hercules

This week there’s been a lot of talk and controversy surrounding J. Scott Campbell’s Midtown Comics variant for Invincible Iron Man #1, featuring the 15-year-old Riri Williams, AKA Ironheart. Fan response to the cover pointed out the highly sexualized depiction of Riri and the inapprop…

Today is Bisexual Awareness Day, the finale of Bisexual Awareness Week. As a bisexual comics fan, I'm always on the lookout for bi characters. It's exciting how many are official now, like Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and probably some characters who aren't female Bat-villains …

Comic books are always driving to be more inclusive and more representative of the real world. It might not always be obvious, and there might be roadblocks, but most of the time there are creators in and out of the mainstream working hard to push the entire industry uphill and make it more welcomin…

Since the dawn of the Silver Age, legacy characters have been a staple of superhero fiction, and having a new character step into a well loved role can open up new opportunities for writers and artists to tell different kinds of stories. In The Replacements, we’ll look back at the notable and…

There was a time not so long ago when one could count off all the LGBTQ superheroes at Marvel and DC on the fingers of one hand. We’ve seen an increasing number of queer heroes make their debuts in recent years, and a few established heroes have come out as LGBTQ, but the number of queer supe…

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed while scanning the Marvel solicitations for April, May and June that certain All-New, All-Different Marvel titles are missing without any word from Marvel about it. Well, it seems that Marvel’s new plan for cancelled comics is to end them without an announc…

Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, became comics' biggest gay superhero last week — again, but also for the first time, because nothing is ever simple in superhero comics. In a scene by Brian Michael Bendis and Mahmud Asrar in the pages of Uncanny X-Men #600, the older of two Bobby Drakes (from tw…

There are many things you can point to in superhero comics as examples of sexism and gender essentialism. Today we will ignore those. Today, we come not to bury comics and their handling of gender issues, but to praise them. Today we salute those brave men who stare down a world of gender-coded clot…

It remains a bleak time for the female comic audience, and for other minority audiences. The recent debacle with Hercules is merely the latest of Marvel’s many ghastly faux pas; for every two steps forward, it seems to take two steps back: it publishes more female titles only to end the major…

The mythological demigod Hercules is bisexual. How you feel about that fact doesn't change the fact; the myths of antiquity have told us that Hercules loved women and men alike. Lustfulness is at the core of his character, and Hercules' appetites aren't limited by gender.

Like many a…