Routledge Companion to Gender

The Routledge Companion
to Gender and Sexuality

in Comic Book Studies
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies is a comprehensive,
global, and interdisciplinary examination of the essential relationship between Gender, Sex-
uality, Comics, and Graphic Novels.
A diverse range of international and interdisciplinary scholars take a closer look at how
gender and sexuality have been essential in the evolution of comics, and how gender and
sexuality in comics demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history. Chapters cover a
wide array of intersectional topics including Queer Underground and Alternative comics,
Feminist Autobiography, re-drawing disability, Latina testimony, and re-evaluating the crit-
ical whiteness and masculinity of superheroes in this first truly global reference text to gender
and sexuality in comics.
Comics have always been an important place for the radical exploration of feminist and
non-binary sexualities and identities, and the growth of non-normative comic book tradi-
tions as a field of inquiry makes this an essential text for upper-level undergraduates, post-
graduates, and researchers studying Comics Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Literary
Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Frederick Luis Aldama is Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State Univer-
sity. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of over 40 books, including the
Eisner Award-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. He is the editor of nine book
series, including Latinographix, a trade-press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and
nonfiction. He is the creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes
in comics (Amazon Prime) and the co-founder and director of SÕL-CON: Brown & Black
Comix Expo. He is the founder and director of the Obama White House award-winning
LASER: Latinx Space for Enrichment & Research as well as the founder and co-director
of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. He holds joint
appointments in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and is faculty affiliate in Film Studies and
the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In 2020, he debuted his first children’s book,
The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie.
“Yet another milestone in Aldama’s overturning of long held misconceptions that the world
of comics and graphic novels lacks space for marginalized voices and diverse perspectives, this
collection is essential reading for anyone studying and, more importantly, making comics.
While taking a comprehensive look back at gender and sexuality in cartooning of the past,
the carefully curated essays suggest a future for comics where previously underrepresented
voices will all have equal opportunity to take center stage.”
— Matt Silady, Eisner-nominated comics creator and Chair of the MFA in
Comics program, California College of the Arts
“A veritable cornucopia of sophisticated, intersectional analysis that digs deep into the his-
tory of the comics industry and the sequential art medium to examine how gender and sex-
uality have shaped our understanding of storytelling, our worldview, and ourselves. This is a
necessary compendium that will continue to push comics forward.”
— Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief
“With its overarching intersectional framework used to investigate a medium uniquely suited
for both personal exploration and collective expression, this volume goes way beyond a cli-
chéd understanding of comics as a playground for pulp anxieties. A remarkably comprehen-
sive tome on an elusive subject!”
— Katie Skelly, award-winning comics creator and author of Maids with
Fantagraphics
The Routledge Companion
to Gender and Sexuality
in Comic Book Studies
Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Frederick Luis Aldama; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Frederick Luis Aldama to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969– editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to gender and sexuality in comic book
studies / edited by Frederick Luis Aldama.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY, 2020. |
Series: Routledge companions to gender |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005271 (print) | LCCN 2020005272 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367209414 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367505295 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429264276 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429554834 (adobe pdf ) |
ISBN 9780429559303 (epub) | ISBN 9780429563775 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. |
Graphic novels—History and criticism. | Gender identity in literature. |
Sex in literature.
Classification: LCC PN6714 .R76 2020 (print) |
LCC PN6714 (ebook) | DDC 741.5/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005271
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005272
ISBN: 978-0-367-20941-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-26427-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
Content note: Some chapters contain discussions of historical and present-
day racist, homophobic and sexist practices and images of sexuality or
violence
. ( Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Contents
List of illustrations xii

List of contributors xviii
Gender and sexuality in comics: the told, untold stories 1

Frederick Luis Aldama
PART I
Interrogating restrictive frames 13
1 Translating masculinity: the significance of the frontier in American

superheroes 15
Patrick L. Hamilton
2 Black boys and black girls in comics: an affective and historical

mapping of intertwined stereotypes 28
Maaheen Ahmed
3 Pocket-sized pornography: representations of sexual violence and

masculinity in Tijuana Bibles 42
Erin Barry
4 The comic strip in advertising: persuasion, gender, sexuality 54

Constance de Silva
5 Real men choose vasectomy: questioning and redefining

Mexican national masculinity in Los supermachos, from Rius
to anonymous authors 66
Annick Pellegrin
6 Marriage, domesticity and superheroes (for better or worse) 78

Jeffrey A. Brown
vii
Contents
7 “Is that a monster between your legs or are ya just happy to see me?”:
sex, subjectivity, and the superbody in the Marvel Swimsuit Special 90
Anna F. Peppard
PART II
Ethnoracial queer and feminist space clearing gestures 107
8 Life out loud in the closet: the grotesque as Latinx imagination in

Cristy C. Road’s Spit and Passion 109
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado
9 Graphic (narrative) presentations of violence against Indigenous

women: responses to the MMIW crisis in North America 119
James J. Donahue
PART III
Back to the future 167
viii
Contents
PART IV
Counterpublics 255
ix
Contents
PART V
Worldly interventions 363
PART VI
Queer and feminist intermedial textures 457
x
Contents
Index 548
xi
Illustrations
xii
Illustrations
13.1 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997 185


15.1 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, cover 213

15.2 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, title page 214
xiii
Illustrations
15.7 Feuchtenberger, cover, On the Issues 5.1 (Winter 1996) 219
15.11 Lilith Adler, Foundation, 1996 222

15.12 Adler, Mitzvah, 1996 223
16.1 Emma Ríos. I.D. ImageComics, 2016 230
19.3 Wonder Woman #98 (1958) 279
20.4 Joe Quinones. Captain Marvel #17 (2013) 294
22.1 Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–19). © HBO 311

22.2 Jessica Jones (Netflix 2015–19). © Netflix 315
xiv
Illustrations
22.5 Spider-Woman #1, 2014. © Marvel. https://imgur.com/gallery/FmE7mJz 321

22.6 Ms Marvel (2014). © Marvel 322
26.1 Alison Bechdel Dykes to Watch Out For (1987) and collected in The Essential
Dykes to Watch Out For (2008), p. 10 366
26.2 Alison Bechdel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007), p. 58 368
27.2a Maciej Jasi ń ski, et al. 1981 Kopalnia Wujek. Zin Zin Press, 2006 380
27.2b Maciej Jasi ń ski, et al. 1981 Kopalnia Wujek. Zin Zin Press, 2006 380
27.3a Beata Sosnowska. “Stworzenie”/“Creation”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata
Sosnowska. Centrala, 2018, n.p. 382
27.3b Beata Sosnowska. “Stworzenie”/“Creation”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata
Sosnowska. Centrala, 2018, n.p. 382
27.4a Aga Gójska: “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska,
Centrala, 2018 384
27.4b Aga Gójska: “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska,
Centrala, 2018 384
27.4c Aga Gójska. “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 385
27.4d Aga Gójska. “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 385
27.5a Anna Krztoń. “Korzenie”/“Roots”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 385
27.5b Anna Krztoń. “Korzenie”/“Roots”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 386
27.6a Olga Wróbel. “Rosół”/“Chicken Broth”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 387
27.6b Olga Wróbel. “Rosół”/“Chicken Broth”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018 387
xv
Illustrations
29.1 Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay Gigante (2015) 403
29.4 Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014) 408

29.5 Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014) 409
29.6 Yaritza Aguilera’s Acid Rain (2018) 410
29.7 Yaritza Aguilera’s Acid Rain (2018) 411
29.8 Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay Gigante (2015) 414
30.1 Rokudenashiko. What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good for Nothing
Artist and Her Pussy. Koyama Press, 2016, p. 112 422
32.1 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973) 443
32.2 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973) 447
32.3 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973), p. 98 450
32.4 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973),
Volume 4, p. 121 451
33.1 Phoebe Gloeckner’s I Live Here (2008) 461
33.2 Phoebe Gloeckner’s I Live Here (2008) 465
xvi
Illustrations
34.4 “Frankenstein.” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics,

2016. Two-page spread. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of
Fantagraphics Books 478
35.1 Dining with Dana, a webcomic (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich) 483
35.5 Dill Comics, a webcomic (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich) 493
36.1 Catherine Meurisse Savoir-vivre (Les Échappés, 2010) 505
36.2 Catherine Meurisse La Légèreté (Dargaud, 2016) 506
36.3 Catherine Meurisse La Légèreté (Dargaud, 2016) 508
36.4 Catherine Meurisse Les Grands espaces (Dargaud, 2018) 510
36.5 Catherine Meurisse Scènes de la vie hormonale (Dargaud, 2016, 2018) 511
36.6 Catherine Meurisse Moderne Olympia (Futuropolis, 2014) 512
36.7 Catherine Meurisse Mes hommes de lettres (Sarbacane, 2012) 513
36.8 Catherine Meurisse Le Pont des Arts (Sarbacane, 2008) 514
xvii
Contributors
Maaheen Ahmed is an associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University

(Belgium) and principal investigator of COMICS, a five-year project on children in Euro-
pean comics funded by the European Research Council. Her first book Openness of Comics:
Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures was published by the University Press of Missis-
sippi in 2016. A second monograph, Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics
was published in 2019. She has edited anthologies and journal issues on diverse themes rang-
ing from comics legitimation, representations of WWI in comics, and comics authorship.
She recently edited Comics Memory: Archives and Styles with Benoît Crucifix (2018).
Jonathan Alexandratos (they/them) teaches developmental English at Queensborough

Community College. They are also an award-winning, internationally produced playwright.
Much of their academic and creative work lives at the intersection of toys, Queerness, and
history. Their work explores how modern Queerness lives in both new pop culture and old
ancestries. Jonathan’s edited collection of academic essays on action figures, Articulating the
Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages, is out now from McFarland. Their plays
have received productions and support from the So-Fi Festival, NY International Fringe Fes-
tival, PEACE Productions, the Queens Council on the Arts, Abingdon Theatre Company,
and others.
Sara Austin received her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2018, and is cur-
rently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Her research,
which focuses on the representation of bodies in literature and culture for children and
young adults, has been published in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Lion and the Uni-
corn, Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, and The Looking Glass: New Perspectives in Children’s
Literature.
Erin Barry is a PhD candidate in the Department of History who is currently working at
Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation in progress considers legal responses to
adult film theaters. She previously earned an MA degree from Washington University in St.
Louis and a BA from Boston College.
Mikel Bermello Isusi is a PhD student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the
Ohio State University. Their research focuses on graphic narratives in Spanish as well as on
queer studies, trauma studies, and comics narratology. Mikel was the President of Spanish
and Portuguese Creative Writing Group for the 2019–20 year.
xviii
Contributors
Bryan Bove is a PhD student and teaching associate at the Department of American Culture
Studies in Bowling Green State University. He received Master of Arts degrees in Interdis-
ciplinary Studies at New York University and in English Literature and Creative Writing
from Southern New Hampshire University, and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with
a minor in Theatre Arts from Linfield College. A member of the Comics Studies Society’s
Graduate Student Caucus, Bryan’s research interests include comics studies, queer theory,
performance studies, popular culture, fandom, and folklore.
Jeffrey A. Brown, PhD, is a professor at the Department of Popular Culture and the School
of Critical and Cultural Studies in Bowling Green State University. Brown is the author
of numerous articles about gender, ethnicity and sexuality in media, as well as five books
including: Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans (2000), The Modern Superhero in
Film and Television (2016), and Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic
Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus (2019).
Sam Cannon was born, raised, and homeschooled in Louisiana. He is currently the Bruce
and Steve Simon Endowed Professor of Language and Literature and Assistant Professor
of Spanish at Louisiana State University Shreveport, where he teaches courses on Latin
American comics, film, and literature. He obtained his PhD in Latin American and Iberian
Literatures and Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on
how Latin American comics depict concepts of political and economic crime and justice. He
currently serves as the Latin American editor for Amatl Comix, a comics publishing imprint
of San Diego State University.
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers

University-Newark. A Henry Rutgers Graduate Fellow and, previously, a Hispanic Scholar-
ship Fund Scholar, her research interests include Latinx culture and literature, comics studies,
and women of color feminist theory. She won first place and people’s choice in the 3 Minute
Thesis 2019 competition at her university. Her dissertation project examines how Latinx
graphic memoirs and comic biographies as counter-narrative reclaim a Latinx subjectivity in
dominant historical narratives of US cultural production. She has presented at the American
Studies, Latinx Studies, and Puerto Rican Studies association national conferences.
Carolyn Cocca is Professor of Politics, Economics, and Law at the State University of New
York, College at Old Westbury. She is the author of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel:
Militarism and Feminism in Comics and Film (2020) and her Superwomen: Gender, Power, and
Representation (2016) won the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award in the Best Academic/
Scholarly Work category. She has written numerous articles and book chapters about gender
and popular culture as well as about gender and law. She is also the author of Jailbait: The Poli-
tics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States and the editor of Adolescent Sexuality. She teaches
US politics, constitutional law, and gender studies.
Zachary Michael Lewis Dean holds a BA in English Literature from the Ohio State Uni-
versity. He is currently an MA-PhD student at Ohio State studying contemporary media. His
chapter “Only a Chilling Elegy: An Examination of White Bodies, Colonialism, Fascism,
Genocide, and Racism in Dragon Ball” appears in the Routledge volume, Comics Studies Here
and Now (2018). He is a cocurator of the Planetary Republic of Comics and a site editor for
the academic comics studies website www.professorlatinx.com.
xix
Contributors
Constance de Silva is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Monash University Australia. Her

primary research field is the language of advertising in the Australian context (1800–1950s),
focusing on health and beauty products. Her other research interests are comics scholarship,
film studies and narratives of socio-economic development in 1800s Australia. She holds
qualifications in English literature, journalism, linguistics and TESOL.
Lisa DeTora is Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Director of STEM
Writing at Hofstra University. Her research focuses on how documentation shapes bodies of
medical knowledge, interests that bridge into her work on embodiment in popular culture.
Recent publications include an essay in Critical Comics Studies (forthcoming). She is also the
editor of Heroes of Film, Comics, and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of
Home (2009), and a co-editor of the Graphic Narrative Research Committee proceedings of
the International Comparative Literature Association meeting held in Vienna.
James J. Donahue is Associate Professor in English & Communication at SUNY Potsdam,

where he holds a secondary appointment in Interdisciplinary Studies as coordinator of the
minor in Native American Studies and founding coordinator of the minor in Disability
Studies. In addition to his numerous articles in American literature, Indigenous literature,
and comics studies, he has authored or co-edited four books, most recently Contemporary
Native Fiction: Toward a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (2019), an in depth study of the necessary
and productive connections between Indigenous studies and Narratology.
Margaret C. Flinn is Associate Professor at the Department of French and Italian and the
Film Studies Program in the Ohio State University. She is the author of The Social Architec-
ture of French Cinema, 1929–39 (2014), and articles on a wide variety of topics in the fields of
French and Francophone film and visual culture. Her recent publications on bandes dessinées
include the articles “Popular Terroir: Bande Dessinée as Pastoral Ecocriticism?” for Studies
in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature; “Photography as Narrative, Aesthetic, and
Document in Documentary Bande Dessinée: Emmanuel and François Lepage’s La Lune est
blanche (2014)” for Inks; and “The ‘Ravaged Body’ as Carrier of Cultural Memory in Farid
Boudjellal’s Petit Polio series” for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature from the University of New
Brunswick, where she was a Canada Graduate Scholar. She is a faculty member in the
Department of English at Douglas College in New Westminster, British Columbia. Her
research interests include Canadian superheroes and representations of Canada in mainstream
American comics.
Karly Marie Grice is an assistant professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

She teaches classes in adolescent literature and English education methods. Her research fo-
cuses on comics and multimodal texts, multicultural youth literature, and critical literacy for
equity and diversity. Her work on narratives of contest in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints
appears in Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, and she
co-curated the comics exhibit “‘Good Grief!’: Children and Comics” at the Billy Ireland
Cartoon Library and Museum with Michelle Ann Abate.
Patrick L. Hamilton is an associate professor of English at Misericordia University in Dal-

las, PA. He specializes in race and ethnicity in post-WWII American literature and popular
xx
Contributors
culture, particularly superhero comics. He is the author of book Of Space & Mind: Cognitive
Mappings of Contemporary Chicano/a Fiction (2011). With Dr. Allan Austin of the History &
Government Department at MU, he has co-written All New, All Different: A History of Race
and the American Superhero (2019).
Susan Kerns is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College
Chicago. She has published pieces on Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake in the Journal of Graphic Nov-
els and Comics and on conjoined twins in Nip/Tuck: Television that Gets Under Your Skin and
Comunicazioni Sociali. She is Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Chicago Feminist Film
Festival, discussed in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism. She also produced
the documentary Manlife (2017) and wrote the screenplay for Little Red (2012) in addition
to producing or directing numerous short films. She holds a PhD from the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Kalina Kupczynska, PhD, is a research assistant at the German Institute of the University
of Lodz as well as Fellow of Alexander-von-Humboldt-Foundation, Franz-Werfel-Grant,
and of DAAD. She has published on the German and Austrian avant-garde, on contempo-
rary German-language literature, on comics and graphic novels, especially on adaptations of
literary texts, on gender aspect in comics, on comic autobiographies, and on Polish comics.
She is the coeditor of Comic in Polen, Polen im Comic (2016), Autobiografie intermedial. Falls-
tudien zur Literatur und zum Comic (2019) as well as special issue of Text+Kritik “Poetik des
Gegenwartsromans.”
Shiamin Kwa is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative
Literature at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She is author of Regarding
Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-first Century (2020).
Sam Langsdale is a senior lecturer in Philosophy & Religion at the University of North
Texas. Her research and teaching interests include feminist philosophy, visual cultural stud-
ies, contemporary critical theory, and pop culture studies. Her work explores the politics
around representation of gender, race, and sexuality in visual culture. Her recent publications
include an article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, as well as chapters in the
edited volumes Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives (2018)
and Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (2020). She is also the co-editor of the vol-
ume Monstrous Women in Comics (2020), published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Rachel R. Miller is a Presidential Fellow and PhD Candidate at The Ohio State University,
where she formerly served as the Assistant Editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies So-
ciety. Her writing on comics and pop culture has been published in Public Books, Bitch Planet,
Pretty Deadly, American Book Review, etc. She recently co-curated the exhibit Ladies First: A
Century of Women’s Innovations in Comics and Cartoon Art for the Billy Ireland Cartoon
Library and Museum, which documents one hundred years of women’s work in comics and
cartoon art. You can find her online at rachelrmiller.com.
Jennifer Nagtegaal is a PhD student in Hispanic Studies at the University of British

Columbia. Her research focuses on contemporary Hispanic visual culture, specifically within
animated documentaries, comics, and graphic novels. Forthcoming publications include a
study of animation and affirmative aging in Ignacio Ferreras’ Arrugas / Wrinkles for the Revista
xxi
Contributors
Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and a contributing chapter to Comics and Catharsis: Exploring
Narratives of Trauma and Memory in the Graphic Novel, which outlines a cathartic function of
Historical Memory in Manuel H. Martín’s Graphic Novel Documentary 30 años de oscuri-
dad / 30 Years of Darkness. Jennifer recently completed a manuscript titled “The Politics of
(Re)Animating History: Animated Documentary in Hispanic Cinema, Television and the
Digital Public Sphere”.
Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Transformative
Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research focuses on enter-
tainment media and their histories; visual effects technologies; and the superhero, horror, and
science fiction genres. She has published numerous articles in journals and anthologies, and
some of her book publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment
(2004), Science Fiction Experiences (2010), The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (2012),
and the edited books The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2009) and Super/Heroes: from
Hercules to Superman (co-editor, 2006). She is currently writing the book: Batman: Myth and
Superhero, which will be published by Rutgers University Press.
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is Assistant Professor in German Studies in the Department of

Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia
in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from the Department of Germanic Languages and
Literatures at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017. Her research focuses on
the representation of history in comics and graphic novels, comics and media on forced
migration, and comics as a feminist methodology. In addition to founding the University of
Michigan’s first comics studies working group, the Transnational Comics Studies Workshop,
Biz is also the Treasurer for the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Fo-
rum and President of the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society’s Graduate Student
Caucus. Her recent publications include articles in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics,
ImageText, World Literature Today, and International Journal of Comic Art, and chapters in the
edited volume Class, Please Open Your Comics (2015), Comics of the New Europe: Intersections
and Reflections (2020) with the forthcoming Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook. Biz
is also currently co-editing a special issue of the German Studies journal Seminar on German
comics and social justice.
Annick Pellegrin is a graduate of The University of Sydney and a lecturer in the Depart-
ment of French Studies at the University of Mauritius. Her PhD thesis is a comparative study
of representations of Latin America in Franco-Belgian, Mexican, and Argentinean comics.
She is a columns and articles editor for the Comics Forum and sits on the editorial board
of Studies in Comics. She has presented at conferences in England, Puerto Rico, Argentina,
Mexico, Japan, Australia, Spain, Belgium, France, Canada, and Mauritius, and has pub-
lished in French, English, and Spanish, most recently in The Canadian Alternative (edited by
Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman) and in the journal Refractory. She is also the co-editor
(with María Celina Bortolotto, Massey University) of a forthcoming issue of Journal of Iberian
and Latin American Research dedicated to the Argentinian author Roberto Fontanarrosa.
Anna F. Peppard is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-
doctoral fellow at Brock University. She has published widely on representations of gender,
sexuality, and race within a variety of popular media genres and forms. Her research can be
found in Canadian Review of American Studies, International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of the
xxii
Contributors
Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Fashion Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Graphic Novels
and Comics, Studies in Comics, and the anthologies Make Ours Marvel and #WWE: Professional
Wrestling in the Digital Age. She is the editor of the anthology Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and
the Superhero (2020) and co-hosts the monthly comic book podcast Three Panel Contrast.
Lorna Piatti-Farnell is Professor of Popular Culture at Auckland University of Technol-

ogy, where she is also the Director of the Popular Culture Research Centre. Her research
lies at the intersection of popular media and cultural history, with a focus on gender, food,
popular iconography, and Gothic horror studies. She has published widely in these areas,
including The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (2014), Consuming Gothic: Food and
Horror in Film (2017), Fan Phenomena: The Lord of the Rings (editor, 2015), and Gothic Afterlives:
Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media (editor, 2019).
C(h)ris Reyns-Chikuma is a professor at University of Alberta, Canada. He studies and

teaches French and francophone as well as American, Canadian, and Japanese Cultural Stud-
ies. In the last ten years, his research has focused on comics (American comics, Franco-Belgian
BD, and Japanese manga). His analyses are based on cultural studies, history, and sociology
(especially Bourdieusian). He has published on Ms Marvel-Kamala Khan, manga adapted to
anime, and on the publisher Glénat.
Rebecca Scherr is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Literature, Area

Studies and European Languages in the University of Oslo. She has published a number of
essays on human rights and the graphic novel, and has also written about the links between
graphic practice and identity formation. She is currently working on a manuscript about
graphic narrative and the built environment.
Radmila (Lale) Stefkova is a PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches and researches on contemporary graphic nar-
rative, fiction, and photography from the Hispanic world. Her research focuses on literature
and visual arts as media for historical memory and social justice. Lale’s previous and forth-
coming publications focus on contemporary Mexican fiction, Central American immigra-
tion, and graphic narrative. She is a regular contributor to Latin American Literature Today, and
an active member of the inter-campus research program UC-Mexicanistas, and a co-director
of a graduate initiative for comics research at UCSB.
Lindsey Stirek is a PhD candidate specializing in Japanese literature at the Ohio State
University. While studying premodern Japanese works, she became interested in how peo-
ple engage with classical literature in contemporary times. This led her to pursue manga/
comics studies and examine how manga have contributed to the perception of classical lit-
erature. She believes manga can influence how we view the world, and plans to continue
examining how manga can change society. As part of her commitment to changing society
through manga, she has developed a course on manga which she teaches at the University of
Cincinnati and is developing another course on anime that she is planning on teaching at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Katlin Marisol Sweeney is a PhD candidate at the Department of English in the Ohio
State University. She researches fictional narratives of Latinx women’s pain and suffering
in media. She is the Co-Executive Coordinator of LASER at OSU and co-organizer of
xxiii
Contributors
LASER’s signature events: SÕL-CON: Brown and Black Comix Expo and Latinx Role
Models Day. She also served as the editor of the 2018 “States of La Frontera” issue of SDSU
Press’ pacificREVIEW.
George Thomas received his BA from the Ohio State University. His work has previously
appeared in ¿Que Pasa Ohio State? and Mosaic Magazine.
Maite Urcaregui is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where
she is also completing graduate emphases in both Black Studies and Feminist Studies. Maite
studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and comics through an in-
terdisciplinary framework that draws from theories of gender, race, sexuality, and perfor-
mance. In her research, she uses a queer formalist approach to investigate how American
authors strategically employ visual elements in their work to navigate and critique the visual
politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Her publications include “Intersectional Feminism in
Bitch Planet: Moving Comics, Fandom, and Activism Beyond the Page” in Gender and the
Superhero Narrative (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, and Professor of American Studies
and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching fields
include the institutional history, theories, and methods of American and cultural studies,
nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural history, comparative ethnic studies,
Black cultural studies, the digital humanities, popular culture, and the visual arts. Whaley’s
recent book is Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015); it
explores graphic novel production and comic book fandom, looking in particular at African,
African American, and multiethnic women as deployed in television, film, animation, gam-
ing, and print representations of comic book and graphic novel characters. Her book in
progress is an examination of dissociative identities (formerly known as multiple personality
disorder) as a narrative trope in popular literature, film, television, and memoir, with a par-
ticular focus on Latinx, White, Asian/American, and Black women.
Daniel F. Yezbick is Professor of English and Communications at STLCC-Wildwood,

