For her senior thesis project for the honors program at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, she expressed her ideas in a graphic novel titled Nath for its lead character. In Cleary’s imagined world with no weapons, Nath is a college athlete in a street gang. But the author, a major in new media and digital design, pointed out that just because there are no knives or guns, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a world without violence.

“I was curious how people may adapt to something like that, so I settled on hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “In Nath’s world there’s a lot of emphasis on honor in fighting, and I thought about how in martial arts they focus on protection and not on harming others.”

Set in an urban landscape that combines the density of 20th-century New York with the sprawl of modern Tokyo, Cleary’s novel wrestles with many contemporary issues, such as the need for weapons in the first place.

Cleary also majored in economics at Fordham, and her background in that area informs the story as well; the characters come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. She said Nath’s life in college differs from her hardscrabble upbringing on the streets.

“There’s an otherness to her, and she tries to bridge that gap,” she said. “Throughout the course of the first issue, she feels that gap in some ways closing and in other ways, it’s too great for her to exist in both worlds.”

It’s an otherness that is not too far from the personal challenges faced by Cleary, who grew up in a suburban working-class family and is the first to go away to college. Her father died when she was 8, and her mother raised the family on her own.

“I am here on scholarship and I don’t come from a very privileged background,” she said. “But my mother always made sure we were together and doing things even when she was looking for work. She never broke down. I’ve always been inspired by her. No matter what struggles I’m facing, because of her, I know I can still overcome them.”

While in Nath’s world there is no established patriarchy, in the real world, Cleary said, the comics industry has been somewhat dominated by men. But she said publishers— even the big ones like Marvel—are starting to hear and hire diverse voices. She plans to shop her comic around at the end of the summer and use her economics background to help market it in “a changing economy.”

In the meantime, fans can keep up with Nath on Instagram by following @streetfighterturbo.

Q: Who is Crystal Eastman?
A: She is one of the most conspicuous reformers in America—an original co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment and a co-founder of antiwar groups like the Women’s Peace Party, which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She co-organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which eventually became the American Civil Liberties Union. She and her brother Max Eastman also co-founded the socialist magazine, The Liberator. And yet, even though she left several institutional legacies, she’s relatively obscure today.

Q. Why do you think her story was lost in popular memory?
Eastman has been largely lost to us because of what we now call her “intersectionality.” She believed you can’t fix one social problem without fixing the others.  She targeted exploitation in the class system, sexism, militarism, and war as linked and mutually reinforcing social maladies.  What’s more, she wanted to be a mother even more than to have a career. She was one of a very few prominent movement women who tried to balance work and family at this time.

Yet her life and her work generally asked her choose: one single-issue campaign, one vision of a better world, and one identity—either activist or mother.  It was her effort to marry multiple identities that I think led to her marginalization in organizations she’d helped to found and movements she’d helped to lead.

Q: Describe her worldview.
A: Eastman lived through World War I and believed a world federation could be achieved—a “United States of the world”—that would transcend national boundaries and international rivalries, ensuring democracy, equality, and human rights to everyone, as well a bringing an end to poverty and war. There were a lot of organizations in the early 20th century that had utopian strains. At the time it wasn’t unusual to think that nations could work together.

However, when the progressives weren’t able to lead the other nations toward a negotiated peace before World War I, Eastman became disillusioned. The Russian Revolution led her to new hopes for world democracy as well as an almost immediate peace treaty between Russia and Germany. She became increasingly radicalized. Following her original vision—democracy, equality, world peace—after 1917 she moved further to the Left. She was one of only a few anti-war activists who continued to protest the world war after U.S. intervention. She supported conscientious objectors in their resistance to the draft, and continued to speak and write and organize against U.S. policy and participation. It was government suppression of these efforts that led to the founding of the ACLU.

Q. Did she embrace communism and revolution?
A. Like many on the Left, Eastman supported the Russian Revolution, and she did so with characteristic enthusiasm. The newsletter of Eastman’s Woman’s Peace Party probably articulated her point of view when it greeted the revolution “with mad, glad joy.” But Eastman never abandoned her intersectional perspective and multi-issue allegiances. In a two-part series she wrote for the Liberator from inside Communist Hungary, she celebrates the abolition of private property while she also bemoans the hypocrisy and human cost of revolution. Despite her support for Revolutionary transformation, she struggled with what she termed the dilemma of the “pacifist revolutionary,” – that is, she viewed Revolutionary action as a Leftist as well as a pacifist and feminist. And she admitted she had no real answer for how to bring these positions into alignment.

Q. What was The Liberator magazine like?
A. Crystal and Max founded The Liberator in 1918 as a successor to The Masses, a socialist magazine that was suppressed by the federal government. As The Masses editor, Max and several other editors were tried twice for treason. Although they were never convicted, both trials resulted in hung juries. By the time the cases were resolved, the magazine was finished. Similarly, The Liberator was meant to track revolutions around the world, but it was also a literary and artistic magazine that published the radical artists and thinkers of the day—John Reed, e.e. cummings, Dorothy Day.

Q. What would she think of today’s progressive movements in New York City and beyond?
Eastman’s ideas remain so relevant that she speaks to readers across a century. She would see all the progress we have made—progress for the working class, for women, for gay rights, and for racial equality. But at the same time there is still rancid racism and homophobia. Some of the basics like wage equality for women are still an issue. We have made enormous strides that make me as hopeful as Crystal, but I think she’d agree we still have a ways to go.