The Wednesday Waffle 3rd June 2026: Taking Pride in Comics

It's the first Wednesday of June, which of course means it's the first Wednesday of Pride Month. Like many businesses at this time of year Desties has put a rainbow on its social media logos and we have some Progress Pride Flag bunting up in the store. We also have many books with LGBTQIA+ characters and themes prominently displayed - we are nothing if not current.

As customers you could be forgiven being cynical about all this. Everyone goes all rainbow in June but how much do all these companies really care about the LGBTQIA+ community? How many actually do anything to support the LGBTQIA+ community, and how many merely play lip service to equality in June and then forget about it for the rest of the year? Do these rainbow logos and trite statements about "Love is Love" really mean anything or is it all just PR?

I have no idea. I don't know about the motives of other businesses. My guess is that most of the little ones wouldn't do anything if they didn't care, but I can't speak for them. I can only speak for our little comic store. And speaking for our little comic store I can tell you that comics are, without question, both gay and queer. I've always known this, ever since I started openly reading comics at school in my early teens. I knew because other kids at school would tell me that comics were gay, and queer, and if I was reading them I must be gay and queer too.

Of course I was a teenager in the eighties, when (at least in my South Yorkshire secondary school) "Gay" and "Queer" were the default insults to be thrown at anything somebody disapproved of or thought was not cool. And yes, I know it seems hard to believe these days but back then comics were most definitely not cool. Neither - and I know you'll find this impossible to believe - was I. I was a very small, very nerdy, slightly camp kid who didn't like sport much and had a big mouth. I fitted the stereotype almost perfectly, now I look back.

I was lucky, however. I was insulated from any homophobic bullying I might have experienced by a couple of important factors. My Dad was a well known and well respected Youth Worker. Most of my would-be bullies knew him and had no desire to attract his displeasure. I also had an older cousin who would never have let anything serious happen to me.

And of course, I'm not gay*. So while I didn't enjoy the homophobic slurs that were thrown in my direction they didn't feel like actual attacks on me. They did make me think a little more deeply about things though. What, I wondered, if I had been gay? The general thrust of the insults was that gay people shouldn't really exist, that they were "less than" - how would I have felt if people had been telling me that I shouldn't exist? How would I feel if the words used to express my identity were also the "go to" insults for anything bad?

Clearly I can't ever really know how such abuse feels to somebody who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I may have had homophobic slurs aimed at me but I am not self centred enough to imagine that I have ever really experienced homophobia. But I've seen enough to gain a little insight and to feel a little empathy.

And that's why I feel so strongly about supporting and promoting comics that give a positive, supportive, realistic representation of LGBYQIA+ issues, and that why Desties will always support Pride - not just in June, but every single day.

"But Regie, why can't we just have comics with good stories? Why do you have to shove all this LGBTQIA+ politics down our throats?"

Well, hypothetical and entirely fictional opposing voice, I'm glad you asked.

First of all let's be very clear. Destination Venus is a comic shop. We deal in stories. If we don't think a story is good we're unlikely to have it in store. We have NEVER, not once, stocked something just to "tick a diversity box". Any comic we have on the rack that has LGBTQIA+ themes, or LGBTQIA+ creators is there because we love it**. So if you pick up anything from our Pride shelf you can be sure that we think it's awesome.

Such stories also do a really important job of educating people through their stories. I'll use myself as an example here. As previously discussed, I'm a cis-gendered, heterosexual gen-x man. As a result I have zero experience of the challenges and joys of being gay, or lesbian, transgender or any other colour of the rainbow. Yes, I have friends who are, and I have learned a lot from them, but it's not their job to educate me.

But comics have made some of that knowledge accessible to me - and others.

Whether the LGBTQIA+ experience is an incidental part of a fictional narrative, as in work like Strangers in Paradise and Fence, or part of non-fictional auto-biographical work like Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer I learned a bunch of stuff that not only aided my understanding of people who are not like me, but also gently showed me where my ignorance was causing me to mess up and potentially cause unintentional upset.

Reading comics like that helped to make me a better friend, and frankly a better person.

But these comics are not just helpful to clueless straights like me. They're also vital to people in the Queer community. Your homophobic uncle might be banging on about how there's "gay stuff" constantly being shoved down his throat because there's a Russell T. Davis series on Channel 4 and two men kissed on Eastenders, there might be Pride flags everywhere you look in June, but the truth is that we still live in a culture that is still incredibly hostile to people who are in any way non-conforming in terms of their gender of sexuality.

Good comics with queer characters do a number of things for the queer community. Representation matters, for a start. When I was a kid the only gay characters we ever saw were literal jokes. Kenneth Williams gurning in Carry On films, Mr Humphires proclaiming that he was free, Larry Grayson camping it up on the Generation Game. Nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but if I'd been a gay teenager in the early eighties that's the only representation of who I could be I would have seen. The queer kids of today have many other characters they can relate to.

It's more than that though. Queer representation in comics - and in wider society - also makes it easier for people who are struggling with their sexuality or gender identity to make sense of who they are. Because there is more representation, people are discovering a vocabulary that can help them describe their feelings and their experience. Not only that, but these days when a person makes the decision to "come out" to family and/or friends there is more of a chance that they will be met with understanding instead of confusion.

That matters because according to Childline nearly half of queer kids fear coming out to their families. Now. In 2026. Against that backdrop the shelf of LGBTQIA+ comics at Desties seems like a teeny, tiny, pathetically insufficient gesture.

But I know it helps, at least a little.

A long time ago when I was new to Desties and we were still in the old shop we had a life-size Batman cutout in the window. We'd stick a flat cap on him for Yorkshire Day, a Santa Hat and Beard for Christmas and for Pride we gave him a Rainbow flag for a cape.

A teenaged girl who was a very occasional customer brought her friend to see it. They didn't come into the shop, but they spent a while chatting by the window. That weekend the friend came into the shop with a slightly uncomfortable person I assumed to be her Dad. They came in, and they bought some Batwoman graphic novels featuring the kick ass lesbian Kate Kane. I got the impression that the discussion they were having was not really about superheroes.

She was a customer for a while before she went to University. It was the Pride Flag that made her feel safe enough to broach the subject with her dad, and the presence of comics with dynamic, heroic LGBTQIA+ characters that gave her a way to actually bring the topic up. Comics did that.

It's not much.

But it's a start.

And it's things like that that make me proud of comics. It's things like that which made me understand the value of Pride. Besides, we're called Destination Venus. We are always heading towards love. We don't care who you love, or who loves you.

We just think that everyone deserves the love they crave.

*Any straight man who talks about gay issues will drop this fact into the conversation somewhere, but in this case I think it's a pertinent point.

**Something, incidentally that is not always true about "mainstream" superhero comics. We have many of those in stock that I loathe because I think either that they are badly written, the art makes my eyes bleed, or both. We keep them in because there is customer demand for them and so we find it difficult to curate them out. And yes, if you come in the shop and ask me I'll happily tell you which ones they are.