where he also serves as Intercultural Education Coordinator and Lead English Faculty. He
has lectured and published widely on film, theater, comic art, and material culture. His
survey of the work of American children’s cartoonist, George Carlson, Perfect Nonsense, was
published by Fantagraphics Press in 2015, and his comics scholarship has appeared in Comics
Through Time (2014), The Blacker The Ink (2015), Comics Studies: Here and Now (2018), The
Oxford Handbook of Comics Studies (2019), and Monstrous Women in Comics (2020), as well as
journals like ImageText and The International Journal of Comic Art. He is a regular contributor
to Fantagraphics’ continuing Carl Barks Library series. Daniel loves good comics, bad dogs,
great baseball, most jazz, and many single malt scotches. He lives happily in South City
St. Louis with his wife, Rosalie, their two kooky offspring, and a pair of maniac rescue mutts.
xxiv
Gender and sexuality in comics
The told, untold stories
Until relatively recently, comic book creators have been dominated not only by straight male
creators but also by creators who chose not to create storyworlds that upset heteronormative
conventions. They chose to create storyworlds that erased the complex presence of women,
gay, lesbian, and transgender peoples who make up the world, and to do so in ways that upheld
a patriarchal, straight male status quo. Indeed, even when those creators arrived who chose
to push the envelope of comic book narrative convention, they often made vital and new one
aspect of identity by either neglecting or denigrating women and non-binary sexual peoples.
This isn’t to say that comic book narratives have not been an important place for the
radical exploration of feminist and non-binary sexualities and identities. For instance, in the
USA during the time of the male-centric underground comix revolution, women artists,
authors, and editors appeared on the scene to create and publish stories that affirmed the fe-
male and queer self in ways that promoted greater gender and queer equality. After Robbins
moved to San Francisco to join the underground comix scene, she discovered not only that
publishing venues for comix excluding women, but that “many of her male contemporaries
were ‘uncensoring’ themselves by exploring misogynist and racist fantasies in their comics”
(125), as Jared Gardner states. Robbins and other women creators, in the words of Gardner,
“began to question the value of a personal liberation through comics that seemed to come at
the expense of the bodies of the disenfranchised” (125).
The result: a flurry of creation by women authors. Two years after the publication of the
first all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe (1970), Sharon Rudahl, Terry Richards, Lee
Marrs, Pat Moodian, Aline Kominsky, and Trina Robbins published the first ongoing comic
drawn exclusively by women, Wimmen’s Comix (1972–1992). Later, the group would splinter,
with Kominsky and Diane Noomin creating the one-shot Twisted Sisters (1976) that featured
on its cover Kominsky’s autobiographical character The Bunch sitting defecating on a toilet.
Many other feminist-oriented comic books appeared during this period, including Joyce
Farmer and Lyn Chevely’s Tits & Clits (1972–1987) that also affirmed women’s sexuality;
notably, as a result of a pornography investigation and local district ruling in Orange County,
in 1973 they had to change the name to Pandora’s Box. The comic launched the careers of a
next generation of feminist comix authors such as Dori Seda who became especially known
for Lonely Nights Comics (1986).
1
These women creators chose to eschew those self-centered and macho-driven stories seen
in the work of Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay
Wilson, to name a few. They also chose to create an aesthetic that stood in sharp contrast. For
instance, Robbins’s chooses a slick brush line to create Panthea (1976)—a line style that was
uncommon in the male underground comix scene. Indeed, in Graphic Women Hilary Chute
identifies how such women creators during this period such as Robbins and Lynda Barry
(along with others that followed) used the visual shaping devices to inscribe themselves on
the page as “legible, visual drawn” bodies that embodied at once the individual as well as the
collective experience (3). They did so to “put contingent selves and histories into form” (3).
For instance, Chute identifies Aline Kominksy choice to use handwriting in her work as
more than just a means of conveying information. It was her way of powerfully inscribing
her self as a women in time and place; it affirmed the female self without disclosing the self;
it suggested a certain intimacy and yet prevented full disclosure, “resignifying and reversing
the negative connotations of female ‘inconsistency’” (55). In the hands of a woman creator
like Kominsky, a shaping device like the handwritten lettering could serve, according to
Chute, as a tool to carve “out space for the representation of complex lived realities” (55).
During the late 1960s through the mid-1970s some underground comix did feature
queer characters—they usually appeared as denigrating caricatures. See, for instance, S. Clay
Wilson’s hyperbolic, baroque, anything goes, “Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters
Stomp the Fags” (1967), where Ruby and her diesel dykes beat up “fags”; we see a similar
objectification in his portrayal of gay and lesbian pirates in comics such as “Captain Pissgums
and His Pervert Pirates” (1968). The band of pirates come from “every crud-crusted corner of
the globe […] some were sadists…some were masochists. Some just licked stinky ol’ boots…
and the captain settled for having his crew whiz into his mouth while others looked on de-
lighted” (Rosenkranz 96). While S. Clay’s style and content excited and inspired Crumb—
he remarks on how he’d never before seen this level of “mayhem, violence, dismemberment,
naked women, loose body parts, huge obscene sex organs” (176)—undoubtedly Clay (along
with his straight male underground cohort) reduced women and LGBT characters to mind-
less (sex) objects aimed to shock and grab attention of straight readers.
It is important to keep in mind that in the USA from 1954 through 1989 the Comics Code
Authority (CCA) had censored any suggestion of queer sexuality in comics. Indeed, many of
the comics that inspired the likes of S. Clay and others of the underground scene were pub-
lished by EC Comics (best known for Mad magazine). Before the Comics Code came into
play, EC published some of the most brutal and gritty no-holds-barred comics in the genres
of crime and horror fiction. In his 1954 published Seduction of the Innocent, Frederic Werthem
declared that Wonder Woman had lesbian inclinations and that Batman and Robin were gay
and so a censorship apparatus needed to be put into place to protect the minds of the inno-
cent. In response to those years of censorship that followed, the underground comix arose
to bust the shackles of expression, but at the expense of women and LGBT representation.
In response to the straight underground scene and its deplorable depictions of women
and LGBT characters, there was the incipient rise of a queer comic book scene. Several
gay and lesbian creators created comics that explored queer sexuality with greater sophistica-
tion and complexity. For instance, there was Mary Wings who published her one-shot lesbian
comic, Come Out Comix (1972) followed by Dyke Shorts (1976). And, there appeared Roberta
Gregory who published the first lesbian underground serial comic, Dynamite Damsels (1976).
In the 1980s, appeared several venues for publshing gay, lesbian, and transsexual artists, such
as with Gay Comix (1980) and Meatmen Comics (1986). And, the pioneering g.b. jones arrives
on the scene with her punk lesbian aesthetic. After the publication of her queerzine J.D. in
2
1985, she went on to trouble more radically what she considered too restrictive feminist and
GLBT notions of sexuality and agency with Double Bill (1991). In 1995, Howard Cruse pub-
lished his magnum opus, Stuck Rubber Baby, that follows him on an autobiographical journey
growing up gay in the South during the Civil Rights movement.
***
Inspired by what was going on in the USA with the comix scene, those like the early 1970s,
Nikita Mandryka and others started the magazine, L’Écho des Savanes (May 1972), that em-
braced the body in all its glory. In the mid-1980s in France, for instance, several women
creators such as Florence Cestac, Nicole Claveloux, Jeanne Puchol, and Chantal Montellier
began publishing feminist bandes dessinées. For instance, Montellier published Odilie et les
crocodiles (1984) that features a female protagonist driven by revenge after being denied justice
as a victim of rape. In January 1985, many of these women creators published a manifesto
published in Le Monde that condemned the male chauvinist, macho fantasies that had typified
bandes dessinées. Their feminist affirming comics helped usher in a new era of French comics
known as la nouvelle bande dessinée that appealed to readers who had historically been other-
wise sidelined or denigrated in comics.
With the founding of the independent comic book publisher L’Association in 1990, these
efforts in France became solidified. Arguably, one of the best known of these comics to
be published by the artist-crated cooperative publishing house known as L’Association was
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–2003).The comic book format offers Satrapi a venue not
only to critique repressive Islamic state but also to reconstruct the self of a girl then woman
coming of age within the socio-political trauma of the Islamic Revolution and capitalist im-
perialism. Satrapi used the visual/verbal format of comics, as Chute remarks, “to destabilize
the coherence of the subject over time through the presence of visible adult narrators on the
page that depict that same narrator in the past; and self-reflexively call attention of their re-
spective texts, presenting temporal layers of experience while refusing to reify ‘experience’
as the foundational precept of feminist critique” (6). Notably, Medhi Kalhor (former media
and cultural advisor to former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran) banned both the
comic and film Persepolis.
***
In Latin America, we have women comic book creators also troubling the representational
map. In the early 1980s, Patricia Breccia (the daughter of one of Argentina’s most famous
comic book authors Alberto Breccia) publishes her feminist strip, Sol de noche, in Hum®.
Here and elsewhere Breccia portrays in gritty, harsh detail the difficulties that indepen-
dent, strong-willed female characters face in Buenos Aires suffocating with military tyranny
(1976–1983) and a macho hegemony. During this same period, there appears Argentina’s
Maitena Burundarena (she worked for the magazine, Hum®) who also creates women char-
acters who struggle for self-determination and self-realization in a patriarchal world. After
publishing her first successful comic, Flo, in Tiempo Argentino, she went on to create historietas
eróticas such as El langa, Coramina, and Historias por metro. Indeed, the twenty-first century
is proving to be a watershed moment for Latin American comics history. More and more
comics explore complex and affirming non-binary spectrums of gender and sexual identifica-
tion, troubling the very concept of gender. With the arrival on the scene of women creators
like Power Paola, Maitena Burundarena, and Nacha Vollenweider, among others, we were
3
seeing comics actively troubling, inverting, resisting, and completely reconstituting gender.
Argentinian Maitena Burundarena’s daily satirical strip, Superadas (1998–2003), gives pow-
erful expression to socio-political equality for women. (See Janis Breckenridge’s “Tracing
(Argentine) Feminism Across Time, or How Maitena Plays with La Histori (et)a.”) In comics
like Notas al pie (2017), Argentine creator, Nacha Vollenweider, deploys an intergenerational
feminist narrative as the lens to powerfully revisit the trauma of Argentina’s Dirty War. As
Radmila (Lale) Stef kova discusses herein of Notas al pie, this is a way for Vollenweider to
ensure that the family’s story doesn’t disappear into “oblivion while remaining conscious
of the weight these memories impose to their own identities and family structure” (“My
Grandmother Collects Memories”). And, in the work of another Argentinian comic cre-
ator, Salvador Sanz, we see the move to trouble gender binaries. In Salvador Sanz’s comic,
Angela della Morte (2012), as the eponymous protagonist easily swaps bodies, they ask readers
to question male vs. female biological and social essentialist identity categories as limiting
constructs that constrain and trap experience and subjectivity. (See also Mauricio Espinoza’s
“Drawing up a ‘post’-Latin America.”) Indeed, we’re seeing many twenty-first-century,
Latin American comics that seek to destabilize gender and sexuality binaries. We see this in
Chilean creators María José Barros and Bárbara Pérez Márquez’s speculative adventure, queer
inclusive and affirming webcomic, The Order of Belfry; Vicente Casanova’s queer webcomic
Noisome (2017–); Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014); Yaritza Aguilera’s queer quotidian
love story with Acid Rain (2018); and Gabriel Ebensperger’s coming-out Gay Gigante (2015).
***
The manga scene in Japan also experienced a transformation. Against the kind of stereotyp-
ical representations of women in seinen komikku (adult comics)—girls and woman with large
round eyes, elongated eye lashes, long noses, thin lips, large breasts, small waistlines—that
reinforced male superiority (sometimes in violent ways), we had the arrival of women man-
gaka that created shôjo manga that focused stories on female relationships as wells as gender
bending moments. For instance, in Riyoko Ikeda’s Oniisama E (Dear Brothers, 1975), she
foregrounds real life issues such as drug addiction and suicide as well as same-sex longings.
And, there arrives on the publishing scene the yaoi manga—those identified as boy-boy
stories for adult readers. In these boy-boy romance comics, we see young men/teens ex-
periencing the kind of emotional insecurities normally only fixed to girl/women in more
traditional manga. As J.D. Ho writes of boys’ love manga, they present “gender fluidity” that
readers “can identify with those who are different from us, experience new things, and, most
importantly, achieve things that were impossible before” (512). Notably, however, while in
many ways the shôjo and yaoi manga traditions were ahead of the game with its troubling
issues of gender and sexuality, it is not until the twenty-first century that we see creators
such as Gengoroh Tagame (G-men) and the new work of Susumu Hirosegawa explicitly
bring gay themes and issues into the manga scene with the arrival of bara manga into the
seinen komikku marketplace. Haruhi Fujioka’s Ouran High School Host Club (2002–2010) and
Gengoroh Tagame’s Eisner-winning My Brother’s Husband demonstrate just how accepted,
even mainstreamed genderqueer themes can be in manga.
While the male generator of underground comix was not exactly progressive in the areas
of feminist and queer (and race) representations, it marked a time in the parts of the world
where otherwise marginalized women and queer comic book creators could come along and
do something different. And, just as women in Europe were using the comic book format
to shake up heteronormative representations, so too were gay creators such as the British
4
Oliver Frey (aka Zack) with his Bike Boy (1981), and Spain’s Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s
Manuel (La Luna de Madrid in 1983–1984 and re-published in book format in 2005). L’As-
sociation published not only comics with a feminist and postcolonial orientation, but also a
queer content such as Fabrice Neaud’s Journal (1996 and 2002). He uses thin, clean lines and
the incorporation of photos in the creation of day-to-day life filled with fear for gay man
living in Angoulême.
Today, we see all variety of kinds of gender and LGBTQIA+ progressive comics, from
the independents to those for young adult readers to innovative webcomics—and across all
the genres. I think readily of Los Bros Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Alison Bechdel (Fun
Home), Ivan Velez Jr. (Tales of the Closet), June Kim (12 Days), Lynda Barry (One Hundred!
Demons!), Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing Is Monsters), Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele
(Queer: A Graphic History), Nicole J. Georges (Calling Dr. Laura), and Justin Hall (No Straight
Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics). For young readers that feature same-sex attraction and
identity, I think readily of Tillie Walden (Spinning), Maggie Thrash (Honor Girl: A Graphic
Memoir), Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (Skim), Katie O’Neill (Princess Princess Ever
After), and the Lumberjanes series. I think readily of extraordinary webcomics by the likes
of Canadian Aminder Dhaliwal with Woman World (2018). And, there’s a great blossoming
of gender and queer positive characters in superhero comics such as Northstar, Bunker,
Scarlet Witch, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Gwenpool. Indeed, in 2014 Ms. Marvel was a
bestselling digital title and Thor: The Goddess of Thunder proved to be more popular than
the male-Thor comics.
In the twentieth century, we’ve seen queer and feminist alternative comics flourish in
other countries. I think of Julie Maroh’s Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude (France, 2010), Kiriko
Nananan’s Blue ( Japan, 1997), Diane Obomsawin’s On Loving Women (Canada, 2014), and
Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim (Canada, 2008). However, it’s important to keep in
mind that comic book creators, in these and other regions of the world, work under different
sociohistorical and political circumstances. For instance, because of the histories of draconian
cultural censorship in other countries, feminist or queer themed comics appear at different
moments. For instance, it is not until the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 that we see the
publication of queer comics in Spain. In Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s Manuel (published in La
Luna de Madrid from 1983 to 1985), he uses intertextual references (Dalí’s melting figures
and Velázquez’s Las Meninas), unusual perspectives, out-of-place motifs, distortion of scale,
and the juxtaposition of disparate spaces to visually queer the urban space as we follow the
unnamed gay protagonist journey through Madrid.
And, we don’t see a feminist comic tradition in places like the Middle East and India until
very recently. It is only in a post-Mubarak Egypt that venues such as the satiric magazine, Tok
Tok (2011), appear to give voice to those at the social margins: women, children, and those of
non-dominant races and classes. And it is only relatively recently that we have the creation of a
feminist protagonist in comics when Deena Mohamed created the webcomic Qahera in 2013.
Here independent, courageous, hijabi-wearing superheroine, Qahera, defends female victims
of male violence, challenges preconceived notions of Muslim women in the Middle East, and
celebrates the right to education and self-expression of Muslim women. Qahera has attracted
Arab and Muslim female readers all over the world. And, in India it is also relatively recently
that we see the creation of a feminist protagonist when the male creator, Ram Devineni, pub-
lished the webcomic Priya Shakti (2014). The eponymous female protagonist is a rape survivor
who, along with the Goddess Parvati, defends women against sexual predators.
***
5
Feminist and queer approaches to comics studies are growing rapidly. Today we see such
scholarship build on and grow foundational works such as Alice Shepphard’s Cartooning for
Suffrage (1994), Trina Robbins’s From Girls to Grrlz (1999), and Lillian S. Robinson’s Wonder
Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (Routledge, 2004). We see the recent wave of scholarship
on gender in comics as seen in Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary
Comics (2010), Jennifer S. Prough’s Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural
Production of Sh ōjo Manga (2011), Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence (2016),
the scholarship in Maja Bajac-Carter et al.’s edited, Heroines of Comic Books and Literature
(2016), and Tahneer Oksman’s “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish
American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016).
We’ve also seen important special issues of academic journals dedicated to excavating
both gender and sexuality in comics. I think readily of Jeffrey A. Brown and Melissa Louck’s
special issue of ImageText (2014), A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading and Em-
bodying through Comics as well as the recent special issue of American Literature (2018) edited
by Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck Scott, Queer about Comics. In this latter special issue, we see
for the first time the systematic gathering together of original scholarship that analyzes the
important presence of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities and experiences as reconstructed in word-
drawn storyworlds. And, in The New Mutants (2016), Ramzi Fawaz creates an analytical
scaffold built from queer theory, woman of color feminism, media studies, psychoanalysis,
and political economy to dig into mainstream comics like Superman, Justice League of America,
The Fantastic Four, and especially the X-Men. Fawaz seeks to enrich understanding of how
mainstream comics perpetuate stereotypes of non-normative subjects as Other as well as
how queer readers and readers of color along with women’s and gay liberation movements
transformed comics storyworld building, or what he calls a “comic book cosmopolitics” (15).
We can add to this the significant scholarship of scholars such as Michelle Ann Abate, Karly
Marie Grice, Christine N. Stamper, Jude Roberts, Carol Tiley, Caitlin McGurk, Margaret
Galvan, Kate McCullough, Jennifer Camper, Laura M. Jiménez, Poushali Bhadury, André
Carrington, Alice Shepphard, and Lillian S. Robinson, among others.
Scholars such as Laura M. Jiménez, Sheena C. Howard, Poushali Bhadury, and Rebecca
Wanzo, among others, excavate and explore race and intersectional identities in comics.
With the publication in 2016 of Black Women in Sequence: Reinking Comics, Graphic Novels,
and Anime, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley presents the first scholarly study that center-stages
African American women represented in and creators of comics (print, pixelated, televisual,
and filmic). Whaley takes us on a journey that includes Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman in the 1960s
Batman TV series, to the first African American comic book superhero, Butterfly, and the
more contemporary Monica Rambeau to reveal how “women of African descent are se-
miotic referents for social relations and discourses about national and international politics,
gender, race, and sexualities” (8). With “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses”? Women
and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016), Tahneer Oksman studies
the complex ways that Jewish women creators such as Aline Kominsky Crumb, Miriam
Libicki, and Leanne Finck among many others use the graphic memoir form to express and
self-referentially perform race, ethnic, and gendered identity experiences. In The Hernandez
Brothers (2017), Enrique García analyzes Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s comics as ushering
in a new era (post-Chicano Movement) of self-representation that make natural all variety
of ways Latinxs exist: politicized and non-politicized, bilingual and monolingual, dark and
light skinned, and across all geographies of the Americas. There are other scholarly excava-
tions that seek to complicate erstwhile straight, white, and male superhero comics histories.
In Superwomen (2016), Carolyn Cocca identifies how significant female superheroes have
6
been in the shaping of mainstream superhero comics. And, in my book Latinx Superheroes in
Mainstream Comics (2017) and like-titled film (2018), I build on and complicate work done in
Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009). With a focus on excavating the presence of Latinx super-
heroes in mainstream comics (including print, filmic, and televisual means), I attend to how
geometrizing devices—for instance, mise-en-page and layout in comics; editing, casting,
and lensing in films; and voice acting in animation—can distill and reconstruct Latinidad in
simplistic or complex ways. They can also erase entirely Latinx origin texts and characters,
such as with Christopher Nolan’s whitewashing of the Latinx Bane by casting Tom Hardy to
play the role in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
This is but a brief sampling of the rich array of scholarship that seeks to dig into non-
normative archives to trace and analyze non-normative (able-bodied, white, male) comic
book traditions. Moreover, the texts enrich our understanding of how using the visual (dom-
inant) and verbal techniques gives shape to protagonists of color and their experiences in
vitally complex ways. One way or another today’s “diversity” comics scholarship seeks to
clear a space for creating new possibilities of representing and embracing non-normative sub-
jectivities and experiences—and to set the record straight (and with it the mainstream imag-
inary) concerning problematic stereotypes and attitudes toward women, people of color,
LGBTQIA+ peoples, and those differently abled, among others.
***
The chapters in the first part, “Interrogating Restrictive Frames,” focus on excavating an oth-
erwise hetero-masculine comics landscape: independent and mainstream. I open Part I “Re-
strictive Forms” with Patrick L. Hamilton’s chapter, “Translating masculinity,” that explores
how Anglo, male US frontier mythologies as per Frederick Jackson Turner weave their way
into superhero comics. Hamiltion is particularly interested in uncovering how this masculine
ideology translates into the modern, urban, and technologically advanced space of superhero
comics. The urban freely moving, masculine superhero not only reproduces Turner’s frontier
ideology, but perpetuates hegemonic forms of masculinity. In “Black boys and Black girls in
Comics,” Maaheen Ahmed examines the representation of racist stereotypes of black children
in comics, animation, and literature, especially from the late nineteenth century. Moreover,
Ahmed analyzes how racist stereotypes transcend gender, congealing in and through the
bodies of both black boys and black girls. I follow with Erin Barry’s chapter, “Pocket sized
pornography,” that also takes us into the archives: the eight-page wallet-sized Tijuana Bibles
(1930s–1960s). She reveals how they were more than just underground erotica, they were a
cultural force that reinforced normative gendered and racialized notions of masculinity and
sexual violence. I follow with Erin Barry’s chapter, “The comic strip in advertising,” Con-
stance de Silva uses Pascal Lefèvre’s formalist comics framework to examine how comic-strip
advertisements use comic-strip shaping devices and stylistics to persuade audiences to sell
products, they do so by selling certain acceptable types of gender roles and sexuality within
a consumer society. I follow with Annick Pellegrin’s chapter, “Real men choose vasectomy,”
where she examines Mexican comic creator, Rius, and how his radically progressive Los
supermachos were transformed into a more conservative and prototypical masculinist comics
story in the hands of creators who took over the making of the comic in 1967. As she writes,
Rius “questioned the use of the association between masculinity and nationhood to maintain
control of powerless citizens, the new authors of the series did not question this association
but rather sought to partly redefine what a good man and therefore a good Mexican meant.”
I turn to heteronormative constructions in superhero comics with the two chapters that end
7
this section. In “Marriage, domesticity and superheroes (for better or for worse),” Jeffrey A.
Brown examines the history of the superhero genre as it uncritically reproduces restrictive,
heteronormative gender and cultural binaries: masculinity aligns with work, public spaces,
and homosocial relationships; femininity aligns with the domestic, private spaces and het-
erosexual coupling. Brown also examines the ruptures in this heteronormative patterning
that present new less culturally restrictive heroic masculinities. I end the part with “‘Is that a
monster between your legs or are ya just happy to see me?’: Sex, Subjectivity, and the Super-
body in the Marvel Swimsuit Special,” where Anna F. Peppard analyzes how the spectacle of the
superhero body (“superbody”) in the Marvel Swimsuit Special (1991–1995) reveals the complex
and contradictory ways that this superbody reproduces both sexist and subversive messages.
Part II “Ethnoracial Queer and Feminist Space Clearing Gestures” brings together chap-
ters that focus on the ways that comics by creators of color clear dynamic intersectional
(queer, feminist, differently abled, and ethnoracial) storyworld spaces. I begin with Jennifer
Caroccio Maldonado’s chapter, “Life out loud in the closet.” Here she uses disidentification
and Latinx gestural theory to analyze how the Latina queer coming out, Cristy C. Road’s
Spit and Passion, contests Anglo queer narratives and violently heteronormative ideas and
practices within the Latinx community. For Caroccio Maldonado, Spit and Passion uses an
aesthetic of the grotesque to redeploy the trope of the closet as at once informed by sex-
uality and ethnicity. In the chapter, “Graphic (narrative) presentations of violence against
Indigenous women,” James J. Donahue brings an Indigenous feminist approach to bear in
his examination of how Indigenous (Native American/First Nations) creators use the comics
form to draw attention to continued settler colonialist mentalities, policies, and violence
against Native peoples. Moreover, these comics put front and center the violence against
Indigenous women and girls. Jennifer Nagtegaal’s chapter, “From ‘accidental’ autobiogra-
phy to comics activism,” explores Quan Zhou’s coming into a comics activist sensibility
as traced from her autobiographical comic Gazpacho agridulce to her recent webcomics. By
providing a gender sensitive analysis of Gazpacho agridulce, Nagtegaal reveals how this is a key
ingredient in the author’s early formation of feminist worldview as informed by her Chinese
and Chinese-Andalusian cultural heritages. Nagtegaal demonstrates how Quan Zhou’s work
builds on and complicates the growing intersectional Andalusian feminism in Spain today. I
end this section with Katlin Marisol Sweeney’s chapter, “Plea deal compounds,” where she
unpacks how the character Kamu in Bitch Planet can be read as a significant black feminist su-
perhero whose superpower is reclaiming anger from the confines of the angry black woman
stereotype in the US imaginary.
The chapters that make up Part III “Back to the Future” variously excavate the past, pres-
ent, and future of comics to make visible histories and practices that have occluded comics
that focus on queer and feminist subjectivities and experiences. I open this section with the
chapter, “Panels of innocence and experience,” where Sara Austin sets her sights on the abun-
dance of sexual relationships that form the backbone to plots in early 1950s EC horror comics.
In so doing, she reveals the importance of horror comics as a narrative space that sees young
readers as nascent sexual beings and invites these young readers to navigate a radically shifting
terrain in socio-sexual mores. I follow with chapters that take us into non-US comics spaces.
In “Teenage biology 101: serializing a queer girlhood in Ariel Schrag’s Potential,” Rachel R.
Miller examines Ariel Schrag uses the episodic comics structure along with other visual shap-
ing devices to recreate the story of her queer girlhood. In C(h)ris Reyns- Chikuma’s chapter,
“Genre, gender, sexual, textual and visual, and real representations in Bande Dessinée,” the
author explores the history of gender and sexuality representations in French bande dessinée
from the 1960s onward, especially analyzing those that appeared in the feminist magazine, Ah
8
Nana! (1972–1975), Claire Bretécher’s sociological strips (1970s–2000s), and gay comics in
Fabrice Néaud’s gay Journal and Julie Maroh’s lesbian focused, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude.
In her chapter “A Comics Écriture Féminine,” Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam focuses her attention on
the work of East German graphic artist, Anke Feuchtenberger. She examines how Feuchten-
berger infuses into her 1995 collection of comics Mutterkuchen elements of the East German
avant-garde and the feminist politics of German unification, radically innovating German
graphic novel form and content. In the chapter “I’m trapped in here!” Gender Performativity
and Affect in Emma Ríos’s I.D.” Mikel Bermello Isusi uses affect and comics narrative theory
as a tool to examine how the genre of sci-fi can become an emancipatory comics space for re-
imagining non-binary configurations of body, gender, and sexuality. Bermello Isusi analyzes
how Spanish comic book creator Ríos invites readers to empathically engage with the trans
teen protagonist Noa’s struggle to come into his own as a self within a society that perceives
him as different. I end this section with the chapter, “Empirical looking,” where Lisa DeTora
seeks to build on and complicate comics studies approaches by formulating a quantum atomic
behavior model for understanding science comics; she’s specifically interested in analyzing
how Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010) re-
constructs a feminist scientific mode of thinking.
The chapters in Part IV “Counterpublics” focus on how LGBTQIA+ and feminist comic
book storyworlds clear spaces for women and LGBTQIA+ readers—counterpublics that
radically displace erstwhile straight, male comics industries and reading communities. I
begin with the chapter, “From anodyne animals to filthy beasts,” where Daniel F. Yezbick
demonstrates how the Underground comics movement and its sex- and gender-driven coun-
terpublics of protest and empowerment radically complicate a history of “family-friendly”
Funny Animal comics. For Yezbick, the Underground comics use sex-positive, gender-
conscious, and hyper-erotic contexts to dismantle anthropomorphic and pet-centered com-
ics. I follow with chapters that turn to the superhero genre and their various constructions
of new reading communities. In the chapter, “Wonder Woman’s complicated relationship
with feminism,” George Thomas examines major ideas and events that inform the Wonder
Woman and the feminist movement as well as narrative, plot, and aesthetic devices that
work closely with (or against) feminist ideals. In “’Part of something bigger’: Ms./Captain

Marvel,” Carolyn Cocca uses feminist, queer, critical race, and disability theory, among
others, to analyze the different evolutions of Carol Danvers from Ms. Marvel to Captain
Marvel as well as the different fan-reception contexts, demonstrating how her variously
negotiated gender roles throw light on the shifts (progressive and regressive) in superhero
comics authorship and fandom. And, Sam Langsdale also explores with big broad historical
sweeps the representation of the character, Carol Danvers. She does so across the in-print
comics, animation, and film media. In her chapter, “Higher, further, faster baby! The femi-
nist evolution of Carl Danvers from comics to film,” she considers how while Danvers failed
to live up to her 70s feminist expectations, in a close analysis of same-sex relationships in
Captain Marvel (2019) she determines that she’s become the most feminist yet. For Langs-
dale, today’s filmic characterization of Danvers points to ways that the media can do a bet-
ter job creating female superheroes generally. In “Female fans, female creators, and female
superheroes,” Angela Ndalianis uses a semiotic approach to examine the gender dynamics
in female representation and female readership in the superhero genre since the early 2000s.
Indeed, for Ndalianis the introduction of more female writers, artists, and directors as well
as the rise of digital comics and online spaces makes for a transformative and vital gender
superhero semiosphere. In “Public-facing feminisms: subverting the lettercol in Bitch Planet,”
Brenna Clarke Gray examines the innovative use of the back matter (especially the lettercolls)
9
by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro in their Bitch Planet series as a space to ed-
ucate readers and grow fans sensitive to and affirmative of intersectional identities. For Gray,
the space of the lettercolls, normally a throwaway space, becomes a site not only for growing
new intersectional-positive audiences, but also for challenging the formal conventions com-
ics themselves. In “‘I’d like everything that’s bad for me!’: Tank Girl’s cracks in patriarchal
pop culture,” Susan Kerns unpacks how in the late 1980s and 1990s Jamie Hewlett and Alan
C. Martin’s seemingly male-gazed Tank Girl comics actually create women reading publics
that expand well beyond male readerships. I end this part with Karly Marie Grice’s chapter
“Falling in or stepping out” that analyzes the all-ages comics series Lumberjanes, arguing that
it uses the rebelliousness of the comics medium, the peritext, and a self-reflexive fairytale
scripting to disrupt fixed non-binary gender and sexual identifications as well as to empower
readers to embrace non-binary gender, sexuality, and identities and experiences.
The chapters that make up Part V “Worldly Interventions” focus on independent
comics—from the USA and around the world. Maite Urcaregui’s chapter, “’A revelation
not of the flesh, but of the mind’: performing queer textuality in Alison Bechdel’s Fun
Home,” analyzes how Bechdel’s graphic memoir is an act of resistant narrative creation as
well as reader resistant spaces that constantly unfix readable queer subjects. In an analysis
of Alison’s initial coming out to her parents via letter as well as her father’s response, Ur-
caregui demonstrates how the “writing” names and performs a shifting queer identity as
well as invites readers to co-crate the construction and performance of sexuality. In Kalina
Kupczynska’s chapter, “BLOOD, or: gender and nation in the contemporary Polish comic,”
we turn to our lens to Polish LGBTQIA+ and feminist comics author and publisher, Beata
Sosnowska. Kupczynska analyzes Sosnowska’s comics anthology, Blood, that it critiques a
masculinist comics tradition in Poland—as well as how blood as leitmotiv inscribes femi-
nist and queer historical subjectivities within this comics history and masculinist notions
of a Polish nation. In the chapter, “My grandmother collects memories,” Radmila (Lale)
Stef kova examines two graphic novels from the Hispanophone comics world: Anya Pen-
yas’s Estamos todas bien and Nacha Vollenweider’s Notas al pie. For Stef kova, these embody
the power of graphic novels to reconstruct and record the “process of female intergener-
ational transfer of memory.” In “Feminist riots and gay giants,” Sam Cannon uses Chile’s
LGBTQIA+ and Mayo Feminista resistance movements as the contextual frame to examine
how an ever-growing Chile’s queer and trans comics scene has given rise to a radical critique
of an oppressive straight society increasingly violent toward Chile’s queer communities.
And, in “Questioning obscenity: the place of ‘pussy’ in manga and the world,” Lindsey
Stirek explores how Manga artist, Rokudenashiko, created her manga What Is obscenity?
(2016) in response to the obscenity charges against her for creating, “3D MK Boat”—a
boat made from a 3D scan of her vulva. Stirek analyzes how What Is obscenity? “takes back
women’s identities through words, images, and narrative construction while also managing
to educate and include all audiences both international and domestic.” I end this part with
two chapters on Japanese shōnen manga (male, teen reader oriented) and issues of gender
and sexuality. In Zachary Michael Lewis Dean’s chapter, “See him, see her, see Xir,” he
brings a queer theory approach to analyze how creators Akira Toriyama, Yoshihiro Togashi,
and Eiichrio Oda create significant LGBTQIA+ characters. Dean argues that shōnen manga
has quickly become not only a genre that is accepting of LGBTQIA+ characters, but also
a central cultural force in elevating them to become popular figures. And, in “An age of
sparkle and drama,” Lorna Piatti-Farnell analyzes how Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles
(1972–1973) reflects i mportant shifts in Japanese culture concerning issues of queer sexuality
and gender.
10
The chapters that wrap up the volume in Part VI “Queer and Feminist Intermedial Tex-
tures” variously consider how creators make vital intersectional (race, gender, sexuality)
identities in their comics in the use of all variety of different narrative modes and forms—
from internet to photograph to dolls and much more. It begins with Rebecca Scherr’s
chapter, “Representing the extreme end-point of sexual violence,” where she examines
Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novella, La Tristeza (2008) and its focus on mixed-media (pho-
tos and hand-made dolls) reconstruction of the Juárez (Mexico) “femicides.” She analyzes
how Gloeckner uses the visual shaping devices and strategies of comics storytelling to rep-
resent the sexual violence and violation toward women who also ask the readers to question
their own ethics of looking at other peoples’ pain. In the chapter, “The people upstairs,”
Shiamin Kwa examines how in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Emil Ferris uses a verticality of
storytelling and imagining (“the people upstairs”) along with “trompe l’oeil effects of paper
clips, pasted in pages, ink traces, and ballpoint pressure marks pushing through to other
side of the paper to radically queer our notions of memory, inheritance, and family.” And,
in Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s chapter, “Fat bats, postpunks, and ice witches,” we see how
webcomics, interviews, music, and visual Afrogoth create African American affirming, sonic
political spaces. In “Catherine Meurisse and the gender of art,” Margaret C. Flinn sets her
sights on the celebrated cartoonist, Catherine Meurisse, analyzing how her trademark style
grows from form (canonical French literature and art and the art of the bande dessinée) and
content (gender and sexuality), and worldview (an affectionate but critical toward France’s
sexism). Ultimately, Flinn demonstrates how her intertextual aesthetics seek to elevate bandes
dessinées to the level of all the arts. And in the chapter “My life with toys: an adademic Esai
into the queer multipurposing of toys as interrupted by the author’s life,” Jonathan Alex-
andratos interweaves autobiographical testimony with theory on toys to queer traditional
understandings of toys as having only heteronormative fixed use-function. I end this part
and the volume with Byran Bove’s scholarly comic, “’Bobby. . .you’re gay’: Marvel’s Iceman,
performativity, continuity, and queer visibility.” With feminist and queer theory as his criti-
cal tool set, Bove uses the actual visual-verbal shaping devices of comics to draw attention to
both Marvel comics universe’s construction of straight masculinities and its retooling of new
queer comics spaces by creating significant queer superheroes like Iceman, America Chavez,
and Wiccan and Hulking.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies builds on and ex-
pands the growing comics studies field. It covers key issues concerning gender and sexuality
as an important shaper of the evolution of comics and how gender and sexuality in comics
demand that we re-frame and re-view comics history as a scholarly field of inquiry.
Works Cited
Chute, Hilary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010.
Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York:
New York University Press, 2016.
Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2012.
Ho, J.D. “Gender Alchemy: The Transformative Power of Manga.” The Horn Book Magazine. Septem-
ber/October 2007: 505–512.
Rosenkranz, Patrick. The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson: Volume 1 Pirates in the Heartland. Seattle: Fanta-
graphics, 2014.
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. Black Women in Sequence: Reinking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime.
Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016.
11
Further Reading
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. University of Arizona Press, 2018.
———. Ed. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. University of Texas Press, 2010.
———. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez. University of Texas Press,
2009.
Aldama, Frederick Luis and Christopher González. Eds. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Pres-
ent, and Future. University of Texas Press, 2016.
Ayaka, Carolene and Ian Hagues. Eds. Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. Rout-
ledge, 2018.
Booker, M. Keith. Ed. Comics through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas. ABC-CLIO, 2014.
Brown, Jeffrey A. and Melissa Louck. Eds. A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading and Embody-
ing through Comics. Special issue of ImageText vol. 7, no. 4, 2014. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/
archives/v7_4/
Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Danziger-Russel, Jacqueline. Girls and Their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative.
Scarecrow. 2012.
Darowski, Joseph J. X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and Gender the Comic Books Lanham, MD:
Littlefield, 2014.
Fawaz, Ramzi and Darieck Scott. Eds. Queer about Comics. Special issue of American Literature vol. 90,
no. 2, June 2018.
García, Enrique. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2017.
Howard, Sheena C. and Ronald L. Jackson II. Eds. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation.
Bloomsbury, 2013.
Juno, Andrea. Dangerous Drawings: Interview with Comix & Graphix Artists. Juno Books, 1997.
Lewis, A. David and Martin Lund. Eds. Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Madeley, June M. “Transnational Transformations: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Manga Featuring
Unexpected Bodily Transformations.” The Journal of Popular Culture vol. 45, no. 4, 2012: 789–806.
Nicholson, Hope. The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book
History. Quirk Books, 2017.
Usoz, Maite. “Sex and the City: Urban Eroticism in Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester’s Manuel series”. His-
panic Research Journal vol. 14, no. 5, October 2013: 394–408.
Williams, Laura Anh. “Queering Manga: Eating Queerly in 12 Days”. In Drawing New Color Lines:
Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Ed. Chiu, Monica. Hong Kong University Press,
2015, 279–297.
12
Part I
Interrogating restrictive frames
1
Translating masculinity
The significance of the frontier
in American superheroes1
Patrick L. Hamilton
In 1893, at the World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago and before the assembled Ameri-
can Historical Association, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered the speech that would later
be published as the essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it, he
outlined how the American frontier experience had shaped the nation’s history; as well, he
attributed to the frontier what he described as the “striking characteristics” of “the American
intellect”:
That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical
inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things,
lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that
dominant individualism, working for good and for evil; and withal that buoyancy and
exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier, or traits
called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. (Turner)
Here, Turner set the terms for how the nature of Americans would be understood not just in
American history but also in popular culture, including the American superhero.
But this litany of characteristics is not so benign as it may seem. What Turner presented
as intellectual traits are simultaneously the characteristics of a—if not the—hegemonic mas-
culinity operating within US society and culture. Developed by R.W. Connell, the term
“hegemonic masculinity” refers to a “pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of
expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue” (Con-
nell and Messerschmidt 832). Turner’s entire history of the frontier’s significance—which,
for him, is America’s history—is precisely such a pattern in its iterative nature. The frontier—
and all that comes with it—constantly shifts west with the forces of civilization coming in
subsequent to each move. This unfolding process describes what Turner sees as having been
“done” on the frontier, and thus constitutes, in Connell’s terms, a “pattern of practice.”
Connell furthermore describes the “normative” function of hegemonic masculinity: “It
embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to
position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordina-
tion of women to men” (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). That Turner established such a
15
Patrick L. Hamilton
normative ideology is patently clear. For one, women are almost wholly absent from this
history, thus placing them in an obviously subordinate position. Nor is it in any way rare to
link what Turner describes as “American” to masculinity. Michael K. Johnson, for example,
states explicitly that though “[s]pecific definitions of masculine behavior shift during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, […] a patriarchal and very often violent masculine ideal
remains central to articulations of the frontier myth” (10). Similarly, James J. Donahue asserts
not only that “the frontiersman […] has long stood as the model of American masculinity”
but also that “the myth of the American frontier is central to our modern understanding of
masculinity and definitions of manhood” (1, 9). Turner, in addition to what else he accom-
plished, becomes the foremost maker of what masculinity comprises within American cul-
ture. To talk about the traits of the frontier is, then, to talk about what constitutes normative,
hegemonic masculinity in the United States.
At the same time that it explicated this frontier pattern, Turner’s essay attempted to draw
a line between what it casts as America’s past and its future. Turner ended his essay—notably,
immediately after he identified the defining traits of Americans—declaring the end of the
frontier’s literal existence. His essay thus clearly marks the end of what he terms “the first
period of American history,” in this way differentiating between what had been and what
was yet to come.
But no such demarcation occurred regarding the ideological functions of this frontier
myth, including those related to gender and masculinity. In many ways, it is possible to cast
much of American culture—popular and otherwise—in the twentieth century as an effort
to re-imagine the frontier and, with that, its masculine ideal. As Richard Slotkin observes,
such reinvention of the frontier myth within a context of “world power and industrial de-
velopment” was “a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since
the 1890s” (3). Theodore Roosevelt, for example, cast the “American West as a crucible in
which the white American race was forged through masculine racial conflict” (Bederman
178), while Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan would deploy frontier imagery
in service of anti-Communism and the Cold War (see Slotkin 1–3, 645). American literature
and popular culture of the twentieth century, too, function to transform and thus carry the
ideologies of the frontier beyond their assumed expiration. Owen Wister’s novel The Virgin-
ian, published in 1902, seeks to “project a larger vision of the ‘significance of the Frontier’ for
a post-Frontier world order,” and does so in the racialized terms of Roosevelt as well as the
gendered ones of Turner (Slotkin 175–177); two years later, Jack London’s Sea Wolf would
imagine the ocean as a new but similarly gendered frontier. As Aldo J. Regalado explains,
popular fiction writers of the early twentieth century such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P.
Lovecraft similarly trace their lineage back to the “heroic fiction” of the nineteenth century;
more to the point, “these fictions privileged heroic identities that were expressly masculine
in their articulation” and “tended to champion aggression, competition, [and] individualism
[…]” (Regalado 41). Jumping to the latter half of the twentieth century, the original series
of Star Trek began with its nigh-ubiquitous tag line—“Space: the final frontier”—and ended
with the gendered “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” thus again revealing and
perpetuating the grounding of the frontier myth in a masculine ideal.
As present as the frontier myth and its patriarchal ideology are within American popular
culture more generally, when it comes to superhero comics specifically, its establishment
has proven to be more vexed. There are those, not unlike Turner, who attempt to draw a
clear line between the superhero and this problematic past. Bradford Wright does so largely
by delimiting the ideology of the frontier hero to the conflict between civilization and
the wilderness. He claims, “the explicit problems and solutions expressed in the Western
16
myth are historically most relevant to American civilization before the twentieth century.
Postindustrial American society raised new tensions” and so, implicitly, required a new kind
of hero (Wright 10). Ramzi Fawaz makes a similar point. At the same time that he places
“the American superhero at the tail end of a long tradition of mythic folk heroes, namely
the frontier adventurers and cowboy vigilantes of nineteenth-century westerns,” he also
largely distinguishes these latter-day heroes from their earlier ilk: “Though the superheroes
of the 1930s limned these figures through recourse to heroic masculinity and the embrace
of vigilante justice, the superhero is distinguished from these previous icons by its mutually
constitutive relationship to twentieth-century science and technology” (Fawaz 6). Between
them, Wright and Fawaz argue that the context of industrialization and/or technological
development distinguishes the twentieth century, which they then use to distance the super-
hero from the frontier hero and, in effect, its accompanying ideologies of gender.
Other scholars draw a firmer line between the superhero and this frontier past. Regalado
does so explicitly. According to him, those same qualities inhering within nineteenth-
century heroic fiction, “[f ]or better or worse, […] served as the foundation for the crafting of
early twentieth-century heroes” (Regalado 41). Lorrie Palmer similarly identifies an explicit
connection between the comic book superhero and the gendered values of the frontier when
she writes, though largely focusing on the film version of Marvel’s Punisher, “that the mod-
ern comic book hero is the descendent of the Western hero” (293). Others, if not directly
invoking the frontier myth in their descriptions of superhero masculinity, connect the latter
to normative beliefs about gender of the kind that the frontier helped foment. Derek Lackaff
and Michael Sales state outright that “[c]lassical comic book depictions of masculinity are
perhaps the quintessential expression of mainstream cultural beliefs about what it means to be
a man” (67). Jeffrey Brown makes similar claims for the superhero and masculinity. He casts
superheroes as revealing “some of our most basic beliefs” about, among other things, “gender
and equality” (“Panthers” 134). The way in which these scholars tie superhero comics to fun-
damental beliefs about gender within US society and culture invokes a further connection
between these texts and the frontier myth generative of those ideas.
Furthermore, the ways in which these critics more generally characterize superhero comics
are evocative of frontier ideologies. For example, the freedom associated with the frontier
finds expression when Lackaff and Sales describe how “[s]uperhero comic books give the male
id an unbridled place to be freed and play like a child” and “are a symbolic playground where
we let our idealized versions romp” (67). Furthermore, when Brown describes the traits com-
mon among male superheroes, they overlap significantly with Turner’s traits. Brown describes
them as “incredibly powerful, smart, confident, and always in control” (“Panthers” 134),
which echoes, to paraphrase, Turner’s strong, acute, masterful figure. And just as Turner’s
conception can be linked to hegemonic masculinity in American society and culture, Brown,
too, casts the superhero as “an adolescent fantasy of hegemonic masculinity” (“Panthers” 135).
However, the significance of the frontier to the American superhero and his representa-
tion of its hegemonic masculinity are even more direct than the most explicit of those above
connections. The American superhero is, in many if not all ways, not just grounded in the
foundational ideologies of masculinity from the nineteenth century, nor just overlapping
with them as its own instantiation of a hegemonic masculinity. Instead, the American su-
perhero is a translation of that masculine ideal from the nineteenth to the twentieth century,
from the rural/agrarian past within which it originated to the modern/urban environment
that would seem, but only at first, to invalidate this connection.
That purported invalidation hinges largely on context. For Wright, it’s that super-
hero comics do not appear to partake of the frontier myth’s basis in a conflict between
17
Patrick L. Hamilton
the wilderness and civilization: “Whereas heroes of the previous centuries, like Daniel
Boone, Natty Bumpo [sic] and Wyatt Earp could conquer and tame the savage American
frontier, twentieth-century America demanded a superhero who could resolve the tensions
of individuals in an increasingly urban, consumer-driven, and anonymous mass society”
(Wright 10). Even Regalado at times softens this connection via the comic book superhero’s
basis in modernity (4, 8, 79). Fawaz adopts a variant tack: he refers to the frontier’s opposition
to civilization as curtailing the superhero’s basis in this myth; however, it is not because the
binary conflict is absent but rather resolved. Fawaz describes the superhero’s relationship with
twentieth-century advancements as “mutually constitutive” and thus, rather than exhibiting
a conflict with these elements, embodies a “synthesis” between this figure “and the technolo-
gies of industrial society” (6, original italics). But that binary opposition between wilderness
and civilization is, in one way or another, only seemingly neutralized within the pages of
superhero comics.
Seemingly, because what that binary opposition produced remains intact within super-
hero comics. What the frontier so facilitated, and that Turner revealed as fundamental to the
functioning of his pattern, was movement. He makes this clear in the close of his essay:
[T]he people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion
which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a
rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now
entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no
effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its
exercise. (Turner)
Thus, what Americans—or, more specifically, American men—“are” in Turner’s conception

is a product of how this allegedly open space provided an unfettered, unrestrained place for
them to move into and within. Such understandings of this frontier space—as unfettered,
unrestrained, and thus inherently free—persist in our imaginings. As Anne Goldman writes,
“the West,” which is often synonymous with the frontier, “has been reduced to an exercise in
self-imaging, the philosophical equivalent of the climbing wall at a city athletic club, a place
existing to be scrambled up or ridden over, to be camped upon by scouts playing imaginary
Indians or skied through by athletic ‘pioneers’ longing for unbroken fields of powder [i.e.,
snow]” (xii–ix). Goldman’s description hearkens back to Turner, who wrote of the frontier
that it provided “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence,
and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas” (Turner). In sum, what
the frontier both allowed for and produced in Americans generally and men specifically was
unrestricted movement. And it is the unfettered nature of this movement, more so than the
space in which it occurred, that superhero comics can be seen as continuing and, so, translat-
ing for this latter-day masculine ideal.
Admittedly, the “reality” of where most superhero comic books occur—cities—would
seem to preclude such resonances. From the gleaming, ultra-sleek, ultra-modern skyscrapers
of Superman’s Metropolis, to the dark, gothic spires of Batman’s Gotham, or even the sheer
density of Marvel’s New York, which practically all the company’s heroes call home, the
city in American superhero comics appears profoundly not “open,” not “unfettered,” not an
empty stretch of land beckoning people into it.
But the nature of the city in American superhero comics, or the nature of the superhero’s
relationship with that space, remains like in effect for the heroes who inhabit and protect
it. Where the nineteenth-century frontier hero strove to escape the city, the superhero
18
transcends it. For one, they exert a kind of mastery over the space. They shape it to their
whims. Superman, for example, “[r]ather than simply conforming or skillfully navigating
the interstices of the modern city, […] brazenly confronted the cityscape and thus presented
a direct challenge to systems and physical structures that attempted to order human action”
(Regalado 102). Far from a synthesis of superhero and technology, Superman perhaps even
more starkly embodies a conflict between the two, especially when the latter is represented
by transportation. As Regalado goes on to enumerate, Superman, in early issues of Action
Comics, smashed cars, lifted trollies, leapt over busses, smashed tanks, and tore down bridges
(103). Whether he destroys them or simply circumvents them, Superman is not only not
subject to these means of conveyance, but, furthermore, master of them and thus of the
civilization for which they are a metonym. Furthermore, Superman is not escaping this
civilization and its trappings. It is not something that once contained him that he then flees.
It is something he stands above or removed from and thus transcends. Even to the extent he
appears confined in his alter ego of Clark Kent, it is precisely his choice to seemingly be so
confined, not the imposition the earlier frontier hero rebuked, and thus further expresses his
transcendence and freedom.Nor is such transcendence limited to this first and, in many ways,
most quintessential superhero. Scott Bukatman casts superheroes in general as defined by
movement unique to these figures that, in these cases, also transcends the built environment
of the city. “Superheroes negate the negation of the grid—they move through space in three
dimensions, designing their own vehicles, choosing their own trajectories. To be a super-
hero, you’ve got to be able to move. Superhero narratives are sagas of propulsion, thrust, and
movement through the city” (Bukatman 189). It is not just Superman, then, who leaps over
buildings—“in a single bound!”—and transcends the city; so too can the Hulk as well as too
many to name who—either via technology or biology—possess the power of flight. Batman,
when not behind the wheel of the Batmobile, grapples and glides from rooftop to rooftop;
Spider-Man and Daredevil similarly swing across New York City’s concrete and steel ex-
panse. Plastic Man and Mr. Fantastic can use their stretching abilities to traverse their cities
uniquely while on foot. They, and countless other superheroes, move in ways not governed
by the streets and buildings. Perhaps even more evocative of this unfettered movement are
the speedsters like the Flash, who can not only run up and down the sides of buildings but,
if vibrating fast enough, pass directly through them. The effect is that the built environment
may as well not exist—hearkening back to the (presumed) nature of the frontier—for all the
ways superheroes can and do move in defiance of it. And that’s not even to mention charac-
ters like DC’s Vibe or Marvel’s Nightcrawler that, via their ability to open extra-dimensional
portals or teleport, respectively, might be said to move through entirely different dimensions
than their 3D world on the 2D comic page.
Additionally, predicated upon this movement is a process of identity formation that is
similarly part and parcel of how superhero comics translate this myth and its ideologies to the
twentieth century. On various levels, the frontier serves to reinforce identity. Goldman talks
about the frontier as “an exercise in self-imaging,” and thus at the level of the individual self:
the frontier myth writ small. As Slotkin more broadly terms it, “this myth-historiography”
has “been the means to our achievement of a national identity”; the myth redeems and re-
news the “American spirit or fortune” (Slotkin 10, 12). Cyrus R. K. Patell further elaborates
on how this process of renewal occurs in his discussion of the “rugged individualism” that
is part of a larger discourse regarding US individualism in general. As he notes, this myth of
the rugged individual “has given rise to character types that have attained heroic status in US
culture: the frontiersman, the cowboy, the hard-boiled dick” (Patell 71–72); to this can ulti-
mately be added the comic book superhero. Like those other fictions of rugged individualism,
19
Patrick L. Hamilton
superheroes are “a cultural fantasy that compensates for some of the self-imposed limits of
everyday individualism” and “give[s] its readers access to the ontology of mastery,” serving
“as a form of wish fulfillment for a culture that extols varieties of individualism that often lie
outside the reach of the average person” (Patell 72).
Though seemingly counter-intuitive, the comic book city likewise provides such a re-
newal to and of the male superhero. Regalado explicitly describes Superman as “affirm[ing]
his identity” in contrast to an urban sprawl that threatens to dwarf and thus extinguish it.
Furthermore, the anonymity of his alter ego Clark Kent—bound within the confines of the
city map—underlines even more how Superman—this specific identity—speaks to the as-
sertion of individuality. The same is again true in so many superheroes. “Puny” Peter Parker
struggles with money, grades, and girls, but his alter ego of Spider-Man is an outwardly
confident individual as he battles crime in New York City. If the nature of the city is to
atomize, anonymize, and annihilate individuality, the comic book superhero not only defies
this process in dramatic fashion, but does so in ways that render it as much a “playground”
for American male identity as the frontier was when it existed.2
If, then, in these ways the comic book superhero translates the conditions facilitating the
frontier’s ideological effects, it should come as no surprise that this same figure ends up em-
bodying most if not all of the traits concomitant with its hegemonic masculinity. Most obvi-
ous among them is strength, which is less translated than simply continued from the frontier
hero to the comic book one, particularly given, as Peter Coogan points out, the superhero’s
indebtedness to cartoon strongmen like Hugo Hercules and Popeye (7–8). Exacerbating the
existence of this strength is how it is emphasized on the comics page: “[T]he illustrations
emphasize the muscles and the stature of the heroes as perfect male specimens” (Brown,
“Panthers” 134). From an emphasis on such “perfect” male bodies and thus physical strength,
comics would eventually reach levels of hypermasculine representation. Particularly in the
early 1990s, artists like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld would, first at DC and Marvel and then
at Image Comics, the company they helped found, reach dizzying heights of popularity
and sales with, among other things, their depictions of male bodies unrealistically swollen
with muscles. In addition, such comic book hypermasculinity carries over the subordination
of the female/feminine. As Brown elsewhere explains, “superhero comics are one of our
culture’s clearest illustrations of hypermasculinity […] premised on the fear of the unmascu-
line Other” (“Comic Book Masculinity” 31) (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Rob Liefeld’s Cable. Panel from X-Force #1 (January 1991)
20
Figure 1.2 Panels from All Star Comics #11 (June–July 1942)
The nigh-frenzied masculinity in the work of an artist like Liefeld implicates itself in such a
fear: such bodies can be seen as compensating for and thus inherently invoking this much-feared
umasculine presence. Such hypermasculinity then represents another way superhero comics share
in the subordination of the female/feminine that is the effect of such hegemonic masculinity.
Other of Turner’s specific traits conglomerate around implicit ones that carry on. What,
for example, Turner characterizes as, on the one hand, “coarseness” and, on the other,
“acuteness” in the end speaks to a kind of severity in the frontier figure that can be seen as
translated into the comic book hero in a number of ways. Part of what Palmer identifies as
the Punisher’s, and thus comic book vigilantes’ more generally, inheritance from the Western
genre is a sadism and masochism that can be seen as one facet of how this severity translates
from its earlier context (288–289). Of course, the comic book superhero is known for taking
bold, direct action and in its earliest incarnations during the Golden Age era, this was often
dealt out with a severity that is startling given how some heroes are today imagined. Super-
man, for example, is seen today as a champion of justice and fair play. But this is far removed
from the Superman of the WWII-era newspaper comic strip that, for example, rammed
Japanese submarines into the ocean floor and then abandoned them, ostensibly leaving the
sailors inside to die (Siegel 167–168) (see Figure 1.2).
Nor is Superman unique in this. The wartime exploits of DC’s Justice Society of America
are rife with similarly violent actions by the ostensible heroes. In All Star Comics #11 alone,
Hawkman machine guns down enemy Japanese bombers while the Sandman turns a Japanese
machine gun against its owners, their gruesome demise captured in a panel from behind the
gun’s crosshairs (Fox 16, 32).3 Nor were such actions limited to comics set during the war; in
his earliest adventures, Batman used guns and killed his enemies, both things that are anath-
ema to the version most people know (see Figure 1.3).
Once comics reach the Silver Age, this severity appears in a highly gendered fashion,
particularly at Marvel. As Slotkin makes clear, such a gender dynamic reinforcing male supe-
riority commonly functions in tales of the frontier. As he explains regarding Wister’s The Vir-
ginian, the hero’s relationship with Molly Stark Wood functions as “an acknowledgment of
his superiority,” and “signals the Virginian’s dominance” (176). Female superheroes, besides
playing largely subordinate roles, were likewise regularly and harshly put in their place by
their male counterparts. The original Ant-Man, for example, admonishes the Wasp in their
earliest exploits. In Tales to Astonish #44, he yells at her as she launches herself at an invading
21
Patrick L. Hamilton
Figure 1.3 Panel

