Story Of The Women Of Marvel Comics’ Authors Interview

Although Marvel Studios did not make a presentation in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con this year, Gallery Books held a presentation of Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics Sunday afternoon in a return to the roots of the convention: fan and community engagement.

Written by Beautiful Creatures author Margaret Stohl, former Marvel Entertainment editor Jeanine Schaefer and producer and Women of Marvel podcast host Judith Stephens, the book delves into the experiences of women behind Marvel Entertainment — from the early days of the comics to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“We talked to some of the movie people that had come into earlier chapters, but we really had to focus less on Marvel Studios by the end,” Stohl told Deadline Saturday morning. “There also would have been five more years of an approval process. This book has taken five years. We interviewed 140 women all through the pandemic. Our job here is to make sure that books like this get into curriculums, get into libraries, are on the record so that people know we were always here. And they can fight about it or not like it, but some things are facts.”

The book itself could become a comic-like series in its own right, with the first draft weighing in at 650 pages. The now 377-page version was published June 24, 2025. The trio of authors quickly realized that no one experience of women behind Marvel was exactly the same.

“[There was] imposter syndrome, but [also] reverse imposter syndrome, where you didn’t have to be one of [the men] because you were never going to be one of them, and freeing that could be, which is an experience,” Stohl said. “And also there was this heartbreak thing that ran all the way through, which was ‘What is the vulnerability of loving something that might not love you back? How do you navigate that?’ Because lot of Marvel story lines, in terms of people who work there, end in a kind of heartbreak, you move on. Especially for women of a certain time, you had to make more money to support your kids, or you didn’t have childcare. You became a teacher, or you got divorced from the editor.”

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Stohl herself worked on “re-engineering” the backstory of Captain Marvel ahead of the 2019 film starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, and she contributed many anecdotes from this experience as well as earlier ones working on Black Widow: Forever Red and Black Widow: Red Vengeance as well as The Mighty Captain Marvel.

“We like to say that for a Marvel creator or staff member, it’s a journey to seeing yourself as a protagonist and a hero, and you can’t write a hero if you can’t see yourself as a hero. Carol Danvers was a secretary at NASA, in their security. She was the blonde sidekick girl. That journey to the middle of the page is always so messy,” she said. “I would say that female superheroes are still on a messy journey to the center of the box office. Partly, that’s the fandom. Partly, that’s the reflection, Marvel’s always been — Stan Lee, would say — it’s the world outside your window, so you absolutely see what’s going on in the world bubbles up into what’s going on in the Marvel. It’s not ever a static thing. I’d say we’re in a slightly different place now than we were even when we kicked this book off five years ago, and I think it’s a quieter moment for female superheroes.”

A very early draft of the book’s cover featured a composite of several women heroes like Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel, Silk, She-Hulk, Jean Grey, Shuri, and Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel, but the final product went in a different, scaled-back direction with the title sitting alongside Sue Storm, aka The Invisible Woman. The decision to “build the imagery” around that idea was Schaefer’s.

“There are so many photos that it could just be a whole book of just photos. I looked at the cover, and I [thought], ‘When [publishing] made this cover, before the manuscript, even a draft was done, I don’t think they could really understand the scope the book, or the type of book that it was, because here haven’t been books about this,” Schaefer said. “There was a thought that, ‘we’re not even really sure of the depth of how many women there even are.’ I don’t know how much we can think about that, so ‘let’s keep it focused on the women characters,’ but after looking through it, I [thought], ‘This needs to sit alongside the Jill Lepore Wonder Woman biography, and the History of Stanley Kubrick visual compendium that they made. This needs to sit alongside those more scholarly and academic works that really are a preservation,’ and so we wanted to signal that when you look at this, it’s not a book about comics, this is a book about people, about history and about our culture.”

It was not lost on the group that this design choice tied in well timing-wise with the release of Fantastic Four: The First Steps (2025) July 25, starring Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm. No spoilers here, but her storyline also reflects what Super Visible aims to achieve.

“It’s actually kind of interesting, and not super surprising that a pregnant, mom figure, a sister figure in the oldest, most classic Marvel first family is the Marvel box office hero of this moment,” Stohl said. “I think that’s sort of the one right now that culture can agree on. It is always in flux.”

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With her background on the podcast, Stephens secured countless interviews for the trio, many of which did not make it into the book as direct quotes, but still informed the story. Stohl stressed the “personal relationship” invested in the book with all three contributors leaning on their networks to leave no stone unturned.

