[man 1 in Spanish]
[woman 1 in Spanish]
[woman 2] I would say that in comics,
the artist has the most control over the story.
[man 2] Well, how do you show emotion with just these little lines?
Like, how do you actually show someone feeling pain?
You know, hand gestures and eye movement
and body composition and body language.
Stan always said that the Marvel Universe is the world outside your window,
that he really wants people to open up a comic
and feel this is the world they live in,
and that they could find characters they could see themselves in.
At Marvel, we have about 3,500 artists worldwide.
We have creators working in almost every country on this planet,
contributing to the Marvel Universe.
Not only do we have characters that reflect all people from all walks of life,
we have creators who are bringing their story to those characters.
The uniqueness, the style, the kind of originality, the kind of grittiness,
the kind of different storytelling sensibilities that we get by using
these international artists opens us up to so many different kinds of stories,
so many different kinds of storytelling.
Now you have readers around the world, young kids who might be inspired
by these writers and artists who are from their culture.
"Oh, my God. You know, this artist is from Spain?
This artist is from France? This artist is from Brazil?
They're just like me."
They're making comic books
that are being read by millions of people around the world,
and it's very inspiring.
What Javier Garrón has been doing on Miles Morales: Spider-Man,
has just been incredible.
The kind of scale, the scope, the power that he brings to the characters
when they put on their costumes, when they use their powers,
when they go into battle, is like no other artist that's working today.
Natacha is a magician.
The style in which she draws Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur,
she is so minimalistic in what she puts on that page,
but she gets across the maximum amount of information,
and it's really mind-blowing.
There are certain artists who just, we say, have it.
Who are fearless storytellers.
Who, no matter where they're from,
no matter what walk of life they come from, no matter what culture they are,
are taking a piece of themselves and putting it in those characters.
Natacha and Javier are two of those storytellers.
At the start of Marvel,
everybody lived, worked, breathed under one roof to create comics.
Back in the day, in that Marvel Bullpen, because they were doing so many stories,
Stan Lee sometimes would actually come up with just a plot.
[Cebulski] There were famous scenes of when he would just call the artists
into his office.
He'd act out the story on his desk.
He'd give it to Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, whoever was drawing the book,
and they would draw it out.
And, you know, they'd come back later with a 20-page story.
There's the old adage that you write what you know.
And just when the Marvel Universe was created,
it was by a bunch of white guys in New York City,
who were coming up with characters
that they kinda based somewhat on themselves.
They drew the New York and the characters and the people that were around them.
Just not how comics are made anymore.
This global, creative culture that we live in
has brought individuality and uniqueness and cultural authenticity
to the way that we tell our stories, graphically.
People tell stories from the place that they're at.
The life experience, the background of an artist,
the things that are around them now in their life, matters.
It affects how they draw.
It affects what they emphasize when they draw.
It affects how they think about storytelling.
[Cebulski] What I like to tell aspiring writers and artists
is there's no boundaries for you
to become someone who is going to work at Marvel.
[Ahmed] When you get creators coming from different places
and have different life experiences...
informing what they think a superhero is,
the stories only get better.
[Garrón in Spanish]
[speaking baby talk]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Jennings] As an artist, the instrument that you use
is an extension of yourself.
There's this idea that you can actually imbue yourself into a character,
and I think that's very true for cartoonists and comic book illustrators.
Part of it is the fact that they're projecting themselves onto the image,
but then also, I think that people are reading what's there too in the linework.
Every little squiggle of a line is an emotion.
Bringing a piece of art to life,
it's very difficult to not put yourself into the work.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[grunting]
[laughing]
[man 3] Natacha put so much of herself into those early pages of Moon Girl.
Anything that was coincidentally close to her,
maybe she embraced and emphasized, maybe she stepped outside herself.
It's a mix of everything.
We all share the co-creator credit,
but Natacha has contributed the most to Moon Girl.
[in Spanish]
[Montclare] In the late '70s, Jack Kirby, all by himself,
created a strip called Devil Dinosaur.
Moon-Boy was a character in it, and he was a young caveman.
And they became friends.
It was not a success. Only lasted nine issues.
It was brilliant visually, but it was really a rudimentary story.
And I thought, maybe we could come up with a Moon Girl,
and instead of having her be a cave person, have her be a modern girl.
I had had this character kicking around in my head.
She was socially awkward and really smart.
Just this idea of somebody that would roller-skate around town
and she'd just fight crime.
The look for the Moon Girl books really came from a whimsical place.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Reeder] She wanted it to be a little more cartoony because it was for kids.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Reeder] Moon Girl is the smartest person in the Marvel Universe.
As we started to develop it, we put a lot of thought into,
"What does this mean, and what is it about her that is so smart?"
The future of our society is gonna be based off of technological advances.
So, what does it mean to actually have people of color in those spaces
that are talking about engineering and mathematics?
[Bustos in Spanish]
Comic book creative teams, typically, are pretty much arranged marriages.
You're asked to work on a book as a writer, and the editor says,
"And we're going to pair you with this artist."
[Reeder] But sometimes you can strike gold, get lucky,
and you just get the right kind of collaborators
and the right combination of people
where you can really make something special.
As a writer, everything that you do, in my opinion, has to be driven to,
"How do you set the artist up to succeed?"
[Ahmed] Your entire process there is aimed
not at a final reader who's going to read it.
Your actual text, it's aimed at the artist.
[in Spanish]
[Cebulski] Spider-Man is one of Marvel's most,
if not the most, iconic character in our universe.
He's the character that every writer and artist
from when they were a kid wants to draw.
[Ahmed] Spider-Man is a character that people can see themselves in.