from Detective Comics #30 (August 1939)
Figure 1.4 Panel from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Tales to Astonish #44 (June 1963)
monster: “Wasp, come back! You fool child! Come back!” (Lee and Kirby, “Creature” 143).
He similarly rebukes her the next issue when she attempts to handle the villainous Egghead
solo: “As for you, young lady, don’t you ever try anything like that again! We’re a team –and
we’ll work as a team! Understand?” (Lee, Huntley, and Heck 161) (see Figure 1.4).
The Fantastic Four’s Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards portrayed a similar attitude toward his
fiancé Sue Storm. When Sue reacts angrily to his sneaking up behind her to test her abilities,
he retorts, “Just like a woman!! Everything I do is for your own good, but you’re too scatter-
brained and emotional to realize it!” (Lee and Kirby, “Master Plan” 168). Though these are
but a handful of many possible examples, they speak to the way in which superhero comics
replicated the subordination of women that is part and parcel of hegemonic masculinity, and
do so in ways that translate that severity of the frontier hero into this later era.
Other qualities in Turner speak to more generalized forms of male dominance and con-
trol. Such dominance is invoked in the ways Turner highlights a “masterful grasp of material
things” and “dominant individualism” as traits of the frontier hero. Such mastery is part of
the DNA of the frontier hero. It likewise runs through the comic book superhero; as Lackaff
and Sales clarify, “Male superheroes are depicted as incredibly powerful, smart, confident,
22
and always in control” (134). DC’s Silver Age heroes specifically share an orientation to their
world that is another resonance with this frontier figure. As Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs
explain, particularly those written by Julius Schwartz were each “a positivist in a positivis-
tic world, using reason and knowledge to master an ultimately knowable universe and thus
restore our unquestioned status quo to proper order” (22). This description, in its references
to reason, knowledge, order, and mastery, encodes the same traits as the frontier hero within
these later characters. Embodying this fact are the day jobs of so many of DC’s classic heroes:
as Barry Allen, the Flash is a police scientist, and Ray Palmer (The Atom) a physicist; Carter
Hall (Hawkman) and Adam Strange are both archaeologists, while Clark Kent works as an
investigative reporter and the Martian Manhunter and the Elongated Man are detectives in
their civilian identities (and Batman, of course, is one when he dons his costume). The very
name of one DC team, the Challengers of the Unknown, makes that urge for order, to elim-
inate what is unknown, even more explicit and, so, a further translation of the frontier hero
into the comic book superhero.
The ways in which Marvel represented their superhero scientists reinforce this connec-
tion, as, in them, the rationality tending toward order and reason is paired with what can be
seen as the “inquisitiveness” and “inventive turn of mind” Turner included in his delineation
of Americans. In short, a great bulk of Marvel heroes are both scientists and inventors. Phys-
icist Bruce Banner invents the “gamma bomb” responsible for the accident that makes him
into Marvel’s Hulk. Biochemist Hank Pym discovers the particle that allows him to create
his various size-changing serums. Tony Stark, an engineer turned industrialist, of course
invents the technology that both keeps him alive and powers his Iron Man armor. Similarly,
high-school science whiz Peter Parker, though not responsible for his spider-like abilities,
creates Spider-Man’s various accessories, including wrist-worn web shooters, his web fluid,
and spider-tracers. Of course, surpassing them all is Dr. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four
whose list of scientific creations, beyond the rocket that precipitated their getting powers, is
staggering. He is responsible for inventing the fabric of the team’s costumes, “woven from
chemical fibers containing unstable molecules that shift in structure” and thus adjust to their
powers (Lee and Kirby, “Captives” 132). A diagram of the FF’s headquarters in the same
issue reveals further wondrous creations attributable to Reed’s intellect: the Pogo Place,
Fantasti-Car, Fantastic-Copter, and a “long range passenger missile able to reach any point
on earth in minutes” (Lee and Kirby, “Captives” 133) (see Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5 Panel from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #44 (November 1965)
23
Patrick L. Hamilton
Further underlining the wondrous nature of these creations was the artwork of Jack
Kirby, whose outré designs for these creations further highlight their inventiveness and so
also the ways in which Reed and other Marvel super-scientists are translations of these fron-
tier qualities.
Finally, there is another cluster of traits in Turner’s hegemonic definition that are recog-
nizable in comics. Turner lauds the American created via the frontier as possessing “rest-
less, nervous energy” as well as the “buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom”
(Turner). Here, the frontier elicits something very different from the other traits Turner iden-
tifies, which all speak to a kind of rationality and pragmatism. These traits speak to a facet of
hegemonic masculinity that both accompanies and contrasts their mastery of the practical,
the rational, and thus a sense of order. As with all the other traits Turner identified, ones
similar to these have been recognized as existing within comic book superheroes. Bukatman
writes about just such a dual-sided nature: “Alongside the image of an idealized classical
self, superheroes further embody a male fantasy of flamboyant, performative intemperance,
something blocked by the pragmatic, self-controlled economy of a historically constructed
masculine identity” (216). And he similarly ascribes such resonances to the cities these char-
acters inhabit, as they convey “utopian aspirations,” “sublime grace,” and the “unfettered and
uncanny” (185).
To these, it is possible to add other aspects of the comic book superhero as signaling the
same abundant energy. The main such trait would be the hyperkineticism inherent in the su-
perhero. While all superheroes are, as shown earlier, creatures of movement, there are those
acrobatic superheroes who display an almost frenetic motion that exudes a similar exuber-
ance and energy as that Turner identified. Perhaps the most obvious embodiment of this fact
is Marvel’s Spider-Man (see Figure 1.6).
Throughout original Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko’s tenure on the series, he made clear to
emphasize the arachnid hero’s hyperkintetic motion. A single panel from Amazing Spider-Man
#16 demonstrates this fact, as Spidey performs at a circus. Not only does the panel depict
him in a variety of acrobatic poses, but the way in which Ditko numbers the positions, thus
diagramming the order of his motion, captures the fluidity and energy with which the hero
performs. Spidey’s closing declaration—“This is nothing compared to what I’ll do when I
really get warmed up!!” (Lee and Ditko 446)—further emphasizes Spider-Man’s exaggerated
motion. And while Spider-Man might be the most iconic of such figures, he is far from the
Figure 1.6 Panel from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man #16 (September 1964)
24
only one. Acrobatic heroes—and thus examples of similar hyperkineticism—abound: Dare-

devil, the X-Men’s Nightcrawler and Beast, Alpha Flight’s Puck, the New Warriors’ Speed-
ball (also a Ditko creation) to name just a few at Marvel; most prominently at DC, Nightwing
(the original Robin, Dick Grayson), but also Deadman. Thus, too, does the way in which
such heroes carry on yet another aspect of the frontier figure and his hegemonic masculinity.
In Regeneration Through Violence, Slotkin applies Philip Wheelwright’s stages of myth—the
“primary” in which the myth is generated, the “romantic” in which it is formally codified
and functions metaphorically, and the “consummatory” which seeks to recuperate the orig-
inal by transcending the codified version of the myth with “new visions”—to the myth of
the American frontier (12–14). In each of these stages, the hegemonic masculinity imbricated
within this myth would similarly be generated, codified and metaphorized, and/or recuper-
ated. Superhero comics, as a translation and thus instantiation of this myth and masculinity,
appear largely to have located themselves at the “romantic” stage, particularly in the way in
which the superhero is a metaphorical version of the masculine frontier figure. Thus, largely
unquestioned within much of superhero fare in the second half of the twentieth century are
the ideas of masculinity and their simultaneous subordination of women/the feminine via
the hegemony they possess. As a result, superhero comics have only somewhat entered into
what Donahue proposes as a fourth and most important stage of myth-making, the “reeval-
uatory.” In this stage, “the myth is challenged and its accepted truths reexamined in light of
more recent cultural developments,” and so works in this stage offer “a critically sustained
challenge of the past and those narratives about the past that have become paradigmatic”
(Donahue 2). Some superhero comics have undertaken a very conscious reevaluation of this
masculine ideal. The most apparent of these efforts might be Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’
Watchmen which, via such aspects as Rorschach’s sadistic tendencies or Nite-Owl’s impo-
tence, interrogates how comics largely and perhaps invisibly perpetuate hegemonic forms of
masculinity (see Moore and Gibbons). More recently, writer Matt Fraction and artist David
Aja’s Hawkeye—whose hero shares his name with Fenimore Cooper’s hero and quintessence
of frontier masculinity—flips this formula on its head, ascribing the various masculine ideals
to the female Hawkeye Kate Bishop while simultaneously undercutting their presence in the
original Hawkeye, Clint Barton (see Fraction et al.). The most recent Ms. Marvel, Kamala
Khan, might be seen similarly, as she possesses similar stretching abilities as Plastic Man or
Reed Richards. But as long as such interrogations remain sporadic, superhero comics will
remain problematic in how they at best unconsciously translate and so perpetuate this form
of hegemonic masculinity in American society and culture.
Notes
1 The author would like to thank Dr. Allan W. Austin, who read an earlier draft of this chapter
and provided invaluable feedback on it. The writing of this chapter was also facilitated by a sum-
mer research grant the author received from Misericordia University’s Faculty and Summer Re-
search Grant Committee. Finally, the author would like to thank Dr. Heidi Manning, Dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences at MU, and Michelle Donato, Administrative Assistant for the College
of Arts and Sciences at MU, for their efforts in organizing the 2019 Writing Retreat, where early
work on this chapter was accomplished.
2 Bukatman extends this effect to the reader’s vicarious experience: “Through the superhero, we
gain a freedom of movement not constrained by the ground-level order imposed by the urban
grid” (188). They thus—to use Bukatman’s terms—“negate the negation of the grid” not only for
themselves but also for the comic book reader.
3 For a discussion of the racialized dimensions of these heroes’ actions during wartime, see Austin
and Hamilton 32–30.
25
Patrick L. Hamilton
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27
2
Black boys and black girls in comics
An affective and historical mapping
of intertwined stereotypes
Maaheen Ahmed
We are only too painfully familiar with racialized imagery in comics, cartoons and other
media, especially those relying on caricatural styles. We are also all too familiar with the
argument that such representations were inevitable for their times: the artists didn’t know
better; the exaggerated idiom of caricature was the only way othered (non-white) people
were recognizable; caricature spares no one and deforms in the service of humor, etc. In this
chapter, I unpack stereotypes of black boys and black girls that traveled between popular
imagery (especially advertisements and prints) and popular entertainment (minstrelsy and
vaudeville), illustrated children’s literature, dolls and comics to interrogate the rigidity of
derogatory stereotypes of black children and their persistence in the face of more conciliatory
representations. I begin with the rise of derogatory stereotypes of African Americans in mid
to late nineteenth-century American culture (Bernstein, “Signposts” 99–100; Black), which
was also a period when the illustrated press boomed. I then discuss racial stereotypes in early
British and American comics. The chapter closes with a discussion of a contemporary comic,
Boondocks, that subverts and criticizes those stereotypes.
In the case of black comic strip characters, prominent girl characters seem to be by and
large absent. Notably even the few relatively famous boy characters – such as Richard Out-
cault’s Poor Lil Mose and Peanut in Beano – were short-lived because they did not attract many
readers and their place as central characters was not considered legitimate even in the context
of comics which has been home to several outcast protagonists. This highlights the extent
to which racial prejudice is taken for granted. The persistence and acceptability of harmful
stereotypes can be better understood by turning to Sara Ahmed’s concept of stickiness and
focusing on the emotions potentially evoked in (non-black) readers and viewers of such
stereotypes. In dialoguing between past and present representations and the kinds of affects
and emotions they channel and evoke, I trace the contours of what seems to be a carefully
constructed architecture of soft hate.
The political scientist Joseph Nye famously described soft power as the exercise of con-
trol through economic and cultural forces. Soft hate simultaneously relies on these forces
and is channeled through popular images. Nye’s simple dictionary definition of power is
worth recalling: “power means an ability to do things and control others, to get others to
do what they otherwise would not do” (Nye 1990, 154). Soft hate wields a similar kind of
28
power: it is hatred that sneaks through nooks and crannies of images that have some of-
fensive elements but have become acceptable because of their good-natured sheen which,
in the case of comics, is reinforced by their intention to entertain and provoke laughter.
Soft hate is at work in very ordinary means of figuring hate and includes images that are
just assumed to be part of comics vocabulary. A mechanism of hate is anchored in the
tools of visual representation, especially in the reliance on stereotypes. That derogatory
stereotypes of black people, which usually incorporated grotesquely exaggerated childish
elements, became a standard means of representation was by no means simply an enter-
taining twist of caricature. Soft hate captures the hating impulse hidden in images that
are otherwise seen as cute and harmless and are used in the service of consumer culture,
including children’s culture.
Stereotypes for all their flatness and unoriginality are layered with history that remains
buried or ignored and complacency that is, against all odds, persistent (cf. Rosello 22–25).
And since stereotypes are sneaky, sometimes it takes a lot of digging in order to realize
just how pernicious they can be, even, and perhaps especially when they look like seem-
ingly harmless images, serving to entertain. Such images call for a constant revisiting. This
back-and-forth movement runs parallel to what Sara Ahmed describes as the “‘rippling’
effect of emotions”, which “move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs,
figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards”. “Repression”, Ahmed adds, “always
leaves its trace in the present – hence ‘what sticks’ is bound up with the absent presence of
historicity” (45). It is therefore important to look back and to look underneath stereotypes.
Minstrelsy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Pickaninny

Both Jim Crow and Zip Coon were familiar characters in minstrel shows which relied on
blackface to enact a fantasy of “Africanness”. They began around the 1830s, became popular
in the mid-nineteenth century and disappeared in the 1930s, when they were widely per-
ceived as inappropriate (Rehin 682). The 1930s saw the rise of the animated, and eventually
cartoony, funny animal, which is where blackface and other minstrel practices found a new,
acceptable home (Sammond; Nel). This is only one example of how the relationship between
comics and racist imagery is deeply entangled with other popular practices and entrenched
in layers of repressive history.
Jim Crow was the mock happy, intensely performative slave of the rural south. According
to sociologist George F. Rehin, Jim Crow draws connections between the clownish servant
“type” (the zanni in commedia dell arte acts) and what became the “harlequin jim crow” or
blackface clown in nineteenth-century America and Britain. Unlike Jim Crow, Zip Coon
is a free black person from the urban north with dandyish airs, who aspires to achieve white
standards of propriety, but always fails. He undoes the freedom that was gradually granted to
slaves throughout the United States in the mid-1800s, a period which, significantly enough,
coincided with the rise of the minstrel show. Both types incarnate repression, ranging from
the open repression of the slave or former slave to the mockery of the freed man. The main
female stereotype is that of the black nanny or “mammy”, expected to take care of white
children and ignore her own (Wallace-Sanders). In children’s culture and comics and later
films, stereotypes of black children seem to combine elements from both Jim Crow and Zip
Coon. These children were referred to as small coons or pickaninnies. Like Jim Crow and
Zip Coon, they were flattened out, intensely performative characters, who were ambigu-
ous at best and usually just unlikeable. More crucially, these characters were also denied
humanity.
29
Maaheen Ahmed
Robin Bernstein describes the pickaninny as a stereotype whose “ juvenile status,

dark skin, and, crucially, the state of being comically impervious to pain” coexisted
with that of the “white, tender, vulnerable angel-child” (Bernstein, Racial Innocence 20).
The cheekily smiling, harmless pickaninny is both a product and vehicle of soft hate.
Bernstein reminds us that since “childhood was defined as tender innocence, as vul-
nerability, and as the pickaninny was defined by the inability to feel or to suffer, then
the pickaninny—and the black juvenile it purported to represent—was defined out of
childhood” (20). This follows an emotional trajectory described by Ahmed, according
to which hate “works to unmake the world of the other through pain” (58) – it turns
bodies into objects and renders them vulnerable to the hate they are exposed to. Such
hate can smear itself on the identity of an entire group of people. The stereotype of the
black child which is used to cancel all positive elements associated with childhood can
be traced back to the portrayal of Topsy, the slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. The novel and the illustrations accompanying it facilitated the transatlan-
tic transfer of racist, minstrelsy imagery (cf. Bernstein, “Signposts”). Blackface perfor-
mances however also have a history in Britain that goes as far back as the nineteenth
century (Rehin 686).
Originally subtitled, “The Man That Was a Thing” (Bernstein, Racial Innocence 17),
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized in the abolitionist National Era from 1851 onward. It is
then bitterly ironic that we find the stereotype of the pickaninny here. On first seeing the
“project” her cousin imposes on her, Miss Ophelia exclaims, “She’s dreadfully dirty, and
half naked”. The first thing to do is, of course, to clean and clothe Topsy. The paragraph
introducing Topsy describes her as the “blackest of her race”, her hair is “wooly” and
“sticks out in every direction”, her expression is “an odd mixture of shrewdness and cun-
ning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful
gravity and solemnity” (Stowe 155). The word “odd” appears twice in this description,
reinforcing a sense of doubt and mistrust. She wears a “single filthy garment made of
bagging” and, to sum up, there is “something odd and goblin-like about her” (155–156).
Topsy also seems to lack basic (“civilized”, Christian) morals: during her first encounter
with Ophelia she is caught stealing ribbons, denyies the theft and fails to see the wrong-
fulness of her acts.
Topsy brings together all the characteristics – dirtiness, unreliability and ambiguity,
laziness – that have become stuck to caricatures of black people. These characteristics
evoke affects of disgust, distrust and fear on one side and pain and shame on the other.
Perhaps this is where Sara Ahmed’s notion of the sideways movement of affect is import-
ant: “hate slides sideways between figures, as well as backwards, by reopening past associ-
ations, which allows some bodies to be read as being the cause of ‘our hate’” (45). Topsy
becomes the node where negative attributes associated with African Americans coalesce
and stick. These attributes seep through her skin to inhabit her body and by extension all
black bodies for decades to come. Such connotations are impossible to shake off as Ahmed
points out:
When the body of another becomes an object of disgust, then the body becomes sticky.
Such bodies become ‘blockages’ in the economy of disgust: they slow down or ‘clog up’
the movement between objects, as other objects and signs stick to them. This is how
bodies become fetish objects.
(92)
30
This fetishization and denigration of the entertaining black body is foreshadowed by the first
task Topsy performed for Ophelia and Augustine: she danced, her “black glassy eyes glittered
with a kind of wicked drollery” to
an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round,
clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and
producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music
of her race. (156)
The prototype of the pickaninny established through Topsy very quickly became a “staple
of U.S. popular culture” (Bernstein, Racial Innocence 16). It was ubiquitous, appearing in ad-
vertisements, books, films, toys, etc. Unsurprisingly the stereotype does not end with Topsy
alone. It is reinforced by the stark contrast between Topsy and the white child protagonist of
the novel, Eva, who incorporates all the elements of childhood alienated from Topsy, such as
innocence and goodness.
This contrast marks cultural derivations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin such as the Duncan sisters,
Rosetta and Vivian’s vaudeville act from the 1920s, with Rosetta, thought to be less pretty
than her sister, appearing in the grotesque blackface that had become the trademark of min-
strel shows. In comics the black “visual alien” is often constructed as a contrast to white
characters, as in Will Eisner’s Spirit and his grotesquely visualized sidekick Ebony White
(cf. Heer). The contrast between Topsy and Eva acquired an earlier, more tangible form in
topsy-turvy dolls, although their origin and direct connection to Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains
unclear (Wallace-Sanders 34–35). This doll had two heads and two corresponding dresses.
One head was black and the other white, with the white doll being often more desirable than
the black one. Wallace-Sanders suggests that the dolls could have been created by black slaves
to teach their own children about simultaneously caring for their own child and the white
one of their masters or employers (37). Bernstein foregrounds the role played by dolls and
by extension girls and girlhood in racial projects: “children’s culture has a special ability to
preserve (even as it distorts) and transmit (even as it fragments) the blackface mask and styles
of movement, which persist not only in Raggedy Ann and the Scarecrow but also in the faces
and gloved hands of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny” (Racial Innocence 19).
Ironically then the anti-slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the source of racist tropes that
quickly became a staple of American entertainment: the obliging, downtrodden but good
old black man and the young, impish girl and, by extension, children and even grownups.
Seemingly ‘timeless’ tropes: watermelon eating and whitening

I am now going to consider another bundle of characteristics already mentioned above to try
and unpeel what lies behind the stereotype of the black child or pickaninny, focusing on the
pickaninny eating the watermelon and hence performing the lack of control, the inability to
resist basic desires that has become stuck to blackness.
The image of the pickaninny – and other black children – eating, and eating watermelons
in particular, is a recurrent one. It was used for advertisements, postcards and other printed
matter. Although the precise origins of the stereotype remain unclear, it is likely to go back
as far as a print published around 1869 in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper that shows a group
of boys eating watermelons on the pavement. In unwrapping the sources and workings of this
image, historian William Black points out that the image was far from a casual juxtaposition
31
Maaheen Ahmed
of a derogatory stereotype with exotic fruit. Emancipation from slavery only took place in
the wake of the Civil War and the newly freed blacks often grew watermelons for their own
consumption and for selling. “Southern whites”, writes Black, were
threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom [and] responded by making the fruit a symbol
of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public
presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so
pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve
guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.
Using the stereotype in all kinds of entertainment was also a means of controlling blacks,
as in the Yellow Kid comic from May 1, 1898 (New York Journal) about his dime museum.
Here the “Wild Man of Bornegro”, a white child in blackface, is being kicked in the face.
While the Yellow Kid, Richard Outcault’s short-lived, intensely popular strip from the end
of the nineteenth century discussed further below, can be said to have a social agenda in
favor of the children growing up in New York’s infamous tenements, black children are
often – although not always – treated differently. This is also evident in a small postcard
from Outcault portraying a black boy dressed in the clothes of a farm worker gleefully
eating a watermelon (dated 1909, a copy of which is conserved at the National Museum of
African American History and Culture). Was Outcault simply recycling a popular trope
of his time or was he actively participating in a racist agenda? The actual answer is prob-
ably somewhere in between. As Robin Bernstein has shown, non-racist representations
of blacks did exist – but they often functioned as singular “artifacts of outlier ideology”
(Bernstein “Signposts” 99). In reproducing seemingly harmless popular images that were
part of a larger project of repressing and denigrating a population, Outcault was partici-
pating in soft hate.
William Black has elaborated on how each derogatory attribute of the stereotype is neatly,
perniciously tied to the acts of growing and eating watermelons: uncleanliness came from
the messiness of eating watermelons; laziness from the act of growing watermelons, which
was relatively easy; and childishness from the bright color of the fruit and its sweetness. In
the cases discussed here, childishness itself is operationalized in the service of buttressing a
persistent politics of hate, helping to normalize racial hatred and inequality.
Educational material was not exempt from such practices of soft hate, as in the case of Ten
Little Pickaninnies, a counting book published by Faultless Starch around 1910. This was one
of the many primers the company distributed freely with its starch between 1890 and 1930 in
areas where these books were sometimes the only accessible educational materials. As with
other pickaninnies, the girls here remain indistinguishable, anonymized and disposable and
recurrent (cf. Michelle Martin’s discussion of the longevity of the Ten Little Niggers books:
21–27). One by one the girls are eliminated from the group and the transition from 1 to 0 is
particularly noteworthy:
One pickaninny when with Faultless Starch she’s done

Finds she’s turned all over white, and so there are none.
1–1=0. (12)
The pickaninny, the primer suggests, can never exist alone and claim individuality. For this
she must become white. As the name of the starch “faultless” reaffirms, both black and white
are heavily coded. Evil and dirt are frequently associated with blackness, so as to make the
32
connection seem natural, when in fact the transposition of abstract notions to skin color is
anything but natural: it is the result of reiterations and reinforcing the sticky elements at-
tached to black bodies, both young and old.
Lara Saguisag examines the recurrent gag where white children trade places with
black ones, horrifying their mothers who cannot make the black come off. This occurs,
for instance, in Buster Brown and The Katzenjammer Kids. In Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der
Struwwelpeter from 1845, this gag provides a seemingly more tolerant perspective. The
boys are punished but their punishment involves becoming even blacker than the “Moor”
they were making fun of. Blackness is clearly undesirable; in the words of M ichelle
Martin, “the story’s implicit racist ideology completely undermines and contradicts its
explicitly antiracist message” (xx–xxi). This is how soft hate works: it thrives through
perpetuating painful and hateful images in contexts that are supposed to be unharmful,
claiming to only entertain or instruct. Children’s culture, as Robin Bernstein and Philip
Nel have suggested, seems to be ideal ground for perpetuating racist imagery that, I would
like to add, hates intensely but softly, in a partially veiled manner. Martin has elaborated
on the lasting influence of Hoffmann’s story and illustrations, most notably in Helen
Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo from 1899 (Martin 3–17). More than 150 years later, a
modernized version of this Struwwelpeter story seems to have missed the point: the boy
still does not have a name and being black is still the punishment meted out to the three
(named) boys (Hoffmann and Teich).
The Yellow Kid and Pickaninnies

Black children were not the only children who were mobilized in the service of consump-
tion, but they were probably the only children to be openly conflated with food. Children
were often mascots of consumption since the early days of consumer culture. One such child
was the so-called “Me Worry” Kid whose origins remain mysterious and who continued to
live on in the mascot of the satirical MAD magazine. Notably, the Me Worry Kid appeared in
advertisements mainly targeting grownups, such as dentist ads in which he gleefully claims,
with a tooth missing in his smile, that it didn’t hurt a bit. Besides Alfred E. Neuman, the Me
Worry Kid shares similarities with the Yellow Kid, who also adorned many advertisements
in his time. These children’s youthfulness and cuteness were undercurrents endorsing vari-
ous kinds of products. Here we can discern a different kind of stickiness stemming from the
positive characteristics associated with children.
The Yellow Kid was a weekly newspaper strip geared to bring quick laughs within a limited
number of panels and often through relying on a few time-tested formulas. The Yellow Kid’s
success led to the famous New Yorker newspaper wars (between the Hearst and Pulitzer
publications) and Outcault eventually switched from The New York World to The New York
Journal. Rapidly recognizable stereotypes contribute to the smooth and quick functioning of
humor. Moreover, Jared Gardner suggests that the sequentiality of the comic strip through
which characters are not bound by a single frame but accompany the reader across several
panels and episodes allows for moving away from stereotyping to what he calls “graphic al-
terity”. Graphic alterity could mitigate, at least to some extent, the harshness and immutabil-
ity of disparaging stereotypes. This, however, does not seem to hold for the Yellow Kid panels
where black children are recurrent characters that usually remain relegated to the sidelines.
Like most of the other kids in the Yellow Kid’s entourage, they have no individuality and
they speak in an oral English common for the strip’s inhabitants. Their blackness however
highlights a persistent streak of soft hate (Figure 2.1).
33
Maaheen Ahmed
(a)
(b)
Figure 2.1 (a and b) Around the World with the Yellow Kid (Blarney Castle), full image and de-
tail. From: The New York Journal, February 14, 1897
In the episode recounting the Yellow Kid’s journey to Ireland, hectic activity charac-
teristic for the comic rules the page (February 14, 1897). Only two black children are seen,
perched on a board and excluded from the action. They are dressed in fancy, minstrelsy
costumes.
“Wait till we git to Africa” the boy says.

“Dats ain’t no place fer us” replies the girl.
34
This might be a small joke and it could also refer to the children’s partial assimilation in
American culture, as suggested by their clothes, and consequent cultural distance from Af-
rica. It is simultaneously a cruel observation that these children do not belong anywhere –
that they will never have the same status as white children.
Sara Ahmed’s affective economy emphasizes how emotions do not inhabit anyone or any-
thing. Instead they are products of contact and movement:
emotions circulate through objects: emotions are not a positive form of dwelling, but
produce the effect of surfaces and boundaries of bodies […] It is not simply that the
subject feels hate, or feels fear, and nor is it the case that the object is simply hateful or is
fearsome: the emotions of hate and fear are shaped by the ‘contact zone’ in which others
impress upon us, as well as leave their impressions. (196)
If this panel functions as a contact zone, and as the product of many earlier moments of con-
tacts and molding of stereotypes, the black children remain not only trapped in performative
types but are also placed at the fringes, outside of the zone of action and interaction.
A slightly earlier Yellow Kid strip channels hate more explicitly. Titled “The Great Fight”
from December 20, 1896 (New York Journal), this strip shows a boxing match between the
Yellow Kid and a black boy. Although the boy is granted one successful punch, the Kid pro-
ceeds to beat him up across two images and eventually lets his goat do the rest. By the end
of it, the boy is unable to stand up and disappears as the final image focuses on the victorious
Kid and his goat. While the images already capture the violence, the words are virulent.
Alternatively calling the boy nigger and coon the text elaborates on the injuries meted out
to the boy in considerable graphic detail: the goat joins to “turn dat nigga blue”, dislocates
his jaws and at the end pulls out his “woolly” hair and throws his possibly lifeless body out
of the arena.
Unfolding in a playful comics form, soft hate makes room for such violence, although it is
rarely as blatantly physical as in the above boxing match. Black girls, for instance, are never
made to face such extreme physical violence but they often face the hatred expressed through
segregation in many Yellow Kid strips. Represented in a minstrelsy mode, an overdressed
black girl is shooed away by a “stage manager” during an opera performance starring the
Kid at Ryan’s Arcade (November 28, 1897, New York Journal). In the only word balloon in
the comic, the manager says: “Git out of here. Dis aint vaudeville”. These words explicitly
connect the girl’s exaggerated appearance with one of the sources of racist imagery. They
also mock the girl’s efforts to transcend, just like the other tenement children in the comic,
her social reality: instead of gloves, she wears oven mittens and her elaborate headpiece rivals
that of the Mephisto costume worn by the Kid. Only her clothes and accessories mark her
gender, which has otherwise been wiped out by her grotesque features.
Pore Lil Mose

The Kid eventually became a victim of his popularity and Outcault stopped drawing him
when he realized that he could not copyright the character. He did not however stop draw-
ing children. Appearing in December 1900, Outcault’s Pore Lil Mose filled, at least in part,
the gap left by The Yellow Kid, who had not appeared since 1898 (Saguisag 73). Most of his
strips took the form of letters he wrote to his mother and family in the fictional Southern
town of Cottonville while he explored urban life in New York. Lara Saguisag suggests that
Mose was most likely the prototype of the immensely successful (and white and middle class)
35
Maaheen Ahmed
Buster Brown (82). Buster eventually became a phenomenal commercial success known, for
instance, for Buster Brown Shoes, a popular company for children’s shoes. In contrast, the
Mose strips were short-lived, most likely because the young protagonist’s blackness did not
speak to most of the readers.
For Saguisag, Mose incorporates aspects associated with normalized white childhood
that are often denied (in real and fictional worlds) to children of other ethnic backgrounds;
he nuances and complicates the image of black boys (79). In the light of the stereotypes
outlined above, I do agree that Mose is sometimes portrayed in a sympathetic light and
that he is allowed a degree of individuality that we rarely encounter in black characters. He
nevertheless remains a racist caricature. In the image below, for instance, he takes part in
the watermelon growing trope (Figure 2.2). We see Mose writing his mother in an insert
in which he wears a bow tie (that could have been worn by either Buster Brown or a min-
strel dandy). Most of the image shows Mose working in the garden wearing the ill-fitting
overalls of a farmworker. Most notably, he is helped in his endeavor to grow watermelons
by animals, many of which are wild and not domestic, unlike those accompanying the
Yellow Kid.
But perhaps the most blatant comments on the effect of skin color are the two contrasting
outcomes Outcault reserves for Mose and the Yellow Kid in a similar situation: a scuffle in a
paint shop. This leaves Mose and his entourage “yellow, red and blue” or thoroughly beaten
up (cf. Outcault). While the Yellow Kid is also doused in paint, he emerges victorious in the
strip from January 9, 1898. Hence, despite, and most likely through, the ambiguity in some
of the Mose stories, Mose remains informed by soft hate. The child may be a friendly, likeable
Figure 2.2 Pore Lil Mose: He Makes a Garden. From: Richard F. Outcault, Pore Lil Mose: His
Letters to His Mammy, Grand Union Tea Company, 1902
36
character but he is also a vehicle for perpetuating harmful stereotypes. I will now briefly
turn to two examples of black children in British comics where racism remains blatant, even
though the harshness of the images is sometimes undone by some individual features and
agency accorded to the characters. Softness is once again reinforced through the connection
to children’s culture and comics.
Blackface in British comics: Peanut in the Beano and the ‘coons’

in Rupert Bear
Although the Beano is now associated with its mascot from the 1950s, the black-haired, ex-
tremely naughty British Dennis the Menace, the early issues of the magazine, which started
in 1938, bear the figure of Peanut on their front pages (Figure 2.3). Here again the name
and the actions of a black boy are conflated with food. Peanut is a barefoot black boy in
patched-up overalls, often eating a banana, while a bunch of other bananas stick out from his
pocket. Affirming the persistence of racist stereotyping, Peanut is a pickaninny and wears the
ragged clothes of a farmworker. The bananas echo racist imagery that associates black people
with monkeys and uncontrollable impulses. Peanut is by and large the only black character
in the early Beano comics.
Writing about E. W. Kemble’s Blackberries children’s books from the late nineteenth cen-
tury, Saguisag points out that giving fruit names to children
was a way of commodifying African American children; their bodies were implicitly
transformed into food that was easy to digest and pleasurable to consume. […] These
metaphors were expressive of white ambivalence over black children: white readers were
encouraged to imagine enacting aggression toward young African Americans (as in the
act of biting) while also viewing these ‘edible’ children as appetizing rather than toxic
or indigestible. (59)
Black children, incarnating the laziness, dirtiness, barbarity and hypersexuality associated
with blackness, were portrayed “as easy and delightful to consume” (63). They existed to
entertain and to further reinforce the sticky connections between skin color and negative
stereotypes. While reinforcing stereotypes attached to black people, Peanut also succeeds in
subverting them on the few occasions when he gets his own comic strip. It is perhaps here
that Jared Gardner’s graphic alterity works best because readers are presented a character that
is humanly fleshed out despite the stereotype.
Figure 2.3 Header of first Beano cover (July 30, 1938)
37
Maaheen Ahmed
Figure 2.4 “The Pranks of Peanut” in Beano (July 29, 1939)
The Jokes section is headed by Peanut’s smiling face, holding a large curved object that
has been bitten into. The rhyming slogans championing the page change each week but reg-
ularly promise hilarious, distracting jokes. “Peanut is black as jet—his page is a winner you
can bet!” reads the slogan from December 31, 1938. Like the toys incarnating racism – the
topsy-turvy doll and the golliwog – Peanut softens racist imagery, without really doing so,
and renders it acceptable by catering to children.
However, the short-lived, irregularly published Peanut strips between August 12, 1939
and September 30, 1939 complicate the image of blatant racism suggested by the representa-
tion of Peanut on the Jokes page. While Peanut remains visually fixed in the Jim Crow mold,
he, like many other children of the Beano, confronts and punishes bullies, often in smart,
innovative ways. While in the strip of August 12, 1939, he teams up with two other white
children as they are all persecuted by bullies, the idea of converting discarded pans into head
armor is all his. In the strip from July 29, 1939, a white boy shoves Peanut away from a slide’s
ladder with the taunt, “Funny Face!”. “Funny Face, eh?” Peanut says to himself and to his
readers. “Wait till he comes down that chute!”, he adds as he places a small trolley that throws
the sliding boy into a water trough for horses (Figure 2.4). In his short-lived strips, Peanut
successfully counters the racism imbuing his form and the more direct attacks and exclusion
by other children and adults.
Although the stereotype was occasionally undone or partially declined, to use Mireille
Rossello’s term, through the Peanut strips (which were eventually renamed Pranks of Peanut),
the “Rupert and the Castaway” story from 1954 shows how crude stereotypes of black people
persisted decades later. Not reprinted because of its deeply problematic content, this Rupert
Bear story has become a collector’s item with an increased price tag, much like the now
banned golliwogs. Soft hate is at work again: in inhabiting a famous childhood and national
memory, the offensive, hateful content remains permissible beyond the official ban because
it is clothed in nostalgia.
“Rupert and the Castaway” recycles picaninny imagery and flattens it even further:
the inhabitants of Coon Island not only resemble each other but, in wearing colored
nightshirts and spiky hair, the “coons” seem to be without a gender and uniformly in-
fantile. Koko the inhabitant who Rupert “befriends” and who eventually leads Rupert
to the British castaway waiting to be rescued cannot communicate with Rupert through
words. “Whatever is he doing there, that creature with the spiky hair?”, Rupert wonders,
surprised at this unexpected sight during his holiday at the beach (Bestall 47). Although
Rupert cannot understand the creature’s “queer language”, he soon realizes that he is
Koko from Coon Island. He ends up inviting him to tea and lending him his bed. The next
38
day, Koko takes him to his island where Rupert receives an enthusiastic welcome from
the island’s inhabitants, all of whom can only communicate through gestures. Rupert is
eventually led to the castaway and, with Koko and the islanders’ help, brings him back
to his family. Koko and his community’s role is nonetheless downplayed, and it is Rupert
who is hailed as the ultimate hero.
While comics were familiar to the comedic and carnivalesque trope of inversion in many
matters including children becoming almost as autonomous as adults, girls acting as boys (far
fewer boys acting as girls) and white boys wearing blackface, the racialized image of blacks
remains disturbingly uniform. As Jeet Heer reminds us: although the negative stereotype
of the “Asian” eventually gave way to other stereotypes such as the “exotically eroticized”
Asian woman, comics have historically known only a few images of beautiful black men
and women. Heer mentions Ebony White and Rosie Lee on the first page of “The Heart
of Rosie Lee” from The Spirit (October 13, 1948) as an exception. Stronger examples are to
be found in Jackie Ormes’ work which, from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, intro-
duced black female protagonists such as Torchy Brown and Patty Jo who broke away from
the Topsy stereotype. In contrast, the Spirit cover highlights the discrepancy between Rosie
and Ebony. While Rosie is indeed beautiful, Ebony resembles a monkey with exaggerated
features. While it would be wrong to say that Eisner was openly racist, quite the contrary
(cf. Benson and Eisner), his visualization of Ebony White tells a different story. This contrast
suggests that caricatural, cartoonish images give in to a blatant degree of racism that is con-
doned and all too easily overlooked.
Moving beyond without forgetting

