Let's write up some comics

This week I bought and read this lot:

Black Canary 1
Much more interesting than I thought it would be from the preview.  It doesn't really feel like my Dinah though, but I guess I'm looking for a Dinah in her 30s ready to settle down with Ollie (who to be fair would never be a rock star).  So this version not feeling like her isn't a criticism.  It is a good comic.  The only thing that pulled me out of it was that I don't buy her wearing her Canary outfit  on stage.  If they'd given her shorts or a skirt it would work much better.

Harley/Peej 1
This was a lot more fun than I expected.  I've been underwhelmed by Harley's main series but this was far better.  The two of them work well together. Unfortunately the cover is not Amanda Conner's finest hour.  The inks are rather heavy and it just doesn't flow very well.

Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman 11
Another bad cover,  Yeeuch.  Badly composed, badly pencilled, badly inked and badly coloured.  Inside is Jamal Igle's pencils which are much better but the inks are a bit too heavy handed.  The colours are OK.  Overall, this lacks the finesse of the Gates/Igle Supergirl work, but that's not Igle's fault.  In the issue Di goes to Africa to try to get two sides of a warring nation to reconcile.  It sounds a bit white saviour-ish doesn't it.  I don't think it comes across that way but I'm willing to listen to other opinions.

Princeless book 4 issue 1
The story is good but I hate the art.  The composition of the panels is good, the actions (and interaction) of the characters are good, but the style of faces, the inks and the colours are horrible.  It won't stop me buying this series, but if you do pick it up please be aware that this art is not indicative of the rest of the series' art!  And on the plus side, we do have killer squirrels:

Battleworld: Thors 1
I think I bought this for horse Thor.  It's OK.  I suspect it's more for Marvel aficionados than me.  It seems like a bit of an industry vanity project, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Battleworld: Runaways 1
The only actual Runaway in this is Molly Hayes.  The rest are mutants, Cloak and Dagger and some other randoms who I expect regular Marvel readers will know.  They are all attending a school to train them as Doom lackeys, or some such.  I tell you what, I do like the premise for Battleworld.  It works far better than Convergence, at least for these two titles.  This was a fun enough comic.  It also queered up Jubilee and Pixie, which was good to see:

Are they gay in the regular 616 universe?

Ms Marvel: Crushed (trade)
This is volume 3 of the current Ms Marvel run.  I really liked it, it's a good young adult comic about teenage crushes and the pitfalls that come with it, with added superpowers.  The only thing I didn't like was the thinly veiled lesson about consent.  It just seemed a bit too obvious to me, but maybe that's because I've been seeing this sort of stuff discussed for years and given where I am at the moment, I really could do with not having these conversations.  Quite frankly, I don't care.  That sounds awful doesn't it.  But I don't.  I'm concentrating on my pregnancy and everything else that requires energy, or passion can piss off.  So, I'm wondering who the teenage audience this is aimed at would take this lesson. If they don't find it too much, then I guess it's a good thing.

Batman: The Ring, The Arrow and The Bat
I've been meaning to get this for about 2 years.  Despite the name, it's a Green Arrow trade, not a Batman book.  The first story is Hal and Ollie meeting for the first time.  Hal is working for the government and doesn't realise he's being used, and Ollie is out for a good vigilante time, until he realises the wrongs being done, and then he gets all angry about it.  It's quite a quick change.  Hal and Ollie argue but end up friends.  Art is by Greg Land, before his porn tracing days.  If you like these two, and you like these trades, then you'll like this story.

The second story is Green Arrow and Batman meeting and working together for the first time.  There is lots of snark and one liners.  The villains in the story are stereotypical/generic Asian bad guys, which makes me wince, and plot development is a bit obvious, but apart from that, it's good fun.

I've also been watching Arrow season 1, and while I'm kinda enjoying it, it's a bit bloody miserable isn't it?  Oliver Queen enjoys life, but Ollie in Arrow doesn't.  Granted, he has just come back from the island and is traumatised, but by all accounts he doesn't get any happier over the seasons.  Le sigh.  I like the flashbacks to the island the best.  He looks and acts more like 'my' Ollie there.

Coming out in comics: Maxima

Supergirl 40 (the new 52) is the last in the current series.  The last few issues have had Kara at Crucible Academy. a training school for super powered folk.  There she met people seen in previous DC continuities, including Comet (not a horse in this incarnation) and Maxima, who previously had been known as the woman searching the galaxies for a suitable male to mate with, so that she could repopulate her home planet.

