Nyla Rose On How Her Mystique Ring Gear Led To Writing For Marvel Comics

Nyla Rose teamed up with Marvel Comics to write an issue for Thunderbird earlier this year, and she recently discussed how that came about. The AEW star wrote Giant Size X-Men: Thunderbird with Steve Orlando, which came out in May. Rose discussed the situation in an interview with Complex Unsanctioned, and you can check out some highlights below (per Fightful):

On how she began working with Marvel: “It was, I wanna say a roller coaster, but it wasn’t. It’s hard for me to put it in words. I never expected something like that to be offered, let alone happen. Left field, it kinda came out of left field. Two All Outs ago or whatever it was, I had Mystique gear because the subtle subtext of my mind, I’ve got a lot of gears, of looks that I want to tackle, that I wanna do. Mystique was on there, but she was down a little bit. I’m like wait, we’re doing a battle royale, lots of bodies. Mystique, shape-shifter, this makes sense, let’s bump that up.

“So I did the Mystique gear for the battle royale, and Steve Orlando, who writes for X-Men, saw that. Prior to this, unbeknownst to me, the talks in the office were to bring Thunderbird back, and they wanted to have some actual authentic indigenous voices attached to this. He was like, I wanna pick your brain, get your insight. He’s obviously a X-Men fan, a Marvel fan, a comics fan. But he’s also a wrestling fan as well. Like I said, unbeknownst to me, he kinda had in mind to at least talk to me a little bit. He kinda threw it out there to them to have me be attached to the project, and they were all for it. So he was like, ah, I don’t know how she’ll do with this, I don’t know how she’ll go, whatever whatever, and when he saw the Mystique gear, he’s like, Oh, she’s gonna love this, let’s do this.'”

On the gig being pitched to her: “So he pitched it to me and I was like absolutely, let’s rock and roll. Obviously the next part is history. We got together, and I had no idea how to approach writing a comic, so I wrote it how I would normally write a script when I do sketches, sketch comedy, whatever it is. I wrote it how I would normally just write a script, and he fine-tuned it and we bounced ideas back and forth off of each other. It was such a beautiful, harmonious relationship. It was probably supposed to be much more painful and much more of a headache, but him and I were absolutely on the same page almost every step of the way. If I was thinking, if he was already writing it down, or we would have written down very similar ideas. So it flowed very smoothly for a first-time comics writer and a first-time team-up… I didn’t expect it. There was no hint of it, and it was just like two of my worlds colliding.”