I think Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks strips succeed in bypassing years of stereotyping and
offering a new way of representing, and by extension looking, at black characters. Drawn in
a manga-like style, the characters here bear none of the exaggerated features we have seen
above. In this strip from April 23, 1999 (Figure 2.5), Huey, the angry young man, recites a
speech against the oppressors of blacks. Halfway through, he is interrupted by an old white
lady smiling at him adoringly, stroking his hair and marveling at how cute he is. While
this strip is funny at face value, the woman’s fetishization and exoticization of black hair is
disturbing. Moreover, her insistence on Huey’s cuteness puts an end to his freedom speech.
Cuteness with its links to childness has a disempowering effect: it cancels threats and renders
the cute object consumable. Soft hate is once again at work here.
Figure 2.5 Aaron McGruder, Boondocks, April 23, 1999. Reprinted in: Boondocks: Because
I Know You Don’t Read the Newspaper, Andrew McMeel 2000
39
Maaheen Ahmed
When, in the following strip (April 24, 1999), the lady declares that she would like to take
Huey home with her, the boy is enraged: “Am I supposed to use cute little slang and be your
little stuffed black doll?” he asks. Once again Huey seems to be evoking an entire history of
subjugating blacks through boxing them in stereotypes used for entertainment and comfort.
It is not surprising that his tirade falls on deaf years: the woman is not in a position to under-
stand Huey or why he is so angry.
Soft hate works surreptitiously; it sneaks in through sheens of goodness and good will. It
channels emotions that are positive and happy but which also support a structure of oppres-
sion. Most importantly, it adjusts itself according to historical and cultural contexts. With the
exception of works like Boondocks and previous comics and illustrations produced by A frican
Americans (most notably Jackie Ormes) and “outlier” artists who rejected mainstreamed
ways of representation (cf. Bernstein, “Signposts”; Martin), the essence of being a child is
often denied to black children. Childishness, in contrast, is a feature blacks remain framed
in – a childishness that is programmatically different from that of white children. Boondocks
successfully rejects the visual stereotypes stuck to blacks for centuries, but Huey is painfully
conscious of the workings of both soft and more blatant hate.
“Emotions tell us a lot about time; emotions are the very ‘flesh’ of time”, writes Sara
Ahmed, “Through emotions, the past persists on the surface of bodies. Emotions show us
how histories stay alive, even when they are not consciously remembered; how histories of
colonialism, slavery, and violence shape lives and worlds in the present” (202). Tracing back
visual representations of black children through the years reveals visualizations of softened
hate that is stamped on the bodies, expressions and actions of children in comics and other
popular culture artifacts. Such representations are often qualified as being just part of comics
vocabulary and caricatural conventions that aim to entertain but are not inherently racist.
Perhaps in order to answer the question regarding whether something is just caricatural or
racist, we need to unpack the emotions and affects that are ensconced in the history of every
representation. This would help bring out the harm engendered by seemingly innocuous
images populating children’s culture. More importantly, it could eventually help us think of
ways to move beyond such images of hate.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd edition, Edinburgh UP, 2014.
Benson, John and Will Eisner. “Will Eisner: Having Something to Say.” The Comics Journal, 2 February
2011, www.tcj.com/will-eisner-having-something-to-say/3/
Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York
UP, 2011.
Bernstein, Robin. “Signposts on the Road Less Taken: John Newton Hyde’s Anti-Racist Illustrations
of African American Children.” J19, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 97–119.
Bestall, Alfred. “Rupert and the Castaway.” The New Rupert. The Daily Express Annual: 1954. Daily
Express 1954, pp. 42–67.
Black, William. “How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope”. The Atlantic, 8 December 2014, www.
theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/how-watermelons-became-a-racist-trope/383529/
Faultless History. Faultless Brands, https://faultlessbrands.com/history/
Gardner, Jared. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine,
and Derek Kirk Kim.” Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama.
U of Texas P, 2010, pp. 132–147.
Heer, Jeet. “Racism as a Sylistic Choice and Other Notes.” The Comics Journal, 14 March 2011, www.
tcj.com/racism-as-a-stylistic-choice-and-other-notes/
Hoffmann, Heinrich. Der Struwwelpeter, oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder. 1876, www.gasl.org/
ref bib/Hoffmann__Struwwelpeter.pdf
40
Hoffmann, Heinrich and Karsten Teich. Die Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben. Hinstorff, 2013.
Martin, Michelle. Black Gold: Milestones from African-American Children’s Picture Books 1845–2002.
Routedge, 2004.
Nel, Philip. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse
Books. Oxford UP, 2017.
Nye, Joseph S. “Soft Power.” Foreign Policy, no. 80, 1990, pp. 153–171, www.jstor.org/
stable/1148580?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Outcault, Richard Felton. Pore Lil Mose: His Letters to His Mammy. Grand Union Tea Company, 1902,
http://collections.citebd.org/ark:/12345/FAm01317/1902
Rehin, George F. “Harlequin Joe: Continuity and Convergence in Blackface Clowning.” Journal of
Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 1975, pp. 19–38.
Rossello, Mireille. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in Contemporary French Culture.
Dartmouth College Press, 1997.
Saguisag, Lara. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics.
Rutgers UP, 2018.
Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Duke
UP, 2015.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly. Henry Altemus Company, 1900.
Ten Little Pickaninnies. Faultless Starch Library, 1910 (ca.)
Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly Gisele. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory. U of
Michigan P, 2011.
41
3
Pocket-sized pornography
Representations of sexual violence
and masculinity in Tijuana Bibles
Erin Barry
In the pre-Playboy era, illustrated erotica was not hidden under mattresses or under false
floorboards; rather, it was constantly present, concealed in pockets and easily available for
perusal and arousal. Measuring two and a half inches by four inches (the average wallet size
of the era), Tijuana Bibles, eight-page pornographic comic books, filled the erotic imagina-
tion of many contemporary men. In many ways, these booklets remain a mystery. Released
by anonymous sources, without authors, dates, or locations of publication, Tijuana Bibles
were sold from approximately 1930 to 1960 exclusively behind store counters, in saloon back
rooms, and behind closed doors. The emerging comic market heavily inspired the small
booklets, with over two-thirds of catalogued Tijuana Bibles featuring established comic
book characters. Tijuana Bibles fulfilled the growing demand for affordable and discreet
erotica, and, as a result, worked to create and reinforce norms of male heterosexuality in early
to mid-century America. As a cultural force, Tijuana Bibles encouraged the normalization
and glorification of sexual violence as a measure of sexual performance and as a common-
place part of a sexual encounter. The descriptions of Tijuana Bibles and their contents present
in this chapter are disturbing and can be uncomfortable to read. The very racialized and
gendered ways that power is normalized in these contents are what make them important
to analyse, and what beseech us to study them and confront these histories, rather than hide
them once again in old attics and hidden drawers.
The anonymous and illicit nature of these comics makes establishing a concrete history
and timeline difficult; to that end, they have rarely been treated to deep historical and cul-
tural analysis. To date, Tijuana Bible historiography has centred on either their position in
the larger schema of counterculture illustration, framing them as precursors to underground
magazines of the 1960s, or the ways in which they portrayed celebrity scandal (Pilcher;
Smith and Wright). The eroticism and sexuality of Tijuana Bibles are notably absent from
the historical conversation. A close reading and analysis of the contents of Tijuana Bibles, in
particular the deeply ingrained celebration of sexual violence that places them within their
cultural moment, has heretofore not been done.
There is an inherent difficulty in working with the history and implications of illicit ma-
terials. Any effort to interrogate these sources raises questions as to the limitations, bound-
aries, and guidelines of the modern practice of history. What does a history look like when
42
the dates, authors, source, and original location of a material are all oblique? Without dates,
tracking the old historical adage of “change over time” becomes increasingly enigmatic.
While we can temporally contextualize many of the eight-pagers through their characters
and cultural references, placing them in reference to one another is near impossible. Perhaps
considering the Tijuana Bibles as a whole and using them to illustrate the sexual dynamics of
the period when they flourished is the best we as historians can do.
While a small number of the booklets can be attributed as early works of prominent
comic artists and others can be grouped together as stemming from a singular author or artist
(though the identity of that creator remains out of reach), the majority are so-called “orphan
works.” The anonymous production and provenance of these works raises problems for his-
torians in the potential for perpetual challenges or questioning as to the authors’ intent. The
lack of provenance for these works has posed further problems for archivists – what kind
of legal status or copyright is afforded to these objects? While a small number of Tijuana
Bibles have found a home in archival collections, the lack of a comprehensive historical
record for these works cannot exclusively be attributed to their illicit subject matter, but to
their near-complete anonymity. If publication dates and authorship remain out of the hands
of historians, information regarding the source location and explicit circulation patterns of
Tijuana Bibles are but a pipe dream. Contemporary mention of the booklets, as well as their
cultural references, can pinpoint them as urban in origin and circulated in male circles, but
information regarding which specific cities and which specific men any one “Bible” may
have reached is not possible, preventing any full comparison of different urban male cultures.
So, with all these problems of oblique production and provenance, why consider these
Tijuana Bibles part of the historical record – why study their impact when such conclusions
must always be marked with a metaphorical asterisk? I would argue for their inclusion along
at least three points. First, these booklets, despite their faults, offer a unique and useful per-
spective into the predominant male erotic culture of the 1930s and 1940s, the rise of celebrity
culture, and the realities of sexual expression. To neglect a source for its imperfections, par-
ticularly in the history of sexuality, where an abundance of material tends to be inherently
classified as unimportant or illicit, is to neglect the full history of sexual culture. A lack of
provenance does not eclipse the fact that these materials were circulated, read, and discussed.
Furthermore, working with sources like the Tijuana Bibles can broaden our understanding
of what history is and what history can do. Considering possibility and potential – what
could have been, what may have been – strays from the traditional dictates of historical
analysis, but can these considerations more fully illuminate an era, provide additional insight
into the lives of historical actors, and thus answer the very questions history proposes to
make clear? Finally, a broadening of the historical discipline to include the history of gender,
masculinity, and sexuality necessitates a broadening of what constitutes a useable source. In
her book These Truths, historian Jill Lepore speaks truth to the struggles of sourcing, writing,
“most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept…the archive is called
the historical record, and it is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical, and unfair” (4). To limit
historical study to that which is in the archives or that which could accurately be classified
within an archive is to perpetuate the inequality and power dynamics of who can speak and
what can be said. The material records of sexuality, including erotica, have been called illicit,
without use, or disposable – the problems with Tijuana Bibles as a source are also the reasons
they are so compelling historically. Investigating sexual culture inherently means investigat-
ing the problematic, the underground, and the use of “messy sources.”
Despite a dearth of standardized records, we can work around the absence of concrete dates
to uncover convincing evidence that the booklets first emerged in the mid- to late 1920s;
43
Erin Barry
many of the earliest comics featured popular comic book characters of the era, including
Barney Google, Toots & Casper, the Gumps, Tillie the Toiler, Happy Hooligan, and Abie
the Agent (Gilmore 15). Manufacturers printed early comics on plain white paper with plain
text covers. Pagination was frequently incorrect, with pages unintentionally left blank. As
demand drove standardization in the early 1930s, a Cuban publisher, Tobasco Publishing
Company, edited the early comics down to the industry-accepted eight pages (Hoffman 15).
It was in the late 1940s that the term “Tijuana Bible” was first used, referring to the apoc-
ryphal trade across the California-Baja California border (Cray 34). Organized crime syndi-
cates, using the same paper as bottle labels destined for use by bootleggers, primarily printed
and distributed the booklets (Heer). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the booklets were sold in
a manner that suggested their illicit nature; initial points of sale tended to be in back rooms
of bars, pubs or men’s clubs, or under the counters of corner stores. Purchasing these works
essentially required that a person previously knew of their existence; they were not openly
displayed or exposed for discovery. Due to these restrictions, the audience for these book-
lets was almost exclusively male and driven by word of mouth. Contemporary estimates for
mainstream comic book readership held that three or four readers shared each comic book;
the same likely applied to Tijuana Bibles (Friedman 203). This mode of circulation places
Tijuana Bibles firmly within homosocial circuits and it was within said circuits that violent
heterosexual norms were created and enforced.
The inherent homosociality of Tijuana Bible culture served to ultimately perpetuate the
sexual violence contained within their pages. The concept of shared erotic experiences is
useful in any analysis of male homosociality. In Between Men, Eve Sedgwick famously argued
for a model of homosocial triangulated sexuality, in which male-male desire can only be
expressed through the use of a female conduit; Tijuana Bibles served a similar role in me-
diating sexual tension between male friends by offering a common sexual experience (23).
For many men, particularly those segregated in same-sex arenas (such as the military), it is
male-male platonic relationships that structured, modelled, and gave meaning to heterosex-
ual relationships. These booklets served as a method for men to develop and/or strengthen
homosocial bonds and discuss sexuality outside of marriage or the family. Sharing these
booklets meant that men had a common language encouraging conversations about male
sexual insecurities and fantasies (Flood 341). When a man gave a Tijuana Bible to a friend or
acquaintance, he was, in a way, sanctioning and approving of the sex acts portrayed inside.
Historian Madelon Powers argues for a parallel between the early twentieth century rise of
the companionate marriage ideal – wherein marriage would be based on communication,
complicity, and support – and the homosocial culture of the saloons. Powers argues that
many working-class men found such a companionate partnership not in marriage but in male
peer groups. Central to forging these companionate bonds were homosocial rituals, such as
the sharing of Tijuana Bibles, in which “women had a place only as sexual objects rather than
as equal participants” (qtd. in Burke 325).
The comic medium as a visual genre further lends itself to both homosociality and sexual
violence. The exaggerated art style of comic books works to the satisfaction of the Tijuana
Bibles audience in compelling ways. The cartoonish form, with exaggerated size and ex-
pression, mediates male anxiety and potential homosexual tension about viewing another
man’s body in an inherently sexual manner, just as the exaggerated fitness-magazine style of
superheroes tap into aspirational ideals of the male figure without men having to view male
flesh and blood. The frequent jokes about men’s inadequate sexual behaviour and experience,
as well as the exaggerated art style mitigated male anxiety about performance. Humour itself,
particularly that that pokes fun at victims of sexual violence, does further work to situate
44
sexual violence as amusing and acceptable. Beyond the work this medium does for alleviating
male anxiety, it is inherently distinct in portraying complete stories rather than static images
while retaining the portability and concealable nature of a photograph. Tijuana Bibles also
tended to be more explicit in their depiction of sexuality and did not assume a disguise of
naturism, like many contemporary nude photographs.
Contemporary erotic illustrations, like the infamous work of Superman creator Joe
Shuster, often took the form of a singular drawing accompanied by a multiple page written
erotic story (Yoe). The women featured in these drawings were either in lingerie or naked,
but the men rarely, if ever, disrobed, and the action portrayed was strictly fetishistic foreplay
rather than any kind of penetration. Moreover, the violence in these singular illustrations was
portrayed as a deliberate and largely desired part of sadomasochistic sexual play, whereas in
the Tijuana Bibles, violence infuses nearly every sexual encounter and consent is obscured
or non-existent. The limited space Tijuana Bibles provided for dialogue and background
narrative further normalized a lack of communication and consent during sex while the
sequential art of Tijuana Bibles more completely portrayed the progression and action of a
sexual interaction. In regard to sexual assault and violence, the hand drawn and cartoonish
medium of these works disguises the real-life impact and physical results of said violence
through period-specific comic violence tactics like stylized onomatopoeic phrases and words
(i.e. “BAM!”).
Tijuana Bible artists borrowed more than serialization and drawing style from more
mainstream comic artists. Co-opting characters from popular comic books proved to be
very fruitful for these artists, appealing to fans of the original characters by illustrating por-
nographic “untold tales” (Spiegelman). Following the 1938 debut of Superman in Action
Comics #1, superheroes frequented the pages of Tijuana Bibles. Most early superheroes drew
from three common inspirations: the burgeoning field of pulp science fiction, virulent pa-
triotism at the imminent threat of the Second World War, and the physical appearance of
the bodybuilding and fitness culture (Ricca 73). This last aspect encouraged the aspirational
nature of the superhero physique for the intended young male audience and was perhaps what
made the characters most appealing for erotic co-opting.
Only serving to enhance the focus on the idealized bodies of both superheroes and ad-
venture men were their costumes. While mainstream comic book authors and artists used
superheroes’ exceedingly “form-fitting costumes” to “better show the champion in hand to
hand combat with the bad guys,” the people behind Tijuana Bibles used costuming to better
show violent sex acts. Frequently invoked in the art of Tijuana Bibles, the loincloths and
animal pelts of Tarzan and his ilk did nothing to disguise muscular male bodies and only em-
phasized their animalistic tendencies (Friedman 203). The hyper-masculine, hyper-muscled
appearance – to a degree mirroring the later (and much more explicitly homosexual) erotic
illustrative work of Tom of Finland – of these characters is utilized to foment an exaggerated
menacing effect in the Tijuana Bibles as the superheroes perform violent masculinity and to
perpetrate sexual assault and a certain normative form of masculinity.
In using established characters like Tarzan, Tijuana Bibles repurposed not only the look of
the superheroes, but their reputation as moral arbitrators and men of high character. In play-
ing with characters moral authority, creators at once titillate readers through the inversion of
expectation and use the characters, to end of characters culturally ingrained morality to boost
the legitimacy of whatever the characters do. While the evil turn of superheroes in many
of these comics is operating in service of ironic humour, there is a subconscious appeal in
seeing the idealized man abandoning a “goody-two-shoes” persona – allowing the reader to
ever more see himself in “Superman” (Langley). It is through a combination of a humanized
45
Erin Barry
ideal and the inescapable, subconscious moral authority of superheroes that sexually violent
actions are made to seem legitimate and potentially valid. Comics like Flash Gordon in On a
Lark, starring Flash Gordon and his friend/enemy in the King Features Syndicates comics,
Zarkov, encouraged a violent performance of male sexuality. Flash and Zarkov come across
two alien women (who appear to have the exact same physique as human women, with the
addition of large wings) and threaten them, “Com’on (sic) baby, we’re gonna sneak a couple
o’ fast ones up yer (sic) pussy and not a word—or else!” Capt. Marvel Jr. opens on a scene of
an evil scientist exclaiming with glee that his “whore dope” seems to be working, while a
naked woman lies in the background. Captain Marvel Jr. flies in to her rescue and fights the
evil scientist, but as soon as the drugged girl awakes, Captain Marvel Jr. attempts to have sex
with her. The evil scientist agrees, as long as Captain Marvel Jr. assists him in a later crime.
In both the Flash Gordon and Capt. Marvel comics, any semblance of a superhero with
moral fibre is destroyed. This is largely indicative of the ironic humour common in the
Tijuana Bible genre. When sexual violence is performed by these characters, who not only
possess idealized bodies, but who were created and marketed as the ideal man in body,
mind, and spirit, sexual violence is normalized as part of aspirational masculinity. In another
comic, Superboy in Big Bet, the titular character, drawn in a style specifically mimicking the
original Adventure Comics artist, saves a young woman from flying bullets (which simply
bounce off his muscular chest). When the woman expresses gratitude and asks if there is
anything she can do for her rescuer, rather than taking off to capture her attempted murder-
ers, Superboy responds, asking for and receiving oral sex. The style and initial plot is close to
a real Superboy comic, but the idea of a sexual reward goes directly against the moral code
given to superheroes, particularly those in the Superman universe, and contributes to a cul-
ture in which sex is an expected compensation from women. Portraying these characters as
sexual predators and perpetrators of sexual violence may be ironically humorous, but the use
of superheroes and action stars connects said violent acts to their intended moral authority.
Tijuana Bibles exploit the American subconscious association between violence and justice
via these characters, whose mainstream comics perpetuated that correlation (Pineda 596).
The use of these characters further normalizes these acts as humorous, masculine, and even
heroic.
Multiple Tijuana Bibles reinforce the idea that a large majority of homosocial bond-
ing occurs over sexual release and expression. The Tijuana Bibles are thus self-referential,
promoting through their narratives the way the booklets are used and distributed. The ho-
mosocial narratives of the Tijuana Bibles, while not necessarily depicting and reproducing
sexual violence scenarios, perpetuate a view of women as sex objects or merely as interme-
diaries in homosocial relationships. The narratives of both He Didn’t Speak French and Hans
and Fritz Meet a Hootchie Cootchie describe two male friends witnessing a heterosexual act of
intercourse and “getting off” in tandem. In He Didn’t Speak French, two middle-aged men,
coded in drawing as wealthy “fat cats” via their dress and posture, arrive at one of their
homes and draw back heavy curtains to reveal one of their wives in the midst of sexual in-
tercourse with a French man. The drawing back of the curtains explicitly frames the sexual
interaction between the Frenchman and the cheating wife as a show to be viewed similar to
a stage production. While the sex act itself is not portrayed as violent, He Didn’t Speak French
is apt evidence of the homosocial voyeurism central to the distribution of Tijuana Bibles. The
commentary of one of the men while viewing the Frenchman and the wife, “By sove [sic],
the bloody chap’s good if he can do that!” indicates not only that men looked to one another
for sexual guidance and comparison, but that a hierarchy of sexual acts was in place. The con-
tents of the Tijuana Bible reflect the kinds of conversation and homosociality it perpetuates.
46
Hans and Fritz Meet a Hootchie Cootchie co-opts the young characters from the Sunday strip
The Katzenjammer Kids and has them discover and attend a local peep show. The comic begins
with Fritz informing Hans of the show. Hans and Fritz, still drawn as young children, are
portrayed as being comfortable with performing sexuality in the same vicinity or together.
At the peep show itself, they infiltrate the dressing room and engage in a threesome with the
naked star; she invites them to stay, saying, “with such big pricks, you boys can get in anytime
free!” The double entendre of being able to “get in” her for free notwithstanding, the dia-
logue indicates a preference for a certain form of large – and thus virile – and aggressive mas-
culinity. While these booklets do not explicitly depict instances of violence, the depictions of
homosocial voyeurism cheekily point to the audience. Through this stand-in, the mechanics
of normalization through homosocial circuits are clarified; men look to one another for
sexual guidance and use common sexual experiences, such as sharing a Tijuana Bible, to
understand and define expectations and aspirations of sexual performance and behaviour.
In the early period of the eight-pagers, the late 1920s, the true story of “Peaches and
Daddy Browning” was widely used as narrative fodder. In June of 1926, on her 16th birth-
day, Frances Heenan married 51-year-old Edward Browning, an eccentric businessman she
had met merely weeks before. The press alluded to the suspicious age differential by call-
ing Browning, “Daddy” (Sugar Daddy), and Frances, “Peaches” (Bovsun). Though they di-
vorced within the year, eight-pagers based on the marriage proliferated for years after. Artists
unanimously portrayed Peaches as sexually insatiable, frequently pairing her with animals
after Daddy failed to satisfy her needs. In My Kingdom for a Horse, Daddy promises to buy her
a Rolls Royce if he fails to sexually satisfy her. After a frustrating attempt at sex, he rents a
horse and it is only the horse that is able to satisfy her sexual needs. When he moves to fulfil
their bargain and purchase the vehicle, she asks him to purchase the horse instead, since she
is unable to “fuck a car” (Hoffman 18). A similar theme is explored in Peaches and Cherries;
she rejects both her husband and the ice deliveryman, only to find satisfaction with the horse
pulling the ice cart. Peaches collapses in tears and exhaustion at the end of that encounter, the
illustration and dialogue framing her nymphomaniac tendencies as unhealthy and Peaches
herself as incapable of making healthy decisions.
The specific choice of using bestiality to illustrate Peaches’ irresponsible sexuality has sig-
nificant historiographical context. An inherent association between the lust and the animal
impulse has long been deployed for a variety of goals – from justifying the use of animals to
keep women of the harem satisfied to moral condemnation of sexual excess. The relationship
between woman and horse is particularly fraught with meaning – the very act of a woman
riding a stallion inverts gender expectations; for once, the woman was the master and the one
mounting (Landry 472). The sexual violence perpetrated in the Peaches comics plays with
both the association between lust and animality and taps in to the potential of bestiality for
upending expectations by inverting stereotypical depictions of assault and having a woman
force un-consenting animals into penetrating her.1 While the bestiality is not taken seriously,
rather played for laughs, it alludes to the idea that leaving sexual decisions in the hands of a
woman only puts her body and morality in serious danger – literally that her animal urges are
out of control (Hoffman 18–19). Complicating matters, the fact that it is an animal that gives
Peaches sexual satisfaction communicates that women want extreme sexual acts, animalistic
aggression, and even a certain size of man.
In their contributions to the normalization of sexual violence and a specific formulation
of masculinity, the Tijuana Bibles additionally reinforce certain contemporary mores regard-
ing race and interracial sexuality. In Mr. Dyslexic’s (so-named for his frequent pagination
mistakes) Esther Williams – Get a Li’l Like the Fishes Do, the titular actress lures her black male
47
Erin Barry
servant Paul into sex. The encounter occurs underwater and before she enters the pool, she
states, “I’ve always wanted a peice [sic] of black cock.” In doing so, the author of the Bible
reduces Paul solely to his sex and race. While Paul swims, Esther approaches beneath him,
reaches forward, and thinks, “A couple more inches and that lovely black cock will be mine.”
Paul is given no agency in this encounter and is portrayed as the property of his white female
employer, for whom he is expected to be constantly sexually available. His race is the reason
why Esther wants to have sex with him and his sexual prowess is further entirely attributed
to his race. Esther encourages her male servant to swim with the explicit purpose of seeing
him naked. Even with putting the power dynamic of a white woman and her black servant
aside, her sexual aggression does not give Paul a chance to consent; in fact, he says nothing
at all throughout the comic.
Curiously, when it comes to interracial heterosexual intercourse in Tijuana Bibles, the
white woman is frequently the sexual predator and is sexually violent. There are obvious
similarities between portrayals of interracial heterosexuality (though only white women and
African American men) and the Peaches and Daddy Browning stories where Peaches en-
gages in violent bestiality. Tijuana Bible Tiger Girl features the titular character traversing the
woods with her pet tiger; they come across a black man, coded through clothing as “native,”
and she immediately engages him in vaginal sex. Just as in the Esther Williams comic, the
black man is given minimal dialogue and is noted primarily for the size of his penis; after a
few minutes “he pushes her off and runs away”; the scene illustrates his lack of consent. The
female protagonist, losing her sexual partner, is happy to replace the black man with her pet
tiger. These comics perpetuate contemporary racist comparisons between black men and
animals and the sexual violence utilized against both groups gives the largely white male
audience a voyeuristic outlet to express fear about the sexuality, virility, and masculinity of
men of colour.
Coincidentally with the emergence of the Tijuana Bibles came the rise of adventure com-
ics/films/pulp. This immensely popular genre emerged from the contemporary popularity
of visual ethnography films and the historical adventure novel genre. It is not surprising then
that the creators behind Tijuana Bibles frequently pulled from these works – the voyeur-
ism of visual ethnography in many ways mirrors the “more explicitly voyeuristic pleasures
of pornography” (Couvares 586–587). These parallels between the ethnographic adventure
genre and the erotica of the Tijuana Bibles speak to the contemporary intersections of race,
gender, and savagery in compelling ways, aiding in our understanding of the perpetuation
of sexual violence.
Theorists have historically conceived of the jungle – or other similarly exotic locales – as
a primitive environment that allows “civilized people to strip away the identities that alter-
natively protect and restrain them” (Couvares 596). Adventure narratives, alongside Tijuana
Bibles, were part of a wider 1930s cultural effort to empower primitive urges in men. In
response to the early twentieth century threat of the “new autonomous woman,” and the
emasculating economics of the Great Depression, a new conception of manhood and mascu-
linity was formed – based less in the self-made head of household ideal no longer accessible
to most American men, and more in virility and brute strength (Bederman 12). Narratives
like Tarzan work in two ways – they thrust the white man or women into sexualized contact
with the stereotyped “Other,” discovering the power of the primitive, while also protect-
ing the superiority of white men over both white women and non-white others (Couvares
590–592). Adventure comics – and their Tijuana Bible adaptations – argue that the white
man can be primitive, and thus aggressive, brutish, and sexually frightening, without los-
ing his Westernized white male superiority. The Tijuana Bible Tarzan in Lost in the Jungles
48
features a white woman named Dolly stalked and attacked by a black man described in text
as a “gigantic savage” who threatens to rape her with his “monstrous” genitalia. The Bible’s
illustrator and author portray the man with almost absurdly exaggerated blackface inspired
features and a dialect that is taken directly from minstrelsy. With Dolly in his arms, the man
assures her, “Hush yo’ mouf ’ honey- ah jes’ gonna dispossess yo’ bowels.” Of course, Tarzan
swings into the panel, rescues Dolly, and drives the so-called savage away. Dolly and Tarzan
proceed to have sex, despite no known previous interaction. The savage and Tarzan are
depicted similarly in their aggression, virility, and lack of civility, but Tarzan’s whiteness not
only elevates him to the role of saviour, but makes those same traits desirable.2
Tijuana Bibles further prey on contemporary understandings of ethnicity to present new
norms of masculinity and sexual activity. The shoe cobbler “East Side Jew,” star of Geezil
in Gimme Back, is co-opted from the Popeye comics (Phelps 69). In Geezil in Gimme Back,
Geezil, coded as Jewish both here and in the original Popeye comics through a long black
beard, black hat, and the accented speech of a recent Russian Jewish immigrant, hires a pros-
titute (Yudelson). Though Geezil reads as satisfied with the encounter, the final panel finds
him threatening to “rip apart” her genitals unless she returns his money. The Bible frames
this last panel as the punch line playing off two troubling conceits – sexual violence as funny
and Jewish men as stereotypically miserly.
Artists and Models, in which a cab driver with exaggerated Semitic features rescues a model
from attempted rape, further illustrates contemporary racist models of power; the rescued
model is willing to have sex with her rescuer until she sees his face (eerily reminiscent of Nazi
propaganda) and screams, “It’s not bad enough all this trouble but I’ve got to get frightened
to death by a face like that.” This comic provides commentary on ideal masculinity, as the
attempted rapist is decidedly effete in dress and immediately flees upon the cabdriver’s threat,
but it also does much of the same work as Superboy in the Big Bet, portraying female sexuality
as a just reward. The fact that she resists sexual assault when committed by the effete man,
but accepts sex from her rescuer (despite a lack of any discussion beforehand or even looking
at his face) emphasizes that a certain brand of masculinity is preferable, while also empha-
sizing that that masculine performance cannot overrule negative ethnic stereotypes. The
problematic ways in which non-white persons are portrayed in Tijuana Bibles are not new;
rather, these booklets perpetuated, normalized, and utilized these stereotypes as a method
of appealing to an established white audience looking to reinforce their masculine authority.
The ways in which homosexual activity and anal sex are depicted in Tijuana Bibles mostly
aim at patrolling proper expressions of masculinity. Most of the Bibles reflect contemporary
understandings of sexual orientation as being determined by the act of giving or receiving
and make the argument that being penetrated is inherently not masculine. Historically and
culturally speaking, penetration symbolized one man’s power over another rather than a
deeply personal identity (Chauncey 315). The Tijuana Bible Donald Duck Has a Universal
Desire does important work in illustrating this understanding. Donald Duck is aroused, but
his pimp acquaintances are only able to provide a homosexual duck to service his sexual
needs. This duck presents as female, and Donald achieves an erection; when it is revealed that
the prostitute duck has male genitalia, Donald is willing to proceed, but states “I’m no god
damned sissy! You can blow me and I’ll stop your bunghole, but I won’t suck your cock.”
The disembodied narrator sums up this attitude in a perfect illustration of the ways Tijuana
Bibles perpetuated controlling sexual norms, offering as the moral of this tale: “A randy ass
at times is fine, but he knows where to draw the line.”
Consensual homosexual sex appears in a small number of Tijuana Bibles. In Jimmy Cagney
in Boys Will be Girls, James Cagney and his Warner Brother’s co-stars Pat O’Brien and Dick
49
Erin Barry
Powell engage in three-way oral and anal sex. The booklet does deliberate work to portray
the men as extremely effeminate. They speak in gay patois, referring to one another as “miss”
and “girl,” are drawn with feminized faces and curved hips, and wear loose blouses. None
of the actors portrayed here assumes either an exclusively penetrative or receiving role, again
pointing to the gendered nature of said roles. This portrayal makes it clear that “real men”
do not practice homosexual activity and affirms that aggressive, stoic masculine performance
goes hand in hand with heterosexual sexual activity. Historian George Chauncey effectively
summarizes this dynamic, writing “a man who allowed himself to be used sexually as a
woman then risked forfeiting his masculine state, even if he were otherwise conventionally
attractive” (315).
Throughout the remaining known Bibles, the concept of receptive anal sex as incompat-
ible with a strong masculine identity is elaborated and emphasized in the way receptive anal
sex is portrayed as a threat or response to misbehaviour perpetrated by ostensibly straight
male characters. “Blackjack” was the audience-created name for an artist working in the
mid-1930s known for his signature aggressive and menacing style of portraying male gen-
italia as disproportionately large and drawn with heavy black line weights. The aggressive
nature of Blackjack’s comics did not stop at an illustration style: many of his comics, most
of which were based off of established characters, centred rape. Terry and the Pirates in Some
Chinese Joys is based on and features characters originating in the daily adventure comic Terry
and the Pirates. In the original comics George Webster Confucius acts as a guide to the heroes
in their adventures across Asia; after the outbreak of the Second World War, Confucius par-
ticipates in the Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation. Tony Sandhurst, however, is the
immoral Axis-sympathizing husband of the hero’s true love. In Some Chinese Joys, George
Webster Confucius is reduced to “Chinese Connie” and anally rapes Sandhurst as punish-
ment for his villainy. The real punishment, according to the social logic of the Tijuana Bibles,
lies not solely in being raped but in being penetrated and thus in being forced to take on the
role of a woman or homosexual. Sandhurst’s powerlessness is furthered as he is overpowered
by the aggressive and violent masculinity of a non-white actor – it is portrayed as a double
humiliation for white American masculinity. On the surface this Tijuana Bible demands its
audience to act morally and patriotically (unlike Sandhurst) or face disempowering punish-
ment. But to a deeper degree, this Tijuana Bible does additional work in demonizing those
who partake in receptive anal intercourse – the act itself is understood and portrayed as
wrong and threatening to a coherent sense of white masculinity. These stories that feature
anal rape do similar work as other Tijuana Bibles, normalizing certain forms of masculinity
and sexual congress while diminishing others under the guise of humour.
In turn, Andy Gump Has an Unusual Piece portrays anal rape in an explicitly comedic light.
The comic begins with Andy Gump, again a character transplanted from a mainstream strip,
entering a brothel; due to a misunderstanding by the minstrel-like servant, Gump is led to
and has sex with hermaphrodite. Subsequent panels show the hermaphrodite “seeing her
chance” and anally raping a sleeping Andy. Andy Gump’s pain the next day is portrayed as
punishment for his indiscretions, particularly engaging in sex with a person not understood
as female, as he grumpily hunches with a pillow strapped around his waist and responds “Oh
Shut Up…oww” to his wife’s questioning. This story is paralleled in Uncle Willie and Moon in
“Masquerade”; Uncle Willie goes undercover as a woman to spy on his wife’s activities, but is
pursued by an aroused drunk. He takes refuge in the women’s dressing room, and is raped by
two women. While there is no homosexual activity, his gender non-compliance is punished
via sexual violence, his attackers explicitly stating that they want to “teach this imposter a
lesson, or else.” The appearance of each of the three men discussed here – Tony Sandhurst,
50
Andy Gump, and Uncle Willie – deliberately serves to emphasize their lack of virile mascu-
linity: Tony Sandhurst is overweight with a distinctive baby face, Andy Gump is lanky and
balding, Uncle Willie is both fat and bald. In the Tijuana Bibles, sexual violence – particularly
of the penetrative bent – is simultaneously portrayed as something valid to do to women and
as a valid punishment for men for straying from lines of proper behaviour and performance.
In the post-war years, the rise of pornographic men’s magazines like Playboy on the soft-
core side and more targeted fetish-based skin magazines reshaped how mainstream culture
understood pornography and essentially halted the creation and distribution of Tijuana
Bibles. Earlier magazines portraying nude or nearly nude women existed, but the appeal
of the glossy, full-colour photographs that filled these magazine pages, as well as loosening
obscenity laws, propelled their domination of the market. As these new publications and the
burgeoning sexual revolution pushed erotic media and erotic life into the mainstream, filmed
and photographed pornography continued to do the work of creating and normalizing cer-
tain forms of sexuality and masculinity. The effect of pornography has been widely studied
in the last half a century, particularly in regard to its role in perpetuating violence and racial
stereotypes. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the counterculture movement encouraged the
production of underground comics and zines, which both drew heavily from the style and
even occasionally content of the Tijuana Bibles. While not specifically aimed at the promo-
tion of Tijuana Bibles, legal victories against obscenity charges in the late 1970s allowed for
the publication of a number of collections of Tijuana Bibles, igniting a nostalgic interest in
the quaint pornography of a former era (Gilmore 31).
For what essentially add up to cheap paper flip books with crude sex jokes, Tijuana Bibles
provide an impressive insight into questions of masculinity and sexual culture in the 1930s
and 1940s. Through a distinctive homosocial distribution system, Tijuana Bibles constructed
and subsequently enforced particular formulations of masculinity. Most prominently, these
comics advocate and normalize a violent and aggressive white masculine performance.
Tijuana Bibles depict and encourage the same homosocial bonding through heterosexual
voyeurism that allows for their promulgation, while setting strict boundaries and punish-
ments for veering too far away from dictated sexual activity and expressions of masculinity.
The fact that these booklets are relatively anonymous and difficult to accurately date has
previously made historians hesitant to engage in close study; however, it is the illicit nature
of these booklets and their underground status that makes them such compelling pieces for
historical analysis, particularly in understanding homosocial circuits and their role in the
construction of normative masculinity.
Notes
1 See Colleen Glenney-Boggs, “American Bestiality: Sex, Animals, and the Construction of
Subjectivity,” Cultural Critique, no. 76 (Fall 2010), 98–125; Nick White, “Issues of Consent in
Human-Animal Sexual Relations.” Accessed 20 December 2018, njw.name/consent.
2 David Roediger’s treatment of blackface and minstrelsy in The Wages of Whiteness is of some ex-
planatory use here. Roediger cites George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup in arguing that racism
expanded so strongly in America because “blackness came to symbolize that which the accumulat-
ing capitalist had given up but still longed for.” He particularly singles out unbridled sexuality as an
evocative desire. Blackface was a way of cementing whiteness while allowing for an “escape into
the preindustrial past.” Might we understand the Tijuana Bibles approach to men of colour – and
the contemporary cultural moment for masculinity – similarly? The virility and sexuality of black
men is illustrated, but mediated through an assignation of the same values to white men just as said
white men assert their supremacy and civilized nature. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness
(New York: Verso, 1991). (Roediger)
51
Erin Barry
Works Cited
Andy Gump has an Unusual Piece. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB029.
Artists and Models. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB042.
Bovsun, Mara. “Child Bride Gets Zilch from Real Estate Mogul Edward West Browning,” New York
Daily News, 12 June 2011.
Burke, Patrick. “Oasis of Swing: The Onyx Club, Jazz, and White Masculinity in the Early 1930s.”
American Music, vol. 24, no. 3, 2006, pp. 320–346.
Capt. Marvel Jr. Accessed 5 March 2017. tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB084/.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940.
Basic Books, 1995.
Couvares, Francis. “So This Is Censorship: Race, Sex, and Censorship in Movies of the 1920s and
1930s.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, pp. 581–597.
Cray, Ed. “Ethnic and Place Names as Derisive Adjectives.” Western Folklore, vol. 21, 1962, pp. 27–34.
Donald Duck Has a Universal Desire. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.tijuana-bibles.com/tijuanabiblecomics/
dduck-universaldesire.html.
Flash Gordon On a Lark. Accessed 5 March 2017. Tijuana-bibles.com/tijuanabiblecomics/flashgordon-
onalark.html.
Flood, Michael. “Men, Sex, and Homosociality: How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Rela-
tions with Women.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 10, no. 1, 2007, pp. 339–359.
Friedman, Andrea. “Sadists and Sissies: Anti-pornography Campaigns in Cold War America.” Gender
and History, vol. 15, no. 2, 2003, pp. 213–239.
Gilmore, Donald, Sex in Comics: A History of the Eight Pager. New York: Greenleaf Classics, 1971.
Glenney-Boggs, Colleen. “American Bestiality: Sex, Animals, and the Construction of Subjectivity.”
Cultural Critique, no. 76, Fall 2010, pp. 98–125.
Hans and Fritz Meet a Hootchie Cootchie. Accessed 5 March 2017. Tijuana-bibles.com/tijuanabiblecomics/
hansandfritz.html.
Heer, Jeet. “Tijuana Bibles.” St. James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture, edited by Tom and Sara Pender-
gast, St. James Press Gale Group, 2000, pp. 656–657.
Hoffman, Frank A. “Humor in the Eight-Pagers.” Sex and Humor: Selections from the Kinsey Institute,
edited by Catherine Johnson, Betsy Stiratt, and John Bancroft, Indiana University Press, 2002,
pp. 13–21.
Jimmy Cagney in Boys Will be Girls. In Philip Smith and Ellen Wright. “A Glimpse behind the Screen:
Tijuana Bibles and the Pornographic Reimagining of Hollywood.” International Interdisciplinary
Scientific Conference, “Scandal in Culture. Taboo - Trend -Transgression,” November 8, 2011,
Wroclaw.
Landry, Donna. “Horsy and Persistently Queer: Imperialism, Feminism and Bestiality.” Textual Prac-
tice, vol. 15, no. 3, 2001, pp. 467–485.
Langley, Travis. “Why Do Supervillains Fascinate Us?: A Psychological Perspective.” Wired, 7 July
2012. www.wired.com/2012/07/why-do-supervillains-fascinate-us/.
Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. W.W. Norton, 2018.
Morse, Wesley. He Didn’t Speak French. Tijuana-bibles.com/tijuanabiblecomics/hedidntspeakfrench.
html.
Mr. Dyslexic, Esther Williams in Get a Li’l Like the Fishes Do. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.tijuanabibles.
org/bibles/TB006.
Phelps, Donald. Reading the Funnies. Fantagraphics Books, 2001.
Pilcher, Tim. Erotic Comics: A Graphic History Vol. 1. ILEX, 2009.
Pineda, Antonio. “Violent Lives: The Representation of Violence in American Comics.” Violence in
American Popular Culture Vol. 2, edited by David Schmid, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2016, pp. 589–610.
Purcell, Natalie J. Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in
Hardcore Pornography. Routledge, 2012.
Ricca, Brad. Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster- the Creators of Superman.
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness. Verso, 1991.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia
52
Smith, Philip and Ellen Wright. “A Glimpse behind the Screen: Tijuana Bibles and the Pornographic
Reimagining of Hollywood.” International Interdisciplinary Scientific Conference, “Scandal in
Culture. Taboo - Trend -Transgression,” 8 November, 2011, Wroclaw.
Spiegelman, Art. “Tijuana Bibles.” Salon, 19 August 1997. www.salon.com/aug97/spieg2970819.html.
Superboy in Big Bet. Accessed 5 March 2017. tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB083/.
Terry and the Pirates. Accessed 5 March 2017. tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB048/.
Tiger Girl. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.vintagenudephotos.com/tjbible1.htm
Uncle Willie and Moon in Masquerade. Accessed 5 March 2017. www.tijuanabibles.org/bibles/TB038.
White, Nick. “Issues of Consent in Human-Animal Sexual Relations” Accessed 20 December 2018.
njw.name/consent
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. Harry N. Abrams, 2009.
Yudelson, Larry. “Popeye the Sailor’s Man in Glen Rock.” Jewish Standard, 20 December 2018.
53
4
The comic strip in advertising
Persuasion, gender, sexuality
Constance de Silva
The storytelling cartoon strip – having propelled its way into the new millennium from its
forebear the caricature of the 1500s (Duncan) – finds itself situated both in scholarly research
(Bramlett) and in the limelight of the silver screen (for instance, as the creative inspiration
of Disney’s 2019 Avengers: Endgame). The graphic storytelling form passed into the literary
hall of fame in 1992 when the Pulitzer Prize committee presented its Special Award to Art
Spiegelman in recognition of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a biographical comic book that tells
his Holocaust experience (Park). Thomas Doherty remarks that ‘In the hands of cartoonist
Spiegelman, a conceit obscene on its face – a Holocaust comic book – became solemn and
moving, absorbing and enlightening’ (Doherty 70).
Since Spiegelman’s Maus, scholarship of the graphic narrative is visible in a conduit of
book-length publications, essays and journal articles. The evolution of the cartoony line
drawing from its genesis as a playful or satirical single-frame rendering to its current place
in academia, arts and literature positions graphic storytelling as a compelling research area
and an influential form of communication (Gardner; Ryan). The dramatic visual impression
of the cartoon shape, its humorous persona, its potential to convey meanings in minimalist
depiction and the enduring appeal of the comic-book hero are unique features that set apart
this literary genre from others. These four merits combine to make the comic strip a suitable
selling tool for the advertising community, at least in the English-speaking world.
Promotional language seeks to transform person to consumer. To achieve this transfor-
mation, an attention-getting and covertly persuasive language is necessary to attract and
grow a market (Bruthiaux; Cook; Myers ‘Words in Ads’, ‘Ad Worlds’; Tanaka; Vestergaard &
Schrøder). Advertising-language research shows the structure of an advertisement to include
a range of discourse elements intended to work together to deliver the advertiser’s selling
proposition (Dyer; Leech; Yule). Three consistent elements within the composition are:
• Thematic information, which is found in socio-cultural shared knowledge of the real