I think the fact that people can look at Spider-Man and imagine,
"That's how I'd be if I was a superhero,"
in a way that they can't with some other characters
who are billionaires or aliens or whatever it might be.
I think that's the ultimate appeal of Spider-Man.
[Cebulski] Brian Bendis with, you know, some encouragement from Axel Alonso,
who was Editor in Chief at the time, created Miles Morales,
who is the Spider-Man of this time.
Sara Pichelli, the artist, came on and designed the character
in the comic at that time. The rest, as they say, is history.
[Ahmed] When Miles was first proposed, he really shook up the fandom.
There was a segment that freaked out at the thought of a black Spider-Man,
that freaked out at the thought of a Puerto Rican Spider-Man,
that didn't want their stuff messed with.
He's a sort of different person, right? Miles is black, he's Puerto Rican,
he's from Brooklyn, not Queens, he's younger than Peter...
and yet, embodied all the values of Spider-Man.
Self-sacrifice, insisting on decency...
perseverance to serve others.
He's classically Spider-Man because of those things.
[Cebulski] And what Saladin and Javier created for Miles
is what Stan and Steve created for Peter Parker back in the day.
New characters, they can't just be reflections of the characters
that might have been their inspiration.
And that's what Saladin and especially Javier in creating--
The visual world that he's built around Miles has been so key too.
[Ahmed] Before we ever saw the pages
of the first issue of Miles Morales' Spider-Man,
Javier turned in a character sheet, and I was blown away.
He'd added something to the book
that I had not put nearly enough thought into,
which was, "How do teenagers dress?
How do they get their hair cut?"
In a way that I just wasn't equipped to do.
I'm a middle-aged shlubby guy, and Javier is much hipper.
I knew that we had, sort of, hit gold with that
when I started seeing people on Twitter
talking about how Miles needs to get his own Instagram. Right?
For his fashion.
That's really when it feels like you're telling a story together
in the most primal way
where you're really forging this thing from the ground up together.
[Garrón speaking Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón speaking Spanish]
[patrons chattering]
[woman in Spanish]
[man in Spanish]
[waitress in Spanish]
[man]
-[Bustos in Spanish] -[man]
[Bustos]
-[Bustos] -[woman]
[Bustos in Spanish]
Cadmium Red. Lipstick Red.
Lipstick Red. Lipstick Red is good.
-I'm gonna take one of these. -[clerk] Okay. That is six.
Six, okay.
Would you like a bag?
No need. I'll just put it in the pocket.
-It's great. -Okay.
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Ahmed] Spider-Man, he's really a very local hero.
From the beginning, I wanted to set out to make the comic
that was about a certain place, that was about a family in that place,
a school in that place.
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Ahmed] You know, a lot of Marvel stories take place in Manhattan.
Brooklyn's been a sort of neglected space in Marvel mythology.
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Ahmed] I've lived in Brooklyn for a good number of years,
but Javier is based in Europe, and so, this was not something
where he could go outside his door and say,
"Here's what this block looks like."
[Montclare] The Marvel Universe really is New York.
You know, they go off into outer space and maybe they're in other states sometimes,
but New York is such a big part of everything that's Marvel.
Putting Moon Girl on the Lower East Side on Yancy Street was specific,
because Yancy Street is the fictionalized Delancey Street of Jack Kirby's youth.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]
[chuckles]
[Reeder] Brandon did a short story in an anthology with Natacha.
So he had her in mind when we were looking at artists.
[Montclare] Separate from our work together on that short story,
she was working for Marvel doing a one-shot,
a filler issue of Spider-Woman.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Montclare] So we had a whole list of artists,
potential artists, for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.
And she was on the list, but there was a challenge
because Natacha didn't have a very long track record.
Do we need a bigger name?
Do we need somebody who's done a monthly book before?
But it seemed to me that if anybody was going to take Moon Girl
and put themselves into it, it would be Natacha.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
-Hey. -Hi, how you doing?
I'm okay. How are you?
Fine, thanks. What can I do for you?
Well...
[Ahmed] Some people weren't ready for Miles when he was first introduced,
but between film, between video games, between the comics,
Miles has really won over fandom
in a way that you rarely see with a new character.
You know, it's been very exciting to be part of that legacy.
[Garrón in Spanish]
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Jennings] Just think about being a little black girl, right,
and reading Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur for the first time.
I can't even imagine what that feels like.
Think about how empowering that is to see someone,
"I wear my hair like that."
Or, "I have this affinity for tinkering and stuff like that."
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Ahmed] With great power comes great responsibility, right?
And the actual saying in the original comic is,
"With great power there must also come great responsibility."
In other words, it's not automatic.
And so I think about my responsibilities as a writer
and trying to create that world
where a kid can just pick up a comic
and it's not weird to them that Spider-Man is black.
It's not weird to them
that there's a girl with a Muslim name who's brown-skinned,
who's the teenage superhero representing them.
That should be normal.
[Jennings] You're gonna see more characters of color,
more characters from various backgrounds,
and, you know, maybe a window to a better future.
Now, through the global creators that we're working with,
we're inspiring a different generation to maybe follow their dreams.
We want our heroes to be inspirational.
We want people to read the books and want to go out and do better,
to be heroes in their own right.
Stories are empathy technologies, right?
The superhero is a type of technology that connects us.
[Ahmed] If, like me, or like a lot of other creators who are just now
starting to have a voice in the field, you come from a background
where that didn't seem possible when you were growing up.
We have to remember it will be hard.
Despite that, it's possible.
[Bustos in Spanish]
[Garrón in Spanish]