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It's Wednesday, but - in Harrogate at least - it's not New Comic Book Day because due to unavoidable Staff Absence Destination Venus is closed today and on Friday. We will be open Saturday though, and our Elves look forward to seeing you then. "What's on the Rack?" will also be delayed this week.
But it's still Wednesday, which means whatever else is going on it's definitely time for another Waffle.
It's June. Which means it's Pride Month. Normally about now we'd be prepping the comics and graphic novels we wanted to put on our stand at the Harrogate Pride in Diversity event. For the second year running Covid precautions have put an end to that magnificently joyous afternoon (seriously, if you ever find yourself in Harrogate on Pride weekend, be sure to check it out - it's the most fun thing) so we're setting our stall out on here.
Now. I'm not about to pretend that comics doesn't have a problem with Homophobia. While progress is always being made Homophobia and Transphobia, like Racism, Sexism, Ableism and every other "ism" you can think of it continues to plague our medium and our industry. Much like the rest of society, if we're honest. I like to think that those issues are receding, but acknowledge that we need to be alert and deal with issues as they arise.
Pride Month though, is a time for celebration. Not in a "look at us! Aren't we all woke for being supportive!" kind of way - that kind of performative posturing is just that, posturing. It doesn't help anything. No, Pride Month is about celebrating the achievements of the LGBTQIA+ community and highlighting the characters and creators from that community who contribute to the industry and medium that we all enjoy.
So.
We could at this point reel off a list of comics writers, pencillers, inkers, colourists, letterers, editors and other assorted comics professionals who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. We're not going to, because frankly the sexual orientation and gender identity of actual people is their business. If you have a creator whose work you enjoy follow them on social media. If they're LGBTQIA+ and they want folk to know? They'll tell you.
No. We're going to take a look at the characters who represent the LGBTQIA+ community in the pages of the books we read. There are some famous examples, of course and my personal bias always brings me to start with the inimitable Kate Kane - the Batwoman.
As a hardcore Batfan, we admire Kate because she is very like the Batman, but also very unlike Bruce. She has the same single minded focus on the mission, but she is also a much more social being. Beyond the Bat Family and the very few people who can assist in his war on crime, Batman/Bruce has no friends. Kate does.
Kate is a different kind of person. Like Bruce she plays the role of the socialite (She and Bruce are cousins) but Kate actually seems to enjoy it. Her training is a little more orthodox (by which we mean "realistic") too. Bruce toured the world seeking instruction from the greatest masters of the martial and detective arts. Kate joined the Army and trained to be special forces.
According to current cannon she was discharged from the US military under the old and unlamented "don't ask, don't tell" rules. We imagine that at some point DC will need to retcon that a little - "Don't ask, Don't tell" thankfully ended a decade ago and at some point Kate's going to be too old to have been affected by that. For now, it's all too plausible.
In the end I love Kate for the same reason I love pretty much all the women in the Bat Family. Along with Babs "Batgirl" Gordon, Stephanie "Batgirl/Spoiler/Robin" Brown and Cassandra "Batgirl/Orphan" Cain, Carrie "Robin" Kerrie, Kate never asked permission. They saw the mantle of the Bat and saw that they could do some good with it. So they did. The boys - Dick "Robin/Nightwing" Grayson, Jason "Robin/Red Hood" Todd, Tim "Robin/Red Robin" Drake, Duke "The Signal" Thomas, all of them were invited into the club by Bruce. That seems somehow lame by comparison.
So. We start with Kate, in the mainstream. Who else represents?
Well. How about old Con-Job himself, the misanthropic Mage, the sullen Sorcerer, John Constantine? His sexuality hasn't been much of an issue in his comics - he's spent most of his time battling demons and such. The relationship that is perhaps best remembered is with a woman, the artist Kit Ryan, which featured in the comics of the mid-nineties when the power team of Garth Ennis and the late, much missed Steve Dillon were on the book.
But John is Bi, not straight. He tells us himself that he's had "girlfriends, the odd boyfriend" and leaves it at that.
As it should be. What does it matter, in the end? I'd say that "love is love" but in the context of Constantine that would be trite. He doesn't love much except himself after all... And maybe that's important too. Just because John Constantine is part of the LGBTQIA+ community that doesn't automatically make him a nice guy. He isn't.
Staying with DC Comics - who actually have done a half way decent job of representing the rainbow over the years, which is a little surprising given the company's reputation for social conservatism and narrative caution - perhaps the most important and controversial "coming out" of recent years has been that of the Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott. Seriously, you could hear the teeth clenching across the internet - and initially I had some sympathy with the annoyance.