world – such as a human condition (e.g. anxiety), a practical need (e.g. clothing) or a
desire (e.g. romantic love)
• Presupposition, which is knowledge assumed as known that may or may not be true (e.g.
that there is a correlation between body shape and romantic success)
54
Comic strip in advertising
• Implicature, which is a cognitive trajectory of meaning-making, whereby a person can

inferentially derive the meanings latent in messages.
These elements are designed to cooperate as a mechanism to achieve a persuasive connection

with the addressee – and if successful will segue to deliver the selling proposition. The prop-
osition offers the promise that consumption of the advertised item will result in a positive
change. Frequently, the transformational effect of the item occurs at two levels: practical and
emotional. That is, the item can meet a need and fulfil a desire. In other words, the commer-
cially available item possesses beneficial attributes that can solve problems at hand. Cartoon-
ing, with its longstanding and widespread public acceptance, presented itself in the 1930s as
an ideal tool to deliver the selling proposition: it provided a new kind of script for marketing.
Over nearly two decades, from the 1930s, the advertising cartoon strip was prolifically
evident, serving to promote a range of products and services. In its unique promotional
disguise, cartoon storytelling added a new dimension to what is called the ‘universals of
sales psychology’ (Burridge 12). However, the fortunes and misfortunes of cartoony adver-
tisements were variables that related to the bumpy history of cartooning in the twentieth
century. The spell of disgrace that struck the comic book in the 1940s affected the advertising
industry. The eventual demise of comic-strip advertising may be attributed to objections
raised both by society at large, as reported by Amy Kiste Nyberg in her historical account of
comic-book censorship Seal of Approval; and by the medical community, who reported a link
between cartoon advertising and adolescent cigarette-smoking.
As comics literature garnered mass readership, it also attracted repudiation. Subsequently,
the regulatory Comics Codes of 1948 and 1954 (Nyberg 165–168) were formulated to ad-
dress perceptions of immoral content and detrimental effects of comics on children. The
Codes effected a decline in sales; and had repercussions for the advertising industry, both
implicitly and explicitly. With respect to cartooning in general, the Comics Code of 1954
forbade ‘words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings’ (Nyberg 167). This
posed a restraint for the advertising copywriter, as ambiguity and the pun are popular devices
employed to associate meanings that enhance the advertised item (Dafouz-Milne; Leech;
Myers ‘Words in Ads’; Van Mulken et al). Further, the 1954 Code stated that ‘A sympathetic
understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion’, and ‘The treat-
ment of love-romance stories shall emphasise the value of home and the sanctity of marriage’
(Nyberg 168). These caveats on how love stories may be portrayed diminished the freedoms
of cartoony advertising, given that romantic love was thematically popular.
With specific attention to cartoon advertising, the 1954 Comics Code included nine
numbered guidelines under the heading ‘Code for Advertising Matters’, with a statement
to publishers that ‘Good taste shall be the guiding principle to the acceptance of advertis-
ing’ (Nyberg 168–169). The use of cartooning to sell alcohol and cigarettes was prohibited
under the first guideline: ‘1. Liquor and tobacco advertising is not acceptable’. Guideline 8
stipulated the requirement of factual correctness and warned against misrepresentation; and
the ninth targeted medical, health and toiletry products (Nyberg 169). Together, these two
effectively interdicted the inclination of the advertiser to use suggestive and indeterminate
language:
8. To the best of his ability, each publisher shall ascertain that all statements made in
advertisements conform to fact and avoid misrepresentation.
9. Advertisements of medical, health, or toiletry products of questionable nature are to
be rejected.
55
Constance de Silva
The stipulations of the 1954 Comics Code are socially significant. The Code mirrors a greater
societal recognition of products whose alleged properties could not be verified as beneficial.
These include alcohol and tobacco products, over-the-counter medicines, nutritional supple-
ments and personal-care (toiletry) items. Institutional concern for exploitation of the cartoon as
a selling device was targeted at tobacco. This was expressed in state-wide tobacco prevention
and control activities of medical doctors in the United States. The December 1991 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) included three independent studies that estab-
lished a link between cartoon advertisements and the smoking of Camel cigarettes by adoles-
cents and their awareness of this product. In a JAMA article of August 1992, Samuel Broder MD
emphasised his belief that ‘the new generation of cartoon advertisements promoting Camel and
Kool cigarettes would only serve to recruit millions of adolescents to the smoking ranks’ (782).
The phenomena of cartoons as literature and its spin-off as a commercial tool for adver-
tising foreground the communicative might of cartooning: the objections to cartoony ad-
vertising by medical doctors is a strong indication. Another is the intensive market-research
activities by corporations to discover the most effective strategies to achieve selling goals
(Chauvin and Hirschey; Crawford; Hardy et al.). The adoption of cartooning by manufac-
turers like Colgate and Lifebuoy (as illustrated below) is testament to the persuasive potential
of cartoon language. This points to cartooning as a form of communication that transcends
the idea of language as principally a linguistic mode, and dispels the perception of comics as
juvenile entertainment. The language of comics, in the fluidity of its punchy minimalism, is
in fact a powerful carrier of meanings.
Narrative storytelling as language

Before leaping into analysis of comic-strip advertising, two descriptors of narrative storytelling
should be evaluated. One is that comics can be viewed as a script (given the denotative mean-
ing of script as ‘a written document’); the other is that of comics as a language (as identified by
the scholarship of cartoonist Will Eisner). While the orthodoxy of academia is a landscape of
analytical frameworks that draw on researching the written word, the comic strip is primarily a
picture-based ecology. Justification of narrative storytelling as a script or language is neverthe-
less evident in comics-language research dating from Helen Tysell’s linguistic forays published
in 1934 and 1935. Review of comics scholarship interrogates cartoon illustration – as in Critical
Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (Smith and Duncan), and Bramlett’s Linguistics and the
Study of Comics – to afford understanding of how words are used with pictures to create stories.
Scott McCloud submitted a set of cognitive principles that delineate the ideational gateways
of comics – one of which he calls filling in the gaps, where the viewer can draw meanings in
transition from panel to panel. Forceville et al. (67–69) in their study of cartooning contend
that speech balloons, as the ubiquitous element of the comic-strip narrative, are thoughtfully
selected to convey meanings. They submit that visual properties such as colours, and ‘jagged-
ness’ versus ‘roundness’ in balloon form and in elements within balloons, embody concepts
‘and hence possibly universal features of human perception’ (72). Further, it is argued by comics
scholars that the artistic creation of cartoon characters and stories, in sets of frame-by-frame de-
pictions, is to the reader ‘a writing system’ that communicates intended meanings (Eisner 26):
What comic artists do is use a writing system to represent speech, conversation, narra-
tion, and thoughts of the characters. Whether the writing system is an alphabet, sylla-
bary, or logographic system, it is a visual representation of a cognitive/ social construct,
and writing plays an immensely important role in comics.
56
In Eisner’s claim of cartoon storytelling as a writing system, it appears that an obsolete

meaning of ‘write’ (originating in Old Frisian) is being invoked. That is, ‘To score, out-
line, or draw the figure of (something)’ – as evident in the following quote from Edmund
Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. This line, dated 1590, expresses the portrait of the
Faery Queene as being ‘writt’: ‘1590 Spenser Faerie Queene ii. viii. sig. T8v Guyons shield.
Whereon the Faery Queenes pourtract was writt’ (Oxford University Press).
Etymologically then Eisner’s abstract idea of picture stories as writing is verifiable. Ad-
ditionally, it is put forward by cartoon scholars that the narratives of comics offer units of
meaning in calibrations that may be likened to the grammatical patterns of natural language.
Eisner (8) refers to the ‘repetitive images and recognizable symbols’ used again and again
as a ‘disciplined application that creates the “grammar” of Sequential Art’. In the words of
Bongco (46), the comic book is ‘an ingenious form, with highly developed grammar and
vocabulary, based on a unique combination of verbal and visual elements … Reading a
comicbook is a complex semiotic process’.
Cartooning language as a robust medium of communication surfaces in analysis of 1940s
comic-strip press advertising (Berry; de Silva). In a case study of Australian comic strips
promoting ‘Chesty Bond’ undershirts (a product line of the Bonds underwear manufac-
turers), Jess Berry concluded that representations of the Chesty character – with his ex-
traordinary muscular build, breathtakingly fearless exploits and sexy jutting jaw – created a
myth of the Australian male as athletic, heroic, heterosexual and Anglo-Celtic. Another case
study of 1940s advertisements (de Silva) reported on a cartoon advertisement for Horlicks
(a powder-based health beverage, which purportedly restores physical and mental fitness).
The Horlicks cartoon-strip story disparaged timid behaviour in boys, suggesting that it at-
tracts bullying and social isolation.. The advertisement proposed that boys should present as
fearless and energetic (de Silva 65–66).
Given that the use of panel-by-panel depiction is a unique innovation of press advertising
copied from cartooning, it is prudent to explore how the panelling convention of graphic
storytelling is put to work by the advertiser’s cartoonist to deliver selling propositions. To this
end, Pascal Lefevre’s analytical technique of mise en scène and framing is used to probe how
the advertiser’s persuasive stories are developed by sequential art. Mise en scène is the repre-
sentations within each panel (including the characters), and framing concerns the perspective
and choice of borders of the image (Lefevre 73):
Mise en scène in comics concerns the representation of a scene by a specific organization

of its virtual but figurative elements such as décor, props, and characters. … The artist has
to choose from many options for where and how to position the characters, how to “dress”
them, which facial and corporal expressions to use, and which objects and décor to choose.
By framing in comics, we understand two different things: First, the choice of a per-
spective on a scene, and second the choice of borders of the image.
The following discussion explores three comic-strip product advertisements – for tea, tooth-
paste and soap – to discover how the comic strip in its commercial costumery creates mean-
ings and personas. Analysis shows that the panelling technique is employed advantageously
to embed the discourse elements of theme, presupposition and implicature in the storyline to
create the selling proposition. While this is a small sample, the findings support conclusions
elsewhere in analysis of 1940s comic-strip advertisements (Berry; de Silva). Thematically, all
three artefacts engage the idea of romantic love to make a real-world connection with the
viewer. In the discussion below, the terms ‘frame’ and panel’ are used interchangeably.
57
Constance de Silva
Comic-strip advertising: analysis of three artefacts

Comic-strip advertising is faithful to the stylistic norms of comics – artfully mimicking the
theatre of panel-by-panel action stills, speech balloons, captions and standout headlines to
construct a visual ontology. However, the artistic and intellectual renderings evident in the
comics genre are notably absent. In the hands of the advertiser, cartooning is solely a vehicle
to communicate selling propositions. The communicative intent is to persuade the viewer
to purchase a commercially available offering on the premise that its consumption will posi-
tively transform their status and solve a problem at hand. It should be noted that problems as
raised by the advertiser are based on presuppositions that may or may not be true.
The tea advertisement ‘No wonder Dick doesn’t call’ (Figure 4.1) is a two-panel mini-
drama involving two female adults – one of whom comforts the other. Notably, the sequential
framing (as a graphic design element) simultaneously suggests both continuity of action and
temporal separation. This is achieved by blending the two panels at top by a pale wash; while,
in contrast, at base the two are separated by a white column, by virtue of black right-angled
borders at the corners where the panels meet. The separation suggests temporal hiatus and
enables the viewer to infer two events occurred (before and after). The background is a clear
space. The absence of unnecessary detail affords a simplicity that foregrounds the women
and their body language. The imagery thus effectively communicates the emotional state of
the protagonists. Due to the simplified nature of cartooning, ‘images are highly communi-
cative, easily and quickly grasped by the viewer’, and accordingly ‘hand–made pictures …
pronounce telling characteristics by means of perceptual factors’ (Lefevre 73).
The advertiser, who desires to relay that tea can effect a beneficial change, aids message
communication by pictorially embedding intended meanings in each panel. The connoted
meanings are immediately available to the reader without reading the words: the first panel,
a close-up of the women, communicates distress; the second (which captures the act of a
steaming beverage being poured from a teapot) is a scene of relaxed contentment. The sto-
ryline is one of instant transformation – a speedy transition from unhappiness (in the first
panel) to high spirits after the beverage is administered. The panel-to-panel transition is
visually boosted by the whiteness of the arm that pours the tea (in frame 2): the whiteness
connects with the white of frame 1 (even as at base the two panels are separated by black).
Intimate information of the dramatic interlude is disclosed in the speech-bubble dia-
logue. The sobbing female suffers from persistent fatigue, which deprives her of having
Figure 4.1 Advertisement. ‘No wonder Dick doesn’t call: I think you need tea regularly’
58
fun. She blames herself that ‘Dick doesn’t call’. Her empathetic mother recommends tea,
which will cure the listlessness. Implicitly, the message communicates that women who suf-
fer fatigue are displeasing to men, and action should be taken to regain attractiveness. The
solution is to drink tea ‘regularly’, as advised (in frame 2) by the mother. The viewer can
infer that the healing beverage, with its magic-potion-like attribute, restores both energy and
Dick to the lovelorn woman. The tea will save the damsel from rejection and heartache. The
visual attributes of simplicity and economy that are the hallmark of cartoony line work thus
aptly serve the advertiser.
Similar to the tea promotion in Figure 4.1, the comic strips in Figures 4.2 and 4.3 promote
items that apparently have significant potential to effect socially desirable outcomes. The
advertised items are personal-care products. Each item simultaneously offers both a practical
benefit and power to restore stability to a shaky love relationship. Both artefacts feature a
woman saved from romantic disaster by the products, which restore sexual attractiveness
and, respectively, solve problems of halitosis and body odour. In each story, the despondent
female protagonist receives advice from a caring female who diagnoses the root of the prob-
lem and recommends the advertised item as solution. The action of the product results in
romantic success. The first artefact is ‘Colgate Dental Cream combats bad breath’ (Figure
4.2), followed by ‘Lifebuoy soap: she wasn’t lovable’ (Figure 4.3).
Colgate Dental Cream is a seven-frame beach setting, with the final frame reserved for
display of the product tube. To introduce the story, a dramatic capitalised headline appears
in italics ‘AND THEN HE DROPPED HER FLAT!’ – inversed out white on black. The
typographical treatment of the headline matches that of the words seen on the product tube
in the final frame. The picture in frame 1 is twice the depth of other frames (which are set
adjacent, three by three). Frame 1 visually dominates. It shows a handsome male wearing
well-fitting swimming trunks, and in his arms he holds a shapely and smiling female clad in
bathers (who wears ankle-strap high heels). Their eyes meet. His gaze is solemnly approving.
Given the stance of the male, his bronzed skin and the beach setting, he could be a beach-
patrol life-saver.
Overall, with some equivalence, the two visually significant elements of Colgate Dental
Cream are the headline and the first frame. With respect to the first frame, an extraordi-
nary feature of the woman in bathers is her footwear. The tip of her shoe points to the fifth
frame, which flanks the base of the first. In the fifth frame, a male (head only) speaks to
Figure 4.2 Advertisement. Colgate Dental Cream combats bad breath. The Argus 16 November
1940, p. 8. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
59
Constance de Silva
the viewer via a speech bubble where the capitalised words COLGATE COMBATS BAD
BREATH … MAKES TEETH SPARKLE! are set in bold. Given that the ankle-strap shoe
is an attention-getting element and that it points to frame 5, it is reasonable to surmise that
the advertiser’s intention is to lead the viewer to scan from headline to frame 1 to the capi-
talised words contained in the speech bubble of frame 5.
With regard to the viewer’s gaze, it can be said that while there are seven panels in all,
there are attention-getting features that immediately catch the reader’s eye. These are the
striking headline, the standout first frame and frame 5 (given that the high-heel shoe points
to it). This graphic design strategy to lead the viewer is the advertiser’s attempt to instantly
relay the selling message – namely that a problematic relationship was happily resolved by
Colgate. It is possible to glean from the headline that a romantic interlude stagnated. The
words ‘And Then He Dropped Her Flat’ has the meaning that the man ‘let go’ of the woman.
In the literal sense, the man ‘dropped her’ and she fell ‘flat’ on her back. But figuratively, the
headline is emotive, meaning that the woman was jilted. However, the reader can surmise
that the relationship was later resurrected – as suggested visually by both frame 1 and the
couple water-skiing in frame 6.
At the narrative discourse level, from reading the speech bubbles of Colgate Dental Cream
in conventional layout sequence from panel to panel, the reader is privy to a conversation
between the romantically disappointed Claire and her female confidante, who diplomati-
cally advises Claire to visit a dentist about her bad breath. The reader learns that Claire has a
pattern of being jilted by the ‘beach Romeo’ type, who then moves on in pursuit of ‘a new
Juliet’. Taking her friend’s advice, Claire visits a male consultant – depicted in frames 4 and 5.
While the image in frame 5 is head-only, the detail of a high collar suggests the customary
tunic of a dentist. The dental consultant, via a speech bubble, emphatically declares that
‘Colgate combats bad breath’ (frame 5): this declaration is intended to act like a testimonial
from a specialist. The testimonial device functions to suggest that the product is authentic.
Advertisements that use pictures tend to integrate a character who plays an authenticating
role known as the Product Authority (Geis). This voice may be that of a friend or medical
professional, and even the protagonists themselves may act this role. Functionally, this device
imbues the advertisement narrative with the social normality of real-life situations where
people give advice drawn from their formal education or own life experience – as evident
in the dialogue of Figure 4.2, where the reader learns that Claire’s confidant had previously
been a victim of halitosis until rescued by Colgate Dental Cream. The advice of Claire’s
friend is strengthened by the dentist’s statement in frame 4, who explains that ‘decaying food
particles and stagnant saliva around the teeth’ cause bad breath. He recommends Colgate,
which with ‘its special penetrating foam … removes these odour-forming deposits’ (frame 4).
Under the dentist’s speech-bubble testimonial of frame 5 is a caption-like block extolling
the product benefits. Pointing to this commendation is the toe of Claire’s high-heel shoe, spe-
cifically pointing at the words ‘Always use Colgate Dental Cream – regularly and frequently.
No other dentifrice is exactly like it’. Considering that symbols are used in advertisements
to identify the product (Barthes; Durgee and Stuart; Packard; Williamson), the symbolism
of the imagery deserves attention. Principally these are Claire’s footwear, and the depiction
in frame 1 of Claire and Jack (the beach Romeo) as if he is carrying her over the threshold.
The foot is apparently an erotic symbol across cultures, and physiologically an erogenous
zone. According to a behavioural study reported by a medical doctor (Benamou), the foot
‘undergoes reflex movements’ during foreplay, and is sexually attractive due to ‘its contours
and its sinuous movements’ (44). Benamou considers the foot ‘inseparable from the shoe’, and
by association then the shoe is a ‘sexual mode of communication’ (43). Similarly, Graff et al.
60
regard the high-heel shoe as a symbol of femininity and a sexualising characteristic. Eroti-
cism aside, from a practical aspect, the ankle-strap heels in the Colgate advertisement resem-
ble 1940s ballroom dance shoes, with the enclosed back and strap designed to be sturdy and
to carry the dancer safely from move to move – potentially symbolising stability and security.
The notion of security for Claire is suggested by the symbolism latent in frame 1, where
Jack holds Claire in his arms – as if carrying her over the threshold. This image is semantically
realised in frame 6, which is a long shot with the capitalised headline ‘LATER THANKS
TO COLGATE DENTAL CREAM’. In the foreground, the couple are seen water-skiing.
In the background, they are being observed by two onlookers. From the speech-bubble con-
versation of the onlookers in frame 6, the reader learns intimate details about the status of
the couple’s relationship. The dialogue tells the reader that Jack and Claire are ‘more than a
summer romance’, and are ‘going to be married next month’. Claire’s future with Jack is now
secure with matrimony in sight – thanks to Colgate.
The organisational position of the high-heel shoe in the mise en scene of Colgate is
remarkable. First, symbolically it associates the toothpaste with sexual allure and romantic
achievement (as reasoned above); and, further, as a pointer it has a discourse-marker function,
acting as a cohesive device linking frames. It points at frame 5, which contains the dentist’s
speech-bubble testimonial and presents the product’s practical benefits. Thus, the shoe is
instrumental in creating the selling proposition by linking narrative elements. While the
emotional content of the proposition is unverifiable, it reflects the competitive strategies of
advertising. The notion of personal hygiene, introduced early in the 1900s, soon flooded
consumer shelves with personal-care items, thus posing a marketing challenge. To imbue
the product with selling power, a theme (drawn from the real world) was needed to make it
memorable and help create its unique identity.
The Colgate comic strip delivers the advertiser’s proposition via the love story of Jack and
Claire. Within the romance theme, there are two embedded presuppositions to drive the
persuasive message: first, on a practical level, that a dentifrice is needed to ensure teeth health;
and, at the emotional level, the idea of sexual desirability as the key to romantic success. The
presuppositions dovetail with the two implicatures – namely that halitosis can be effectively
treated by use of Colgate toothpaste, and that bad breath will repeatedly destroy the chance of
being loved. Together, the presuppositions and implicatures propose that Colgate effectively
eliminates bad breath and creates positive romantic outcomes. In the final frame, the words
on the product tube COLGATE RIBBON DENTAL CREAM are inversed out white on
black, typographically matching the headline: this suggests that the solution to being ‘dropped
flat’ resides in Colgate toothpaste, which holds the power to thwart the danger of being jilted.
‘Lifebuoy soap: she wasn’t lovable’ (Figure 4.3) is similarly a love story. The advertisement
comprises four picture frames laid out in a square. It is headlined ‘WONDERED WHY
SHE WASN’T Lovable’. The bolded headline is capitalised excepting the last word ‘Lovable’,
which is set in eye-catching italics. Frames 1 and 2 are followed by a flipped L-shaped panel
(referred to here as the L-panel). The individual typographical treatment of ‘Lovable’ isolates
and positions it as a linguistic fragment to headline the L-panel. This panel is spatially equiv-
alent to the three other frames. It portrays the female protagonist Jean, and visually domi-
nates along with the headline. Notably, the L-panel heading ‘Lovable’ and the product name
share the same initial letter. At left base of the advertisement is the product name LIFEBUOY
in bold capitals, along with utilitarian information.
The series of pictures in Lifebuoy soap tells the story of a young woman, Jean, who is
unsuccessful in maintaining love relationships. She has just been on a date with Tom –
but fears she will not hear from him again. Jean expresses her woes and romantic desires
61
Constance de Silva
Figure 4.3 Advertisement. Lifebuoy soap: she wasn’t lovable. The Argus 16 November 1940,
p. 11. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
to her caring friend Babs, who diagnoses body odour (‘B.O.’) as the problem: Jean’s
body gives off a repugnant smell. B.O., apparently, is a condition that destroys the attri-
bute of being lovable. Babs recommends Lifebuoy soap as the solution. According to the
storyline, the soap has power to eliminate B.O. and to repair the troubled relationship.
Jean adopts Lifebuoy soap, and Tom returns to her. He tells her that she ‘is the sweetest
girl in the world’.
Like Colgate Dental Cream, the Lifebuoy advertisement is designed to lead the viewer’s
eyes to particular frames. The visually outstanding features of the advertisement are the
headline and the L-panel. The typographical treatment of ‘Lovable’ emphasises the lovable
attribute, and associates it with the L-panel. Under the ‘Lovable’ heading is a speech bubble
of two sentences, spoken by Jean: SO THAT WAS IT! I’LL NOT RISK “B.O.” AGAIN.
Jean is depicted in the L-panel wearing a startled expression and clutching at a checked towel
to cover her nudity. It would appear that she is preparing to wash herself with Lifebuoy and
thus render herself pleasantly aromatic. She has come to the realisation that her distasteful
body smell has put her at risk of losing Tom.
Considering the dramatic portrayal of Jean in the L-panel, its organisational position
deserves scrutiny. Given that it butts up against the frame at left base, it functions as a
pointer: it has a discourse-marker agenda. It acts as a cohesive device, linking to the frame
at left base that pictures the couple in a loving embrace. The reader sees a contented Jean
nestling her head on Tom’s shoulder. While Tom’s eyes are lowered submissively, and he
rests his cheek on Jean’s forehead, Jean looks directly at the viewer. In a thought bubble,
Jean reflects ‘Lifebuoy makes me so sure of myself even when I am close to him!’ The
powerful action of the soap eliminated Jean’s B.O., gave her social confidence and brought
Tom back to her.
At the foot of the L-panel, flanking the frame of the happy couple at left, there is a
caption-like text block promoting the benefits of Lifebuoy soap. This text block is the persua-
sive voice of the narrator. It advises the viewer that ‘nobody needs to make a bad impression’:
Lifebuoy soap can keep the ‘busiest girl … fresh and lovable’. The L-panel is the significant
device that carries the principal selling message – namely that Lifebuoy holds the transfor-
mative power to deliver positive romantic outcomes.
62
As for Colgate Dental Cream, there are two presuppositions in Lifebuoy and two implica-
tures. This a binary of one practical set in apposition to an emotional set. At the practical level,
the advertiser brings attention to the problem of body odour and offers the solution – which is
to use Lifebuoy to wash. At the emotional level, the problem is that B.O. results in rejection,
but the action of Lifebuoy will bring a satisfactory outcome. While the Colgate and Lifebuoy
advertisements are more complex than the tea comic strip (Figure 4.1), the three artefacts are
united by the love theme, by the idea of sexual desirability as the key to romantic success and
by characterisations of women as defined by their desire to be attractive to men.
The current analysis and the comic-strip-advertising studies mentioned above (Berry; de
Silva) show that cartoony advertisements mimic conversations to create social worlds that
engage the viewer. The advertising cartoonist brings together words and pictures to evoke
‘a kind of ordinariness, of everyday life’ that is effective in persuasion (Myers ‘Words in Ads’
105). Dialogue and symbolism in the advertisement are organised within the conventions
of sequential art to invoke everyday issues and to make associations that link the product to
positive attributes and successful outcomes.
Study of the technical, semiotic, ontological and linguistic concepts associated with car-
tooning positions this genre as a complex form of communication. The evocative minimal-
ism of narrative storytelling and its potential for acuity of message conveyance provided the
advertising industry with a unique promotional channel in the 1930s and 1940s. Investiga-
tion of three comic-strip advertisements of this era – for tea, toothpaste and soap – as reported
above, illustrated how mise en scene and framing were used innovatively to tell dramatic
stories, and to lead the reader’s eyes to particular frames, symbols and linguistic features.
To deliver the selling proposition, comic-strip advertising created social worlds to tell of
people whose lives changed positively after they adopted a consumer item. The constructed
worlds associated both practical and emotional meanings with the commercially available
item. Analysis of the emotional meanings revealed a pattern of social behaviours that sign
what it means to be man or woman. While the discussion above focused on how behaviours
of women were depicted, the observational index suggests that men control the social struc-
tures that govern romantic relationships, and that women inhabit social spaces that are infe-
rior in rank. The dialogues and the imagery define women as centred either on their physical
appearance and sex appeal, or in mothering and pastoral roles.
Analysis shows that the comic-strip advertisement occupies no literary nor intellectual
space. Based on the data at hand, it appears to create consumerist scenarios that communicate
alarmist messages of personal failure, where the transformative power of the product will
deliver the solution to solve problems, and satisfy needs and desires. In the comic-strip adver-
tising world, the goal of women is to seek and sustain the interest of a man. To achieve this,
the woman must possess the features that men find attractive – such as vivacity, nice-smelling
breath and sweet-smelling body parts. The demise of comic-strip advertising, as noted above,
is attributable to the caveats of the Comics Code 1954 and the actions of the medical commu-
nity. The comic strip thus now finds itself relieved of its deployment in product advertising.
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5
Real men choose vasectomy
Questioning and redefining Mexican
national masculinity in Los supermachos,
from Rius to anonymous authors
Annick Pellegrin
Named as much in reference to older Mexican comics such as Los supersabios (The Superwise)
and Los superlocos (The Supercrazies) as in reference to superhero comics from the USA,
Rius’s very first comic series, Los supermachos (The Supermales), was first published in 1965
(Rius Rius para principiantes 151; Rius Mis supermachos 8–9). In the year 1967, this Mexican
comic series started being created without Rius, in circumstances that will be further elabo-
rated on later in this chapter (Hinds and Tatum 91).
Despite the title Los supermachos and the subtitle that invariably and ironically promises
“violencia, sexo” [violence, sex] and a range of other scandalous tabloid-like content, Rius’s
work in this series is more dedicated to political satire and can hardly be said to deal with lurid
or sensational matters. As for questions pertaining to gender and sexuality specifically, they
were on occasion approached by Rius in Los supermachos and can be found in later works such
as De aborto, sexo y otros pecados [On Abortion, Sex and Other Sins] and Machismo, feminismo,
homosexualismo [Machismo, Feminism, Homosexuality] but they do not by any means repre-
sent the major focus of his work for Los supermachos. Amongst the work produced by the new
authors of the series, however, are a number of issues dedicated to sexual health and sexual ed-
ucation, and the topics range from the heavily sexualised image of Mexican national heroes to
so-called “sexual perversions,” male impotence, condoms and vasectomy (héroes; perversiones;
impotencia; preservativo; esterilización). The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview and do a
close reading of the attitudes towards and the framing of male gender and sexuality within a
national discourse as presented in this famous Mexican comic series.
Scholarship has often chosen to only consider Rius’s work exclusively, leaving aside the
copious amount of work created by other unnamed authors. Most scholarly publications on
Los supermachos relate the history of the original series and its handover, and then focus only
on Rius’s Supermachos and/or his second comic series, Los agachados. In that regard, Harold
Hinds and Charles Tatum’s work stands out from the rest in its scope since in a reworked
and more elaborate version of a book chapter released by Tatum in 1989, they dedicate an
entire chapter to Rius’s Los supermachos and Los agachados and an entire separate chapter to
the post-Rius Supermachos in their 1992 book Not just for Children: The Mexican Comic Book
in the late 1960s and 1970s (Tatum; Hinds and Tatum). At the same time, however, Hinds
66
and Tatum’s work follows a clear trend in scholarship on Rius’s work in that Los supermachos’s
social and political satire and/or the representations of the complex relationships between
the USA and Mexico represented therein are recurring topics of interest for scholars (Speck;
Procter; Bhattacharya; Hinds and Tatum; Tatum; Merino). One scholarly publication that
stands out from the existing scholarship in its focus is Ken Eisler’s close reading of the series,
which considers masculinity in Rius’s work and tries to identify what the characters of the
series believe to be a good Mexican (Eisler). In short, a bad Mexican is “anyone who rocks
the boat”; a good Mexican would therefore do the opposite (Eisler 192).
This chapter proposes to explore the representations of Mexican models of masculinity
and the ones recommended by Los supermachos, taking into consideration episodes created by
Rius as well as ones created by anonymous authors who were later invited to take over his
work. What does it mean to be an honourable and responsible man and a good Mexican in
the series? In order to answer this question, after giving an overview of the history of the
series and discussing some considerations pertaining to masculinity, I will do a close reading
of some Supermachos issues, focusing specifically on male homosexuality as well as on con-
ception and birth control in Supermachos episodes created both by Rius and by anonymous
authors.
Los supermachos: a historical overview

