Camelot 3000

This week’s episode, “Camelot/3000,” finds the team flung into the distant future and a not-historically-verified past in search of pieces of the Spear of Destiny. Battles are fought, minds are controlled, and character development is wildly uneven. Antonio Negret directed the episode, which was written by Anderson Mackenzie.

From humble beginnings in the UK small press scene, to his work on one of the most iconic Batman and Joker stories of all time, and his instantly recognizable covers on a range of titles, legendary artist Brian Bolland has blazed a trail through the last forty years of comics history.

My earliest encounters with transgender characters came in Vertigo comics in the mid-90’s, especially Wanda in Sandman and Coagula in Doom Patrol. Wanda dresses a bit like a drag queen (and dies a tragic death), and Coagula is a sex worker, but they both felt like real people, which is not how I’d ever previously been encouraged to view trans people in any medium. Growing up, reading comics has always played a role in my understanding of my own identity and worldview. I certainly wouldn’t say comics had an effect on my gender, but they definitely affected my understanding of gender. Recently, I’ve been wanting to look back farther than Wanda and Coagula and the mid-90’s. Amidst recent discussions of trans representation in comics, I’ve found myself thinking about what preceded trans characters in comics, before there was any chance of them existing.

With this week's release of Marvel's "Black Knight" #1 -- not to be confused with DC's similarly named space zombie epic -- creators Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz are revisiting the age of Camelot to reveal the long-lost origin of the Black Knight and the the sword that's basically Excalibur in one of those Evil Mirror Universe Goatees from "Star Trek," Chaos the Doombringer... Rea