{"id":118771,"date":"2017-12-11T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T14:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118771"},"modified":"2017-12-11T11:08:08","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T16:08:08","slug":"rise-queer-comics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/11\/rise-queer-comics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Queer Comics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Gay Comix <\/em>no. 1, ed. Howard Cruse, cover by Rand Holmes, 1980.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics\u2014comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and\/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of Alison Bechdel\u2019s 2006 graphic memoir Fun<\/em> Home:<\/em> A Family Tragicomic<\/em>\u2014the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway musical of the same title, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. Gayness used to be a public accusation leveled at comics to discredit the medium: in the 1950s, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman, were suspected to be gay, and therefore a negative influence. Dr. Fredric Wertham wrote in his influential book on comics that the former represent \u201ca wish dream of two homosexuals living together,\u201d and for the latter, \u201cthe homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ideal.\u201d The infamous 1954 Comics Code, inspired by Wertham\u2019s study, banned \u201csex perversion or any inference to same\u201d\u2014a clear reference to homosexuality. But today gay comics are an ever-expanding feature of the field, marking a new era of self-expression. Comics used to be read paranoically as gay code; in contemporary comics queer identity is openly announced.<\/p>\n

The excitement around queer comics, from readers and creators both, is rising steadily. Justin Hall\u2019s compendium No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics<\/em>, an edited collection, sold out its first print run in 2012. Two cult classic graphic novels from the nineties, the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz\u2019s Seven Miles a Second <\/em>and literary critic and writer Samuel Delany\u2019s Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York <\/em>(both collaborations with illustrators), were reissued in deluxe editions in 2013 for new readerships. And 2015 marked the creation of the first annual comics convention to focus on queer culture: Flame Con. New York City\u2019s Flame Con describes itself as \u201ca two-day comics, arts, and entertainment expo showcasing creators and celebrities from all corners of LGBTQ geek fandom,\u201d and specifies \u201cgeeks of all types are invited to attend and celebrate the diversity and creativity of queer geekdom and LGBTQ contributions to pop culture.\u201d Most significantly, however, the range and volume of queer comics appearing right now demonstrates how forcefully the realities and details of gay life can get expressed and visualized in comics. Diverse comics about all sorts of aspects of queer experience flourish online, in the direct and censorship-free zone of webcomics. And in the world of print, we see an outpouring of distinct genres of comics that explore and address queerness. Among the artists creating this work, Bechdel has shown most powerfully how comics can be a space for sophisticated storytelling about the complexities and joy of queer life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Alison Bechdel\u2019s\u00a0first published installment of Dykes to Watch Out For<\/em>\u00a0in Womanews<\/em>, 1983.<\/p><\/div>\n

Bechdel was influential long before Fun Home<\/em>, which was published when she was forty-five. Bechdel\u2019s hugely important and popular syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For<\/em>, which chronicles the everyday lives of a diverse group of mostly gay friends and lovers, began in 1983 and ran for twenty-six years; it changed comics culture and broader queer culture definitively. The guide Dyke Strippers: Lesbian Cartoonists from A to Z <\/em>is even dedicated to Bechdel. The film director Lana Wachowski, of the Matrix <\/em>franchise (and a trans gay woman), wrote recently that although she was a fan of mainstream comics as a kid, and later the work of Robert Crumb, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I discovered Alison Bechdel\u2019s Dykes to Watch Out For <\/em>that I really understood what I was looking for, a queer world with stories and characters that I could recognize, that I could laugh with and care about.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sydney and Mo in Bechdel\u2019s\u00a0story \u201cSense and Sensuality,\u201d\u00a0part of Dykes to Watch Out For<\/em> and collected in Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For <\/em>(Ithaca: Firebrand), 1997.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

