PRINTFighting villains and stereotypes
LGBT comic book characters take on preconceptions
April 24, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Ever wonder about Wonder Woman’s sexual orientation? Sure, she married Steve Trevor and has a daughter. But speculation surfaced in the 1950s when the comic book industry’s arch-villain Dr. Frederic Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocents, outed the Amazonian superhero by calling her “the lesbian counterpart of Batman.”
Just as in real life, coming out in the comic book world isn’t as easy as simply taking off a cape. Take Colossus, a gay Ultimate X-Men character with a thing for the masculine Northstar. “My best friend absolutely hates that they made Colossus gay,” John Doerflinger says from behind the register at Rock Bottom Comics, the comic book store on Walnut Street. “She’s a huge LBGT activist. She’s an awesome feminist. She’s totally that lady, but she can’t stand the Colossus-is-gay thing. She believes that Colossus and Shadowcat belong together in any universe.”
“I, myself, was very amused by (Colossus being gay),” Doerflinger admits. “There are people who absolutely love it, and there are people who quit buying the book when it happened.”
At least the Ultimate X-Man can be honest about who he is. This has not always been the case. In the 1950s, Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocents exposed the “moral corruption” of comic books and insisted that they were harming American children.
“It is very similar to the controversies in our times about rock lyrics or violence on video games and television,” explains MU history professor Jeffrey L. Pasley. “One of the things that Dr. Wertham pointed to was the supposedly gay subtext of Batman and Robin as ... bad for kids. That was radioactive in the comics industry for decades.”
In reaction to the outrage brought on by Wertham’s words, the comic book industry adopted the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The code banned any content that the public was scrutinizing, which included gay characters.
The closet door didn’t reopen until X-Men took on the issue of homosexuality in comics three decades later. Like the namesake star that guided runaway slaves to the north, Canadian mutant Northstar, an Olympic medalist with the power to fly and generate light, was an LGBT trailblazer in the comic book industry. “It is generally said that the first gay character is Northstar,” Pasley explains. “He was outed in the late 1980s.”
Ultimate X-Men wasn’t the only pioneer. Mainstream comic series including Y: The Last Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Runaways and Batwoman began to add same-sex relationships to their story lines. Queer and indie comics such as Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise also incorporate LGBT themes and characters. Although comic books have long been an outlet for social commentary, LGBT mainstream comic book characters remain fairly uncommon and are rarely the main players.
Furthermore, these characters are not always presented on the same level as their straight counterparts.
“It’s almost disturbing how many queer characters in comics are represented as either visibly non-human, or actually non-human, like they’re an alien or robot or something,” Doerflinger comments. “Or, they look freakish or monsterish, which can work as both a really awesome metaphor and really disturbing social commentary.”
Mainstream comics often treat LGBT heroes differently than heterosexual characters. “Either the sexuality is overplayed, and it becomes all that the character is,” Doerflinger explains, “or it becomes drastically underplayed, and you get no stories of real quality that have to do with that aspect of the character.”
Still, certain writers are better at integrating homosexuality than others. “Brian K. Vaughn makes a real point to write comics that represent the world,” explains Liz Miller, a Los Angeles-based Web freelancer and avid comic book reader, “so he includes a lot of characters who are not just gay but have varying sexualities.” Vaughn’s comic book Y: The Last Man is set in an apocalyptic world where only one man exists within a planet full of women. The main character, Yorick, recruits lesbian geneticist Dr. Allison Mann to help.
Another distinction is the treatment of gays versus lesbians. “You’re much more likely to see a relationship between two women in comics than two men,” Doerflinger says. “And, if that relationship is there, you are much more likely to see depth (in the relationship).”
But sexual orientation isn’t everything. After all, readers should judge comic characters not by whom they would prefer to sleep with after the cape comes off but rather their crime-fighting capacity and personality. “My favorite gay character is Renee Montoya, a police detective in the DC universe,” Miller explains. “I don’t think she’s awesome because she’s gay; I think she’s awesome because she solves crimes.
“It’s not like this character is great because she’s gay. Rather it’s, ‘This character is great, and she happens to be gay.’”