Here after all, was a character that has been part of the DC Comics Universe since his creation in 1940, and has never ever been presented as gay until he comes out to his son in Infinite Frontier #0 in March this year. In the eighty one years between his first appearance and his coming out he's been married twice and had two children. "Why make an established character gay?" some asked. "Representation is fine and all, but create a new character and have them be the gay Green Lantern!" many went on.
And as I say, initially I had some sympathy with that view. But thinking about it, and talking to some other folk about it, I realised that I was wrong about this. Because Alan Scott has been around since the forties. This is a story that absolutely should be told in this way. Because in the nineteen forties there were people - of all genders and none - who lived out the expectations society had of them. It was assumed that people who were assigned male at birth would be attracted to women, and that people who were assigned female at birth would be attracted to men. Anything else was considered "deviant " and "wrong".
So of course there were gay men who, like Alan Scott, lived a hetero life. Married. Had Children. Even loved the women they married, they just weren't sexually attracted to them. I have an acquaintance who came out as a gay woman in her sixties, having lived a happy but slightly unfulfilled life as a wife and mother. When she married, in her twenties, she didn't have the language to express how she thought her attraction to women, or her lack of attraction to men. She just thought that she was a bit weird. She liked her husband. They were great friends. But as the world changed around her she started to realise that her feelings were perfectly valid. When her husband died and her children were grown she thought - I don't have to keep this secret any more, I won't be hurting anyone if I be my true self.
And that's Alan Scott. The point is that he was always gay he just didn't have the vocabulary or the cultural awareness to fully understand or articulate what his true identity was. And if representation is truly important, then the recognition of generations of gay men and women who were never able to acknowledge their true selves matters. So in fact I'm right behind Alan Scott being gay. The same goes for Marvel's Bobby "Iceman" Drake, although Marvel kinda messed that one up.
In the comics Bobby Drake was one of the original X-Men. With the rest of the team young Bobby came forward in time and met his older self. Young Bobby realised that he was gay - something that old Bobby had never come to terms with. It was an interesting piece of character development for a while, but then the "young" X-Men were sent back to their original time and the best they could say to Bobby was "probably pretend you're not gay..."
There was all sorts of "wibbley wobbley, timey wimey" stuff wrapped up in that of course - Bobby Drake as an out gay man in the past would play merry heck with established Marvel continuity - but given the liberties that comics creators have always taken with continuity (the word "retcon" exists for a reason) it seems to me that there must have been a more elegant and less dismissive way to deal with things.
But all of this is focussing on the alleged "mainstream" of anglophone comics - and there is so much more.
Consider Moonstruck - a very cool series from Image Comics that centred on Julie, a gay woman working as a Barista who happens to be a Werewolf and is very embarrassed about it. On a date with her new girlfriend something terrible happens to her Centaur friend Chet, and shenanigans begin...
Moonstruck is a wonderful series. It's cute, it's fun and it's engrossing. The sexuality of the characters is as irrelevant as it should be - it's not a story about sex - and it's great when all ages friendly series like this present LGBTQIA+ characters without comment. Julie's identity issue isn't that she's gay, it's that she's a werewolf - of course we can see the allegory, but a series like this that treats non hetero sexuality as absolutely normal is evidence that comics have moved on from the attitudes of the past.
But lets pause for a second and look back a little.
A very long time ago (1988, to be precise...) 2000 AD got an "adult" spin off. I was sixteen at the time and so thought that "adult" clearly applied to me - score one for the Fleetway Publishing* marketing department, because they totally sold it to me - and launched the comic CRISIS. Initially CRISIS featured just two strips, "Third World War", about a group of young psychological warfare operatives fighting for their corporate overlords against the people of Central America and "The New Statesmen", which is what's relevant here.
Created by 2000 AD stalwarts John Smith and Jim Baikie, the New Statesmen was a "realistic superhero story" set in a dystopian near future where genetic engineering had made super-powers a thing and Britain had become the 51st State of America. Clearly heavily influenced by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (and now I think about it, probably also in influence on Garth Ennis's The Boys) in its premise that if people really got powers they wouldn't use them well, New Statesmen had one particularly remarkable feature: at a time when Britain was in the middle of a homophobic terror about A.I.D.S. they presented some of the characters as Gay and Bisexual in a positive way.
Not only that, but the story postulated that Bisexuality was likely a more evolved form of human sexuality and would most likely become the norm as humans became better than they currently were. This was in 1988 - an example of comics leading the way in social discourse.
We could go on, of course, and next week we will, as we take a look at more contemporary work exploring the LGBTQIA+ experience.
*Who were the publishers of 2000 AD back in the day...
*Who were the publishers of 'Tooth back in the day...