Kelly Sue DeConnick is a comic writer and editor, who has also adapted Japanese manga into English language comics. She is known for titles like Captain Marvel and Avengers Assemble, and her created owned titles that include Pretty Deadly.

DeConnick was born on July 15, 1970, in Columbus, Ohio. She spent much of her childhood living on military bases and became a fan of comics as a child when her mother would buy her Wonder Woman books. After earning a drama degree from the University of Texas at Austin, DeConnick started her career by writing copy for images in magazines. It was then that she began sharing her own stories on a message board, catching the attention of comic writer Warren Ellis. Impressed by her writing, Ellis hired her to work on his website, writing catalog entries for comic issues.

DeConnick’s next move was translating Japanese manga for Tokyopop and Viz Media, and over the course of seven years, she translated over 11,000 manga pages into English. DeConnick worked with a translator to ensure that the dialogue in the stories was adapted with accuracy and clarity. This attention to dialogue became a foundational aspect of her later work writing her own comic stories.

Her first original comic tale was a five-page text story in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – Dominos #5 (December 2004). For Image Comics, she wrote the 24Seven graphic novels, then she and Emma Rios created Pretty Deadly, a book with western, magic, and horror themes. At IDW, she wrote the 30 Days of Night: Eben & Stella limited series.

She began working with Marvel in 2010 with a string of one-shots, including books that starred Sif and Captain America, and a year later she wrote issues of Supergirl at DC. DeConnick introduced Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel in Amazing Spider-Man #9 (September 2012), then wrote the Captain Marvel ongoing series that began in 2012. After that, she wrote the next Captain Marvel series, followed by Captain Marvel & the Carol Corps.

At the same time, she wrote Avengers Assemble and worked with Dark Horse on Ghost. In 2015 she and Valentine De Landro created Bitch Planet, a feminist take on exploitation films that was published by Image. Four years later, she took over writing the ongoing Aquaman book and wrote the three-issue Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons for Wonder Woman’s 80th anniversary.

Outside of writing and editing comics, DeConnick was a consultant on the Captain Marvel movie and runs the VisibleWomen Project that helps women and non-binary individuals find work in comics.