Noelle Stevenson

“Question everything. Don't try to emulate someone else's path. Look at what you have, the tools you have, the place you're in; know the rules, and break them.”

“It was not until Web comics that I saw stories about women and stories by women and things that were aimed specifically at female readership. It was just kind of this free-for-all that was achieving something amazing with creativity. That was where I got my start.”

“'She-Ra' was ahead of its time.”

“I always have a tendency to take on too many things.”

“I am very interested in female characters and bringing a new perspective to mediums where not necessarily that's been valued at all.”

“Hopefully, comics will be enough to support me after I graduate.”

“I was going to be a storybook illustrator or an editorial illustrator. I ended up in a comics class by mistake because all the others were full, so I was like 'I'll stay for one class, and then I'll go take something else, because I don't care about comics.' I got pulled in really fast; I discovered I had a voice in comics that I didn't know I had.”

“It's easy to feel like you don't have any control over yourself or your life or your body as a teen - everything is changing so fast, and a lot of it feels so outside of your power. I think that's why a lot of teens form really strong attachments to fictional characters or celebrities, draw their own characters or write themselves into fan fiction.”

“I've always had a lot of story ideas rattling around in my head, but 'Nimona' felt very tangible very early. I knew the ending. So I just started making more and more pages, and then I made it a webcomic, like, 'OK, I'm really gonna do this.'”

“Kids aren't dumb - they might not get something, but they're going to figure it out.”

“The first movie I saw was 'Prince of Egypt' - that was the first movie I saw in theaters.”

“I swear slightly more when there aren't children around, but not that much.”

“Even in stories that I like, with a female character that I love deeply, it always feels like there's something that she has to prove to the male characters before she can even get started.”

“I was a junior at school, and I had just taken my first comics class, and we were doing an exercise for this other class where we had to create our own characters,and 'Nimona' just kind of came out of that. I decided that I liked her so much that I wanted to do a comic with her.”

“Fantasy is usually considered an escape, but it's also a way to deal with weighty real-world issues from a safe distance and in a context where you usually have some kind of power that you don't have in real life.”

“I think my lack of 'Pokemon' knowledge and complete confusion at the descriptions makes people think I'm adorable, like a lost baby duckling or your grandmother trying to use an iPad.”

“It was definitely a very appealing prospect to be in a company, especially as an art student: we had it hammered into us that the odds of us finding a job, especially fresh out of school, was very slim, and we could expect to work as a bartender for the next three years after we graduate.”

“I went to Maryland Institute College of Art, and I studied illustration there.”

“'Runaways' was exciting because it was something brand-new and fresh, and I'm hoping to be able to bend the rules in my own way of what a Marvel superhero story can be.”

“We can make this industry and this environment and comic book shops and comic book conventions and comic books themselves, we can make them a thing that is accessible to everybody so that nobody feels unwelcome, and nobody feels like this isn't their place.”