In her latest comics series, Kelly Sue DeConnick mixes monstrous magic into a timely family dramedy
“Right before this call, I got my parent coffee,” Kelly Sue DeConnick sayswo kids, one 16 and the other about to graduate from high school. The first coffee of the day got her through her morning mom duties. The next, she says, will be for writing
DeConnick’s current comics series, FML is one of her most off-the-wall titles to date, but it’s also her most autobiographical. “Every book that I do is personal,” she says. “But this one’s literal.”
Set in an off-kilter version of Portland, it follows the misadventures of a family of four after 16-year-old Riley joins a metal band, visits a cursed witch house, and turns into a huge hairy monster. The book is drawn by artist David López, who previously teamed with DeConnick for a run on Captain Marvel. FML, whichdebuted in 2024, is nominated for a 2026 Eisner Award. The first trade collection, Fire, will hit shelves in November.
DeConnick was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1970. With a father in the Air Force, she moved a lot growing up. “Comics are really big on base,” she recalls, “so I read a ton of comics.”
As a college student at the University of Texas at Austin, she studied drama, and after graduation moved to New York City to pursue a career in theater. She started to pick up work as a comics writer—“When you live in New York, you’re gigging”—after meeting comic book artist Will Rosado and getting involved in the Warren Ellis Forum, an early online comics community where many up-and-coming writers and artists connected.
“Looking back on it now,” says DeConnick, “the WEF was not the hearts-and-flowers, warm, and welcoming community that my brain wants to remember it as, but I met so many people who are still an important part of my life.” Through the WEF, she got her first job in comics, writing a prose story that ran in the back of IDW’s monthly titles.
More work followed. DeConnick cowroteEben and Stella (30 Days of Night #7) with series cocreator Steve Niles and broke into Marvel through the Girl Comics anthologies spearheaded by editor Jeanine Schaefer. She also did rewriting and localization for manga
“At some point,” she says, “I realized, this is what I’m doing for a living. Sweet.” DeConnick’s writing is known for its sardonic humor, offbeat imagination, and rough-and-tumble feminist sensibilities. In online discourse, she coined the “sexy lamp test,” which she described in a 2012 interview with ComicsAlliance as, “If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft.”
DeConnick began scripting her first original series, Pretty Deadly, for Image Comics in 2013. She approached artist Emma Ríos to draw it. The two had previously worked together on the Marvel series Osborn, and Ríos had expressed an interest in drawing a western—so DeConnick wrote a horror-themed story set on a mythical frontier. “It felt like I was asking her to prom,” DeConnick says. She and Ríos are currently working on the fourth volume of the series.
The comic DeConnick is best known for is the dystopian sci-fi series Bitch Planet, which sparked when she met artist Valentine De Landro at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto. “Comics has changed so much,” she says. “We’re not there yet; there’s still work to be done. But at the time, I was walking around introducing myself, and most of the dudes were looking to see where the wallet was behind me. Val was a consummate gentleman.”
DeConnick shared some plot ideas she calls “sweater threads,” and De Landro liked her concept for a series set in a space prison where society sends its rebellious women.
Bitch Planet launched in 2014 from Image Comics. The series won a British Fantasy Award in 2016 and became a phenomenon in feminist fan circles. Readers got tattoos of the noncompliant logo that prisoners are branded with in the comic.
DeConnick and De Landro saw the series as a satire with dark but pulpy humor. “We liken the tone to RoboCop,” DeConnick says. “I don’t do grimdark.” Reality, however, quickly overtook satire. “The last issue of the main storyline came out the week of the 2016 election, and that book became very hard to write. I always tell people we are going to come back to it. No one ever believes me, and that’s fine.”
FMLwent through many concepts and drafts before DeConnick settled on the story of Riley and his family navigating life in a version of Portland where magic and monsters exist alongside free speech crackdowns, police injustice, and true crime podcast addiction. “One hundred percent of the time, the book is not what I think it’s going to be,” she says. “One hundred percent of the time, I am wrong. I don’t mean this in any metaphysical way, but the book tells you what it wants to be.”
Fire focuses on the relationship between Riley and his mom, a fiery but loving cartoonist and former punk musician. DeConnick says she drew from her 1990s adolescence for the character, including references to zine culture. Her favorite moment in the comic is a panel visualizing an emotional break between mother and son.
“He’s drawn as an anatomical heart walking up the stairs with an umbilical cord between him and Mom broken,” DeConnick says. “Especially with my son going off to college, I’m feeling that in a big, big way.”
The next arc of FML will focus on the family’s father and daughter. López will draw the comic and DeConnick will write bonus pages, but the main script will be penned by DeConnick’s husband, Matt Fraction, who wrote the comics Sex Criminals and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Fraction pitched his wife on the idea when she told him she was having trouble writing the father’s plotline. After some initial skepticism, she decided it made perfect sense. “David is the father of a daughter,” she says. “So to have David and Matt both doing a book about fathers and daughters in this moment is really great.”
Above all, DeConnick hopes readers see FML as a story about a family and community coming together. “A few years ago, I did a short story with Joëlle Jones for a Las Vegas shooting benefit book, and we worked with an X-ray tech who was in emergency rooms that night,” she says. “She told us a story about her patients, and her story was about how trauma makes your world small. Right now, everything feels crazy and scary, and it matters that we take care of the people around us.”
That said, FML is also one of DeConnick’s funniest comics. “In our family, certainly, humor is a coping mechanism,” she says. With that, she’s off to take care of the next script, the next family issue, and the next coffee.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a frequentPWcomics contributor. Her latest graphic novel isSteam.
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A version of this article appeared in the 07/20/2026 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Close to Home