In Supergirl 40 she comes out to Kara:

I think it's great we have another queer character in the DCU.  Maxima not liking men changes her history and motivations and experience quite a lot, and I'd really like to see that explored.  I'm just a little bit sad about the way it's been done.  I'm not having a dig at the creative team here - I think they were constrained by the series ending and so only had one page to show this, and it's better to canonically establish that Maxima is queer than not.

However, given the circumstances and the brevity of her coming out, it reads more like she's coming out to further Kara's story.  Take the bottom left hand panel,, Maxima says:
'I know nothing can convince you to stay, but I wanted to tell you this because you've given me hope for my future.  And that I thought you should know'.

It reminds of 90s films with queer characters, like Threesome, where the gay or bi ones came out and had their friends accept them, but never got together with anyone.  I remember watching Threesome with my straight friends and they thought it was sweet that the queer guys accepted their sexuality and that their straight friends accepted them.  They thought that was good and made it a positive film.  It's certainly better than films that condone homophobia, or ignore LGBT folk.  I disliked it because I wanted the queer guys to have the same as the het guys - a loving relationship and the ability to be themselves without fear.

This page in Supergirl reminds me of that film.  What about Maxima?  If she truly likes Kara in a  sexual way I can't see her (or anyone) just thanking their crush for being around and giving them a hug and being happy to say goodbye to them.  It's all rather chaste.  Maxima says:
"You're exactly the kind of person I envisioned being with and I didn't think that person existed until now".
If Kara represents that to her then I cannot understand why she's being so accepting of Kara leaving.  When I've crushed on straight friends it's been heartbreaking for me.

So on one level this scene works for me and another it doesn't.  I really hope it can be explored further down the line, perhaps when the Supergirl title is brought back after June.

Coming out in comics: Thundra

This is from She-Hulk 34.  I'd not come across Thundra before, but I gather she's from a nation where men and women are at war with each other and she doesn't like men very much.

Whatever her story, it's always nice to see women in comics crushing on other women.

Coming out in comics - Psylocke

I recently read Uncanny X-Force v3, issue 7.  I have no idea how I got hold of this or why I was tempted to read it, but I'm glad I did.

The premise is that Psylocke is living with a guy named Fantomex, who was recently split into 3 different bodies through a cloning process I think.  We now have Fantomex, Weapon XIII and Cluster (the only female clone) - each version got different parts of the original Fantomex's personality.  Psylocke was in a relationship with Fantomex before he got split into 3, and she continued her relationship with this Fantomex's body, believing him to be the same personality as he was before the split.


However, it turns out this Fantomex is a bit of a dick, which leads to these 2 scenes from issue 7:

I have no idea what Psylocke regards her sexuality as.  I have no idea if she has had relationships with women before.  What I like about these pages is that once she realises which personality she loves, she doesn't hesitate to act on her feelings.  There are no negative thoughts around Cluster being female, it's just Psylocke and Cluster, acting on their feelings.  They love each other, they've realised and acknowledged it, that's all there is to it.  Beautiful.

Comic review - Smallville and Ame-Comi Girls (and a bit of coming out in comics)

Spoilers ahead for Smallville 26 & 27

Coming out in comics: Black Cat

This probably isn't news to anyone else but as I don't read much Marvel I don't know a whole lot about the Black Cat.  I have heard rumours that she's bisexual but I only got proof of this when I read the MC2 Spider-Girl series.  In it, Felicia Henderson is now 40 something and has a teenage daughter called Felicity.  They don't have a great relationship.  Before this particular issue, we had hints that Felicity was unimpressed with her mother's love life, but we didn't know for sure who her partner was until this page, from Spider-Girl 53:

Ok, so it's not explicit, and I guess that if you were particularly blinkered and maybe naive you wouldn't see it, but it's fairly clear that Felicia and the woman in the top right hand panel have just moved apart from a romantic clinch.  And that Felicity isn't too happy about it.  Nothing more has been said about this, and seeing as I'm now at issue 73 ish I don't hold out much hope for this being looked at again.  We shall see.

Coming out in Comics - Renee Montoya and Maggie

This is from Gotham Central, #34:

This issue has a guest appearance by the Teen Titans, I can't remember the rationale now, but it was obviously written as a tie-in to bump up the reader numbers.  Anyway, at this page Starfire walks in to the police station and asks if she can help with the investigation.

As far as I'm concerned this issue outs Maggie Sawyer.  If you look at the column of panels, you see the expressions on the male cops faces when they see Starfire.  The bottom panel shows Renee Montoya (previously outed) and Maggie Sawyer.  Maggie's face mirrors Renee's.  The top panel in the column establishes that the men are lustful for Starfire, the middle one points out Renee's and Maggie's reactions, and as Maggie's expression perfectly mirrors Renee's, I'd say that this page outs Maggie, in a non verbal manner.

