Queer and Here at Comic-Con: 25 Years of Gays Comics – NBC Chigo

Contents:

• QUEER AND HERE AT COMIC-CON: 25 YEARS OF GAYS COMICS
• TAG: GAY COMICS
• GAY COMIX HISTORY WH ANDY MANGELS
• 10 IMPORTANT GAY MOMENTS COMIC BOOK HISTORY
• GAY GEEK GUI

QUEER AND HERE AT COMIC-CON: 25 YEARS OF GAYS COMICS

Among the celebratns this weekend at Comic-Con Internatnal San Diego, one of the most noteworthy is Saturday's Gays Comics panel 25th year celebratn. “Out of the Closet and Into the Comics” addrsed Mangels’ personal experienc of g out as a gay man, and workg an dtry he loved, but was one that offered no support or reflectn of his own life.

Viewed agast the current backdrop of gay-marriage bat, hip-hop performers g out of the closet and LGBT characters and shows stakg a claim pop culture, such advanc may seem ls than signifint. Hall, who eded the new gay anthology “No Straight L: 40 Years of Queer Comics” (which also is celebrated wh a panel at Comic-Con), believ that queer ics and the people who create them ma their biggt advanc over the last .

TAG: GAY COMICS

To ensure would be more a celebratn than the regular qutn and answer panel, Mangels reached out to every panelist who has participated Gays Comics over the 25 years and asked them to attend. One issue likley to e up is the worry that the current celebratn by the media of all thgs gay ild lead to queer characters and storyl beg add simply for polil rrectns or to jump on the zegeist. Over the next year, the ic would revis Andy — touchg on the stigma of the disease, the stigma of homosexualy, the medil muny’s nfn over the disease’s unpredictabily, the difficulty of gettg to experimental treatments, and many other topics and issu facg AIDS patients.

Wh the Co havg reversed s posn on gay people, Marvel cid that 1990 was the year they were gog to have someone wh superpowers really actually e out the pag of their ic books! In Dark Horse Prents #40, they began a story set a dystopian future where homosexualy had taken over and heterosexualy was crimalized.

GAY COMIX HISTORY WH ANDY MANGELS

Rick Vech self-published a limed seri lled Brat Pack, a really dark satire of mastream ic books, sort of ak to Watchmen some ways but like… In , the Batman analog Midnight Mk was a flamboyant gay man who sexually ab his sikicks. DC ics spent that year fully embracg the new Co l regardg LGBTQ+ characters by first havg the former supervilla Pied Piper e out as gay the openg pag of The Flash (vol. They kept that trend gog 1992 puttg the reformed villa Lightng Lord a gay relatnship, and implyg that the heroic duo Shrkg Vlet and Lightng Lass were a uple, and Jtice League Quarterly #8 sually mentned that Tasmanian Devil was gay (not the Looney Tun one, I know you were thkg ) by havg him exprs how acceptg the team was.

) pretty mad bee his gay son had died of AIDS and been blamed for , bee of the stigma surroundg both AIDS and gay people. So, Northstar says he knows the hardships gay people face, sce he is gay… that mak Major Mapleleaf even angrier bee Northstar isn’t g his fame to help gay people or act as an AIDS activist. The issue received a ton of acclaim om the LGBTQ+ muny for tacklg the AIDS crisis so well, alg wh HIV stigma and homophobia simultaneoly, and fally gettg Northstar out of the closet.

The issue touch on almost everythg happeng NYC leadg up to the Stonewall Rts — police rptn, mob n gay bars, Andy Warhol, Judy Garland — and leav off right before the police raid begs. In March of 1993, Lynn Johnston’s syndited ic strip “For Better or For Worse” — nng daily newspapers sce 1979 — began a story which long-nng character Lawrence Poirier me out of the closet, beg the first openly gay teenager and first gay person of lor (as his father is Brazilian) a syndited newspaper ic strip. It’s pretty sad, until the end of the arc which is a much more upbeat endg than a lot of gay kids fd wh their fai and iends even now.

10 IMPORTANT GAY MOMENTS COMIC BOOK HISTORY

In other ic strip news, one of the four leadg characters of Doonbury, Mark Slackmeyer, also me out of the closet as a gay man that year. They created a mi-seri lled Sebastian O, the lead which was basilly a gay Jam Bond (and I don’t know about you but I’m dyg for the film adaptns!

) In Enigma #4, the Enigma enty awakened the latent homosexualy of s host Michael Smh — was only an eight-issue seri but was still the lead character for the seri grapplg wh his own sexualy. In Miltone Media — which published and distributed s ic books through DC — superhero Fa was outed by a telepathic supervilla Blood Syndite #8 — makg him the first black gay superhero by a mastream ic book publisher, even though he never really embraced who he was.

GAY GEEK GUI

(This also ma Spectral the first gay character for Malibu Comics but sce they were only gog to be around another year before beg absorbed to Marvel and basilly fotten, that’s kd of cintal. The ia of gay superhero took hold unrground ics, wh Go-Go Boy by Neil Johnston and Leatherboy by Craig Maynard both beg released.

In Marvel’s New Warrrs #48, a time-travelg Jtice would disver that his father — up to this pot pated as a pretty unsympathetic abive father character — was a closeted homosexual. Shadow Cabet revealed two of s female superhero, Donner and Blzen, were together, and Static #16, the ma character’s bt iend Rick Stone me out after survivg a btal gaybashg at the hands of whe supremacists.

That year would also see even more gay superhero — Malibu Comics, recently acquired by Marvel, wrote superhero Turbocharge g out Prime (vol. In DC’s Black Lightng (vol 2) #5, the hero Jefferson Pierce learned that his recently killed -worker Walter Kasko was gay. DC also released Chiaroscuro: The Private Liv of Leonardo Da Vci, a bgraphy of Leonardo Da Vci that left all the juicy gay parts that ually get dropped.