Although new episodes are no longer being published, Los supermachos enjoyed quite some
fame while it was still ongoing. According to Sánchez González,
La revista alcanzó ventas de hasta 250 000 ejemplares, lo que implicaba cerca de un
millón de lectores que pasaban Los Supermachos de mano en mano y que semana a semana
buscaban una visión diferente, fresca, bravucona y crítica sobre una sociedad que con
frecuencia era reprimida. (Sánchez González n.p.)
[The magazine reached sales of up to 250 000 copies, which implied close to a million
readers who passed Los Supermachos from one reader to another and who week after week
sought a different, fresh, daring and critical outlook on a society that was frequently
repressed].
The series also achieved sufficient fame that there have been stage and screen adaptations of
Los supermachos (Rius Rius para principiantes 158; Arau). The film, Calzonzin [sic] inspector, is
essentially an adaptation of episode 100, the last one created by Rius (Arau; Rius “Los super-
machos 100”). In addition, Los supermachos are considered iconic enough that the Mexican
postal services approached Rius to create some stamps with his characters although the proj-
ect never came to fruition (Rius “interview”).
Rius’s original series recounts the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of the village of San
Garabato de las Tunas (literally, Saint Doodle of the Prickly Pears). Headed by a handful of
rich men, the inhabitants of San Garabato, claiming to be supermales, endure poverty and
abuse on the part of the powerful in the name of a stoic endurance and dignity that are, ac-
cording to them, the ultimate expression of patriotism and the right behaviour for Mexican
heroic masculinity, or the honourable way of being a supermacho (a supermale), as opposed
to the USA’s Superman (Rius “Los supermachos 11” 49/3–7; Rius “Los supermachos 13”
52/7; Eisler). This heroism, one quickly comes to realise, however, resembles more coward-
ice and a lazy reluctance to act to bring a change to an undesirable situation than any heroic
act of stoic resistance in the face of great adversity. Eisler, for his part, suggests that “Those
67
Annick Pellegrin
who don’t have access to wealth by either [ joining the elite class or collecting bribes], must
simply make the best of their lives. Which leaves either pulque1, or philosophy. Or passive
resistance” (Eisler 190).
The lead characters of the series include, in no particular order, don Lucas Estornino (the
pharmacist), Juan Calzónzin and Chon Prieto (a wise and a drunkard “Indian” respectively).
Never venturing too far from the village, each episode of Rius’s Supermachos relies on a
premise—ranging from the organisation of a procession around the church and visits from
outsiders to allegorical dreams and the telling of (distorted) biblical stories—that enables the
author to comment on the political situation in Mexico. Eventually, the publisher, uncom-
fortable with the content of Los supermachos and under pressure from the Mexican govern-
ment, employed other more submissive authors to create the series and censored some of
Rius’s work without advising him. By 1968 Rius had created some 100 fortnightly episodes
of Los supermachos, left his publisher, as well as the series Los supermachos and gone on to create
a new series, Los agachados (Rius Mis supermachos 7–8 & 10; Rius “Personal Communication,
18 May 2011”; Rius Rius para principiantes 161). According to Hinds and Tatum, “the reader-
ship dropped dramatically from 200,000 to 50,000 after issue Number 100, that is, after Rius
was replaced by other writers and cartoonists” (Hinds and Tatum 71).
Most of those who have researched and written about Los supermachos refer to the new
authors of the series as anonymous or unknown. Hinds and Tatum, for example, explain that
Los supermachos, “in its post-Rius period, has never had associated with it the strong identity
of a single author and illustrator; rather, its publisher, Editorial Meridiano, has marketed Los
supermachos since 1967 as a corporate product” (Hinds and Tatum 90). Hinds and Tatum fur-
ther recount that “Despite repeated attempts, [they] were not allowed to interview individ-
uals involved in the production of Los supermachos” (Hinds and Tatum 90). In a more recent
publication, however, Agustín Sánchez Gónzalez asserts that the series was entrusted “al
periodista Natividad Rosales y al caricaturista Francisco Ochoa” [to the journalist Natividad
Rosales and to the caricaturist Francisco Ochoa] (Sánchez González n.p.). While I have
come across no evidence that these were the authors behind every unsigned Supermachos is-
sue, out of the issues under consideration in this chapter, only one clearly states that the text
was prepared by José Natividad Rosales but nothing is said about the artist behind this issue
(héroes 24).
With the publication of Mis supermachos (literally, My Supermales, a compilation of 12
episodes of Los supermachos by Rius) in 2004, some of Rius’s Supermachos stories became
available to the general public in their uncensored version for the first time (Rius Mis
supermachos 1). A fifth and final volume of Mis supermachos was released in 2014 (Rius Mis
supermachos 5). These five volumes do not include all of the episodes created by Rius as some
of his original work was never returned to him, some of it was so damaged that it could
not be salvaged and some of the content of the fourth and fifth volumes is, on occasion,
undecipherable due to the state of the original work as a result of the censorship (Rius Mis
supermachos 12; del Río 6). As for the “post-Rius Los supermachos” as Hinds and Tatum refer
to the work produced by Rius’s successors, they were normally released as magazine issues
of one episode each, printed on newsprint. In my experience these can easily be found and
purchased at markets as second-hand items but are not on the shelves of bookshops while
issues created by Rius are harder to find at markets. It appears that the publisher also created
volumes compiling ten consecutive issues that could once be ordered by mail but I have
not as yet come across such volumes (perversiones 15). As such, the choice of episodes under
consideration here is determined and constrained as much by the focus of this chapter as
by access to primary sources. For Rius’s work, I use relevant episodes from the uncensored
68
Mis supermachos and for the post-Rius publications, I use the relevant episodes within the
selection of issues that I have been able to purchase. Rius’s other work on matters related to
gender and sexuality outside of Los supermachos, for their part, are not under consideration
here for reasons of space, which is not to say that they do not constitute material that is
worthy of further study at a later stage.
Hinds and Tatum assert that “Artistically, the new series of Los supermachos closely resem-
bled the original one. The illustrators (all anonymous) succeeded in imitating Rius’s simple,
flat style.” Hinds and Tatum also take the time to “scrutinize Rius’s contention that, after
1967, Editorial Meridiano sold out to government interests and became a dupe of the PRI
[Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the ruling party at the time]” (Hinds and Tatum 91 &
92). After comparing the drawing style and the interests of Rius’s Supermachos with those of
the post-Rius Supermachos, they come to the conclusion that “The post-1967 version of Los
supermachos was every bit as adversarial as its pre-1967 counterpart, even though it advocated
a more reformist and revolutionary approach to Mexico’s substantial social, political, and
economic problems than during Rius’s tenure” (Hinds and Tatum 106). While the drawing
style and the interests of the post-Rius Supermachos may not be much different from those of
the original series, the tone of the “new” Supermachos episodes is quite different as it is often
less narrative and more overtly didactic, even though the episodes may sometimes be highly
critical of Mexican mores. It is also apparent that the characters originally created by Rius
only play a very small part in the post-Rius series, if any at all, only appearing on the covers
and briefly in the introduction and conclusion.
Without passing any judgement on the artistic values of these anonymous authors’ work,
one could say that Rius’s work was a more typical comic, with a lot of interaction between
characters whereas the work produced after Rius resembles more an illustrated text—there
is a lot of autonomous narrative text that, although accompanied by images in frames, often
does not in fact require the images to be understood. Jorge Carrión sums up some of the
same observations, but stating it more sharply in his prologue of the fifth and final volume
of Mis supermachos:
Los Supermachos empezaron a ser burdamente falsificados—en el dibujo y en el contenido—,

para hacer de Juan Calzonzin [sic], en la mano y la idea de Rius amable e irónico filósofo
popular, un petulante pontificador desdeñoso de la involuntaria ignorancia del pueblo
mexicano, un insoportable pedagago de enciclopedia de Reader’s Digest que habla lo mismo
de los misterios de la maternidad que de la píldora y sus beneficios. (Carrión 6)
[Los Supermachos started being blatantly falsified—in the drawing and in the content—to
turn Juan Calzonzin [sic], in Rius’s hand and idea a loveable and ironic popular phi-
losopher, into a smug soapbox preacher disdainful of the involuntary ignorance of the
Mexican people, an unbearable Reader’s Digest encyclopaedia educator who speaks in the
same way about the mysteries of motherhood and of the pill and its benefits.]
Machos‚ machistas and other such considerations

Now that the history and the content of Los supermachos have been broadly covered and before
going any further, it is crucial to specify that the term macho, in English, has a negative con-
notation that is not necessarily present in Spanish. In Spanish, the term macho means “male”
and what is meant by the term macho in English is in reality termed machista in Spanish,
although macho in Spanish may also refer to a gender style: a macho macho is a man’s man.
69
Annick Pellegrin
According to Ken Eisler,
machismo, in Latin America, is the cult of masculinity, run wilder than even Ernest
Hemingway could ever have dreamed of. A macho is a he-man: rough, tough, hard-
drinking, proud, without fear, and utterly contemptuous of the women he subdues so
easily. The quickest way to get a knife in the ribs or a bullet in the head is to walk into a
pulquería 2, hoist a few with a local macho, and then introduce, ever so subtly, some ques-
tion of his masculinity. RIP. (Eisler 192)
Sergio de la Mora, for his part, describes machismo as “an ideology of heterosexual male
supremacy that in Mexico gets wedded to the institutionalized post-revolutionary State ap-
paratus” (Mora 7). This link between machismo and the state is one that is important to take
note of and that I will refer back to later on.
There are two ways to approach the question of manhood in Rius’s Supermachos. One
approach that I have adopted previously, as has Eisler, is to consider the link between
nationhood, masculinity and geopolitics, with a particular interest in US-Mexico relations
and the preparations of the Mexico Olympic games held in 1968 (Pellegrin; Eisler). The
scope of this work does not allow me to elaborate extensively on this aspect. Suffice to say
that rather than physical strength, the character trait that the supermachos value the most is
the stoic endurance of hardships. The character who best explains the sometimes curious
attitude adopted by the inhabitants of San Garabato is Calzónzin, in a conversation with
an outsider:
¿No se acuerda usté [sic] del señor Cuauhtémoc…? / ¡Ese era un macho a todo dar! /
¡Ese jué [sic] nuestro mero héroe…! / ¡Y pa’ honrarlo nosotros nos portamos como
supermachos! ¡No tenemos qué comer, pero nos aguantámos [sic]! / …Nos amuelan
los caciques, la policía, los riquillos… ¡pero nos aguantamos! (Rius “Los supermachos
11” 49/3–7)
[Don’t you remember Mr Cuauhtémoc…? / Now that was a real male! / He was our
very hero…! / And to honour him we behave like supermales! We don’t have food, but
we endure it! / …We are pestered by the despots, by the police, by the rich… but we
endure it!]
Calzónzin’s explanation is the key to beginning to understand supermacho thought. His very
clear reference to Cuauhtémoc, known as the young grandfather, gives us a clear indica-
tion of the San Garabato concepts of masculinity: it is defined by the ability to endure all
hardships. As Eisler puts it,
the most highly charged, ironical epithet in “Los Supermachos” is aguantador: one who en-
dures, bears, is silent, restrains himself. And its most ironical application is as a definition
for “Los Supermachos”.
In short, suggests Rius, if you’re not willing to “sweat it out,” not willing to
resign yourself unprotestingly to a perpetual hotfoot from landowners, petty offi-
cials, and anybody one step higher in the social scale than yourself—then you’re no
supermacho.
It’s not just a personal problem, either, like bad breath. You’re not only maladjusted;
you’re a menace to the Republic, too. (Eisler 192)
70
Los supermachos and homosexuality

Having considered the history of Los supermachos and masculinity in Mexico, I can now begin
the close reading of a selection of Supermachos episodes. In this section, I focus on represen-
tations and attitudes towards male homosexuality in Rius’s work (issue 27) and in the work
produced by his successors (issue 69).
Los supermachos 27, or please don’t speak against the reds

In Los supermachos issue number 27, the inhabitants of San Garabato receive the visit of an offi-
cial art critic sent to oversee an exhibition of modern paintings (Rius “Los supermachos 27”).
While the fact that there will be a cultural event in San Garabato is initially met with some
enthusiasm, most characters soon change their mind once the paintings and the art critic
arrive. First, don Lucas and Calzónzin, who are in charge of setting up the exhibition, are
convinced that there is a mistake when they receive the paintings. Together with fellow vil-
lagers, they speculate on what they might have received: stained tablecloths, the x-ray of a
spinal cord tumour, pork, marks left after a crime, representations of nightmares (Rius “Los
supermachos 27” 81–82). The only local who seems to make any sense of the paintings and
truly derive pleasure from these paintings is Chon’s mad aunt, doña Cuca Marina (Rius “Los
supermachos 27” 83–84). The art critic does not fare much better than the paintings in San
Garabato. Announced as “un señor rarísimo” [an extremely strange man], the gentleman in
question displays a behaviour and a fashion sense that lean towards the precious and effemi-
nate and point towards him as being possibly gay although this is never clearly stated (Rius
“Los supermachos 27” 79/1 & passim). Clearly uncomfortable with the art critic’s suspected
homosexuality, the mayor and his police officers Arsenio and Lechuzo seek to put as much
distance between themselves and him as possible (Rius “Los supermachos 27” 79–80, 85–86).
While those who enjoy a lower social status than the mayor are quite outspoken about
their dislike of the paintings that have been sent to them—to them it is nauseating rubbish—
the mayor, defender of what the authorities might deem to be of good taste, finds himself in a
difficult position. Despite his clear unease faced with the critic’s apparent difference, he wants
to support the official party line. In the end, however, he is unable to. Indeed, as the critic
talks at length about how this modern art that no one in the village seems to enjoy (except
for a mad woman) is not available in communist countries, don Lucas enquires “¿y en esos
pobres países no hay gentes como usted, que viven del cuento..?” [and in these poor countries
there aren’t people like you, who make a living out of tales..?] and the mayor decides that
the critic is too dangerous for the established order in San Garabato (Rius “Los supermachos
27” 90/6 & passim). He chases the critic out of the village with the final words “¡Y no vuelva
por acá! ¡Si tipos como usted hablan mal del comunismo, toda la gente se me vuelve comu-
nistaaa..!” [And don’t come back over here! If people like you speak badly of communism,
everybody will turn communist on meee..!] (Rius “Los supermachos 27” 90/7).
This is the extent of Rius’s treatment of homosexuality in Mis supermachos: it is never ex-
plicitly said that the art critic is in fact homosexual but the feeling that he may be is a source
of great discomfort for those in power. While supporting left-wing politics is time and again
labelled anti-patriotic by the powerful of San Garabato, the art critic is explicitly asked not
to speak against communism as he is perceived as a threat to national interests. After all, as
mentioned earlier, according to de la Mora, machismo is “an ideology of heterosexual male
supremacy that in Mexico gets wedded to the institutionalized post-revolutionary State ap-
paratus” (Mora 7).
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Annick Pellegrin
Los supermachos 481, or homosexuality is a serious psychiatric problem

The only issue of Los supermachos that explicitly tackles homosexuality amongst those
that I have been able to secure is issue 481, released on 20 March 1975 and dedicated to
“sexual perversions.” Without any real narrative thread, this anonymous issue that could
be aptly qualified as an illustrated essay on “sexual perversions” opens with an edifying
statement:
En la confección de este número nos han auxiliado distinguidos psiquiatras y sexólo-

gos, cuya opinión coincide en considerar que no existen normas absolutas en la
actividad sexual; no se pueden establecer facil y rápidamente regulaciones de este
carácter. Por tanto, no existe una linea divisoria absoluta entre lo normal y lo
anormal. […]
Hay, sin embargo, conductas que se disparan completamente de la normalidad y caen
en el terreno franco de la psiquiatría.
De las mismas hablaremos en esta ocasión. (perversiones 3, emphasis in the original)
[In the creation of this issue we received the help of distinguished psychiatrists and
sexologists, whose opinions agree in considering that no absolute norms exist in
sexual activities; regulations of this character cannot be established so easily and so
quickly. For this reason, no absolute dividing line between what is normal and
what is abnormal exists. […]3
There are, however, behaviours that depart completely from normalcy and fall
frankly in the field of psychiatry.
On this occasion we will speak of these same behaviours.]
While the authors of the issue seem to educate readers to have an open mind about the
variety of sexual preferences, this issue considers male and female homosexuality to be an
unacceptable psychiatric issue alongside zoophilia and necrophilia. The assertion of this
issue, quite troubling by contemporary Western values, is that homosexuality is an “ab-
erración sexual, porque va contra las leyes de la naturaleza” [sexual aberration, because
it goes against the laws of nature] (perversiones 13/1). Homosexuals are also presented
as “sujetos inmaduros sexualmente, neuróticos, niños hambrientos de amor y frustra-
dos” [sexually immature subjects, neurotics, children craving love and frustrated] and as
selfish narcissistic people (perversiones 14/5 & 16). There is no subtle message that needs
to be inferred or deducted from the content of this issue: homosexuality is presented,
explicitly, as a major problem that could partially be countered through “una adecuada
educación sexológica en las escuelas” [an appropriate sexual education in schools] (per-
versiones 17/5).
There is therefore a considerable difference in the way Rius and his anonymous suc-
cessors treat homosexuality in Los supermachos. In Rius’s work, those in power are visibly
increasingly uncomfortable with a suspected homosexuality that is never named and the
threat that it represents for the established order. The villagers, however, treat the art critic
like any other character. Their difficulty lies elsewhere: they cannot accept the pretentious
abstract paintings that the authorities are trying to pass off as Mexican modern art, influenced
by what is considered to be of good taste in the great Western capitals of the world. In the
post-Rius work, homosexuality is only really discussed as a psychiatric pathology that poses
a grave problem for the country.
72
Los supermachos, reproduction and birth control

When it comes to the question of reproduction and birth control in Los supermachos, Rius
again uses a more understated approach in his work while his successors are more explicit. In
this subsection, I turn to three issues: issue 69, created by Rius and issues 713 and 371 created
by anonymous authors. The latter two are dedicated to condoms and vasectomy respectively.
Los supermachos 69, or where do babies come from?

While in reality dedicated to a strong critique of the pharmaceutical industry, Los supermachos
issue 69 includes a long prelude dealing with how babies come to be. This prelude comes
about as two of the very devout women of the village (doña Eme and doña Casimirita) seek
to solve the mystery of where babies come from as Tomasa (wife to the police officer Arsenio)
has recently had a child. While doña Eme asserts that they come from Paris,4 the other asserts
that they are sent by God. After asking the new parents how they had a child, suggesting
that the baby came from the river like Moses did and being shown the way out for clowning
around, the two ladies turn to don Lucas for answers (Rius “Los supermachos 69” 115–121).
Even when don Lucas encourages them to turn to the content of the Hail Mary, which
clearly says “…y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre ¡Jesús!” […blessed is the fruit of thy womb
Jesus!], the two women cannot accept this and go on to ask the shopkeeper don Ticiano,
whose wife is pregnant, whether they ordered the child from the heavens or from Paris (Rius
“Los supermachos 69” 121–123, emphasis in original). Without turning his comic series into
a lecture about sexuality, Rius criticises the religious education that these devout women
received. It is indeed surprising that even a widow (doña Casimirita) does not know how
women get pregnant while Tomasa learnt about the reproductive system in primary school
(Rius “Los supermachos 69” 120–121). Rius, however, does not educate his readers on sex-
ual matters in the issues compiled in the five volumes of Mis supermachos.
Los supermachos 713, or your wife is not an incubator

If Los supermachos issue 69 is subtle in its treatment of reproduction, issue 713, released on
30 August 1979, is quite explicit in a technical way. It is also clearly sponsored by Profam, a
brand of condoms that, in Mexico, now appears to have become one of the ranges of con-
doms offered by the brand Durex, which is quite ironic given the fact that issue 69, in its
criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, starts by pointing out that most of the Mexican
medical laboratories are in reality foreign ones (Reckitt Benckiser n.p.; Rius “Los superma-
chos 69” 125–126).
The narrative content of issue 713 is framed by an advertisement for Profam on the front
inside cover, an epilogue to the issue that is in reality an advertisement for Profam on the
back inside cover and yet another advertisement for Profam in comic form on the back cover.
While the episode itself does not name any brands, it is reminiscent of an infomercial in that
its detailed didactic content leaves little space for storytelling per se. Out of the 24 pages con-
taining the Supermachos story of this issue, 20 are dedicated to discussing birth control, about
13 of which consist essentially of don Lucas delivering a lecture about the history, advantages,
reliability and recommendations for use of condoms (preservativo).
Given the heavy-handed approach to informing readers about family planning, there
is little space for storytelling or self-reflection on the part of the reader, as is even more
73
Annick Pellegrin
markedly the case in the issue dedicated to “sexual perversions.” The only parts of this epi-
sode that lean more on the traditional comic narrative side are the introduction and conclu-
sion, where a couple who have had numerous children come to San Garabato and interact
with the villagers. These outsiders seem to be there as stand-ins for uninformed readers and
are an excuse as much to provide information about birth control as to present having a very
large family as undesirable and irresponsible. From the very first frame, when the entire fam-
ily comes to San Garabato looking for information about birth control, they are judged by
Chon and Calzónzin, who make disparaging comments about the size of this family. When it
is revealed that this large number of children is in fact only half of all the children they have
welcomed into the world (the other children have passed away), Calzónzin tells the husband
off, asking him “¿pués qué cree que su vieja es una incubadora?” [well what is it — do you
think that your wife is an incubator?]. Calzónzin does not stop his reproaches when the father
states that it is not Calzónzin who supports these children; rather, he retorts that the father
clearly does not support his own children either (preservativo 3–4).5
Tellingly though, Chon’s and Calzónzin’s disparaging remarks and reproaches are for the man
in the family, not for the wife and the only time Chon talks to the wife, he does not address re-
proaches to her, but rather laments the conditions of extreme poverty in which the children are
being brought up. Even after the couple is better informed about the available options in terms of
birth control and seems keen to use condoms, don Lucas and Calzónzin continue talking amongst
themselves and judging them for the size of their malnourished family and expressing regret at
their previous ignorance (preservativo 3–4, 26). It is thus understood, first, that having a very large
family while not being able to provide for them is undesirable and socially unacceptable and,
second, that the responsibility for excessive reproduction falls solely on the shoulders of the man
while the woman and the offspring are victims of such excesses.
Los supermachos 371, or it is your moral and patriotic duty

to undergo vasectomy
Where the issue dedicated to condoms has a limited plot that serves as an excuse to educate
readers about condoms (and comes with advertising for a specific brand of condoms endorsed
by the characters of the series), the issue dedicated to vasectomy, released on 8 February 1973,
is stripped to the extreme minimum of a plot. Thus, there is only a brief narrative introduc-
tion of roughly two pages, preceded by a clear statement in favour of vasectomy and followed
by 17 pages with a strongly didactic tone, then a little more than two more pages of narration.
In the case of this issue, however, there is no transition out of the narration into the more
didactic part of the publication, but rather an abrupt shift from one part to the other. The first
two more narrative pages show a conversation between a vendor of street food and one of her
customers. She explains that she has 12 children, each by a different father, because she feels
pressured into giving in to customers’ sexual solicitations in order to sell her food and is un-
able to buy all the supplies her children need in order to attend school (esterilización). Whereas
the issue dedicated to condoms uses the couple who have come to San Garabato as a stand-in
audience to don Lucas’s explanation, as stated earlier, the issue dedicated to vasectomy, for
its part, has no visible diegetic audience or narrator. The invisible external narrator launches
into a mini lecture of sorts, starting with a statement to the effect that “La irresponsabilidad
varonil es causa de que en México el número de niños sin padre (o de madres solteras) alca-
nce proporciones alarmantes.” [Male irresponsibility is the cause of the fact that in Mexico
the number of children without a father (or of single mothers) reaches alarming proportions]
without any real transition (esterilización 4/3).
74
The narrator, throughout the issue, is strongly critical of men who seduce women and
abandon them and any children they may produce and—again, as in the issue dedicated to
the condom—places the responsibility solely on men. The narrator presents it as a patriotic
and individual moral duty to control the birth rate for fear of a famine and, for this narrator,
there is no better way to do so than through vasectomy, a birth control method can only be
applied directly on men. The narrator clearly states: “La vasectomia es, hasta el momento, el
más eficaz medio anticonceptivo y de control de la natalidad que se conoce.” [vasectomy is,
up to now, the most effective known contraceptive and birth control method] (esterilización
8/2). The narrator goes on to recommend free elective vasectomy and even legally enforced
vasectomy in certain cases (esterilización 14–18).
Aside from stressing the fact that “lo inmoral, lo anticristiano, es tener más hijos de los que
se puede alimentar y educar” [what is immoral, unchristian, is to have more children than
one can feed and educate], the issue on vasectomy, like the issue on condoms, also comprises
a more formal sexual education segment. Here again, the issue on vasectomy is more explicit,
in a scientific way, than the issue on condoms. While the issue on condoms uses technical
scientific terms to refer to the reproductive system, an entire hour of sexual education about
the specifics of how pregnancy comes about is left out of the story and only hinted at through
an ellipsis (preservativo 7/4). The issue on vasectomy, for its part, is complete with scientific
diagrams of the male reproductive system and explanations as to how it functions before
providing readers with information regarding what vasectomy entails and how it works
(esterilización 9–10).
If the message were not clear enough, with the numerous condemnations of irresponsible
parenthood within the episode on vasectomy itself, the introductory page summarises the
content of the same episode and states that the reasons why only few Mexicans resort to
vasectomy are: “porque somos muy machos” [because we are very manly], “porque somos
ignorantes” [because we are ignorant] and “porque somos irresponsables” [because we are
irresponsible] (esterilización 1). While there is nothing wrong with being manly in and of
itself, the authors clearly present using manhood as an excuse to not undergo vasectomy as
being on par with ignorance and lack of responsibility. Los supermachos in no way suggests
that any man should be denied sexual pleasure. Quite the contrary, in the issue dedicated to
male impotence (released on 10 January 1974), for instance, not only do they list the many
possible causes of and cures for impotence, but they also state that “La impotencia masculina
priva a quienes la padecen de la posibilidad de vivir plenamente.” [Male impotence deprives
those who suffer from it of the possibility of living life to its fullest] (impotencia 20/1), mak-
ing it clear that they believe it is important that men be able to engage in sexual intercourse
should they wish to do so. However, any man being “utterly contemptuous of the women he
subdues so easily” (Eisler 192) is condemned time and again in the post-Rius works.
The good and real Mexican man according to Los supermachos