Never in this series was it confirmed, verbally, that Maggie is gay.  There was a hint in the early issues when Renee has just been outed, and then this.  But this is plenty good enough for me.

As with the last post I did in this series, this scan was kindly provided to me by DAJB of Broken Voice Comics.  As I read this on Comixology I can't take a scan.  For argument's sake, and for a different POV, I will give you DAJB's take on this.  He felt that by this point the series:

"lost its authenticity and strayed into the murky waters of mainstream titillation.  Whereas Batman's brief appearances in GC made sense in the context of the story, Starfire's little cameo just seemed completely gratuitous; inserted purely to allow Rucka to make a cheap joke.  I'm not convinced this "outs" Maggie Sawyer, but we all take something different from these things, I guess.

That's the glory of literature!"

When I read the series, I didn't feel that this titillation, or done for a cheap joke.  Mind you, I felt the series became a little looser and little bit more fun, mayhap for a darker definition of fun that most people use.  At any rate, this series is canon (or was, pre new 52), so to my mind it still outs Maggie within the parameters of the story.  Whether the writer or artist intended it as a joke or not, it still stands as is, real within the story.

So I'll celebrate it.

Coming out in Comics: Renee Montoya

I recently bought the Gotham Central series from Comixology (don't ask how much it cost, eep), and am pleased to discover it's the series that outs Renee Montoya, then a cop in the GCPD, later The Question.

Gotham Central is about the GCPD, the people working for it and the cases they investigate.  On issue 6, Greg Rucka takes over writing duties for the Half of a Life arc, outs Renee and wins an Eisner award.  A well deserved trophy I reckon.

So, Renee is being sued by a criminal who got off from a rape charge.  She comes into the GCPD HQ one day to find her colleagues crowded around the notice board.

The photograph was taken by the criminal who is suing her and has sent the copies to her workplace and her parents.  Neither of whom she was out to.

The next 4 issues has Renee dealing with her work colleagues, being set up on a murder charge and dealing with her parents, who cut her out of their lives.

I recommend this arc to all fans of Renee Montoya, Gotham City, Batman's supporting characters, and LGBT comics fans (and potential fans) everywhere.  It's seriously good.

I think it's been traded but you can also buy the issues digitally from Comixology.

Many thanks to DAJB of Broken Voice Comics for sending me the scans.

Coming out in comics: Catman

Gail Simone confirms that Catman is bisexual and in the new DCU he will be witten as bisexual when she next writes him.

She also describes the make up of Secret Six. Who is who do you reckon?

Anyway, aww yeah!!

Coming out in comics: Poison Ivy

From Gotham City Sirens 24, I present to you:

In seperate pages, to make it easier to embiggen:

The whole point of this arc is that Harley knows exactly what buttons to push to get the reaction she needs.  She knows people's inner truths and she knows how to present them in the most hurtful manner.  So when in the last panel she says to Ivy "Is it because you loves me?" you know she's telling the truth, Harley does love her.

As far as I'm concerned that's incontrovertible proof that Ivy likes women, making her lesbian or bisexual.

One up for us!

Coming out in comics: random villains in the DCU

It's been ages since I've done one of these Coming out posts.  Anyway, I just came across this page from JLA, vol 4, issue 2 (split into 3 panels to make them bigger when posting)

Click to make it bigger.  It's nice to see someone be incidentally gay.  What else is noteworthy is the implicit homophobia of Cavalier's community.  It's stuff like this that gives so much information about life in the DCU, but in a subtle manner.  I like it.

Thinking on bisexual invisibility..

Y'all should know by now that I did a post on Starman over on Prism Comics that specifically dealt with bisexual invisibility.  Well, after writing that I had an email conversation with Alexander Lyons about Madame Xanadu and her bisexuality.  Alex said that there is an interpretation of Madame Xanadu that explains her sexuality as being down to her otherwordly status, and so she may can be seen a snot specifically bisexual but more pansexual.

I thought the same thing could be applied to Mikaal in Starman - he's allowed to be bisexual because he's an other, an alien, and so he doesn't have to conform to human norms.  Human norms in this case being straight or gay.

But you know, I want to claim Mikaal as actually bisexual.  I want heroes like me.  I want visibility for bisexual people.  As I write this I'm 30 years of age and I have only recently come to accept that I don't have to rely on gay culture for my identity as not straight.  I don't fit in with straight culture either, I'm caught between the two.*

I appreciate that people might find it challenging to write a bisexual character and incorporate that into their personality.  It may be daunting - there's not a whole lot of examples to draw on, and if the writer doesn't know any bisexual people they may not know how to write clealry bi characters.