The history of gay comics, however, doesn\u2019t start with Bechdel. It has roots that go back at least to the underground comix movement of the 1960s and \u201970s\u2014and even earlier, too, if one considers classic comic-strip characters like George Herriman\u2019s Krazy Kat, one of the most celebrated characters in the history of comics. Krazy Kat <\/em>(1913\u20131944) which debuted in William Randolph Hearst\u2019s New<\/em> Yor<\/em>k<\/em> Journal<\/em>, featured a famous love triangle: The mouse, Ignatz, hates the cat, Krazy. Krazy, however, passionately loves Ignatz; even though the mouse throws bricks at Krazy\u2019s head, they are received affectionately. Offissa Pupp, a dog, adores Krazy and hates Ignatz as a result. Krazy is androgynous, a \u201ckat\u201d with a fluid gender that seems to shift and is never actually meant to be conclusively verified (sometimes the narration refers to Krazy as a \u201che\u201d; largely, however, Krazy has been interpreted as female, including by superfan E. E. cummings). In an exchange from a 1915 Krazy Kat <\/em>daily strip, Krazy complains, \u201cI don\u2019t know if I should take a husband or a wife,\u201d to which the indifferent Ignatz responds, \u201cTake care,\u201d and hurls a brick. That a syndicated strip published in a mainstream Hearst paper\u2014Hearst adored the strip\u2019s artistic merit and gave Herriman a lifetime contract\u2014had such a conspicuously \u201cgenderqueer\u201d star at its center indicates that queer comics, even if not hailed as such, have been lurking in plain sight for over a hundred years, at least. We might even consider queerness part of the DNA of comics.<\/p>\n

Other newspaper strips have featured openly gay characters, some controversially. Garry Trudeau\u2019s topical and political Doonesbury <\/em>also introduced an openly gay character in 1976\u2014early for mainstream comics. Readers first meet the character Andy Lippincott in a law library as the object of a female crush. In the Doonesbury <\/em>storyline, after a yearlong battle, he dies of AIDS<\/small> in 1990, an event that helped bring discussions about the disease into a wide number of homes. Andy is the only fictional character to be included on the real-life AIDS<\/small> Quilt. (He later appears to longtime character Mark Slackmeyer in a dream to tell Mark that Mark is in fact gay, causing him to come out of the closet.) And Matt Groening\u2019s Life in Hell<\/em>, which ran for thirty-five years starting in the late 1970s, featured the always-together characters Akbar and Jeff. Akbar and Jeff\u2014also early and prominent gay characters who eventually became well-known in popular culture\u2014are identical-looking men in fezzes and Charlie Brown\u2013style shirts who initially were introduced by Groening as \u201cbrothers, or lovers, or both\u201d but were soon acknowledged as gay.<\/p>\n

Asked by a fanzine in 1987 if his characters had ever elicited a homophobic reaction, Groening replied yes. \u201cThe main reaction was when I first acknowledged that either of these characters could possibly be gay, some people who had been following the strip for years and had feelings about gays were very, very upset, which made me very, very happy.\u201d (When Groening ended Life in Hell<\/em>, a tribute poster was assembled; Alison Bechdel\u2019s contribution was a fitting Akbar and Jeff tribute strip about the multivalent word \u201cgay.\u201d) The newspaper strip For Better or For Worse<\/em>, by Lynn Johnston, about a suburban family with three kids who age in real time, introduced one of its characters, Lawrence\u2014a friend of the family\u2019s son\u2014as gay. In 1993, when Lawrence came out, For Better or For Worse <\/em>was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers. The backlash was so intense that today Johnston devotes a portion of her website to explaining it under the heading \u201cLawrence\u2019s Story.\u201d It may be hard to remember or imagine just how unusual sensitive gay content was for the \u201cfunny pages\u201d of mainstream newspapers even twenty-five years ago, but within a week, nineteen papers had canceled For Better or For Worse <\/em>outright, many more had suspended the strip, and Johnston went on to receive over 2,500 personal letters (in the days before email, no less), including death threats. \u201cI learned that the comics page is a powerful communicator,\u201d Johnston writes on her website. \u201cI learned that our work is taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

