knew worlds.

At Marvel, we work together retelling the origin story

of Carol Danvers in a comic series called

The Life of Captain Marvel, but today

I'm interested in a different story,

the life of Margaret Stohl.

So what's your origin story?

For me, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

I just started writing.

So for me, it was always about storytelling.

It was like an escape.

I can relate to that totally.

I would sit in bed and just concoct

stories that would take me away from that time and place.

Did your family know you sort of wanted to do this?

Were they supportive?

My mom is sort of an interesting figure in my life.

She would read us books in the car,

and I can remember, like, pressing my face

against the car window and looking

out at the stars in the desert and listening

to my mom's voice.

And that was sort of the beginning.

I have loved working with people who are different than I am

and finding out, like, what bits are true for everyone.

Yeah.

You and me sitting in the room talking Captain Marvel when we

figured out Life of Captain Marvel and that origin story,

I've never had an experience like that

actually in my entire life.

Like, I have never had that much of a brain jab

where you knew when you left the conversation

how good the piece was going to be that came out of it.

Like, it all happened in the room.

JOE QUESADA: Everybody was pulling for their family.

You know, in my family, this happened.

In my family, this happened.

And it all sort of came together in Carol's story.

Beautiful Creatures

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARGARET STOHL: I'm heading for the sky.

I was made for this, Joe.

Pew, pew!

I just wanna lay down here right now.

Seriously, dude.

That's a bit unusual.

It's a little bit like Darth Vader's helmet.

This is therapy.

Tell me your hopes and dreams.

You ready, Major Stohl?

We're about to take off fuel cells.

I am ready.

Pew, pew, beep, beep.

JOE QUESADA: You're published in--

MARGARET STOHL: 50 countries. - 50!

- Yeah. - I thought it was 38.

38 territories.

My debut novel--

JOE QUESADA: Right.

Beautiful Creatures-- Southern Gothic,

it seems like such a specific thing

to write a story set in a small town in the south

of the United States.

But I get-- I still get mail from all around the world

from, like, people in small towns in France

and people in small towns in South America who understand

that, like, fishbowl feeling.

You really start to change the way you create because you see

more and more of your readers and you

realize we really are all now living in a global readership.

Clearly when you wrote the first book,

you didn't anticipate any of this.

Yeah.

JOE QUESADA: But now as you can continue as a writer,

do you feel the weight of it?

Is there a sense of responsibility?

Don't you remember that?

Yeah.

MARGARET STOHL: Your work starts to get, like, attention,

and then suddenly you see it all,

like, a little differently.

JOE QUESADA: For me, it changed when my daughter was born.

You know, it really, really, really

changed because now we're seeing it through her eyes.

Right.

So my goal-- and I always used to say this from my first

date as editor in chief is--

I don't want to break anything.

I want to make sure that we take these characters to a point

where they advance and they're still fun

but that I left these characters either the same place

or a better place than they were before I got there.

Yeah.

This would be cool if we were in space

and you could just sit on your porch and kinda look out.

Just open the capsule, just sit there and go--

- Right. - Hey, comet.

Look at that. - Yay.

See, Carol can do that.

All right, here we go.

[ALARM BLARING]

That's it.

Really bad idea.

JOE QUESADA: Right, really bad idea.

No!

No.

As a kid playing video games, there's

a leap there between wanting to be a writer

and then knowing that somebody writes videogames.

No, I know.

Like, I don't think that ever occurred to me for a long time.

Right.

I think my first game was about spies.

It was called Spycraft.

And then I made adventure games, these ones called Zork.

I've always loved the game industry

because it's really smart people who are building

worlds just like they do.

So here you are 20 years ago, right.

I mean, how many women do you think were

in the industry at this point?

There aren't very many women still.

There are more and more every day in games.

It means a lot because you get to decide

who gets to be a hero.

Because I want girls to get to be heroes.

Yeah.

I taught a class last week, and there was a girl there who

was wearing her Captain Marvel flight jacket

and had the same Captain Marvel Vans I had who said I'm

going to be a game director.

And there's like-- there are very few women game directors,

and every time you're the only girl in the room,

you bring other girls in there.

And then there are more girls in the room, and it changes.

Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Look at all those.

It's the Millennium Falcon.

I can bet what you were like as a kid.

These are part of you, your life, for anyone in your life

that you feel you've really interjected into Carol

Danvers and her world.

Carol's origin being sort of all over the place,

you had to really give her her own story arc.

And I thought really a lot about that

because it's the story of girls in comics in a certain way,

right.

We were sort of a side character,

and I bonded with that because I realized

that was my journey, right.

And it was my mom's journey.

So for me--

How was it your mom's journey?

Life of Captain Marvel became about,

like, Carol discovers that her mother is also a Super Hero.

So my mom's had MS my whole life, has been in a wheelchair

since I was, you know-- had a walker for a while--

but since I was 12.

I gave my mom the last panel of the last issue that was like--

it's like Carol flying, and she's, like, had this power

fantasy with her mother where they're, like,

kicking butts together, right.

And we don't get to see Super Heroes' mothers.

And for a girl Super Hero to have this butt kicking equally

powerful Super Hero mom--

I framed that panel, I gave it to my mom Christmas morning,

and it says I am my mother's daughter where

she's flying away at the end.

That's a thing that, you know, Marvel

made up and for me personally.

I will never forget.

Flight Academy

JOE QUESADA: How much research goes into Carol Danvers?

Have you ever flown a jet plane?

I can't say that I have, Joe, though I'd like to.

JOE QUESADA: You'd like to.

MARGARET STOHL: Mmm hmm.

JOE QUESADA: I'm about to make your dreams come true.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ready for this?

Bring it, flyboy.

All right. - All right.

Let's bring it.

Just a fair warning, I tend to cry like a baby.

Oh, boy.

Oh my God.

Oh, yeah!

[LAUGHING]

Sorry about that.

Let me bring us back here.

Let's do a barrel roll.

Hold on.

This is not what they show you in flight academy.

Uh oh.

All right.

Uh oh.

I don't think this is how it works.

MARGARET STOHL: Oh my God, that was actually hilarious.

JOE QUESADA: Oh, God.

Nicely done.

The Intrepid

You have a whole new appreciation

for what pilots do.

I think we can collaborate on one more story

together, the Intrepid itself.

I mean, it's literally still floating

right here in the water.

And there's an urban legend if there was a big enough crisis

and they needed extra ships, they

could actually use this thing.

Oh, that would be awesome.

So what's the crisis?

What's the story?

OK.

Well, we'll set sail.

We'll float with our zombie crew--

JOE QUESADA: Yes.

MARGARET STOHL: And then a fleet of 10-year-old girls

in their Captain Marvel cosplay will save us, 'cause

that's what's going to happen.

JOE QUESADA: I like it.

Chatting with Margaret, I've learned that great storytelling

is about creating characters whose paths

reflect their own journeys.

Placing women at the forefront as leaders, protagonists,

and heroes allows Margaret to have a more personal

connection to her story.

But more importantly, it propels young women

forward to become the architects of their own worlds.

[MUSIC PLAYING]