Lynne M. Thomas > Quotes

“There are a variety of reasons I identify with Batman. Not because he is dreamy or rich or anything like that. But because he’s awesome, and he just... feels right. If I had to choose between all fictional characters in”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge. Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television, or chances across articles on the Internet. He’s still not sure how he feels about them. He’d say he’s indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he’s one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already. Well, screw it. He’s indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body. At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day. © 2015 by SL Huang. Originally published in Strange”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“It’s not bad to have a second family, and it’s okay to have a different kind of family. Especially one who understands you at your core level like that.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“Remember that if Sector 12 General Hospital5 could have been built to accommodate aliens who breathe chlorine, oxygen, or methane, who communicate through the production of sap or through ripples in their fur, who need different gravitational levels, who have two, four, or twenty eyes, then spaces can be build that accommodate us.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Then I read Greg Rucka’s run on Detective Comics – when Batwoman had the lead role – and discovered the art of J.H. Williams III.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“At conventions I could go a full hour and never see another female. At the first “Females in Comics” panel I attended, there were nine women on the panel and four people in the audience, one of whom was my husband. Powerful talents like Lea Hernandez and Devin were routinely accused of having their work actually written by their husbands or boyfriends.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“You decide who you are. You can have something horrible happen to you and become Batman, or you can become the Joker. You can get swept up in horrible circumstances and bad choices, but you don’t need to. You can exert force on your own life. You can steer your own path. I did try to follow that, even in those special difficult times known as primary and secondary school. No matter what peers or adults were putting me through, I didn’t need to let it make me a certain way. I didn’t have to become mean, or bitter or angry. I employed”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“The world changed and the companies haven’t yet figured out how to exploit it, exactly. Twilight and Harry Potter and manga have shown females will purchase genre books with a vengeance if given the opportunity and an enticing enough read.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“It’s perfectly legitimate to ask What Would Batman Do?”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“The obstacles society puts in his path decrease only marginally, and that in no small part due to his own efforts. But after the transition point of Memory, Miles begins to nurture his mental and emotional health, to harness his manias to a productivity that is not self-consuming, and to find tools to light the way out of depressions. This development is highlighted in the later novel A Civil Campaign: Miles does not cease making bad decisions, but he has learned how to prevent some and identify others much more quickly and has developed tools for recovering from mistakes. For me, this is a healthy vision of life with a disability. It is not a slow freeze or a self-immolation, but a balance of self and selves. I’ve often struggled with seeing myself as a fractured broken assemblage, but I have been slowly discovering that the secret is not to snuff out these selves. There is no me that is free of myself. The challenge is to find that central self and nurture it; to use its strengths to temper other states and selves. Making decisions is still hard, but Miles finds, if not a map, then at least a light in the darkness.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Scott and Jean are having marital troubles, on account of Jean periodically being an untouchable cosmic force, and him wanting to live a normal-ish life!”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“There’s a reason most perfect fairy tale princesses disappear after the Happily Ever After. Developing Jean’s character beyond “the girl, the one everyone loves, you know, the one you wish you could be” would actually have damaged her character, taking away the very core that supposedly made her so appealing.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“You may still have to design this spaceship, even though you shouldn’t have to, but do not let them make you think you have to be grateful for being allocated this patch of emptiness, for being permitted to find a way to exist. Don’t think, when I said to design your own spaceship, I meant you must think it is okay that you have to use every last piece of your precious energy to cobble together a ship from old parts. Don’t think that this means you must carve out your own space because you will never belong in theirs, that you have the right—grudgingly offered—to fly and breathe and eat, but not to pilot and explore and maintain and repair and upgrade. You can fly alone if you like, and you can fly alone if you have to. But we’re not just designing spaceships here, we’re designing whole universes. Universes where you make that choice rather than it being made for you.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality),”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“You’re wary, too, of these people who can imagine the intricacies of hover chairs but can’t even give you accurate information as to whether there are steps into a building, who won’t turn the music down on request. How can they imagine what these futures will be like for you when they can’t understand what you experience now?”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Here were these people who had absolutely no say in whether they became superheroes – they didn’t become scientists (the fastest way to get superhuman abilities, at least in the Marvel Universe), or worse, date scientists; they didn’t develop strange medical conditions that could only be cured with experimental treatments; they didn’t pick up mysterious canes and utter mystic phrases. They were just born, and because they were born different, they could never fit in with the world. So they became heroes, protecting a world that hated and feared them.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“If I thought there was a chance that a resurrected Jean would finally go, “You know what? Screw this. I’m going to Canada,” and go bang Wolverine’s brains out, I might be more interested in seeing her climb out of her grave again, just because it would be something new. What’s more,”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“The modifiers “adolescent” and “male” are often tacked on to this description, sometimes with the explicit purpose of saying, “What can you, grown-up women, expect from stories that were never meant for you in the first place? Steer clear of that playground and/or go off and find your own, because this place isn’t for you.” Batwoman exists, it would seem, as an entry point to”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“The Pro (a creator-owned Eisner-nominated book for Image Comics, written by Garth Ennis).”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“Bondage gear is totally a costume when you’re a bad guy!”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“So, I’ll let you in on a secret, the thing I’ve learned about having a life-long disability, the thing that lots of stories never quite grasp: The real trick, the true solution to a disability, is to find a balance between your abilities and your goals.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Yet, even beyond the allure of hidden physical strength, the fantasy of secret identity has an appeal that transcends demographics. For anybody who knows the experience of getting lost in a make-believe world – for anyone who knows the experience, in other words, of being a geek and being a fan – the secret identity has an appeal that is part of the text itself. It’s a dream of meaning, a wish for purpose. Beyond this day-to-day life, beyond what you see of me, I am working on something extraordinary.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

“what I love the most is the format itself, the way a gap between panels can be a minute or a decade, the way you can destroy a planet, a plant, or a plan in the same amount of space, how the words can be lying while the pictures tell the truth, or vice versa.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them