These widely popular strips, which each came at gayness from a different angle, provided important early examples of gay representation in comic strips. But the gay or queer characters they featured were secondary characters. It wasn\u2019t until the underground comics movement, starting in the early 1970s, that gay comics as a self-conscious genre took root. In the underground, comics was reinvented as a medium for self-expression. It follows that the underground was also where political, identity-based comics were first developed, bolstered by the energy of the left-wing counterculture\u2019s attention to disenfranchised voices\u2014and also by women cartoonists\u2019 reactions to what they perceived as the overly straight, overly male first wave of underground cartoonists. The comic book Wimmen\u2019s Comix<\/em>, run by a collective of female cartoonists, developed as a platform specifically for women in 1972. And their debut issue (which is also where Aline Kominsky-Crumb\u2019s comics first saw print) featured a three-page story about lesbianism, \u201cSandy Comes Out,\u201d by Trina Robbins, a guiding force in the Wimmen\u2019s Comix Collective. The story, about a young woman coming out and joining a \u201cgay\/hippie commune,\u201d was framed as a \u201ctrue life\u201d comic about a friend of the artist (unidentified as such in the story, that friend was Sandra Crumb, Robert Crumb\u2019s sister.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Diane DiMassa, panels from Hothead Paisan<\/em>, 1993.\u00a0Reprinted in The Complete Hothead Paisan<\/em> (San Francisco: Cleis Press), 1999.<\/p><\/div>\n

While Wimmen\u2019s Comix<\/em>, and other feminist comics titles, acted as a corrective to the male-dominated underground comics scene, they were thin on gay content and gay authors. The perceived heterosexism of feminist underground comics inspired Mary Wings, then twenty-four, to self-publish the first full-length lesbian comic book, Come Out Comix<\/em>, in 1973\u2014a groundbreaking, stand-alone title that\u00a0paved the way for queer comics of all different kinds to claim a place in the field. The underground inspired that kind of creative practice: if you perceived a gap, you could fill it yourself. Soon thereafter, Wimmen\u2019s Comix <\/em>published its first lesbian contribution by an actual lesbian, Roberta Gregory\u2019s \u201cModern Romance\u201d\u2014also, like Wings\u2019s comic book, a coming-out story (Gregory would later go on to publish the hilarious comic book Naughty Bits <\/em>during the 1990s, starring the character Bitchy Bitch, <\/em>and a spin-off collection, Bitchy Butch: The World\u2019s Angriest Dyke<\/em>). Wings followed up in 1976 with another comic book, Dyke Shorts<\/em>. The work coming out of the underground was substantial, and personal, claiming space for nuanced stories that previously hadn\u2019t found expression in comics\u2014or in most other media. When Bechdel started drawing her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For <\/em>in 1983, \u201cthere was already such a thing as a lesbian cartoonist,\u201d she notes. \u201cI didn\u2019t have to invent it, or fight for it, or suffer over it. I just did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Comics about gay men were slower to form, although the artist known as Tom of Finland, and his drawings of well-endowed muscle men, were significant to gay culture starting in the 1950s, along with plenty of other homoerotic fetish drawings and pornography. There were some gay-themed single-panel gag cartoons in the burgeoning gay press, like Joe Johnson\u2019s campy \u201cMiss Thing\u201d and \u201cBig Dick,\u201d which appeared in The Advocate <\/em>starting in the late 1960s. The country\u2019s oldest LGBT-interest magazine, founded in 1967, The Advocate <\/em>has always featured cartoons and comics as a form reflecting, however humorously, on gay life. And Rupert Kinnard\u2019s Cathartic Comics<\/em>, an early version of which first appeared in his college paper in 1977 before later migrating to multiple alternative weeklies, notably featured the first continuing African American gay characters in comic strips\u2014the Brown Bomber, a man, and Diva Touch\u00e9 Flamb\u00e9, a woman. But the central figure in gay comics is surely Howard Cruse, a respected cartoonist raised in Alabama who\u00a0began an underground comic strip, Barefootz<\/em> (the titular character was always barefoot), in 1971. Five years into its publication, the strip\u2019s character Headrack came out as gay. Cruse knew this choice would mark his own public coming out, and though he struggled with the decision to draw gay content, he was encouraged ultimately by Mary Wings to take the leap into that subject matter. \u201cGravy on Gay,\u201d in which Headrack comes out, is a story whose central plot point Cruse described as \u201can explosion of long-repressed liberationist fury.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Alison Bechdel, the only double-spread in Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic<\/em> (New York: Houghton Mifflin). \u00a9 2006 Alison Bechdel. All rights reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

