trans representation

Quantum Teens Are Go is Magdalene Visaggio's follow-up to her breakout Black Mask Studios hit Kim & Kim, with Constantine: The Hellblazer artist Eryk Donovan. It's a teen drama, a sci-fi story, an action adventure --- just every cool genre thrown together into an entirely awesome, bright kinetic comic! With the series premiering next month, ComicsAlliance sat down with Visaggio and Donovan to discuss the past, present, and future of Quantum Teens are Go.

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!

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.

Koi Boi, a young Marvel superhero who’s been around for about a year, is transgender. Specifically, he’s trans-masculine. Most likely he’s a trans man, but since he hasn’t specified, I don’t want to push him into a binary that he may not identify with. If you don’t know who Koi Boi is, you’ve been missing out on Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and that’s a shame because it’s a great book. Koi Boi is an Asian American college student named Ken Shiga, but that’s about all we know about his life. Except that he’s transgender, and apparently hasn’t had top surgery, because he wears a binder. But to know that, you have to really be paying attention, because nobody’s said it in the comic yet.

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 superheroes at the Big Two in any given month is still sometimes small enough to count on one hand. To celebrate Pride, and the many LGBTQ heroes that have appeared at Marvel and DC over the years, we’ve assembled a panel of ComicsAlliance contributors to hold a fantasy draft. Our writers will take turns building up seven-member dream teams of LGBTQ superheroes from the ranks of both publishers.

Written, illustrated and self-published by Kylie Wu since 2013, the autobiographical webcomic TransGirlNextDoor deals with the fun and frustrations that come with being a young California surfer girl during her transition --- the process of changing which gender she lives as.

Airboy is a four-issue miniseries written by James Robinson and illustrated by Greg Hinkle, and published by Image Comics. Its premise is that Robinson and Hinkle, portrayed as fictionalized versions of themselves, are tapped to revamp an obscure Golden Age character. Robinson suffers writer's block, which hanging out with Hinkle doesn't help; the two of them wind up injecting, inhaling and eating the equivalent of a small pharmacy and go on a bender. When they awaken, they find that the creation they were tasked to revamp, Airboy, has sprung to four-color life, and he sees much wrong with the world – possibly rightly, possibly wrongly. So far, so good. It's metafiction, but speaking as someone whose shelves groan under the weight of Grant Morrison and Terry Pratchett, there's nothing wrong with a good metafiction that blurs the line between creation and creator. But there's a dark side to blurring that line, and that dark side is that it makes it difficult to tell where the fictional character ends and the real person's opinions begin – and that's lent an odious air when the opinions ventured in the narrative are wrongheaded and harmful.