A female superhero's journey is complex: Captain Marvel writer Margaret Stohl

Spoilers ahead for the ongoing Life of Captain Marvel mini-series.

Best-selling novelist Margaret Stohl was on her third coffee of the day. Having flown in to Singapore from San Francisco via Seattle, she had plunged straight into a series of interviews.

When restaurant staff mistakenly brought another mocha to the table, Stohl drily remarked, “We will drink it, if you need us to. I can go to four.”

But despite the jetlag, Stohl, who is also a comic and video game writer, was lively and articulate during her interview with Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore last Friday (2 November).

The 51-year-old was in town for the annual Singapore Writers’ Festival. She is perhaps best known for the young adult Caster Chronicles book series. Beautiful Creatures, the first book in the series, was adapted into a 2013 movie starring starring Alden Ehrenreich and Jeremy Irons.

From 2016, Stohl was tasked with revamping one of Marvel Comics’ most powerful characters: Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel, who will soon be the subject of only the second major female superhero movie.

After writing the monthly Mighty Captain Marvel series, her ongoing five-issue Life of Captain Marvel mini-series has an even more important role: it re-writes Danvers’ origin story and serves as the lead-up to the Captain Marvel movie. Starring Oscar-winner Brie Larson as the title character, the movie comes out in March 2019.

Stohl, who had only limited experience with writing comics at the time, confessed that she found the idea of writing a monthly comic series both “terrifying” and “humbling”.

She explained, “There’s not a library of how to write a comic, and they just throw you in and say, write your comics…Beautiful Creatures books have sold 10 million copies and I still felt like I was starting from scratch, and that is why I loved it.”

Revamping Captain Marvel

While Stohl was not involved in the Captain Marvel production, Marvel is known for adapting key moments from the comics, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also been similarly influential on the comics.

Asked how much of her interpretation of Captain Marvel would influence the movie, Stohl was tight-lipped, but was effusive about Larson’s casting. “I think she is someone whom Carol would like to play her. She definitely holds herself to a high personal bar and she makes her own decisions. She has a strong sense of right and wrong.”

There may be further clues about the movie to be found in Life of Captain Marvel. In a big reveal from the latest issue, readers discovered that Danvers’ superpowers actually come from her alien heritage: her mother was sent to Earth as an agent of the Kree, an alien race that will feature in the movie.

It’s a stark contrast to her decades-old origin story, which saw her absorbing powers from the original Captain Marvel – a male Kree agent – following an explosion.

“It’s been decades of her talking like, are these powers really even mine? Do I deserve to call myself this name? So we were trying to sort of give her story back to her,” said Stohl.

“Psychologically, there’s just a huge thing about not having borrowed powers, and also from a man with the same name. it was time for her to own it.”

Female characters and the hero’s journey

The breakthrough in the portrayal of Danvers came when Stohl realised that the character’s “hero’s journey” echoed her own, as well as that of many women.

“Because we don’t grow up thinking of ourselves as the hero. People don’t give us action figures of our heroes. I grew up in an era where we got Barbies, princess dolls, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that was the only fantasy available to us,” said Stohl.

“The hero’s journey for a girl superhero is the journey from a side character to a protagonist. Because we just never started out as a protagonist.”

This was perhaps echoed in the creative team’s search for a “vulnerable side” to Carol Danvers -“someone who was trying to reconcile how she could be so strong and still so vulnerable.”

And as a female writer, Stohl admitted to feeling what her writer friend Sarah Kuhn has termed “rep sweats”: the pressure of representation and making sure she gets it right. She also alluded to “pushback” from fans, perhaps exacerbated by the current political climate in the US, which has even taken the form of death threats and hate mail.

“From fans, I feel that a lot of times, it’s clear my decisions are read as female decisions. I don’t think there’s a creator in the United States who hasn’t been struggling with (the current political climate) for two years, and it’s very difficult.”

But what does Stohl think will make a great Captain Marvel movie? “It’s about taking the character seriously, understanding her total arc, letting her own her story, showing the connection between the little girls and their heroes…understanding that representation matters, and letting her be a hero, and letting her be funny.”