Cruse became the founding editor of the field-defining comic book Gay Comix<\/em>, published by the underground press Kitchen Sink starting in 1980. It may have taken longer than other underground titles to coalesce, but its significance has been enormous. (And it lasted eighteen years, longer than most underground publications, excluding Wimmen\u2019s Comix<\/em>, which lasted twenty years.) Gay Comix <\/em>aimed for inclusivity and to consolidate queer underground comics. It came with the tagline \u201cLesbians and Gay Men Put It on Paper!\u201d Its first cover, by Rand Holmes, hilariously features a man walking down the street, stuck in a literal closet, ogling another man in shorts eating a hot dog. In Gay Comix<\/em>, Cruse crucially frames comics as an uncensored art form in which stereotypes and expectations can be overthrown in favor of particularity and range. \u201cIn this comic book you\u2019ll find work by lesbians, gay men, and bisexual human beings. The subject is Being Gay,\u201d he wrote in the editor\u2019s note. \u201cEach artist speaks for himself or herself. No one speaks for any mythical \u2018average\u2019 homosexual. No one is required to be \u2018politically correct.\u2019 \u201d For Alison Bechdel, discovering the first issue of Gay Comix <\/em>was the single biggest event that sealed her fate as a cartoonist. \u201cI\u2019d been out as a lesbian for a couple of years, [but] the notion of cartoons about being gay had never crossed my mind. It was like, \u2018Oh, man! You can do cartoons about your own real life being a gay person.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From <\/span><\/em>Why Comics?<\/span>\u00a0Published with permission of Harper. Copyright \u00a9 2017 by Hillary Chute.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Hillary Chute is an expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is the author of<\/em> Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, <\/em>Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, and <\/em>Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The fastest-growing area in comics right now may be, broadly speaking, queer comics\u2014comics that feature in some way the lives, whether real or imagined, of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and\/or queer) characters. Queer comics are one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary comics, fueled in large part by the runaway success of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[3784,31933,7451,31941,3535,31934,31922,31939,131,31918,15825,8310,31924,31925,31923,31917,7452,31929,31942,11054,31940,31936,31920,27000,31926,31931,31927,31930,31928,31919,31914,31935,31915,31938,31921,31937,15692,31932,31916],"class_list":["post-118771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aids","tag-aline-kominsky-crumb","tag-alison-bechdel","tag-barefootz","tag-batman","tag-bitchy-bitch","tag-bread-wine","tag-cathartic-comics","tag-comics","tag-comics-code","tag-david-wojnarowicz","tag-doonesbury","tag-dyke-strippers","tag-dykes-to-watch-out-for","tag-flame-con","tag-frederic-wertham","tag-fun-home","tag-garry-trudeau","tag-gay-comix","tag-george-herriman","tag-howard-cruse","tag-joe-johnson","tag-justin-hall","tag-krazy-kat","tag-lana-wachowski","tag-life-in-hell","tag-matrix","tag-matt-groenig","tag-new-york-journal","tag-no-straight-lines","tag-queer-comics","tag-roberta-gregory","tag-robin","tag-rupert-kinnard","tag-seven-miles-a-second","tag-the-advocate","tag-william-randolph-hearst","tag-wimmens-comix","tag-wonder-woman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Rise of Queer Comics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Comics used to be dismissed for their perceived coded gay messages. 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