SALADIN AHMED ON WRITING BLACK BOLT, INFLUENTIAL EDITORS + WRITER WHO GOT HIM GIG, TURNING A MARVEL D-LISTER INTO A-LIST POTENTIAL, COSMIC PRISONS + AHMED’S CONNECTION TO SECRET LIFE OF PRISONERS (MF GALAXY 127)
HIS LOVE FOR CRUSHER CREEL, BLACK BOLT’S RACIAL IDENTITY, HOW WRITING COMICS PROTECTS HIM FROM A “GOOD OLD-FASHIONED NERVOUS BREAKDOWN” LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Saladin Ahmed is a fascinating cat. He’s best known as the Arab and Muslim American fantasy novelist who crafted Throne of the Crescent Moon which was nominated for the Hugo and won the Locus Award for best first novel. But his ethnicity also includes Polish and Irish, and his writing also includes short stories, articles, a stunning number of Tweets, and the new Marvel Comics series Black Bolt about the king of the Inhumans. We met at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit in 2012, and he was as fun and down to earth in person as he is online. When I learned that he was writing for Marvel I just knew I had to find out what it was like for him as a novelist to leap into the world of comics, and was delighted to learn that like me, he was a lifelong comics fan who’d always wanted to cr...