Rius is not overly explicit about or concerned with sexuality and sexual education in general
in his Supermachos, and his primary interests remain more linked with geopolitics and power
relations within Mexico. The two instances of his touching upon such topics constitute
rather rare occurrences in his contribution to Los supermachos, despite the title of the series he
himself created and named. When his characters speak of being supermachos in his work, it is
an ironic and satirical reminder that masculinity and nationhood have been linked in such a
way that it has become antipatriotic and unmanly to rebel against the abuses they suffer at the
hands of those in power. He was more concerned with such uses of something so profoundly
75
Annick Pellegrin
intimate as one’s gender identity to maintain power relations rather than in gender identity
and sexuality in and of themselves. Sánchez González also sees this in Rius’s work as he states:
“Una caricatura no derroca un gobierno, pero sí estimula la creación para la crítica. En ese
sentido, Los Supermachos presagió la ruptura que venía y la búsqueda por quebrar el estigma
de aguantador, de supermacho.” [a caricature does not bring down a government, but it does
stimulate the creation of criticism. In that sense, Los Supermachos foreshadowed the break that
was coming and the quest to break the stigma of the aguantador, of the supermacho] (Sánchez
González n.p.).
The authors who contributed to Los supermachos after Rius, however, were much more
interested in questions of gender and sexuality per se. They present homosexuality as a se-
rious problem within a psychoanalytical frame. Moreover, they present it as each man’s pa-
triotic and moral duty, as a man, to be responsible fathers and good men to their partners by
choosing vasectomy, which, it is clearly stated, does not in any way make them less manly
(esterilización 12/3).
A good man, in Rius’s Supermachos, is an aguantador; a good man in the post-Rius Superma-
chos is heterosexual, looks after his female partner and his children and takes measures to limit
the number of children he has. The major difference between these two periods, however,
is that there is an ironic and satirical distance in Rius’s work that is not to be found in the
post-Rius Supermachos. The latter, while doing important work raising awareness regarding
planned and responsible parenthood, and while critical of the popularity of womanising
national heroes, nonetheless still frames these within a patriotic discourse. In addition, one
cannot overlook the overtly homophobic teachings of issue 481. While Rius questioned the
“heterosexual male supremacy” and state association that de la Mora mentions in his work,
his successors seek to redefine part of what being a good patriotic man means rather than
questioning the association between “heterosexual male supremacy” and state (Mora 7).
Notes
1 A Mexican alcoholic drink made from agave.
2 A bar that sells pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from agave.
3 Emphasis in the original.
4 In Spanish-speaking countries babies are said to be brought from Paris by storks.
5 The fact that Calzónzin himself, in the last issue created by Rius, found out that he was the father
of a grown man seems to have fallen into oblivion.
Works Cited
Calzonzin inspector. Dir. Arau, Alfonso, 1973. DVD.
Bhattacharya, Nilanjana. “Historia y política en México: Algunos aspectos de las historietas de
Rius.” Revista latinoamericana de estudios sobre la historieta, 9 (2009): 34. <rlesh.mogno.com/pdf/
RLESH_34.pdf>.
Carrión, Jorge. “Prólogo.” Mis supermachos. Vol. 5. México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 2014. 5–8. Print.
Eisler, Ken. “Mexico’s New Race: “Los Supermachos”.” Texas Quarterly, 10 (1967): 182–197. Print.
Hinds, Harold E., Jr., and Charles M. Tatum. Not Just for Children: The Mexican Comic Book in the Late
1960s and 1970s. Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 1992. Print.
La esterilización masculina. Los supermachos 8 Feb. 1973. Vol. 371: EM, 1973. Print.
La impotencia masculina. Los supermachos 10 Jan. 1974. Vol. 419: EM, 1974. Print.
Las perversiones sexuales. Los supermachos 20 Mar. 1975. Vol. 481: EM, 1975. Print.
Lecciones de educación sexual: Preservativo, viejo método para nueva necesidad. Los supermachos 30 Aug. 1979.
Vol. 713: EM, 1979. Print.
Los héroes y el sexo. Los supermachos 20 Sept. 1973. Vol. 403: EM, 1973. Print.
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Merino, Ana. “Comic Art at the Margins of Hierarchy: The Mexican Multicultural Expression of La
Familia Burrón and Los Supermachos.” Latin American Literature and Mass Media. Eds. E. Paz-Soldán
and D. A. Castillo. Vol. 22. Hispanic Issues. New York & London: Garland, 2001. 152–168. Print.
Mora, Sergio de la. “Macho Nation?” Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006. 1–20. Print.
Pellegrin, Annick. “(Not) Looking Together in the Same Direction: A Comparative Study of Repre-
sentations of Latin America in a Selection of Franco-Belgian and Latin American Comics.” PhD
Thesis. The University of Sydney, 2013. Print.
Procter, Phyllis Ann Wiegand. “Mexico’s Supermachos: Satire and Social Revolution in Comics by
Rius.” PhD Thesis. The University of Texas at Austin, 1972. Print.
Reckitt Benckiser. “Durex® Profam”. 2016. 9 July 2019. <www.durex.mx/productos/condones/
basicos-seguridad/durex-profam/>.
Río, Eduardo del (Rius). “A guisa de introducción.” Mis supermachos. Vol. 4. México, D.F.: Grijalbo
Random House Mondadori, 2012. 5–6. Print.
Rius. De aborto, sexo y otros pecados. México, D.F.: Grijalbo Penguin Random House, 2014. Kindle
edition.
———. “Interview with the Author.” Mexico City/Tepoztlán over the Telephone, 2011.
———. “Los supermachos.” (Los supermachos 100) Mis supermachos. Vol. 5. México, D.F.: Grijalbo
Penguin Random House, 2014. 271–318. Print.
———. “Los supermachos de San Garabato.” (Los supermachos 11) Mis supermachos. Vol. 2. México,
D.F.: Grijalbo Random House Mondadori, 2009. 41–66. Print.
D.F.: Grijalbo Random House Mondadori, 2004. 39–64. Print.
D.F.: Grijalbo Penguin Random House, 2014. 113–38. Print.
———. “Los supermachos de San Garabato, Cuc.” (Los supermachos 27) Mis supermachos. Vol. 3.
México, D.F.: Grijalbo Random House Mondadori, 2010. 65–90. Print.
———. Machismo, feminismo, homosexualismo. México, D.F.: Grijalbo Penguin Random House, 2014.
Kindle edition.
———. Mis supermachos. Vol. 1. México, D.F.: Grijalbo Random House Mondadori, 2004. Print.
———. Mis supermachos. Vol. 5. México, D.F.: Grijalbo Penguin Random House, 2014. Print.
———. “Personal Communication.” 2011. Print.
———. Rius para principiantes. México, D.F.: Grijalbo Random House Mondadori, 2008. Print.
Sánchez González, Agustín. “La historia y el historietista.” Relatos e historias 1 Feb. 2017. n.p. Electronic
version.
Speck, Paula. “Rius for Beginners: A Study in Comicbook [sic] Satire.” Studies in Latin American Popular
Culture, 1 (1982): 113–124. Print.
Tatum, Charles. “Images of the United States in Selected Mexican Comic Books.” The Americanization
of the Global Village: Essays in Comparative Popular Culture. Ed. Roger Rollin. Bowling Green: Bowl-
ing Green State University Popular Press, 1989. 33–60. Print.
77
6
Marriage, domesticity and
superheroes (for better or worse)
Jeffrey A. Brown
A recent trend in wedding photography are pictures that playfully expose superhero t-shirts
under the formal attire of the groom and groomsmen. Either the men are ripping their shirts
open themselves to reveal a superhero emblem underneath (ala Cark Kent’s famous pose), or,
feigning surprise and admiration, the bride and bridesmaids are tearing the shirts open for
the men. At first glance this wedding photo shoot cliché seems out of place. Hardcore comic
book fans have been known to have superhero-themed weddings, complete with full cos-
tumes for everyone in attendance, Batman rings, Captain America invitations, Spider-Man
decorations and so on. But the subtle heroic symbol under a tuxedo approach does not seem
to be limited to fans. The outfits and the poses clearly suggest the basic masculine superhero
fantasy that underneath every mild-mannered male is a superman. But uniting the symbol-
ism of weddings and superheroes is curious given that matrimony is very rarely a focus in
the stories of caped crusaders. Superheroes regularly fight supervillains, monsters and alien
invaders. They do not regularly get married and live happily ever after.
Marriage and superheroes rarely go together with any lasting success. The superhero
genre has traditionally trafficked in extreme gender ideals. Super men with square jaws,
bulging muscles, incredible powers and able to defeat any threats. Wonder women with per-
fect hair and beautiful faces, long legs and ample bosoms, dressed in revealing costumes and
capturing villains without messing up their make-up. Yes, issues like justice, morality, vio-
lence and politics are important narrative themes in superhero comics, but the depiction of
gender fantasies is the bedrock of the entire genre. Comic book super men signify a cultural
paradigm of hegemonic masculinity, and the wonder women represent a feminine standard
of objectified beauty and sexuality. Specifically, superhero stories have traditionally valorized
a very narrow definition of masculinity based on demonstrations of physical power. Or, as
David Coughlan has insightfully argued: “comics suggest that strength in the masculine
public sphere is the truest sign of manhood” (2009, 238). Marriage in American culture is
seemingly anathema to the type of gender ideals represented in the world of superheroes.
This chapter addresses the problematic function of marriages in superhero comics as they
recontextualize the traditional masculinity and femininity of costumed characters. Gender
roles and expectations change in the few matrimonial situations that do occur as the heroes
shift from public to domestic personas. The apparent mundanity of married bliss is at odds
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Marriage, domesticity and superheroes
with the adventurous lifestyle of superheroes. The genre’s difficulty in portraying marriage
ultimately reinforces the belief that love and domesticity are incompatible with hegemonic
masculinity and the unrealistic fantasy of female sexuality.
In his influential essay “The Myth of Superman” (1972), Umberto Eco argued that the com-
mercial and serial nature of comic book adventures occur in an “Oneric,” or dream-like, climate
where each story “takes up again from a sort of virtual beginning, ignoring where the preceding
event left off” (19). According to Eco, the hero is a myth and must remain timeless or “inconsum-
able” while he simultaneously appears to exist within the parameters of our time. This flexible
treatment of time is what allows characters like Superman, Batman and Captain America to fight
criminals for nearly a century while they remain in their late 20s or early 30s. Their never-ending
war on crime cannot end, nor can these characters ever age or move toward narrative comple-
tion or death. One of the examples Eco gives for an irreparable event that would bring the hero
closer to death is marriage. “If Superman married Lois Lane, it would of course be another step
toward his death, as it would lay down another irreversible premise,” reasons Eco, who concedes:
“nevertheless, it is necessary to find continually new narrative stimuli and to satisfy the ‘romantic’
demands of the public. And so it is told ‘what would have happened if Superman had married
Lois’” (1972, 22). Similar “imaginary” marriage stories were repeated for most of the major male
superheroes. In addition to maintaining the status quo of the hero’s world so that he can continue
his monthly adventures with no real change, relegating the possibility of marriage to “imagi-
nary” stories put it on par with other ridiculously fantastic tales like “What if Superman was a
gorilla?” or “What if Batman was a vampire?” In the early decades of comic book superheroes,
marriage seemed to be as ludicrous a concept as the hero turning to a life of crime.
Eco’s analysis focused on stories primarily from the Silver Age of comics, which comics
historians roughly date from 1956 to 1970. The structure that Eco identifies in superhero
comics as crucial to maintaining the mythical narrative logic that requires nothing ever really
changes also reflects the cultural concerns of the time period. In the conservative McCarthy
era of early 1950s America, Dr. Frederic Wertham’s sensationalistic book Seduction of the In-
nocent (1954) contributed to a moral panic about comic books. Wertham’s infamous claims
included Batman and Robin being a gay couple, Wonder Woman being a lesbian and comics
promoting deviance in general including voyeurism, Sado-Masochism and violent juvenile
delinquency. Faced with a moral public outrage and a Senate Hearing witch hunt, the comics
industry chose to create the self-monitoring “Comics Code Authority” (CCA) in 1954 to
ensure proper and morally safe stories. Among the many requirements for a comic to receive
the approval of the CCA were directives that any romantic storylines were to “emphasize
the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage,” and “illicit sex relations are neither to
be hinted at nor portrayed.” In his historical analysis Michael Goodrum notes that “DC’s
response to this formalizing and imposition of conservative outlooks was to retreat into pro-
ducing narratives and images that championed contemporary values” (2018, 446). Thus, the
character of Batwoman (Kathy Kane) was introduced in 1956 to serve as a love interest for
the Batman, and her niece, Bat-Girl (Betty Kane), was brought in shortly after to function
as an age and gender appropriate girlfriend for Robin. Though Batwoman and Bat-Girl
became regular additions to the Dynamic Duo’s adventures in an attempt to confirm their
heterosexuality, the rigidity of the Comics Code meant that anything beyond a few blush-
ing flirtations between the characters was forbidden. Covers and storylines may have hinted
that Batman and Batwoman would fall in love, but the restrictions of the Code and the
commercial necessity of keeping the Batman and Robin partnership as the focal point of the
narratives often made the women seem more like a threat to the men’s independence than a
romantic temptation (Figure 6.1).
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Jeffrey A. Brown
Figure 6.1 Batman blushes at the prospect of romance with Batwoman (1964)
The CCA’s explicit mandate to valorize heterosexuality and marriage, at the same time
that it forbade any depictions or allusion to actual sexuality, created an odd bind for super-
hero romances. Moreover, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the rise of second wave
feminism contributed to the comic book industry’s dilemmas about how to handle romance.
One of the corporate strategies already established in the postwar publishing market was
to clearly demarcate romance from adventure comics along gendered lines. Romance titles
were targeted to girls, such as DC’s Girls Love Stories (1949–1973), Girl’s Romances (1950–1970)
and Young Romance (1963–1975), and Marvel’s Love Romances (1949–1963), My Romance
(1948–1966) and Teen-Age Romances (1949–1955). In her overview of early romance comics,
Jeanne Emerson Gardner (2013) argues that the titles appealed to young women because they
dealt with every one of the hectic transitions that took place in the lives of young women
and addressed the uncertainty that accompanied their rapidly shifting roles from daugh-
ter to spouse, student and worker to homemaker, carefree girl to responsible woman…
and balance new ideas of romantic partnership with traditional expectations of mascu-
line authority and feminine submissiveness. (17)
Love, marriage and homemaking were presented in romance comics as aspirational ideals for
women. However, adventure stories, especially superheroes, were geared specifically to boys
and mostly avoided any romantic overtures.
One particularly interesting series that bridged the gap between superheroes and romance
comics during the Silver Age was Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane (1958–1974). Michael
Goodrum focuses on this Lois Lane series for how it revealed the era’s concerns about women
both as romantic distractions and as infringing upon the male domain of work. Goodrum
notes the prospects of marriage (both real and what if scenarios) were the primary device used
to address both romance and the place of women: “Concerns about marriage and Lois’ ability
to enter into it routinely provide the sole narrative dynamic for stories and Superman en-
gages in different methods of avoiding the matrimonial schemes devised by Lois or her main
romantic rival, Lana Lang” (2018, 442). Lois Lane’s role as an investigative reporter has chal-
lenged traditional roles for women ever since she first appeared alongside Superman in 1938.
But, as the focus of her own Silver Age title, the stories routinely “put Lois in her place,” as
Superman put it more than once. The literal “place” men assigned as proper for women in
this time period was the home, and their metaphorical “place” was subordinate to men. This
80
assumption that some locations (like the home) were feminine, and others (like the office)
were masculine became an interesting structural device. “Despite Lois’s career ambitions, she
still yearns to attain domestic ends, to be married and to take up her position as a wife and
homemaker,” (446) Goodrum argues, “Lois Lane is driven by the desire for domesticity as
both end goal and method of containment for a ‘difficult’ woman” (447). In numerous stories
Lois attains superpowers, or pretends to have them, thus telling Superman he can marry her
knowing she is safe from harm. Lois also transforms herself in various ways in an effort to be
irresistible. She tries to make Superman jealous by dating or getting engaged to other men,
including Lex Luthor, Bruce Wayne, the Devil, aliens and even Clark Kent. And countless
imaginary tales explore what family life for Superman and Lois would be if they wed, always
with some unexpected downside for Lois. In almost every case, Superman counts himself
lucky to have escaped being trapped into marriage. Through complicated schemes to trap or
trick Superman into marriage, and a number of extreme what if marriage scenarios, Super-
man’s Girlfriend Lois Lane repeatedly depicts the home and family as the ideal place for women
and as an emasculating threat to men (Figure 6.2).
Superhero comics mirror our cultural conceptions of work as a masculine realm and
the home as a feminine domain. In his work on gender and physical spaces, Andrew
Gorman-Murray (2008) notes “the construction of gendered identities and power relations
is spatialized, most prominently through the binary of so-called public and private spaces,
where women are normatively identified with domestic and suburban environments, and
men with the world of paid work” (368). Moreover, at least since the Victorian era (see Tosh
2005), this conventional binary of labor and space has served to bolster ideas of hegemonic
masculinity and to naturalize unequal gender divisions. “Hegemonic masculinity became
the norm, legitimizing patriarchal relations based on power and inequality,” summarizes
Rezeanu (2015), “associating women with domestic space of unpaid labor and men with
paid work from the public space” (11). For superheroes, the ultimate fantasy of hegemonic
masculinity, public adventuring (work) is engendered masculine and homosocial while the
private and domestic is aligned with femininity and heterosexual coupling. The prevailing
logic during the Silver Age of comics was the rather adolescent fear that marriage meant men
were weakened by women and emasculated by domestic responsibilities. This tension in
postwar 1950s and 1960s American culture between men’s resistance to “being tied down”
and a romanticized conception of the nuclear suburban family was evident in the popularity
Figure 6.2 Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane (1958–1974)
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Jeffrey A. Brown
of Hollywood’s bachelor-focused romantic comedies (see Worland 2018) of the era, such as
Pillow Talk (1959), Sex and the Single Girl (1963) or How to Murder Your Wife (1965). But, where
the confirmed bachelor of the movies usually fell in love and conceded to marriage, the
more youthful oriented comic book superhero always managed to avoid being “trapped” by
a woman. The superhero’s fear of the domestic, of being domesticated and thus less powerful,
may be humorously obvious in stories from the 1950s and 1960s, but even now it remains a
powerful organizing principle within the genre (and in Western culture generally).
The binary logic that masculinity is publicly demonstrated through strength while the
private realm belies male weakness is mirrored by the conventional dual identity of the
superhero. “The public and private sphere gender divisions found in traditional social struc-
tures of the United States,” argue Voelker-Morris and Voelker-Morris in their discussion of
masculinity in comics, “can be used to parallel the roles of the male superhero and his alter
ego” (2014, 106). Thus, the public figures of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Hulk
and so on signify hypermasculinity, whereas the private (secret) identities are the weaker
and embarrassing alternative: mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, spoiled playboy Bruce
Wayne, nerdy high-schooler Peter Parker and wimpy scientist Bruce Banner. The superhero
identity is a rejection of the private, less masculine, more mundane, self. The superman in
these stories traditionally exists in opposition to the private and the domestic. Moreover, in
most superhero narratives the destruction of the family has been the primary impetus for
the violent revenge fantasy at the core of superheroes. Superman’s parents die with Krypton,
Batman’s mother and father are gunned down in an alley, Daredevil’s single father is killed
by the mob, Spider-Man’s beloved Uncle Ben dies in his arms, Robin’s parents are murdered
by extortionists, Iron Fist’s mother and father both die in the Himalayas and so on. Being
alienated from the idealized nuclear family is a cornerstone to the superhero formula. In his
analysis of identification and superhero masculinity, David Coughlan (2009) argues that the
cliché of the orphaned superhero requires alternative ideas about families within the genre:
“Superman, like Batman and Robin, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man, is an orphan, and
therefore immediately distanced from a natural, in the sense of biological determined, expe-
rience of the domestic. Comic books, therefore, frequently show how those displaced from
traditional familial structures, or denied lineal or territorial claims, can form other commu-
nities” (235). In lieu of traditional family structures, superheroes embrace partners, teams,
and support organizations as makeshift families. But these alternatives tend to be male- and
work-centric environments which reinforce the distinction between masculine spaces of
work and female spaces of domesticity.
The very idea of colorful caped crusaders and masked vigilantes has always been rational-
ized in the stories as a way to preserve the hero’s secret identity, thus protecting innocents
in his life who may be put in harm’s way. As Coughlan (2009) describes the trope “super-
heroes use anxiety over the possible dangers to those who get too close to them to defend
the strategy of masking their identity” (244). As many of the imaginary tales in Superman’s
Girlfriend Lois Lane illustrated, if Superman married Lois she would be in constant danger
from his enemies. As a wife, Lois is presumed to be an Achilles’ heel for Superman, a glaring
weakness to be exploited. This gendered logic that positions men as the primary heroes and
women as a weakness, as victims in waiting, was fully exposed when Gail Simone began
compiling the “Women in Refrigerators” list in 1999. The ever-evolving list catalogues fe-
male characters who have been killed, depowered or excessively victimized (often in a sexual
manner) in superhero stories. The reference to a refrigerator is taken from a 1994 Green
Lantern story where the hero discovers his girlfriend has been dismembered and stuffed into
his refrigerator. The unequal levels of violence that comic book women are subjected to
82
gives substance to the idea that wives and girlfriends are a hero’s weak spot. Women often
suffer in superhero tales merely, as Gianola and Coleman (2018) note in their discussion of
the 1973 death of Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacey, “as a means to propel a male charac-
ter’s story forward” (261). Of course, male heroes are subjected to a large degree of violence,
and are often killed, as well. But the men typically triumph over their pains and even return
phoenix-like from the dead. Female characters are much more likely to sustain permanent
damages, or to remain dead… the women’s tragedies provide pathos and motivation for the
male heroes to defeat the villains.
One of the most notable modern examples of “fridging” the innocent wife of a super-
hero takes place in DC Comics 2004 mini-series Identity Crisis written by Brad Meltzer and
illustrated by Rags Morales. The central mystery that dominates the seven-issue story is
the murder of Sue Dibney (who was also pregnant), the adoring wife of Ralph Dibney, aka
the Elongated Man. The entire Justice League tries to figure out who murdered Sue, and
how. She died from burns while inside her locked apartment, but there is no sign of a fire,
or even of anyone having entered to commit the crime. The prevailing theory is that the
second-tier villain Dr. Light somehow carried out the crime that leaves the Elongated Man
shattered, and most of the other superheroes worried for the people they love. An attempt is
made on the Atom’s ex-wife, Jean Loring, and Superman’s wife Lois Lane receives a death
threat. Robin’s (Tim Drake) biological father is also murdered by Captain Boomerang on be-
half of the mysterious mastermind. The shocking revelations of Identity Crisis crystalize and
compound how dangerous it is to mix a life of superheroism with the domestic. The heroes
eventually learn that Atom’s ex-wife Jean used his shrinking technology to kill Sue Dibney
in a crazed attempt to get him back into her life. And, even more controversially, the reader
learns that years ago Dr. Light had raped Sue Dibney and when several members of the Justice
League catch him, Dr. Light threatens to go after all their families. “It’s your weakness, isn’t
it? I finally got it…” Dr. Light taunts the heroes, “I’ll find her again, you know. Then I’ll
find all of yours…. What about you, Flash? I see a wedding ring bulging under that costume.
You got someone at home?” The heroes, including Hawkman, Green Lantern and Green
Arrow, vote to use Zatanna’s magic on Dr. Light to erase his memory and to make him
more simple-minded. When Batman discovers what they are doing and tries to stop them,
the heroes use Zatanna to steal his memories as well. Identity Crisis illustrates that the private
domestic world makes the superhero vulnerable and weak, it can also morally compromise
the hero’s values.
The comic book logic that domestic bliss risks lessening the hero was reconfirmed in the
failed marriage of Batman and Catwoman that dominated the Dark Knight’s adventures
from 2017 through 2019. DC Comics surprised the world when writer Tom King had the
on-again-off-again couple get engaged in Batman #24. Subsequent stories featured Batman
and Catwoman informing the Bat family and other heroes, stealing a wedding dress, battling
villains’ intent on breaking up the couple, even attending bachelor and bachelorette par-
ties. Despite the long build-up and an avalanche of publicity, Catwoman ended up leaving
Batman at the altar in their “Wedding Special” Batman #50. Catwoman realizes that if her
love makes Batman happy, then he will not be as stern and dedicated a superhero as Gotham
needs. “You are an engine that turns pain into hope. If we’re happy… and we could be so
happy,” Catwoman explains in the note she leaves for him, “I kill that engine. I kill Batman.
I kill the person who saves everyone.” The implication is that a happy and content Batman is
a softer Batman, less an icon of hegemonic masculinity. R.W. Connell (1987) original cate-
gorized “hegemonic masculinity” as a cultural ideal that normalized manliness as rooted in
physical, economic and social superiority to women and lesser or subordinated men. Connell
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Jeffrey A. Brown
and Hammershidt (2005) later clarified: “Hegemonic masculinity was not assumed to be
normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it. But it was certainly
normative. It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man” (832). As a fic-
tional ideal, the ever-victorious Batman (like all superheroes) presents a perfected model of
manliness. According to Connell: “hegemonic masculinities can be constructed that do not
correspond closely to the lives of actual men. Yet these models do, in various ways, express
widespread ideals, fantasies, and desires” (Connell and Hammershidt, 2005: 838). In order to
maintain this fictional standard of masculinity as an ideal for audiences, Batman must remain
angry and ever vigilante, he cannot be tainted by love and/or domesticity.
Love and family responsibilities reduce the superhero’s ability to embody his masculine
superiority over others. The vulnerability of loved ones as a weak spot is a weakness the
superhero cannot afford. Coughlan describes the recurring dynamic where the hero must
ultimately remove “himself from the home because he cannot trust himself not to harm
his family, given the violence that defines him as a man” (2009, 235), which reinforces the
notion that “for any superhero, the idea of home also signifies the location of weakness”
(246). For decades, the hegemonic masculinity personified by superheroes has been required
to shun real intimacy for fear that it will lead to distraction, domesticity and emasculation.
Interestingly, the narrative logic that women weaken men also applies to the super villains.
“I’ve felt some changes coming over me since you entered my life. I’ve been reminded of
what it’s like to be part of a couple, to care for someone who cares for me. It’s the first time
in recent memory I’ve had those feelings” the Joker tells his girlfriend in Paul Dini’s Batman:
Harley Quinn (1999), “and I hate having those feelings! They’re upsetting, confusing, and
worse, distracting me from getting my share of Gotham now that the getting’s good!” In her
discussion of the Joker and Harley relationship, Tosha Taylor argues that: “Just as Batman
sometimes finds it hard to balance his relationships with Catwoman… with his role as the
self-appointed savior of the city, the Joker finds that he cannot function as Gotham’s most
fearsome villain if he gives in to his unexpected desire for a romantic partnership with Har-
ley” (2016, 85–86). The genre’s persistent fear that romantic relationships are an emasculat-
ing trap to both hypermasculine heroes and psychotic villains exposes the adolescent “boys
club” mentality that first formed the superhero over 80 years ago.
The superhero genre marks a clear difference between domestic space and private space.
The domestic is a place where the public hero intersects with loved ones and family respon-
sibilities. The domestic also suggests a sense of privacy – a chance for the hero to take off
his mask and embrace his secret identity. But the most privileged private space in comics is
characterized as an almost exclusively masculine enclave. Long before the concept of the
“Man Cave” was popularized in American culture in the 1990s via the short-lived Men’s
Movement, Batman had the Bat-Cave, Green Arrow fashioned an Arrow-Cave, Superman
his Fortress of Solitude, Tony Stark (Iron Man) had his lab, Dr. Fate his Tower of Fate,
Dr. Strange his Sanctum Sanctorum and so on. These caves and labs and secret hide-outs
serve as private spaces for the masculine public personas to find respite from adventures with-
out resorting to conventionally domestic locations. The superhero lair literalizes the genre’s
overriding concerns about hegemonic masculinity being defined in contrast to femininity
and lesser men. These lairs are essentially hi-tech and secretive Boys’ Clubs.
In her analysis of work-related Boys’ Clubs on television, Pamela Hill Nettleton (2016)
describes these clubs in terms that would also fit the superhero hideout: “homosocially segre-
gated areas where men keep company with other men and women rarely, if ever, dare (or are
allowed to) tread” (563). And the assumed young male reader can belong to the heroes’ private
realms, just as Nettleton’s viewers “can virtually ‘inhabit’ these masculine spaces, along with
84
male characters, and in a way, participate in boys’ club membership” (2016, 568). Numerous
Golden and Silver Age comics promised to privilege readers by revealing to them the “secrets”
of the Bat-Cave or the Fortress of Solitude. The symbolic importance of these private, but still
masculine, spaces continues in modern comics. For example, when Batman “first” (at least in
this continuity) brings Catwoman to the Bat-Cave during the “Hush” storyline in 2002, he
thinks: “I have made a decision to bring Catwoman back to the cave. I do not do this cavalierly.
The cave, in so many ways, is my most private place” (Batman #617). Likewise, a decade later in
the “Forever Evil” event, Batman again brings a blindfolded Catwoman to the cave for the first
time, telling her: “I’m taking you someplace few people have been, Catwoman. The less you
know about its exact location, the better… There are secrets about me you’re safer not know-
ing.” When he removes her blindfold, Catwoman simply and insightfully remarks: “Wow,
nice bachelor pad” (Forever Evil #3, 2013). As important as these lairs are for the superhero,
as extravagant “bachelor pads,” they are not a convention that extends to superheroines. The
closest parallel might be Oracle’s Clock Tower as a base of operations for the all-female Birds
of Prey. But the Clock Tower is also Oracle/Barbara Gordon’s home so it doubles as a domestic
female space. Even costumed women, it seems, have homes, men have caves.
In the Modern Age of comics (roughly 1985–present), publishers have been much more
willing to explore the possibility of major characters getting married as the logical develop-
ment of years, or even decades, of romantic relationships. But the generic logic that marriage
and domesticity are anathema to heroic masculinity remains a factor to be addressed in the
stories. The rarity of superhero weddings means that when they do occur, they become a big
event – and huge sellers. Publishing houses like Marvel and DC Comics typically tease wed-
dings for months in advance, mainstream news outlets report on the nuptials and expensive
“Collector’s Editions” are released to boost sales figures. Numerous side stories build the sus-
pense (envious supervillains) or add a more lighthearted element (bachelor and bachelorette
parties). In addition to reaching a narrative milestone and the culmination of long-running
storylines, the wedding comics appeal to fans by bringing together all of the costumed heroes
in the publisher’s universe (and often having them battle all of the villains who invariably try
to crash the party). Most notably, Spider-Man wed long time love Mary Jane Watson in 1987,
Jean Grey (Phoenix) and Scott Summers (Cyclops) of the X-Men married in 1994, Superman
and Lois Lane got married for real in 1996, both Marvel couples Luke Cage and Jessica Jones
and Storm and Black Panther exchanged vows in 2006, Black Canary and Green Arrow
married in 2007 and the X-Men Gambit and Rogue became husband and wife in 2018.
Marvel also gained a lot of media attention for the same-sex marriage between mutant hero
Northstar and his partner Kyle Jinadu in 2012. Though many of these, and other, superhero
marriages have been narratively undone (and some redone), erased or relegated to alternate
universes through the increasingly common practice of rebooting characters or entire fic-
tional universes, these modern marriages are forced to address gender roles in a different way
than most costumed adventures.
It is important to note that most of these superhero weddings in the modern age involve
characters who are equally powerful. Superhero and superheroine marriages help to negate
the conventional excuse that the average spouse (typically the wife) is vulnerable to the hero’s
enemies. The trope of wife as potential damsel in distress has, obviously, not been completely
eradicated. The inclusion of Superman/Lois Lane and Spider-Man/Mary-Jane Watson as
high-profile modern super marriages demonstrates that wives can still reveal a hero’s soft
spots. But even these average wives have often been recast as equally super powerful women.
The popular ongoing series The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows (2016-current) is set in
one of Marvel’s parallel universes and features the exploits of the entire Parker family (Peter,
85
Jeffrey A. Brown
Mary-Jane and daughter Annie), all of whom have identical Spider powers. And in the series
Superwoman (2016–2018) Lois Lane temporarily assumed Superman’s powers and carried on
his heroic mission. All of the other superheroine wives (e.g. Storm, Phoenix, Black Canary,
Jessica Jones) are equal to, or more powerful than, their superhero husbands. These super-
couples are partners in adventuring, they are equals in their public roles as costumed heroes.
The super-powered wives allow the stories to avoid the image of women as merely damsels
in distress. In fact, several of the stories about these super-couples intentionally reverse the
gender roles of who can be held captive and who can be a rescuer. For example, at the con-
clusion of the first issue of the Green Arrow and Black Canary series (2007–2010) that immedi-
ately follows their wedding special (Everyone Who’s Anyone in the DCU Will Be There!), it is
revealed that Green Arrow has been kidnapped by Amazons and is being held on the myth-
ical island of Themyscira. Naked, except for a loin cloth, and covered in bloody scrapes and
bruises, Green Arrow is trapped in a suspended cage while dozens of Amazons thrust their
spears at him through the bars to try to silence him. “Yeah,” this husband-in-distress taunts
them, “I’m just telling you, when my wife finds out about this… You big bitches are gonna
be in some very deep @#$%!” And, of course, in the second issue Black Canary does come
to rescue Green Arrow and trounces countless Amazons in the process. For super-couples,
either of them can be the knight in shining-armor or the person-in-distress. Modern equals
in marriage and super powers means being equal in the public realm of heroism and the
mundanity of the domestic sphere.
When both partners are super the distance between the public and private realms shifts.
Domestic spaces are depicted as unnatural to both male and female heroes, and the domestic
also becomes less removed from the world of exciting adventures. As befits the fantasti-
cal science fiction of superheroes, even mundane tasks often become a rousing activity. In
Mr. and Mrs. X #6 (2018) when Rogue and Gambit throw a cocktail party in their penthouse
shortly after getting married, many of their mutant colleagues from the X-Men attend. But
just before their guests arrive the Thieves Guild crash into the apartment and threaten to
kill Gambit (Remy LeBeau). Rogue is more concerned about the living room getting messy
than about the death threats: “Not in this house, Remy. I spent too long gettin’ it ready.
You take this nonsense outside.” In fact, Rogue is eager to stop her party prepping and
switch to beating up bad guys. When Gambit asks if she wants to join him on the roof for
the fight, Rogue quickly claims: “Wild horses couldn’t stop me.” Similarly, in Jessica Jones
#3 (2018), the supervillain Lone Shark punches his way into Jess and Luke Cage’s apartment
while they are preparing a birthday party for their five-year-old daughter. Jessica and Luke
trade wall-shattering punches with the mutated shark-man while her inner narration thinks:
“I don’t want to kill this guy on my kid’s birthday. Plus, that will make an even bigger mess.”
Humorously, the villain notices the decorations and stammers: “Are you trying to throw a
birthday party for your kid? – Oh Man, I’m sorry… It’s a real jerk that ruins a kid’s birthday
party.” The heroes decide to let him go and clean up for the party instead of fighting any
longer (Figure 6.3).
The general equality of the super-couples in the public/work/masculine realm of costumed
adventuring also allows the stories to explore a relative equality between the characters in
the private/domestic/feminine environment of the home. Both the super husbands and the
wonder wives are shown begrudgingly tackling mundane tasks like making meals, grocery
shopping and folding laundry. The implication of these modern comic book m arriages is
clear: the world of superheros is no longer a male-only domain, and the home is no lon-
ger a feminine environment. This sharing of heroic and domestic responsibilities is clearest
when the super-couple have super children. When children are included in the stories they
86
Figure 6.3 Mr. and Mrs. X #6 (2018)
typically fall into two categories: either they are normal kids and thus an extreme source
of vulnerability, or they are super powered and merely need guidance to learn how to pro-
tect themselves. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage’s unpowered daughter, Danielle, has been kid-
napped by Skrulls and rescued by her dad, and she has been used as a lure by Kilgrave (aka
The Purple Man) only to be saved by her mom. Conversely, super-powered children like
Superboy ( Jonathan Kent) may still be a cause for parental concern but they are often shown
to be perfectly capable of protecting themselves, and even rescuing their parents on occasion.
The marriage of Scott Free (aka Mister Miracle) and Big Barda (two escapees from the
supremely evil world of Darkseid) has been humorously atypical since the couple wed in
Mister Miracle #18 in 1974. Scott is the central character of their stories, an incredible es-
cape artist, but Barda is clearly marked as the tougher and more bloodthirsty of the pair.
Barda towers over her adoring husband by at least a foot, she is extremely muscular and has
super human strength. Mister Miracle escapes things, Barda smashes them. In other words,
Barda is coded as the more masculine of the couple. She is more at home on a battlefield
than in a kitchen. In Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ award-winning miniseries Mister Miracle
(2017–2018) juxtaposes Scott and Barda’s private life, with their roles as military leaders for
the armies of New Genesis in a war against Apocalypse. The couple commute between their
California condo and the alien star system via a “Boom Tube,” though on occasion some of
the other New Gods come to visit them in their home. The series mocks the incompatibility
of super-heroism with mundane domestic spaces as colorful demi-gods are forced to squeeze
onto a small sofa with Big Barda in front of a veggie platter. The couple casually talk about
remodeling the condo while they kill their way through guarded corridors on their way to
Orion. After Barda gives birth to the couple’s first child midway through the series, Scott
and Barda take turns leading their army against Darkseid while the other stays home to care
for baby Jacob. Superhero job sharing. They often discuss over the phone mundane, but
important, parenting things like pediatric appointments, feeding schedules, poop color and
first steps while the other is mid-battle. When Darkseid offers to end the conflict that has
taken millions of lives in exchange for custody of the one-year-old Jacob, Scott and Barda are
devastated. The fear of losing their child motivates Mister Miracle and Big Barda to do the
impossible and kill Darkseid. Pretending to go along with Darkseid’s wishes so that he gives
up his deadly “omega beams” (laser eyes), Scott then breaks the deal and fatally stabs the evil
god with a special knife that he snuck into the room inside a veggie tray.
87
Jeffrey A. Brown
Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows (written by Gerry Conway and illus-
trated by Ryan Stegman) indulges in the premise of a superhero family that fights together
against all manner of villains. Peter and Mary Jane’s daughter, Anna May, inherited her
father’s spider powers. And Peter was able to adapt a power syphoning piece of technology
so that he and Mary Jane could share powers. When Anna May is eight-year-old the preco-
cious youngster begins to fight crime alongside her parents, Spider-Man and Spiderette, as
Spiderling. From the very beginning, the series clarifies that the entire Spider family is the
focus and that Spider-Man is learning to think about his role as hero, husband and father in
a different way. In other words, Spider-Man, and by extension his readers, have to revise the
genre’s established conception of hegemonic masculinity. At the home, Peter and Mary Jane
are shown taking turns making meals, cleaning and taking Anna May to school. But even
more importantly, when he is in costume as Spider-Man (the public realm traditionally asso-
ciate with hegemonic masculinity), the dialogue and monologues reveal a change in perspec-
tive necessitated by a super family. In the first issue the Spiders go up against the Mole Man
and his underground minions, and as Spiderette leaps into the fight alongside her husband,
she thinks: “Peter has a hyperactive responsibility gene. Sometimes he forgets he isn’t alone.
We share this life together. All of us.” When Spider-Man worries about Mary Jane possibly
getting hurt in the fight, she reminds him: “It’s about us. You’re not a solo act anymore. You
haven’t been since we got married. Look, I get it. You’re a guy. You think it is your role to
keep me safe. Maybe that was true once. Not anymore… certainly not since Annie.” Then, as
the first issue closes with Annie in the clutches of the villain, Peter thinks to himself: “Mary
Jane was right. What we have together. It isn’t about MJ or Peter, not anymore. But it isn’t
about Mr. and Mrs. Parker as a couple, either. It’s about our family. It’s about our daughter.
It’s about Annie.” Of course, Peter still tries to protect his family, but they also protect him.
Fighting bad guys becomes the same as “family fun night,” and the Parkers share a love,
closeness and appreciation for each other because they support one another. Renew Your Vows
shows that including the domestic realm, including a family, does not mean a hero is less
heroic or less masculine (Figure 6.4).
Though the superhero genre has served as an effective analogy for male adolescence for
most of its history, the inclusion of marriages and families in modern stories allows the basic
formula to serve as a metaphor for other developmental milestones. The adolescent male
power fantasy of ripping open one’s shirt to reveal the superman underneath, or to be bitten
by a radioactive spider, doused in just the right mix of chemicals and lightning, or granted
Figure 6.4 The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows (2017)
88
powers by an ancient wizard is still a potent idea of masculine transformation. But, as a

wish-fulfilling fantasy, this traditional definition of masculinity remains very narrow. After
over 80 years, superhero comics are branching out to grapple with life changes beyond just
gender and puberty. Parenting, domestic responsibilities, mid-life crises, retirement, disabil-
ities and other life milestones can be explored through the symbolic world of superheroes.
Superheroes in different situations, like in families, require a rethinking or at least a reflection
on basic social assumptions about gender and responsibilities.
Works Cited
Connell, R. W. Gender and Power. Allen and Unwin Press, 1987.
Connell, R. W. and Messerschmidt, James W. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”
Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829–859.
Coughlan, David. “The Naked Hero and Model Man: Costumed Identity in Comic Book Narratives,”
in Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essay on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home, edited
by Lisa M. Detora, McFarland Press, 2009, pp. 234–252.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press,
1979.
Gardner, Jeanne Emerson. “She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in
American Romance Comics, 1947–1954.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2013,
pp. 16–24.
Gianola, Gabriel and Coleman, Janine. “The Gwenaissance: Gwen Stacy and the Progression of Women
in Comics,” in Gender and the Superhero Narrative, edited by Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott, and
Philip Smith, University Press of Mississippi, 2018, pp. 251–284.
Goodrum, Michael. “‘Superman Believes a Wife’s Place Is in the Home’: Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois
Lane and the Representation of Women.” Gender & History, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 442–464.
Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Masculinity and the Home: A Critical Review and Conceptual
Framework.” Australian Geographer, vol. 39, no. 3, 2008, pp. 367–379.
Nettleton, Pamela Hill. “No Girls Allowed: Television Boys’ Clubs as Resistance to Feminism.” Tele-
vision & New Media, vol. 17, no. 7, 2016, pp. 563–578.
Rezeanu, Catalina-lonela. “The Relationship between Domestic Space and Gender Identity: Some
Signs of Emergence of Alternative Domestic Femininity and Masculinity.” Journal If Comparative
Research in Anthropology and Sociology, vol. 6, no. 2, 2015, pp. 9–28.
Taylor, Tosha. “Kiss with a Fist: The Gendered Power Struggle of the Joker and Harley Quinn.” in
The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, edited by Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert
G. Weiner, University Press of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 82–93.
Tosh, John. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essay on Gender, Family and Empire.
Pearson Longman, 2005.
Voelker-Morris, Robert and Voelker-Morris, Julie. “Stuck in Tights: Mainstream Superhero Comics’
Habitual Limitations on Social Constructions of Male Superheroes.” Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 101–117.
Wertham, Frederick. Seduction of the Innocent. Reinhardt Press, 1954.
89
7
“Is that a monster between
your legs or are ya just
happy to see me?”
Sex, subjectivity, and the superbody
in the Marvel Swimsuit Special
Anna F. Peppard
In an essay originally published in 1994 and reprinted in 2003, Scott Bukatman argues that
superhero comics “present body narratives, bodily fantasies, that incorporate (incarnate) ag-
grandizement and anxiety, mastery and trauma,” offering “a corporeal, rather than a cognitive,
mapping of the subject into a cultural system” (49, emphasis in original). Within the tremen-
dous growth of comics scholarship since the turn of the century, a handful of scholars have
followed Bukatman’s lead in embracing the dramatic spectacle of the superhero body—or
“superbody”—as a key aspect of the superhero genre’s meaning and value.1 Several recent
books—including Scott Jeffery’s The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Super-
human, Transhuman, Post/Human, Larrie Dudenhoeffer’s Anatomy of the Superhero Film, and
Wendy Haslem, Elizabeth MacFarlane, and Sarah Richardson’s edited collection Superhero
Bodies: Identity, Materiality, Transformation—focus specifically on the superbody as a locus of
meaning, one which reflects and even shapes the conventions, style, and defining cultural
conflicts of superhero stories.
Certainly, reading the superbody as a text can help us investigate the mechanics of the
superhero genre’s famous sexism. As many scholars have argued, the superhero genre’s
typical hypermasculinization of male superbodies and hypersexualization of female su-
perbodies highlights its privileging of the male gaze and reification of misogynist and pa-
triarchal gender norms (see Avery-Natale, Behm-Morawitz and Pennell, Brown, Cocca,
Heinecken). Numerous scholars have also explored how superheroes have historically
embodied restrictive cultural prejudices related to disability, sexuality, and race, among
other dynamics (see Alaniz, Fawaz, Whaley). Reading the superbody as a text can also,
however, complicate deeply held cultural beliefs. In their introduction to Superhero Bod-
ies, Haslem, MacFarlane, and Richardson mobilize the embodiment feminism of Judith
Butler and Elizabeth Grosz as well as Daniel Punday’s theory of “corporeal narratology”
to argue that embracing the textuality of the superbody can challenge the mind/body
90
dualism that continues to limit our imagining of the actual and potential meaning of all
types of bodies. The superhero genre, Haslem, MacFarlane, and Richardson argue, not
only “enacts… the body as cultural construction and the body as a site of narrative me-
diation” but also pushes these concepts “to the limits of possibility.” The comics form,
wherein “anything that can be drawn can be believed” (Scott and Fawaz 201), contributes
to the superbody’s ability to both concretize cultural norms and undermine them. The
“amplification through simplification” that Scott McCloud identifies as essential to the
power of cartooning (30) enables “stereotype and fixity” (Gateward and Jennings 2) even
as “[t]he expansive representational capacity of the [comics] medium queers it,” enabling
“the depiction of a vast array of nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality” (Scott
and Fawaz 201).
In this chapter, I use the somewhat unlikely example of the Marvel Swimsuit Special to
highlight and unpack the contradictory—and often coextensive—ability of the comic book
superbody to communicate sexist and subversive messages. Spurred by the rise of the super-
star artist and the collector boom (and bust) of the 1990s, the period from the early 1990s
to the early 2000s saw most publishers of American superhero comic books—with the no-
table exception of DC Comics—produce some form of swimsuit or lingerie special. These
specials are generally quite similar; each one consists of full-page pinups of superheroes—
usually, generously endowed female superheroes—striking provocative poses in bathing suits
and underwear. At first glance, the appeal of these specials might seem obvious, their images
somewhat redundant; though mainstream superheroes almost never appear naked,2 the con-
vention of the skin-tight superhero costume means they are always suggestively so. And yet,
superheroes are also famously prudish. The abandonment of the Comic Book Code Author-
ity has not meaningfully transformed conventions wherein the same miraculous spandex
costumes that enable the individual articulation of female superheroes’ always-hard breasts
and the detailed striations of male superheroes’ always-flexed muscles possess the even-more-
miraculous ability to never become unglued from women’s nipples or reveal the shape of
men’s sex organs. The actual business and diversity of sexuality remain even more invisible.
As Richard Harrison puts it: “for most of the history of superhero comics… erotic need,
and the tensions, sorrows, and ecstasies it brings, is always offstage—gestured to, but never
brought into the light” (157).
The Marvel Swimsuit Special,3 which was produced during the era of the Comics Code but
was printed without its seal of approval, does not fully reject these conventions; although
female nipples and male packages are often visible under skimpy string bikini tops and briefs,
breasts and lower extremities are never fully exposed. Marvel Swimsuit does, however, com-
plicate the superhero genre’s traditional prudishness and reification of gender norms. Though
the five issues of Marvel Swimsuit produced between 1991 and 1995 do not lack for buxom
“Bad Girls,” they are also the only swimsuit or lingerie specials from the period to feature
nearly equal numbers of female and male pinups.4 In addition, whereas most other swimsuit
and lingerie specials feature newly created characters with relatively little cultural baggage,
Marvel Swimsuit presents many decades-old characters as newly sexual. For these reasons,
Marvel Swimsuit offers a vital opportunity to consider the still-neglected complexity of super-
bodies as subjects and objects of desire. Through an analysis of representative images from all
five specials, this chapter argues that by eroticizing recognizable mainstream superheroes and
stripping them of (most) narrative context and clothing, Marvel Swimsuit uniquely exposes the
gender and sexual ideologies and tensions superheroes do—or might—graphically embody,
and the implications of that embodiment.
91
Anna F. Peppard
Normalizing tendencies
Though all of Marvel Swimsuit’s covers and most of its pinups are overtly erotic, a veil of
parody variously diffuses and intensifies the subversive potential of this eroticism. As the
small print on the credits page of the first issue states, “This publication is a parody of
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED,” specifically, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which began
publishing in 1964 but had its most popular issue upon its 25th anniversary in 1989. In
keeping with this parodic tone, each pinup is accompanied by a self-consciously corny,
often double entendre-laden caption; the title for this chapter is taken from the caption
for Michael Bair’s pinup of Hellstrom from Marvel Swimsuit #1, wherein the Son of Satan’s
tanned, muscular thighs are, indeed, stretched around the body of a scaly aquatic monster.
Yet different images employ parody in different ways, toward different ends. Many pinups
reflect the house style of the era. Following the lead of superstar artists such as Jim Lee and
Rob Liefeld, superhero comics from the early to mid-1990s privileged thin, detailed line
work and especially excessive exaggerations of male muscles and female sexual character-
istics. Indeed, inasmuch as it consists solely of gratuitous pinups and was launched a year
before many of Marvel’s most popular artists would leave the company to co-found the
aptly named Image Comics, Marvel Swimsuit can be understood as a pinnacle of Marvel’s
embrace of the stylistic excess that would soon define the Image brand. Each issue of Marvel
Swimsuit also, however, features a substantial diversity of creative styles. For instance, the
first issue—whose official title is Marvel Illustrated: Swimsuit #1—features pinups by Lee,
Liefeld, and fellow Image co-founders Mark Silveresti and Whilce Portacio as well as a
photo realist-style pinup by Joe Jusko, a self-described “retro”-style pinup by Joe Sinott,
and pinups in the distinctive styles of Mike Mignola, John Romita Jr., and Kevin Nowlan,
among others. This stylistic diversity means that analyzing Marvel Swimsuit’s superbodies
requires careful attention to who or what is the subject or object of parody, in general, and
within specific images.
Starting with the general: despite and even within Marvel Swimsuit’s diversity of styles
and seeming embrace of equal opportunity eroticism, female superheroes commonly bear
the brunt of sexual objectification. Almost without fail, Marvel Swimsuit obeys conventions
of representation in which male superheroes are much larger and more muscular than their
female counterparts. In addition to reifying patriarchal gender norms, this discrepancy pres-
ents male sexuality as more strongly associated with power and agency. In addition, male
superheroes are often positioned in the background admiring the female superheroes who are
most often positioned in the foreground as the central subjects—or, more appropriately, the
central objects—of the tableau. In several instances, including Tristan Shane’s pinup of Ghost
Rider from Marvel Swimsuit #1 as well as Steven Butler’s pinup of Silver Sable and Sandman
from Marvel Swimsuit #3, the male character’s body is present in name only. In Shane’s im-
age, Ghost Rider reclines on a beach towel in the form of a flaming skeleton, and in Butler’s
image, Silver Sable strikes an erotic pose in the foreground while Sandman is positioned
behind her in the form of a sandcastle, his only human feature being his ogling face. As such,
even when they include male superheroes, most of Marvel Swimsuit’s pinups reflect Laura
Mulvey’s famous observations about the representation of gender in classical Hollywood
cinema, wherein women embody “to-be-looked-at-ed-ness” while “the male figure cannot
bear the burden of sexual objectification” (12). Writing about classical Western art, John
Berger condenses this argument into the axiom “men act and women appear” (47, emphasis in
original), while Steve Neale, writing about action movies, rephrases it as, “[w]here women
are [typically] investigated, men are tested” (16).
92
Moreover, while Marvel Swimsuit commonly uses humor to deflect erotic attention away
from the male body, it rarely uses humor to meaningfully contest the conventional objecti-
fication of female bodies; most of the time, Marvel Swimsuit’s humor either excludes female
superheroes or targets them. For instance, the main joke of Darick Robertson’s pinup of the
superhero team the New Warriors in Marvel Swimsuit #4 is the fact that the male team mem-
bers are using the kinetic force-empowered Speedball as a volleyball. Female team members
Turbo and Firestar, posing seductively for the viewer (or “for the camera”) in the foreground
while the men play carelessly behind them, do not meaningfully contribute to this joke.
Although there is also humor in the male teammates’ seeming obliviousness of Turbo and
Firestar’s erotic display, this joke is decidedly gender normative, boiling down to a version
of “boys will be boys” that exploits superhero comics’ conventional sexualization of women
(or girls, since Firestar is a teenager) far more than it questions it. In Rob Liefeld’s pinup of
the superhero team X-Force from Marvel Illustrated #1, the joke is even more directly at the
expense of the female superhero (Figure 7.1).
In Liefeld’s pinup, male superheroes Cable, Cannonball, and Rictor are positioned in the
background reacting to the erotic display of their female teammate Boom-Boom, who poses
in the foreground wearing what the caption assures us is a “string bikini.” To the extent that
Boom-Boom’s erotic display is capable of un-manning her male teammates—who are, with
the exception of the appreciatively smiling Cable, visibly upset and/or aghast—it could be
considered empowering. As Richard Reynolds observes, within a majority of mainstream
superhero comics, “[female] [s]exuality is simultaneously presented—from the male point
of view—in all its tempting erotic trappings—and then controlled, or domesticated, by a
simple denial of its power and appeal” (80). Yet the composition of this pinup clearly privi-
leges male subjectivity and the male gaze; readers might chuckle at Cannonball and Rictor’s
teenage angst, yet the butt of the joke is quite obviously Boom-Boom, and specifically,
Boom-Boom’s butt, which is exposed not only to her similarly teenaged teammates but also
her adult mentor Cable, whose appreciation is problematic at best, predatory at worst.
Where female superheroes are included in the joke, a postfeminist logic tends to pre-
vail. Stephanie Harzewski observes that the postfeminist culture of the 1980s and 1990s
frequently operated “through ‘stylistic alibi’ or irony” (9). This irony, Imelda Whelehan
argues, frequently “amounts to a reclamation of a pre-feminist image.” “Within many post-
feminist displays of the female body,” Whelehan writes, “any objections we might feel are
Figure 7.1 Rob Liefeld’s pinup of X-Force from Marvel Illustrated #1 (1991)
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Anna F. Peppard
set up as contradictory because we are supposed to ‘know’ that this is ironic and therefore
not exploitative” (147). Angela McRobbie concurs that postfeminist culture frequently uses
irony to excuse the objectification of female bodies under the assumption that this newly
empowered generation of girls and women is capable of embracing objectification as a
“choice and for [their] own enjoyment” (33). She-Hulk’s second solo series, The Sensational
She-Hulk (1989–1994), in which the titular cousin of Bruce Banner is transformed into a
sexier, fashion-conscious but also self-aware and occasionally self-reflexive character who
often “breaks the fourth wall” to speak directly to the reader, makes her an emblematic
postfeminist superhero. Although She-Hulk’s self-awareness allows her to address and even
criticize her own objectification, such critiques are routinely undercut by the character’s
enthusiasm for self-objectification. As often as she protests the sexism informing her de-
piction, She-Hulk willingly poses in revealing lingerie and Playboy bunny costumes; in
one infamous scene, she even jumps rope “in the nude” for four full pages in an effort to
boost sales.5
Several Marvel Swimsuit pinups featuring She-Hulk make use of the character’s pre-
established self-awareness. In a pinup by George Pérez for Marvel Illustrated #1, for instance,
She-Hulk plays up (or with) her own objectification, doing aerobics on the edge of a cliff
while overloaded with feminine jewelry. The subversive potential of this image is located in
She-Hulk’s cultivation of flagrant contradictions; while the jewels draping She-Hulk’s body
signal her objecthood, her unnaturally colored skin as well as her unconventional strength
and size—which is emphasized through a contrast with the more traditionally feminine
Wasp, whom She-Hulk displays in the palm of her hand—signals her individuality and
agency. Yet She-Hulk’s pose—reclining backward with her legs thrust into the air—also
downplays her muscular arms and shoulders in favor of showing off her shapely calves and
thighs and perfectly round, gravity-defying breasts. If She-Hulk’s body is gender or sexually
deviant, this deviance is more theoretical than practical; though She-Hulk is less traditionally
feminine than the Wasp, she is still ideally attractive in all the ways that matter, with a tiny
waist, seductive curves, full lips, and thick, glistening hair. This pinup aligns with Lillian
S. Robinson’s analysis of Sensational-era She-Hulk, in which she argues that although the
character’s “exuberant sexual subjectivity” may be read as an important assertion of female
agency, it is “rather disquieting… that that assertion coincides so seamlessly with mainstream
commercial representations of male sexuality” (101).
The subversive potential of Marvel Swimsuit’s many Bad Girls also tends to be circum-
scribed. According to Christopher J. Hayton, whereas Good Girl art typically depicts
“beautiful females scantily-clad or attired in shape-revealing clothes [who are]… innocently
unaware of the sexuality that is apparent to the reader,” the Bad Girl art that surged in pop-
ularity during the 1980s and 1990s depicts women who are both violent and intentionally
seductive. Combining “‘sexy hair’ [and] exaggerated coiffure suggestive of abandon” with
“‘huge, gravity-defying breasts, mile-long legs, (and) perpetually pouty lips’” (Brown 63,
qtd. in Hayton), Bad Girls “frequently take on the role and form of a dominatrix, combining
ultra-feminine seductiveness with masculine toughness.” Brian Stelfreeze’s pinup of mutant
affairs liaison Dr. Valerie Cooper alongside mutant assassin Domino from Marvel Swimsuit #1
contrasts Good Girl and Bad Girl styles. While both Good Girl Cooper and Bad Girl Dom-
ino show off their exaggerated curves by raising their arms and thrusting their hips forward
to accentuate their read ends, the blonde Cooper smiles playfully in a high-necked, hot pink
one-piece bathing suit while the dark-haired Domino, wearing a black, leather-look bikini
featuring buckle fastenings and a holster for her comically large gun, narrows her eyes above
her parted but unsmiling lips.
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When their contradictions are emphasized, Bad Girls can disrupt gender norms. Martha
McCaughey and Neal King, for instance, argue that Bad Girls’ combination of violence and
sexuality can result in a subversive “weaponization” of femininity. According to McCaughey
and King, “Visions of sexually attractive women skilled with weaponry, licensed to kill,
beating up men might rather take the wind out of the sails of the culture in which sex dif-
ference seems unalterable. Such images might challenge smug oppressors” (6). Jeffrey A.
Brown similarly argues that the Bad Girl is “a transgressive character not because she oper-
ates outside of gender restrictions but because she straddles both sides of the psychoanalytic
gender divide. She is both a subject and an object, looker and looked-at, ass-kicker and sex
object” (47). Yet Stelfreeze’s pinup downplays these contradictions. Even as it emphasizes the
contrast between Cooper and Domino, by putting the characters in the same submissive pose
and giving them identical body types, this pinup reduces Cooper and Domino’s differences
to a matter of style, and reduces style to a matter of empty signs; the most obvious sign of
Domino’s agency is her oversized gun, yet this gun does not point up or out toward an enemy
or the reader, but rather down toward Domino’s own invitingly raised posterior.
Marvel Swimsuit also tends to mobilize race in decidedly conventional—and thus, decid-
edly problematic—ways. Despite Marvel Swimsuit #1 taking place in Wakanda and featuring
a Black woman—the X-Man Storm—on its cover a full five years before Tyra Banks became
the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special’s first Black cover model, Marvel Swimsuit’s pinups are
overwhelmingly white.6 While the paucity of non-white characters makes it difficult to
make general claims about Marvel Swimsuit’s depictions of race, looking at which non-white
characters are featured, and how they are featured, can gesture toward the priorities of an
assumed majority white audience. Besides a pinup featuring the Cheyenne superhero Forge
reflected in Storm’s sunglasses and the previously discussed pinup of X-Force featuring the
Mexican-born but racially ambiguous Rictor, the only men of color in Marvel Swimsuit are
Black, and the only women of color are Black and East Asian. In addition, even though
most of the female superheroes in Marvel Swimsuit are hypersexualized, most of the men
are hypermasculinized, and a great many pinups employ exoticism, these fetishizations and
exaggerations mean different things on different bodies. Marvel Swimsuit shows little interest
in interrogating these distinctions; more often, it perpetuates and exploits damaging tropes
related to intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Marvel Illustrated #1, which is set in the Savage Land,7 especially highlights this tendency.
Significantly, the narrative introduction to this issue explains that Marvel’s superheroes have
traveled to the Savage Land to pose in bathing suits as part of a charity event, culminating
in a Live Aid-inspired “benefit concert of enormous magnitude, to be televised around the
world… to raise money for an environmental protection fund to help save such precious
places as this [i.e. The Savage Land].” Similar to the white-dominated 1985 Live Aid concert,
this issue often uses nameless and voiceless people of color as props to justify and glorify the
display of already-famous white bodies. Many images, including the cover starring She-
Hulk, feature white (or, in She-Hulk’s case, white-coded) characters posing against back-
drops of anonymous darker-skinned characters who are styled to connote exoticism and/or
primitivism. Michael Golden’s pinup of Captain America emblematizes this mode of repre-
sentation, and the implications thereof. Golden’s pinup unconventionally sexualizes Captain
America’s patriotism; the Captain’s square, heroic pose facilitates the exhibition of both his
patriotic symbol-emblazoned shield and patriotic symbol emblazoned-swim briefs, to which
female superhero Diamondback, kneeling between the Captain’s legs, is reverently attentive.
This is also, however, a very racially loaded image, depicting an Aryan superman genetically
engineered to fight the Nazis flaunting his erotic patriotism in the manner of a white colonial
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Anna F. Peppard
explorer—that is, against an exotic backdrop of darker-skinned “natives” equipped with

