Kelly Sue DeConnick has quickly become one of the most popular writers in comics. With a resume that includes Avengers Assemble and Captain Marvel for Marvel Comics, Ghost for Dark Horse, and her creator-owned projects Pretty Deadly and the upcoming Bitch Planet for Image, Kelly Sue has gathered a passionate and vocal crowd of fans. Rarely has one creator and character inspired such an outpouring of fan approval and community building as Kelly Sue’s reimagining of Carol Danvers, taking her from the days of Ms. Marvel into her new identity as Captain Marvel. With extremely active profiles on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, Kelly Sue is constantly interacting with her fans. As one of them put it when he nominated Kelly Sue for the Person of the Year in the Comics Industry over at The Beat: “Kelly Sue DeConnick of course! For being a great role model for all comics creators, and a shining example of how positivity, classiness, and artistic passion make a difference in this world.” In the first part of this two-part interview with our WonderCon Anaheim special guest (which was conducted in late January), Kelly Sue talks about breaking in, Captain Marvel, and that force of nature known simply as the Carol Corps. (As always, click on the images to see them larger on your screen and in slideshow mode.)

Toucan: Yesterday I was following you on Tumblr and I noticed you posted a number of Modesty Blaise drawings and I was wondering if you’re dropping any hints for a future project?

Kelly Sue: I wish. Boy, sometimes I do do that. I did post an awful lot of Barbarella while I was working on Barbarella, well before that was announced, but no, so far as I know no one has relicensed Modesty Blaise to be put out, but if they do they should call me. I’ve got most of the novels, multiple copies of a couple of them, and I have less of the comic. I have The Gabriel Set-Up and the Top Traitor collections that were done by [Peter] O’Donnell and [Jim] Holdaway, the Titan Books ones.

I have an alert set up on eBay for Modesty Blaise original art, and most of the time when it comes up it’s something to do with the movie and there’s nothing original about it. Oh, the movie’s terrible, but every once in a while something will come up and I’m never in a position to buy it but I pine for a few minutes and that’s my experience.

Toucan: What are you doing with Barbarella?

Kelly Sue: I’m already done. I did it for Humanoids. The first volume there was a previous, English adaptation from, I believe, 1966. The second volume has never been in English and the second volume is nuts. That was the most fun I’d had. I think on the first volume I was a little stressed. I hadn’t done any English adaptations for a while and it’s a tricky job, because if you’re doing your job well your hand is invisible. You want to try and intuit what the intention of the original author was and see how you can get that out in English in a way that flows and doesn’t distract from the story. I had been asked to update it and so that was tricky too. How do I stay true to a book that was written in the ‘60s that is very firmly based in the ‘60s? What does updating it mean in that context?

Toucan: It’s the same art? It’s not being redrawn, right?

Kelly Sue: Oh no, it’s not being redone. So it was a little tricky and I think I was nervous on the first one. I think I did a good job, I don’t mean to undersell or anything. I think people will enjoy it. On the second one Jean-Claude Forest kind of cuts loose, you can tell he’s just oh, you like that? Well you’re going to love this! The second one is ever crazier and so I just kind of went with it. There are a couple songs so I got to do song lyrics, which is a thing I absolutely love doing. You have the puzzle of trying to adapt it and make it rhyme at the same time. So it was a good time. I really had fun with that book. I think people are going to love it, especially the second volume, because it’s so new and it’s so nuts. I don’t know that there is a release date for it yet, although there is a television show in development. So if I were going to guess, my bet would be that it would come out about the same time as the TV show.

Toucan: How did all this comic stuff start for you? Were you a fan as a kid?

Kelly Sue: Yes. My dad was in the service, so I grew up on military bases and comics were very much a part of the culture. So I got to go to the Stars & Stripes and spend my allowance on comics every weekend and what I didn’t get at Stars & Stripes I could get used by the handful at the Saturday swap meets.

Toucan: What parts of the country did you grow up in?

Kelly Sue: Germany was where I was probably most ardently a comic reader, both because of the age I was when we lived there and then also because we didn’t get American television and I am not fluent in German, so comics were sort of my TV and that’s just very much the sort of thing that appealed to me.

Toucan: What were some of your favorites?

Kelly Sue: Wonder Woman, which my mom would buy for me frequently because it was the ’70s and it was a national feminist movement and without ever reading any of them, I think she thought, “Wonder Woman . . . that’s feminist.” I liked the DC horror anthologies. I loved Vampirella. My mom did police my reading. I got to read Vampirella. I liked the Archie Digests. I mean I remember after school I would go over to the Edmonson’s house and they had a basement. First off, they lived off base, which was a luxury, and the basement was kind of the kids’ area. It was just beanbags and boxes of comics and we would just kind of read everything we could get our hands on. It was just like, “Well what haven’t I read down here yet?” The favorites were probably the DC horror anthologies and Wonder Woman.

Toucan: Is there one comic book from you childhood that you’d always want to keep?

Kelly Sue: No, nor can I name, like someone will—it’s a frequent question—what was your first comic book, and I have no idea. I have no idea. They were kind of always around and they were always disposable. You know, we cut them up and remixed them. They weren’t things to be put away or treasured or saved to put anybody through college, and you know the weight limit, too, when you’re moving. The Air Force will only move so many pounds of your stuff when they move you around and they tell you that the lowest person on the totem pole when they’re weighing this stuff is the kid. So anything I owned I only kept for two years because the next time we moved very little went with me.

Toucan: So when you say you remixed them, you cut up the panels and rearranged them to tell different stories?

Kelly Sue: Yeah, and it’s kind of a weird thing to do, I don’t know why we did this, but you couldn’t put stuff up on your walls. I don’t know, you probably could, but our parents wouldn’t let us, they were worried about putting lots of holes in the walls or getting a lot of tape on the walls because you take down the paint or whatever. And I mean there was this constant impermanence to everything. So for that reason we would cut things out and make these giant collages on poster board, which we could then prop up or convince them that we’re putting up this big piece of poster board with just this one bit of tape and so we would cut out pictures of like the members of KISS. I had a poster board that was all pictures of Ace Frehley that I found everywhere and then I would also have one that had a part on it that had pictures of Nocturna, who I was super into for some reason, or villains, or Batman doing this or whatever. Sometimes we tried to tell other stories with them—that makes a better story—but I’m afraid we did less of that and more of just categorization.

Toucan: Was there a point when you were a kid reading these comics that you felt like you wanted to be a part of this, that you wanted to be a writer when you grew up?

Kelly Sue: No, it never occurred to me that that was a thing anyone could do. I think I thought that there was like a group of people in New York who did this and you had to be part of that group.

Toucan: Which wasn’t too far off the mark back in the ’70s.

Kelly Sue: No, that’s probably true, yeah . . .