For This Marvel Comics Writer, an MBA Is Key to Her Creative Future

At New York Comic Con last year, Ashley Allen (Class of 2027) found herself explaining to her editors at Marvel Comics that, no, she isn’t in graduate school for an MFA. She’s at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business for her MBA.

Ashley Allen (third from left) speaks on a panel at New York Comic Con in 2025.

For Allen, an MBA isn’t a pivot away from her career as a writer, but rather a strategic move intended to position her as not only an artist, but also a decision-maker on the business side of entertainment and media.

Unlocking Connection Through Writing

Allen has been writing comics for the Marvel character Magik, a superhero in the X-Men series whose power is teleportation, since 2024. But her love of storytelling began as a child, and she got early practice due in part to a disability she was born with.

Allen is affected by apraxia, a learning and processing disorder that manifests in speech. “I essentially equate it to being a stroke victim, where I know what I want to say and I know what I want my body to do. It’s just the synapses don’t fire as quickly,” she says.

Today, the difference in her speech is imperceptible. As a child she attended speech therapy for 10 years, and a recommendation by her therapist to make sure she read and wrote frequently had a profound effect on her interests and, ultimately, her career.

“So I read a lot, mostly because speech was so hard,” she says. “I stumbled into writing because it was a lot easier for me to communicate my thoughts in that way. I think that’s why I fell in love with writing to begin with.”

Books she loved in her formative years, such as “A Wrinkle in Time,” “The Great Gatsby” and the comic “Moon Knight,” influenced her taste and style, while shows like “Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood” sparked her imagination for what her own future could hold.

“It’s a really good show, but it was also based on one of the first comics I had ever seen written by a woman,” Allen says. “So that was cool for me, to really see that women could be in the animation industry, because at the time, it was very male-dominated.”

Something Practical

Allen excelled in math, science and language arts in high school and had her eye on art school. But her parents insisted on a more practical path first: something business-related.  “I took my first econ course and was like, wait, I actually really like this,” she says.

Allen liked finding the story behind the spreadsheets in economics, and the concrete action made possible by understanding that story. A consulting internship at 3M that dealt with vaccine manufacturing — right as the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S. — confirmed her interest.

“What I wanted to do initially with that econ major was to potentially go into a media or an entertainment creative pursuit to help other creatives tell the stories they want to tell through a business lens,” she says. The idea would bloom only a few years later.

Working ‘Magik’

As Allen’s interest in business grew, her childhood dreams of working in the media she loved — comics, anime, books, and TV — came within reach. She was accepted into a talent discovery program run by Warner Bros. Access Discovery that involved a 10-week apprenticeship.

Allen wrote her first independent series for the Marvel character Magik, a superhero in the X-Men series.

“It has just kind of spiraled from there,” she says. Allen built her resume with short stories and smaller projects, including a “Poison Ivy” story for DC Comics and co-creating an anthology by Ukrainian artists and writers to raise money when war in Ukraine first broke out. As her portfolio grew, she reached out to Marvel and landed her first project for the company: “X-Men: Blood Hunt – Magik.”

The single issue did well — even better than the studio had expected. Following its success, Allen wrote an independent series based on the character. “I think how I got to Magik was essentially treating every project I had as a test, or the only thing I might ever get to do,” she says. “And giving it that reverence.”

The series will continue this year under a new name, “Magik and Colossus.”

“That should be fun because I mean, I grew up with the Deadpool movies, so getting to write Colossus is really fun,” Allen says.

The Room Where It Happens

With so much success as a writer, why pursue an MBA?

Allen says she has long aspired to be a showrunner or run her own creative studio, using the levers of business to help other creatives tell their stories, She always knew business school was on the horizon. When sophisticated large language models — the technology at the heart of products such as ChatGPT —  took the world by storm in the early 2020s, she felt a greater sense of urgency.

“AI accelerated a lot quicker than I expected it to,” she says. “So I thought, if I want to be in the room where the conversations happen around choosing an artist or choosing AI, I need to have the vocabulary and the knowledge to articulate why I would choose the artist rather than AI.”

Darden appealed to Allen academically, and she applied. “I’m choosing Darden now to take the consulting experience I’ve had and pivot that experience into a media and entertainment lens, to make sure that I’m in the room to figure out this changing industry, making sure it changes for the good rather than the bad,” Allen says.

Pressure is a Privilege

For Allen, Darden is “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in life, which is crazy to me.”

But the dynamic environment helps raise Allen’s energy to the level of the challenge. “That was one of the things I wanted to prioritize when choosing a business school — being surrounded by really interesting people who were just as passionate about what they wanted to pursue as I was,” she says.

As a lacrosse and hockey player, the Darden Cup and section rivalries appeal to Allen, who is part of Section A. “I think the sections are so fun. That’s been one of the highlights,” she said.

The intensity of the School is matched by the loftiness of her goals. “I hear a lot at Darden that pressure is a privilege,” Allen says. “And so I think you have to frame your mindset that way. When else in your life, in such a chaotic world that’s not set in stone, will you have the chance to shape it in some facet? That’s what I keep telling myself.”