The heroes can still be super, but they have to be human like us too, says Marvel editor
Pakistani-American Sana Amanat grew up wanting to be white like her favourite comic-book characters. Now she’s working to make comics more diverse
Sana Amanat may help guide a diverse range of comic-book superheroes now, but when she was a child, such images weren’t as common in her world. Instead, growing up as a Pakistani-American in a predominantly white New Jersey suburb, she looked at images of women who were blonde and white as if that were the ideal for beauty. And in that world, young Sana wanted to be white herself.
Amanat, director of content and character development at Marvel, recalled those feelings last week at the United State of Women summit in Washington. The gifted Muslim comics executive was on a panel focusing on diversity in the media, and she shared the stage with Gloria Steinem, TV’s Shonda Rhimes and “Muslim Girl” editor Amani Al-Khatahtbeh.
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“When you grow up being very conscious of the fact that you are the ‘other’, it cultivates a sense of uncertainty and shame within you that can take a long time to overcome,” Amanat says. “My desire to be white, while covert, fed a delusion in my self-identity that I only broke away from towards the end of high school and truly in college.”
Her delusion, she says, “spun out of the anti-Muslim sentiment that arose in the ’90s, and the realisation that the truth of who I was got lost in the images being spewed out by the media. My protest was embracing my background fully, immersing myself in my faith and culture and finding ways to share that with others.”
Today, Amanat is known for such achievements as steering Marvel’s 2014 launch of Kamala Khan, the Pakistani-American and Muslim teenager who is Ms. Marvel in the popular comic-book line. Amanat says she is dedicated to creating works that change what images and characters are available to young readers.