Introduction: Queer about Comics

Abstract

There’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached to queer life. Moreover, the medium has had a long history as a top reading choice among those “queer” subjects variously called sexual deviants, juvenile delinquents, dropouts, the working class, and minorities of all stripes. Despite this, comics studies and queer theory have remained surprisingly alienated from each other. On the one hand, classical comics studies’ tendency to analyze the formal codes of sequential art separately from social questions of sexual identity and embodied difference has often led to a disregard for a nuanced queer and intersectional critique of the comics medium. On the other, the prevailing assumption that mainstream comics (namely, the superhero genre) embody nationalistic, sexist, and homophobic ideologies has led many queer theorists to dismiss comics altogether or else to celebrate a limited sample of politically palatable alternative comics as exemplars of queer visual culture. In this logic, “Queer zines, yes! Superhero comics, no!”This alienation—at times even antagonism—evinces a failure of recognition in the current development of scholarship rather than a true gulf between the foundational questions and concepts of the two fields. The conceptual and historical intersections of queer theory (and sexuality more broadly) and comics culture, in both its visual and narrative production and its fan communities, are rife and rich. At every moment in their cultural history, comic books have been linked to queerness or to broader questions of sexuality and sexual identity in US society. In the 1930s and 1940s Wonder Woman visually celebrated S-M practices and same-sex bonding between women, metaphorized through the image of the chained, shackled, or bound submissive; in the late 1940s and early 1950s crime and horror comics presented what was arguably the most antisocial critique of postwar domestic life outside of noir cinema, spectacularizing forms of violence, gore, and criminality that radically upended the ideals of nuclear-family harmony and the sublimation of desire in material goods; in the late 1950s Mad magazine elicited affective pleasure in the satiric critique of the nuclear family and its blatant refusal of the Cold War security state; in the 1960s and 1970s Marvel Comics revitalized the superhero comic book by infusing its art with the visual politics of gay and women’s liberation while the artists who contributed to the Wimmen’s Comix anthology (1972–92) brought a radical sexual politics to the visual culture of comic books; and from the 1960s to contemporary times, gay, lesbian, and queer culture has taken up comics as sites of sexual pleasure, such as in the graphic sex narratives of Tom of Finland and the cartoonists inspired by him, many of whom testify to beginning their cartooning by tracing and imaginatively redrawing the male figures they encountered in superhero comics. These latter crosscurrents now flow strongly in both directions, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of explicitly LGBTQ characters and scenarios in contemporary comics from the X-Men’s “legacy virus” (a potent metaphor for HIV/AIDS) to the lesbian Batwoman and the gay Green Lantern. Moreover, the ubiquity of the medium—comic books being among the most mass-produced and circulated print media of the twentieth century—alongside its simultaneous stigmatization as the presumed reading material of a small slice of immature youth and social outcasts, models Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1990) now-classic formulation of queerness as both a universalizing and a minoritizing discourse: anyone and everyone can be queer, but actual queers are a minority group in the larger culture; similarly, comics end up in the hands of nearly everybody, but comic book readers are a niche (read: queer, nerd, outcast, weirdo) group.As this broad sketch of comics’ queer attachments suggests, rather than needing to be queered, comics themselves “queer” the archive of US culture. Encounters between queer theories and comics studies potentially offer broader historical assessments of how the literary medium of comics, and its larger aesthetic and production history, might be understood as a distinctly queer mode of cultural production that has functioned as queer history, rather than its serialized supplement. When we understand the history of sexuality and the history of comics as mutually constitutive, rather than merely reflective or coincidental, we can gain insight into the ways that the comic book medium’s visual structures not only lend themselves to questions of sexuality and sexual identity but have also taken shape historically in response to transformations in the history of sexuality.The coeditors’ aim for this special issue has been to elicit sustained theorizations of the pairing of queerness and comics, and explorations of the implications of that pairing for reading American literature as well as for queer theory, queer politics, and comics studies. Among the questions we consider to be fecund for exploring what’s queer about comics—and what aspects of comics represent and give meaning to queerness—are the following: How might a medium made up of the literal intersection of lines, images, and bodies capture the values of intersectional analysis? How do comics’ attention to the visual orientation of images in space model a conception of sexual orientation—especially in relation to race and gender, since all these are coordinates of embodied being not truly “present” on the two-dimensional page but signified and referred to by combinations of text and image? How might the medium’s discontinuous organization of images map onto disability’s discontinuous relationship to heterosexual able-bodied existence? How might the medium’s courting of marginal and outsider audiences allow for the formation of queer counterpublics? How do the comics medium’s formal properties provide material analogies for or creatively materialize and literalize seemingly formless experiences of nonnormative erotic desire, pleasure, and intimacy? These questions only begin to scratch the surface of productive encounters between comics studies and queer studies, but they suggest a synthetic approach to comics that considers the medium’s queerness as opening out into a variety of formal and narrative experiments that have attempted to deal with the problem of being literally and figuratively marginal or “queered” by social and political orders.In the interest of developing some of these links, we would like here to map a few of the primary sites where we see queerness as a social/affective force intersecting productively with comics as a medium. This list functions merely as a starting point for identifying those locations where queerness—understood variously as a social force, a complex network of erotic and affective ties, or an entire shared culture—appears intimately bound up with the formal and narrative capacities of the comics medium.Each of these areas of nexus is rich unto itself and allows scholars working at the intersection of queer theory and comics studies to talk about a range of things—from the cultivation of rarefied fan communities, to the production of queer intimacies between readers and fantasy characters, to formal and representational feats that lend themselves to being articulated to the depiction of nonnormative or queer orientations to the world.Following is an example of how a reading attentive to these vectors of confluence reveals that the most quotidian—or what we could heuristically propose as paradigmatic—encounter with even mainstream superhero comics is replete with queer meanings. Figure 1 shows the cover of the first comic book that coeditor Darieck Scott remembers buying as a child. This cover features Nubia, the iconic superhero Wonder Woman’s black twin sister, who debuted in 1973 (Bates and Heck 1973; the cover artist is Nick Cardy). Nubia was in many ways a failed superhero character. She appeared on this cover and in a part of DC Comics’ bid during the bronze age (c. 1970–84) to broaden its consumer audience, to capitalize on the apparent success of Blaxploitation films, and to signal that the fantasy world of DC Comics, like that of its rival Marvel Comics, was engaged with “real” contemporary developments like racial integration and the emergence of the site of the black ghetto in US cultural discourse. The character Nubia, however, unlike other DC Comics 1970s assays in racial diversity such as now-mainstay character John Stewart, “the black Green Lantern,” gained little traction, disappearing from Wonder Woman after three issues and never becoming a frequently recurring secondary or even tertiary character in DC’s fantasy world. 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