Posted in: Comics | Tagged: kris anka, marvel, rainbow rowell, runaways

Bringing Back Gert And Keeping Her Fat Were Amongst Rainbow Rowell's Demands To Write New Runaways Series

Published Tue, 06 Jun 2017 12:00:24 -0500

Last week, we learned that fan-favorite series Runaways will return to Marvel in September, with acclaimed young adult author Rainbow Rowell and artist Kris Anka at the helm. In an interview with Vox conducted by fellow author Emma Straub, longtime comic book fan Rowell explained how she got the gig writing what she calls her favorite series, and what her most important demands were:

I am a Marvel comics reader, very loyally and exclusively for many years. Comics are an important part of my life; they just always have been. So three years ago, when I was here [at BookCon] for Fangirl, I talked to Nick Lowe at Marvel. He read Eleanor and Park, and he said, "We would love for you to come to Marvel and write a one-shot or something."

I was feeling like I had nothing to lose. Like, I already don't work for Marvel. The end result would be the same. So I said, "My favorite comic is Runaways, and I would really love to bring it back. And I want to bring Gert back, and I want her to be fat. Still. Don't bring her back to life skinny! 'She lost a lot of weight in the afterlife.'"

And he was like, "Yeah, that sounds great, let's talk about that."

Rowell goes on to say that she's already written six issues of the comic, and that as long as people keep buying it, she'll keep writing it, a process she says doesn't need to distract her from writing books at the same time. Rowell also had praise for the book's diversity, though she qualifies it as being diverse for the time it was created, implying some changes might need to be made to bring it up to speed with the modern era:

You know, at the time it was created, it's a very diverse book. It's mostly women in the group; there's one — this is a hard thing to say — there is a queer character, there may be more than one queer character; there are people of different races, people of different religions. It was really a joyful book to find however many years ago, when it first came out.

Check out the full interview at Vox, and look for Runaways in stores this September, and for at least the next five months after that.

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