But that's not a reason not to do it.  It's certainly not a good reason.  I argued in the above linked Starman post about ways to write about bisexual characters.  James Robinson did it well.  Gail Simone did it well in Secret Six - 6 degrees of devastation.

There's not enough gay characters in comics (or films, tv, or books) and there's certainly not enough bisexual people.  We need icons and heroes who identify as bisexual.  We need them to be normal people, with varied interests and different lives, just like the straight and the gay folk.

C'mon writers, make an effort.  Please.

(This post was sparked off by a tweet from InnerBrat reading:
"As we know, bisexuals don't exist. RT @dorothysnarker: Glee writers confirm "Santana is a lesbian." http://bit.ly/f4VTVl ")

*That's not really a problem for me - it used to be, it did used to cause me a lot of heartache.  Now I don't really care.  I'm me, I accept myself.

Prism Comics

I’ve written several articles for Prism Comics, all focusing on LGBT characters.  A list of the articles can be seen below.

I'll be updating this post as and when more of my stuff gets published by Prism, and I'll be including a link to this post on my blog sidebar.

Secret Six - Six Degrees of Devastaion: It’s a team of 6 villains, with one lesbian and one bisexual character.

Venus Envy: Webcomic about a young trans woman.

Coming out in comics – similar to my series on this blog, this is an overview of LGB characters in modern DC comics, what I think about them and why I think it’s important to have them.

Iono-Sama Fanatics volume 1: A Japanese yuri (girls love) manga about a visiting Queen, looking to build up her sobames (companions).
Paris:  2 women find love in 1950s Paris.

Starman #45: Featuring a gay male couple, and some rather dodgy gay men in prison assumptions.

Starman 80 page giant - Wherein I talk about the concept of bisexual erasure and what this comic does to break the trend.

Coming out in Comics spreads

I got another article published on Prism Comics.  It's built up around my regular Coming Out in Comics articles I post on here on Pai, but it extrapolates things a bit more.  Go read it here if you're interested.

Ellen Baker

So anyone following me on twitter may have noticed that I read a lot of Animal Man recently.  Not sure if I've mentioned it here or not.  Anyway, upon reading the run I discovered that Ellen Baker is pretty damn cool.  Check some of these scans out:

Upon discovering Mirror Master in her house (issue #8):

Don't mess with her.  She's tough.

She gets annoyed with her husband (issue 51):

Those panels are drawn by the very talented Steve Pugh and coloured by the equally talented Tatjana Wood.  The body language is excellent.  The above scene takes place in the excellent Flesh and Blood storyline (issues 51 to 56) dealing largely with Cliff, Buddy and Ellen's son, being taken away by a crazy uncle.

Then later on in the run, Ellen left her family to join a radical feminist lesbian commune.  This sounds terrible.  It isn't.  It happened naturally and believably and the members of the commune were not caricatures.  Here's a few pages where Ellen's preferences get discussed (from issue 77):

She's an illustrator mostly doing bit part work or hack jobs for other people but she did once get a book deal:

Her son also draws and when she gets a job with a comic writer she notices some similarities between his and her son's work (can't remember the exact issue number, but it's after Flesh and Blood):

Ellen has been blessed with good artists throughout the Animal Run run.  Check out her facial expression in that last panel.

This is a woman who has had her husband die and turn into a humanoid animal thing several times.  Life with Buddy Baker is chaotic.  Yet she retains her sense of humour.  She's sardonic and sarcastic.  She's straightforward and clear.

Those pages are from issues 66 and 79, respectively.  The last one is where Ellen has lost Buddy again.  That's her mum and travelling friend of the Bakers with her, not anyone from the commune.

Ellen's brilliant.   One of the great things about the Animal Man run was the central role that family played, the interactions that were shown within the pages.  Rarely have I seen hoem life relationships depicted with such passion and accuracy.

Coming soon - Ellen's mother, equally kick ass.

Coming out day

Coming out day is a yearly thing occurring on October 11th.  It's meant to promote awareness of gay/bisexual people, increase tolerance and increase visibility of queer folk.  Wikipedia calls it a civil awareness day.

I missed commemorating it this year but I would hope that I do enough year round to promote awareness and visibility.  My reason for the late post is that aroundabout Oct 11th I saw some people declaring that they thought a National Coming Out day was a bad thing as it would push or force people into coming out, when they weren't ready for it and/or when it may not be safe for them to do so.

I disagree with this interpretation of the day - as I see it the designation of Coming Out day is more for those who are already out and able to show their colours so to speak.  It should be a day when those who are comfortable enough to do so discuss LGB (and trans) issues and provide a visible presence and become a role model of sorts tho those folk who aren't out, for whatever reason.