“Judy was able to cajole so many photos out of people. Things that they would not normally give you,” “We’d be talking to a woman in her old folks home in a retirement community and [she’d say], ‘I have so many things, but I can’t lift the box.’ Then we would get to work about how to get the box,” the Beautiful Creatures author said. “We’re a microcosm of the project, and we used every resource we had in our networks to try to get this captured before more of these women died and were lost and left without telling the story. Because if you read a history of comics, there are no women in it until page 300, so that was the thing we were trying to fix.”

Schaefer was brought on as editor to find, according to Stohl, “the golden threads,” themes and stories to organize the book into its chapters. Schaefer did consider a chronological version, or timeline, as the spine, but she preferred to pull readers through with people and their stories, still starting with the publication date of The Fantastic Four in 1961. What resulted were chapters like “The Carol Corps: Carol Danvers, Kelly Sue DeConnick and the Start of a Movement” as well as “Meet Me in the Bathroom: How Women Find Each Other In an Industry That Prioritizes Male Spaces.”

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“I had the themes of family, hardship, passion, and then here’s the theme of bathroom with 75 tick marks next to it because that came up the most, more than any other thing,” Schaefer said. “They each talked about it individually of the other person, so one of them brought it up, but [Margaret and Judy] didn’t then say ‘Oh, can you corroborate this?’ [They] volunteered this other side of the same conversation that happened in the bathroom.”

The bathroom chats were as important to editor and colorist Irene Vartanoff and Marie Severin to Black Widow director Cate Shortland and Captain Marvel director Anna Boden, who ran into each other in the restroom early on in their time at the Marvel offices.

Schaefer stressed how actress Sophia Di Martino, who plays Sylvie in the Loki series, called the set one of the best she had ever worked on “because of the attention that was paid to her needs as a mom.”

“The costume designer, who was a woman, was able to design costumes where [Di Martino] could nurse while she was on the set,” Schaefer said. “That consideration — I think you get better work.”

Stephens also connected the dots of Di Martino getting hired by Loki Season 1 director Kate Herron after their work together on an independent film previously. This snapshot aligned with the broader theme of women opening doors for each other.

“Kate Herron talked about how she was told, ‘If you don’t hire women, if you don’t ask to hire women, you won’t get them,’” she said. “All of these directors talked about how they really tried to get as many Heads of Departments to have women.”

Another story emphasized by the trio was that of Margaret Loesch, President at Fox Kids and former president of Marvel Animation, who was instrumental in adapting Christopher Claremont’s X-men books into X-Men: The Animated Series, as told by X-Men: The Animated Series staff writer Julia Lewald. With the help of writer and editor Louise Simonson, Claremont’s editor Annie Nocenti and Head of Graz Entertainment Stephanie Graziano, the final product came out so much better than the first draft, and as President of Marvel Entertainment Dan Buckley said, on page 97, paved the way for the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Still more interviews with actresses playing women heroes onscreen like Brie Larson, Zoe Saldaña, Ming Na-Wen, Iman Vellani, Teyonah Parris and Scarlett Johansson — who chatted 15 minutes past the planned 30 —  also shaped the book. While not directly quoted, Eternals director Chloe Zhao also contributed.

“We had probably our most intelligent conversation with her that framed a lot of the thinking that was about, you need to be able to be vulnerable to make art, but you need to have your armor up to survive studios full of men, and it’s really confusing to know when you can take it down and when you can put it up,” Stohl said. “We a very long conversation about that. I think we quoted her in every single interview after that, so they’re all in there.”

Schaefer, who echoed Stohl’s observation with the note that there were more announcements on the cinematic side of things coming out when the book was first announced 5 years ago, drew attention to the more niche panels hosted at Comic-Con 2025. Even with it being the first year since 2009 without a Women of Marvel panel, the community engagement — which was a torch carried by the women behind Stan Lee’s columns mentioned in Chapter 1 — is just as important now as ever.

“Looking at the panel lineup this year, I did feel like it was people gathering to talk about the thing that they’re excited to do whereas traditionally, for the past 15 year, it’s been people coming [for] studio announcements, and they’re all essentially advertisements, for better or for worse, for the thing,” she said. “So it was cool to see there’s so many academic panels. That’s what this book feels like, is people getting back together to talk about this stuff and to cement it and keep it present in a way. That’s what why I think the convention is important and gathering in person is important.”