lgbtq

Boom’s Backstagers is one of my favorite comics to premiere in the last year. Ryan Sigh’s lineart and Walter Baiamonte's colors bring the weird, gorgeous magical backstage world to life, but it’s also worth highlighting James Tynion IV’s writing, particularly his focus on overt, in-canon queer representation. Before Backstagers #7 comes out on February 22, I want to take note of the loveliness that is Backstagers #6, published in January. Spoilers for #6, and for the series as a whole, below.

On Saturday December 3, 2016, an Indiana-based comics retail worker named Mary tweeted a story about an an encounter with a young Supergirl fan that made waves across the comics internet, reaching thousands of fans, as well as comic creators and the cast of the Supergirl TV show. ComicsAlliance caught up with Mary to talk about the state of LGBTQ representation in superhero comics, and to find out which books she would recommend to young readers.

Tara Madison Avery and Jeanne Thornton of Stacked Deck Press have announced an anthology dedicated to transgender and nonbinary cartoonists, entitled We’re Still Here, showcasing the comics medium from the transgender/nonbinary perspective. The editors are also inviting open submissions from trans/nonbinary cartoonists who want to show what they can do.

To mark Trans Week of Visibility, ComicsAlliance has put together a list of great comics for younger readers featuring transgender or nonbinary characters. These are comics that are suitable for a wide range of ages, and come from a wide array of genres, from fantasy to electro-pop to superheroes to slice-of-life --- so there should be something for everyone. If you're a young trans or nonbinary comics reader, or if you know someone who is, or if you just want to read some amazing comics, these are our recommendations!

A few weeks back, my colleague Elle Collins wrote about Wonder Woman, specifically an interview Greg Rucka gave about her sexuality. The article was about how having an explicit statement of sexuality in an interview, and an implicit statement in the comic, were two ends of a rope that are infuriatingly close to meeting, but remain unspliced. Gender identity and sexuality aren’t the same thing, but they’re often treated the same along one critical vector: treating one mode of gender or sexuality as the default, and others as exceptions to that rule. So I couldn’t help but think of it as I reflected on the character of Sir Ystin, from 2011’s Demon Knights.

We seem to have missed a step somewhere. Just a few years ago, having a queer character in a superhero comic was a huge deal. There would be boycotts and mainstream news stories. And now we’re told that it’s totally not a big deal for Wonder Woman, the most important female superhero in history, and a third of DC Comics’ trinity, to be queer. It’s so not a big deal that you should have already known. It’s so not a big deal that it doesn’t even need to be directly stated in a DC comic, and in fact to do so would be clumsy and unnecessary. But shouldn’t there have been a step in between? A moment when it was no longer forbidden for Wonder Woman to be queer, but not yet such a casual affair that to even state it in her comic would be passé? A moment when it would be appropriate to show Wonder Woman’s queerness in a comic book, rather than telling it in an interview?

Created by Sophie Labelle, the socially aware comedy webcomic Assigned Male has been running since 2014, detailing the daily life and trials of queer kids of every gender and orientation.

Batman is a straight male power fantasy. His daylight veneer is one of a playboy billionaire. His nighttime identity is that of a sculpted superhero all clad in black. In either take, he is a masculine bulwark against the evil in Gotham — which is why his villains are so often feminine, queer, flamboyant, and robed in bright colors. Hopefully Supergirl and National City can provide a more inclusive and subversive space for the feminine, the gender nonconforming, the queer. Kara is one of the few superheroes more often portrayed as feminine; she derives her strength equally from her own compassion as she does Earth’s yellow sun.

A great many LGBTQ people realize that they’re queer at a young age. Maybe it’s through childhood crushes on fictional characters or an intrinsic knowing that they’re not the gender they’ve been assigned. Many who discover their identities later in life wish they had the language and representation to understand themselves at an earlier age. Media needs more representation of young LGBTQ kids — Lumberjanes and Steven Universe and Boy in Pink Earmuffs can’t carry that burden alone. That’s why I argue that Jonathan Samuel Kent, current Superboy and ten-year-old child to Lois Lane and Clark Kent, should be queer.

Should queer characters be introduced "organically" into stories? The word started being tossed around in this context last year, after SlashFilm asked asked Kevin Feige about the possibility of including gay characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he said he'd like to find "an organic, meaningful and natural way for that to happen." But is anything in fiction ever done "organically"?