It may be a day to tell your coming out story, it may be a day to say why you're proud to be queer (or the descriptor of your choice), it may be a day to talk about your life in general and just make the most fleeting reference to not being heterosexual.  Nobody should be pushed into coming out.  It's not always an easy thing to do, it can be very stressful and for a lot of people it can be dangerous.  the least the rest of us can do is be open and show the bigots that we're here, we're varied and we ain't going anywhere.

Maybe that will help those who are still in the closet.

If you want to read more about what I've said on the subject click on the LGB and coming out tags beneath this post.

Link time!

Because I haven't thought of a real post, have some links:

Snell over at Slay, Monstrobot of the Deep! talking about how the comic industry should respect itself.

A take down of rape jokes and rape culture over at Shakesville.

A comic editor's response to an 8 yr old fan's upset at Jason Todd death, from Ragnell's tumblr.

A mash up of Van Halen's Jump and The Beatle's Imagine.

Zoe Williams talking about the stupidity of ruling that sex whilst HIV positive is a crime.

Kat Banyard on feminism.

OUT140 - telling your coming out stories in 14o characters or less.

A bloody fantastic American Sign Language interpretation of Marilyn Manson's The New Shit.   He's done it like a music video and it's amazing.

Coming out in Comics: Pied Piper

Ahh the Pied Piper, real name Hartley Rathaway, reformed villain from the Flash' rogues gallery.  He's great and he's gay.  He first came out in Flash volume 2, number 53 (1991).  Wally West was the Flash then and they were both good friends by this point.  Let's take a look at how this happened:

See this?  They are friends.  Look at the body language, relaxed and open.












It doesn't last...

Wally West, you are a prat.  Worst excuse ever.  Still, I like how Piper isn't offended by him and takes it all in his stride.  And you know, at least Wally didn't ask if this meant Piper fancied him.

But on the plus side.....

At the end of the issue they are friends again and Wally has evidently forgotten his fear of the gays.  Looking back at the date this was published I feel all warm and fuzzy about the way this was handled.  It could have been positioned as Wally being homophobic and in the right for being so, but I think it's quite clear in the above text that Wally is being a prat and that his mini freak out is wrong.

I was 11 in 1991 and didn't really know a lot about sexuality, but I was aware of HIV/AIDS and the mass panic and bigotry that followed it in the 80s.  With that in mind, it's wonderful seeing a comic that deals with a character's sexuality in a grown up way, and that shows the panic reaction from his straight friend to be a ridiculous one.


Later on, in the 2008 Rogues Revenge Final Crisis mini there was a nice moment where one of the other rogues said something homophobic, and Piper kicked him.  It felt gratifying.

Coming out in Comics: Supporting cast

From Green Lantern vol 2, issue 137.  We have a better look at how to deal with sexuality.  Judd Winick wrote this, and it is a proper coming out tale.  Kyle Rayner is telling his young assistant, Terry, that he's proposed to his giurlfriend, Jenny Lynn Hayden.  Terry doesn't take it so well.  I don't want to scan the whole comic, so what follows are some of the most relevant panels.


The penny drops for Kyle Rayner:

A couple of nice little pages explaining about how stereotypes are wrong.  This is not shoehorned in and comes across really naturally:

How to deal with the coming out process:

And the moments when Kyle sits down and talks to Terry:

Kyle's butt comment could be read badly, but as it has been pretty well established that Terry and Kyle are good friends I read this as friendly ribbing.  Some people make compain about these scenes and say it's heavy handed.  I disagree, I think it's dealt with respectfully and maturely and I think there is place in comics for dealing with social issues.  Later issues dealt with Terry getting pretty badly attacked by homophobic idiots and looked at his recovery, his parents (non supportive) reactions, and his efforts to raise awareness of homophobic bullying.

I take my hat off to you Mr Winick, this storyline was done very well.

Coming out in Comics: Where lesbianism leads to violence

From Green Lantern vol 2 3, issue 93 (1997).  It's Halloween, it's a Green Lantern story, so we must create a story with a bad guy picking on some innocents, in this case, fellow tenants in the apartments where Kyle is renting:

It's great to see background characters who are gay.  Unfortunately, presenting them in such a scenario as this tends to reinforce the idea that being a lesbian is fraught with difficulties and pain.  In this case, people want to murder you because you're gay.  I prefer stories such as these where sexuality is incidental to the narrative.

This is not say that there isn't room for stories which look at homophobic violence, just that the particualr way it is framed above, is not my favourite way of doing so.