the stereotypically primitive trappings of feathers, beads, headdresses, spears, and loincloths.
When and where this pinup is parodic, it is so at the expense of the subjectivity of these
anonymous natives who, similar to the female superheroes in the pinups previously discussed,
are not included in the joke.
From this same issue, the different uses of exoticism in Steve Leialoha’s pinup of Howard the
Duck alongside his human girlfriend Beverly and Jim Lee’s pinup of Storm further highlights
the consequences of such fetishizations where women of color are concerned. In Leialoha’s
pinup, the white-presenting Beverly’s exotic costume is very obviously artificial and comical;
this is signaled by the fact that her romantic partner is a cartoonish duck, and through the pairing
of exotic signs, such as beads, tropical flowers, and coconuts, with signs of “civilized” consump-
tion, such as the umbrella decorating Beverly’s drink as well as Howard’s decidedly un-exotic,
logo-emblazoned swim trunks and baseball cap, oversized plastic sunglasses, and cigar. In con-
trast, Jim Lee’s pinup of Storm naturalizes the African X-Man’s exoticism (Figure 7.2).
No signs of civilization interrupt Lee’s depiction of Storm soaring through a mountain
range accompanied by a fleet of dinosaurs while clothed in a bikini seemingly improvised out
of basic white cloth, her wrists heavy with gold bangles and leather twine while necklaces
made of teeth dangle from her neck, waist, and ankle. In this pinup, Storm is not contrasted
with the primitive, exotic setting, but rather compared to it, and even integrated into it, her
raised arms and tucked leg mirroring the posture of the pterodactyl flying behind her. To the
extent that white supremacist cultures have historically denied Black women even the sliver
of power that accompanies being considered objectifiable, Storm’s prominence throughout
Marvel Swimsuit could be considered progressive. Yet it is obvious that Beverly and Storm
are not objectified equally. Lee’s pinup denies what Deborah Elizabeth Whaley calls Storm’s
“metamorphosis” throughout the 1980s into “a visionary social subject who propels social
change” (107) in favor of regression to the stereotype of Black women as “embellished African
gems extracted from imagined cultural contexts and artfully reshaped for commodification in
the global marketplace, allowing readers the opportunity to gaze and graze upon Africa” (86).
Tellingly, the most “unnatural” aspect of Storm’s depiction—namely, her smooth, flowing
white hair—evokes the “historically specific conditioning of black women since slavery to as-
pire to the white female long hair style as the standard of all that is dubiously good” (Agozino).
Figure 7.2 Jim Lee’s pinup of Storm from Marvel Illustrated #1 (1991)
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Possibilities for subversion

Despite this general submission to sexist and racist conventions of representation, there are
many images throughout Marvel Swimsuit that feature potentially subversive bodily displays.
While monstrous characters—i.e., those characters whose bodies are obviously inhuman or
overtly display human-animal hybridities—are less represented in Marvel Swimsuit, when
these characters are represented, it is impossible to fully control the gender and sexual devi-
ance bound up in their eroticization. Kevin Nowlan’s pinup of Wolverine, the Thing, the
Hulk, and Beast from Marvel Illustrated #1 functions as a case in point (Figure 7.3).
On the one hand, Nowlan’s thick-lined, blocky style conveys untouchability; this style,
combined with the comparatively demure cut of each character’s swimwear, erases any defi-
nite evidence of male sexual characteristics, diffusing the deviant eroticism of Wolverine and
Beast’s connotatively feminine “butt first” poses. On the other hand, Nowlan’s pinup draws
deliberate attention to the questions these categorically unstable bodies inevitably raise. This
pinup maintains—and, in fact, aggravates—the mystery of whether the Hulk or the Thing
has a penis and/or sexual desire when in their monstrous forms. The Hulk’s straight-ahead
pose and smile are both mischievous and vaguely threatening, yet the substance of both the
mischief and the threat is unclear. The Hulk seems confident in what he is showing us, while
showing us nothing, raising the possibility there is nothing to show; he might be teasing
us with the deviance of his monstrous endowment or the arguably even-more-monstrous
deviance of his lack of endowment. The Thing’s pose, in which his four-fingered hands
somewhat embarrassedly cover his crotch, functions similarly; he could be hiding either
presence or absence.
Where pinups featuring more conventionally attractive male bodies are concerned, these
bodies’ heavily emphasized muscularity and diminished sexual characteristics suggests they
are intended to be read as narcissistic ideals rather than erotic objects, conveying, in Mulvey’s
terms, a “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego” (12). As Rowena Chapman
observes, “Even in passivity [the muscular male body] articulates action and potential, iden-
tifying the participants as active subjects, not passive objects, controllers rather than the
dupes of destiny” (237). In a similar vein, Susan Bordo argues that male bodies are not
truly exposed unless their traditional masculine power is somehow threatened. “In a certain
sense,” writes Bordo, “as long as the male body is ‘dressed’ in the phallic power to author all
Figure 7.3 Kevin Nowlan’s pinup of Wolverine, the Thing, the Hulk, and Beast from Marvel
Illustrated #1 (1991)
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Anna F. Peppard
definitions and evaluations of its situation, it is not really undressed (or, perhaps more pre-
cisely, it is undressed but not naked)” (154–155). Yet despite being a primary symbol of phal-
lic power, muscles have never guaranteed men’s exemption from “a controlling and curious
gaze” (Mulvey 8). Kenneth R. Dutton observes that in Western art, male muscles have been
made to signify many things, including different understandings of masculinity and male
sexuality. In Western images of muscular male bodies from antiquity to the present, Dutton
argues, “The heroic tradition can be distinguished in principle from what might be called
the ‘aesthetic’ tradition.” While both traditions “use muscularity as an important element of
the visual message… in the aesthetic convention the muscularity tends to be subordinated
to the overall impression of physical beauty—whether of the body itself, the facial features, or
the graceful elegance of the pose” (152). Whereas the heroic tradition primarily encourages
narcissistic identification, the aesthetic tradition opens up the possibility of objectification
and even a queer gaze.
Superhero comics typically embrace the heroic ideal. Yet despite its general prioritization
of the male gaze, Marvel Swimsuit often blends the heroic with the aesthetic. In between and
alongside its images of men ogling hypersexualized women or striking square, hard poses
while staring defiantly back at the reader, there are images such as Lou Harrison’s pinup of
Captain America from Marvel Swimsuit #3 that present the muscular male body as unusually
passive and, as such, unusually accessible to desirous gazes (Figure 7.4).
In this pinup, the Sentinel of Liberty is shown reclining on a red, white, and blue beach
towel under a red, white, and blue umbrella with his butt and back to “the camera,” his neck
turned to arch a knowing eyebrow above the glasses he has donned to concentrate on his
perfect beach read: a copy of the US Constitution. Harrison’s Norman Rockwell-esque hy-
perrealism lends a buttery softness to the character’s tanned, muscular flesh; where the hard,
angular abstraction of Nowlan’s pinup of Wolverine et al. conveyed untouchability, Harri-
son’s detailed, sensuous rendering of the tiny wrinkles of flesh and fabric around Captain
America’s waist and glutes—not to mention the visible groove between his glutes—flaunts the
character’s touchability, and even penetrability.
To a greater degree than Perez’s pinup of She-Hulk, Harrison’s pinup of Captain America
incorporates contradictions that destabilize gender and sexual norms. While this pinup’s
Figure 7.4 Lou Harrison’s pinup of Captain America from Marvel Swimsuit #3 (1994)
98
retro style and overdetermined American imagery reference the jingoistic and intensely
homophobic decade in which Captain America was created, this very overdetermined-ness,
especially when combined with the Captain’s arched eyebrow and touchably available ass,
advertises a camp sensibility and “gay vague” atmosphere of desire. In the words of Shari L.
Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs, “‘Gay vague’ refers to images that create an ironic under-
standing for those ‘in the know’ who are internal to a marginalized community (or are aware
of its existence)” (57). Following Calvin Klein’s decision to base his first collection on the
aesthetics of “clone culture,” “a style of cultural presentation that took archetypal masculine
figures and reinterpreted them for a gay lifestyle” (McKenzie 160–161), gay vague became
relatively common in advertising and men’s fashion during the 1980s, despite—or just as
likely because of—the supposed danger of gay male sexuality in the context of the AIDS
epidemic; in gay vague imagery from this period, danger can be the bedfellow of excitement
and rebellion.
Adam Hughes’ pinup from Marvel Swimsuit #3 featuring a shrunken Wasp bordered by the
logo-emblazoned male “packages” of Wonder Man and Captain America similarly courts a
gay vague atmosphere that evokes multiple registers of desire. Historically, superhero comics
have been reticent to depict even the suggestion of a penis inside male superheroes’ usually
visible underwear. Brown reads this absence as a reflection of the operation of phallic power
within Western culture. Writes Brown:
Though the phallus as the preeminent symbol of hegemonic masculinity is forever

linked to the penis as the definitive marker of sexual difference—what [Richard] Dyer
refers to… as “the endowment that appears to legitimate male power”—the efficacy of
the phallus is predicated on the absence of the actual penis. In order for the phallus to
signify strength and power, the penis needs to remain invisible. As Jacques Lacan fa-
mously declared: “the phallus can only play its role when veiled.”
Inasmuch as it does not reveal any actual penises and wraps the shapes it does reveal in super-
heroic symbolism, Hughes’ pinup maintains this veil. It also, however, draws attention to the
veil in ways that acknowledge its precarity. This pinup does not shy away from the obvious-
ness of male superheroes’ overcompensation for their always possible lack. More than this, it
highlights the sexual deviance bound up in that possible lack through its obvious homoeroti-
cism, which is partly diffused by Wasp’s presence yet also compounded by the concealed (yet
highly suggestive) positioning of Wonder Man and Captain America’s arms and hands, not to
mention a mysterious metal shaft that bridges the gap between them, which bears a striking
resemblance to the armored flesh of the X-Man Colossus. The ways in which this pinup re-
duces male superheroes to the signs of their penises also echo the typical framing of women
in classical Hollywood cinema, advertising, and glamour photography. In all these contexts,
sexualized parts such as “breasts, legs, or buttocks” are isolated as “a way of reducing women
to just her parts—she becomes, not a complete individual with her own unique personality,
but a thing, an object—just a pair of legs or breasts rather than a human being” (Heinicken
10). This similarity is emphasized through the comparison—size-wise and framing-wise—of
Wonder Man and Captain America’s packages to Wasp’s more traditional “to-be-looked-
at-ed-ness.” Of course, all these subversive possibilities are presented as jokes. But even as
jokes, both Harrison’s pinup of Captain America and Hughes’ pinup starring Wasp and her
male teammates’ packages at the very least demonstrate the male-dominated and ostensibly
red-bloodedly heterosexual mainstream superhero comic book industry’s awareness of the
(homo)erotic potential of its male superheroes.
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Anna F. Peppard
Yet perhaps the most revealing images in Marvel Swimsuit depict excessively muscular but
still human-like male bodies that fall outside the scope of either the heroic or the aesthetic
tradition. The pinup of Namor the Sub-Mariner from Marvel Swimsuit #4 by future Marvel
Comics editor-in-chief and current Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Entertainment, Joe
Quesada, is representative of this type (Figure 7.5).
In Quesada’s pinup, Namor’s ultra-exaggerated and excessively detailed musculature
clearly evokes power more than traditional ideals of beauty, and, specifically, a very elemen-
tal form of male power. Namor’s almost painful-looking hardness, which is anointed with
glowing rivulets of water rendered sticky and vein-like by Quesada’s aesthetication of their
journey over and through dramatic contours and crevices of flesh, is not simply phallic, but
literally penis-like, while exceeding—as superheroes are wont to do—a mere human’s bio-
logical limitations; Namor’s penis-like body remains hard despite dripping with evidence of a
voluminous eruption. Yet the degree and type of this body’s excesses also test the traditional
boundaries of the heroic ideal. Whereas patriarchal masculinity typically “tries to stay invis-
ible by passing itself off as normal and universal” (Easthope 1), and male superheroes tend to
justify their visibility within the context of its ability to enable status quo-preserving vio-
lence, the excessiveness of Namor’s performance of masculinity openly invites interrogation,
and even—given the flayed appearance of the undersea king’s exaggerated musculature—
dissection. You cannot appreciate this body without studying it, without following the sticky
rivulets on their improbable, endless journey.
In my previous work on stylistic excess in 1990s superhero comics—as typified by the
different yet broadly similar styles of superstar artists Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob
Liefeld—I link the especially pronounced exaggeration of this era’s male superbodies to the
anabolic steroid-influenced development of what Adam Locks calls the “post classical” era
of bodybuilding. Post classical bodybuilding, Locks argues, “is based upon the increasingly
fragmented body with over-developed body parts often celebrated and displayed over the
whole” (4). Post classical bodybuilding’s “investment in… ‘freakishness’” (Richardson 194)
is acceptable and desirable to the extent that it advertises the willpower and independence—
and thus, the primal masculinity—of the men who participate in it. In eluding both the
heroic and the aesthetic ideal (partly by simultaneously embracing both), Quesada’s pinup
similarly advertises both the powerful independence of Namor (rendered, in this instance, as
Figure 7.5 Joe Quesada’s pinup of Namor the Sub-Mariner from Marvel Swimsuit #4 (1995)
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a post classical superhero) and his creator, the post classical comic book artist who has “re-
belled against [his] commodification by exaggerating and twisting the ideals of [his] chosen
genre to the point of carnivalization, which in turn [makes] those conventions at least partly
[his] own” (Peppard).
Yet the erotic context of Quesada’s pinup reveals an even deeper intimacy between
the superhero, the artist, and the reader. According to Niall Richardson, the post classical
bodybuilder rejects the increased commodification of the male body and male sexuality by
“building a body which is outside the regime of sexual allure.” These bodies, Richardson
argues, reflect “fantasies in which men create their bodies to impress other men and disgust
women” (192) and embrace “the idea of challenging regimes of normative attractiveness and
creating a body which moves outside the dynamics of sexuality altogether” (197). The cap-
tion accompanying Quesada’s pinup of Namor reflects this thinking by suggesting Namor is
rebelling against his sexual objectification: “Could the Sub-Mariner’s ferocity reflect some
humiliation at having to don such a skimpy little number?” Yet Namor is easily Marvel’s
least prudish superhero. Since his creation by Bill Everett in 1939, Namor’s primary costume
has consisted solely of a pair of scaly green briefs, and since his reintroduction in 1962, his
identity has been indelibly sexual; Namor constantly threatens to both invade the surface
world and disrupt the Fantastic Four’s nuclear family through his desire for the Invisible
Girl/Woman (and her reciprocal forbidden desire for him). Moreover, whatever rebellion
Namor is waging against objectification only introduces more erotic possibilities. Trans-
forming Namor’s limbs into supplementary penises does not de-sexualize him so much as
ultra-sexualize him. In a sense, Quesada’s pinup does not close Namor off but rather opens
him up, maximizing both his virility and erotic possibility by transforming every bit of flesh
into a potential erogenous zone.
Precisely through its simultaneously de-sexualized and ultra-sexualized excess, this image
suggests what can be most radical about the superbody in its comic book form. In this image,
the inseparability of Namor’s power from his sexuality, and of his phallocentrism from an
almost anti-phallic sexual polymorphous-ness, cannot help but create currents of erotic af-
filiation between the artist, the superhero, and the reader that must, regardless of the gender
or sexual orientation of any of those real or imaginary persons, be regarded as queer: reading
Quesada’s pinup of Namor requires pouring over the water that pours over the muscles that
were poured over by the ink that poured over the pencils that poured over the drawing board
that was poured over by the artist out of love for the superhero and in the hope of being loved
by the reader. This pinup is a dream of self-sufficiency that cannot resist plentitude, seducing
the reader with a dream of sharing an experience of spending private time indulging the
desire to spend private time making a superhero your own—one vein and muscle and drip
of water at a time.
In the end, the degree to which Marvel Swimsuit is radically subversive, harmfully sexist
and racist, or just boringly conservative may lie in the eye of the beholder. This is not an
obfuscation, but rather an assertion of the importance of acknowledging the superbody’s
multiplicity; unpacking the complexity involved in encoding and decoding the superbody
is crucial to redressing enduring assumptions that the superhero genre—and the American
comic book landscape they have dominated for much of its history—are too simplistic to be
legitimate objects of cultural analysis. Yet I hope this chapter has also demonstrated that the
fact of multiplicity does not mean all meanings are equally available; Marvel Swimsuit empha-
sizes how mainstream superhero comics invariably make some possibilities more available
than others, and embed these limitations in the spectacular bodies that are central to the form
and genre’s appeal.
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Marvel Swimsuit’s most direct gesture toward the possibility of non-heteronormative sex-
uality especially foregrounds these limitations. The five issues of Marvel Swimsuit include a
total of three pinups featuring canonically gay superheroes. All of these pinups star Northstar,
mainstream superhero comics’ first gay superhero, and the sole prominent LGBTQ character
in the Marvel Universe of the 1990s. Jan Duursema’s pinup from Marvel Swimsuit #4 is the
only image in any of the specials to feature two gay characters, in the form of Northstar and
Hector, a minor character introduced and outed in The Incredible Hulk the previous year.
Depicting Northstar and Hector sunbathing on stone plinths on either side of a narrow canal
of rushing water, Duursema’s pinup features a literalized sexual undercurrent in the form
of the white froth of bubbles surrounding Hector’s submerged hand. Hector’s frothy hand
suggests his active inclusion in the scene’s humor, which involves a conscious subversion of
mainstream superhero comics’ historical prohibition against homosexuality; Hector may not
touch Northstar, but Duursema’s unsubtle visual metaphor at least shows that he wants to.
And yet, Hector does not touch Northstar. Nor do either of these characters ever threaten
to touch any of Marvel’s canonically straight superheroes; neither character is featured in a
pinup alongside any straight characters, in this or any of the other Marvel Swimsuit issues.
Segregating gay characters in this way maintains boundaries between gay and straight iden-
tity and desire, which in turn limits the queer potential of even those images which seem
to consciously court queer possibilities. Keeping Captain America, Wonder Man, and the
Sub-Mariner safely separate from the Marvel Universe’s “actually” gay superheroes assures
readers that Steve Rogers, Simon Williams, and Namor are “actually” straight.
The attempted 2014 revival of Marvel Swimsuit 8 by artists Kris Anka and Kevin Wada—
who are both men of color and identify as queer and gay, respectively9 —showed promise to
make good on the multiplicity of desires the 1990s version of the title was only ever willing
to tease. But after the release of three preview images, Anka and Wada’s project was quickly
canceled. The reasons for this withdrawal remain unclear. Anka’s initial statement indicated,
“after a few months back and forth with the powers-that-be, circumstances have arisen that
have forced us to stop production on this project”; this phrasing suggests Marvel declined to
approve the project. Yet in a second statement, Anka clarified, “Kevin [Wada] and I decided
to pull the plug on this project, not Marvel.” Whatever the reason for the withdrawal, critics
such as Andrew Wheeler of the website Comics Alliance bemoaned the loss of what “could
have been a book that presented men and women as equally sexy in a way that the classic
Swimsuit Specials never could.”
While Anka and Wada did not complete any female pinups before abandoning their proj-
ect, their preview images support Wheeler’s hopes for greater equality in supersexy repre-
sentation. Anka’s Gambit and Hellion possess idealized yet comparably realistic bodies that
welcome female and queer gazes by being neither comical nor aggressive; Gambit smiles
playfully as he causally raises his shirt to expose a midriff adorned with a naturalistic trail of
dark hair that thickens where it disappears into the tight swim trunks slung low on his slim
hips, while Hellion strikes a statuesque pose that neither disguises nor fetishizes his amputated
hand and forearm. Wada’s pinup of current Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes—who would have
been the first Latino superhero to be spotlighted in a Marvel Swimsuit pinup—incorporates a
similarly welcoming combination of realism, casualness, and playfulness; Reyes smiles with
infectious joy at an unseen companion as he peels off his wetsuit to expose the thick but
nicely rounded curves of his tanned upper body and the significantly paler curve of his very
high, very round ass (Figure 7.6).
Like Wheeler, I am saddened that Anka and Wada’s revival was not completed. Yet in the
interests of continuing to highlight the deeply personal and complicated nature of sexuality,
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Figure 7.6 Kevin Wada’s pinup of Ghost Rider/Robbie Reyes from an aborted reboot of the
Marvel Swimsuit Special (2014)
I must also admit that when gazing at Anka and Wada’s tasteful images, I find myself pining,
at least a little, for the tacky excess of the past. To the extent that I have a “type,” Anka and
Wada’s men more closely approximate it than Quesada’s Namor does. But my attraction to
superhero bodies has always been about more than their ability to approximate the types
of real-life bodies I find desirable. For me, the erotic appeal of comic book superbodies is
located just as much in their ability to surprise me with new ways of seeing, and thinking
about seeing. No real-life man could look like Quesada’s Namor, but that is precisely the
point. While I generally balk at objectifying real bodies, the indulgent unreality of Quesada’s
Namor presents considerably fewer qualms. I am attracted to this image’s refusal of restraint,
context, or logic, in short, its shameless surrender to being exactly what it is—namely, an
excuse to spend too much time not just looking at a body, but also thinking about hundreds
of drops of impossible water squeezing their way through almost as many folds of impossible
flesh. To put it another way: I am not turned on by the idea of touching Quesada’s Namor;
but I am a little turned on writing about it.
Notes
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Anna F. Peppard
104
Hayton, By Christopher J. “Evolving Sub-Texts in the Visual Exploitation of the Female Form: Good
Girl and Bad Girl Comic Art Pre- and Post-Second Wave Feminism.” ImageText, vol. 7, no. 4, 2014,
http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v7_4/hayton/.
Heinecken, Dawn. The Warrior Women of Television: A Feminist Cultural Analysis of the New Female Body
in Popular Media, Peter Lang, 2003.
Jeffery, Scott. The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human,
Palgrave Macmillian, 2016.
Locks, Adam. “Flayed Animals in an Abattoir: The Bodybuilder as Body-Garde.” Critical Readings in
Bodybuilding, edited by Adam Locks and Niall Richardson, Routledge, 2012, pp. 166–180.
Marvel Illustrated #1, Marvel Comics, 1991.
Marvel Swimsuit Special #1, Marvel Comics, 1992.
Marvel Swimsuit Special #4, Marvel Comics. 1995.
McCaughey, Martha and Neal King. “Introduction.” Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in Film, edited by
Martha McCaughey and Neal King, University of Texas Press, 2001, pp. 1–23.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Perennial, 1993.
McKenzie, Shelly. Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, University Press of Kansas,
2013.
McRobbie, Angela. “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.”
Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and
Diane Negra, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 27–39.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen, vol. 24,
no. 6, 1983, pp. 2–17.
Nugent, Edie. “Nerds Flame on at Flame Con: All the Queer Cheer Is Here.” The Beat, 31 August
2018, www.comicsbeat.com/nerds-flame-on-at-flame-con-all-the-queer-cheer-is-here/.
Peppard, Anna F. “The Power of the Marvel(ous) Image: Reading excess in the styles of Todd
McFarlane, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, June 2018, doi:10.1080/21
504857.2018.1493520
———. “Presence and Absence in Theory and Practice: Locating Supersex.” Supersex: Sexuality, Fan-
tasy, and the Superhero, edited by Anna F. Peppard, University of Texas Press, 2020 (forthcoming).
Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, B.T. Batsford, 1992.
Richardson, Niall. “Strategies of Enfreakment: Representations of Contemporary Bodybuilding.”
Critical Readings in Bodybuilding, edited by Adam Locks and Niall Richardson, Routledge, 2012,
pp. 181–198.
Robinson, Lillian S. Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes, Routledge, 2004.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010.
Scott, Darieck and Ramzi Fawaz. “Introduction: Queer about Comics,” American Literature, vol. 90,
no. 2, June 2018, pp. 197–219.
Singer, Marc. “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race,” African American
Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 107–119.
Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra. “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” Inter-
rogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane
Negra, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 1–16.
Taylor, Aaron. “‘He’s Gotta Be Strong, and He’s Gotta Be Fast, and He’s Gotta Be Larger than Life’:
Investigating the Engendered Superhero Body.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 40, no. 2, 2007,
pp. 344–360.
Wada, Kevin. “Kevin Wada Illustration.” Tumblr, 6 July 2018, https://kevinwada.tumblr.com/
post/146997750236/sorry-if-this-is-personal-but-are-you-lgbt.
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth. Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime,
University of Washington Press, 2016.
Wheeler, Andrew. “Boooo: Mean Old Marvel Says No to Babes and Hunks; Anka & Wada Drop
‘Swimsuit Special’ Plans.” Comics Alliance, 14 January 2015, https://comicsalliance.com/
kristafer-anka-kevin-wada-swimsuit-special-marvel/.
Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism, Women’s Press, 2000.
105
Part II
Ethnoracial queer and feminist
space clearing gestures
8
Life out loud in the closet
The grotesque as Latinx imagination
in Cristy C. Road’s Spit and Passion
Cristy C. Road’s 2012 graphic memoir Spit and Passion is a grayscale rebellion depicting
adolescence lived out loud in the closet. Road’s non-coming-out/coming-of-age graphic
memoir enters the genre of other queer graphic narratives dealing explicitly with bisexuality.
It is diary pages ripped out, skeletons blasted from the closet and a mix-tape of adolescent
sexuality. Road crafts a comic that contests queer and Latinx histories as it navigates the
genre of life story within the larger counter-histories marginalized people tell. Road narrates
the imagined world of her adolescent self, Cristy who takes solace in her bedroom closet.
I argue that Road’s graphic memoir uses the trope of the closet and the style of the grotesque
to explore interwoven issues of sexuality and culture. The metaphor of the closet becomes
the physical setting, drawn on the page in full detail. Spit and Passion takes the image of the
closet and uses the comic medium to show readers how and why the closet was necessary for
queer children and adolescents growing up in a hostile, homophobic culture. However, Road
as a queer Latina has to rectify her love for her Cuban culture with its conservative Catholic
values that often violently erases her sexuality.
In his book Your Brain on Latino Comics, pioneer of Latinx comics, Frederick Aldama
envisions the possibilities of Latinx graphic narratives, writing, “a whole field of accom-
plishment is being built before our very eyes” (5). That field has continued to grow. I want
to interrogate how these stories are expressed through the comics tradition of breaking and
re-making personal and cultural memory. How are the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality
and class inscribed on the graphic body? Angela Laflen takes a similar approach to Road’s
graphic memoir in her essay “Punking the 1990s: Cristy C. Road’s Historical Salvage Project
in Spit and Passion.” She observes how Road’s autobiographical comic “questions whether it’s
possible to recover a history that has been edited to silence divergent voices and experiences”
(219). Laflen frames Spit and Passion as a historical salvage project; Road uses pieces of pop
culture, family history and heterosexual hegemony to create her own version of history.
Like myself, Laflen is concerned with how Road’s memoir “directly confronts the process
through which historical narratives are created” (219). Road’s work is like other queer and/
or Latina artists, such as Gabby Rivera, Kelly Fernandez and Breena Nuñez, who construct
new Latina perspectives in comics.
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Cristy as the queer adolescent protagonist of Spit and Passion fashions her own imagined
world, and Road in constructing the graphic memoir offers the reader a counter-narrative
of what it means to be gay, Latina and working class in Miami in the 1990s. I draw from
José Esteban Muñoz’s work, Disidentifications, in analyzing Cristy’s marginalized identity in
the graphic narrative. Specifically, how queer individuals of color disidentify with dominant
culture and not only reject notions of whiteness and heterosexuality, but also choose which
aspects to resist or contend within the context of their survival (12). Muñoz goes on to em-
phasize how “these understandings of the self have come to be aligned with each other as
counternarratives” (5). Cristy disidentifies with the rampant homophobia on TV and at her
middle school. While simultaneously protecting herself, she connects with the pop-punk
band Green Day, allowing her family to assume she is attracted to the white, cis-male lead
singer, Billie Joel Armstrong. Even though she is not dating, her family encourages the at-
traction so long as it conforms to heteronormative behavior.
While the idea of the grotesque usually evokes negative connotations in the popular
imagination, I refer to the style in classical art as a means to critique. According to Nancy
Marie Blain’s definition, the grotesque as visual tool is “used to describe characters that are
considered ludicrous or incongruously distorted in their appearance or manner, and out-
landish or bizarre” (161). I contend the grotesque in comics can be a visual-verbal tool to
reshape and resist oppressive ideologies in media and secondary education, as demonstrated
in Spit and Passion. Road’s detailed drawings of mouths, bodily fluids and innards show what
Charles Hatfield, in his book Alternative Comics, observes as “the intimacy of an articulated
first-person narrative” in autobiographical comics that “may mix with the alienating graphic
excess of caricature” (114).
Lastly, I see the grotesque as a visual-verbal tool in comics that operates on both a formal
and informal level in Spit and Passion. Grotesque expressions within both the context of
queer sexuality and Latinidad allow Road to present Cristy in a more full and complex por-
trayal. Juana Maria Rodríguez, in her book Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina
Longings, asks us to think of what a queer Latina imagination could be, “if we wish to truly
investigate the social and sexual gestures of queer racialized female yearnings, as scholars
we need to open ourselves to the informal and illegitimate” (15). Road through the comic
medium presents her young protagonist with all her “queer racialized female yearnings”
(Rodríguez 15).
Out loud in the closet

There is a door nailed shut by half a dozen wooden boards, an indiscernible sticky residue
leaks from the crevices, and another substance oozes down the boards and seeps from under-
neath the door itself. In the middle of the door, on top of the nailed boards, is a sign pinned
up. It says: “CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS” (Road 29). The wall that surrounds the
door is covered in pretty, dotted flower-patterned wallpaper. The door and wallpaper stand
in stark contrast. Many households have this door. Road has drawn the literal door from
her childhood bedroom closet. It is the first place she can explore her sexuality and ideas of
pleasure. The phrase “in the closet” is most often used to express an individual’s requirement
to disclose their sexuality if it doesn’t conform to a strict heterosexual definition. Here, Road
uses “the closet” in both the figurative and literal sense. For the reader the closet is a physical
place that Cristy returns to in the narrative. Scenes in the closet appear a total of seven times
in the memoir, which indicates to the reader that it is a place of significance. How does Road
play with the trope of the closet as part of the traditional coming out narrative?
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Figure 8.1 Cristy C. Road, Spit and Passion (CUNY Feminist Press, 2012), p. 29
Like many queer adolescents, the closet becomes a sanctuary for Cristy. Road grew up in
a conservative Catholic Cuban immigrant household. The comic opens with an altar to the
La Virgen de la Cariad, candles and figures in a boat with the word Cuba surround the saint
(Road 9). The first time that Road as narrator introduces us to her closet she explains the
need for one. The caption above the panel with the closet reads: “All we need is love. It’s true.
But there is a monster rumbling beneath the surface of any Cuban household with traditional
Catholic values. Casual homophobia” (29). As shown in Figure 8.1, Road’s memoir follows
other Latina writers who reconcile their sexuality and ethnicity in cultural communities
with rampant homophobia and dominant cultures of white supremacy. The most recent,
Colombian-Cuban writer Daisy Hernandez’s 2015 memoir A Cup of Water under My Bed.
How does the closet function as a queer space of imagination in Spit and Passion? In his in-
troduction to Disidentifications, Muñoz discusses Marga Gomez’s 1992 performance, which is
set in her bedroom: “The space of a queer bedroom is thus brought into public view of dom-
inant culture…her performance permits the spectator, often a queer who has been locked out
of the halls of representation or rendered a static caricature there, to imagine a world where
queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity” (1). The bedroom
as a private-turned-public space becomes an important space in queer comics. Such as in Al-
ison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the artist-author draws
the home for the reader, making a once private space, public for all to see. In doing so, Road
appeals to other queer Latinx people to view their selves in her narrative.
The bedroom closet represents a tenuous position for queer subjects who are unable to
fully present their sexuality in dominant culture. Unlike heterosexual adolescents, who are
permitted to explore their sexuality, queer children are not supported in a heteronormative
culture.1 The closet in comics offers a space for queer adolescents to imagine what their
queerness might be. In the same manner as Muñoz articulates in his analysis of Gomez’s Bed-
room monologue (1), Chapter 3 of Road’s memoir is aptly title, “Skeletons Come to Life in
my Closet.” Road makes a play on words with the term “in the closet” and combines it with
another well-known figure of speech, “Skeletons in the closet.” Cristy has a shameful secret.
Her secret being she might be gay. Cristy’s closet is the place where she can make sense of a
world that hates LGBTQ people. For example, single vertical panel that takes up two-thirds
of the page; see Figure 8.2. Accompanied by what Robyn Warhol calls “the extradiegetic
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voice-over narration, which printed in a font that looks like free-hand capital letters, always
filling borderless horizontal boxes that run above the panels of the cartoon” (5). In this case
it fills up the borderless space of the vertical box on the page. Road in the “the extradiegetic
voice-over narration” writes:
There was no way on earth that homosexuals could be powerful enough to anger an
entire nation, because I for one usually felt fucking silenced. But I tried to see through
reality—when I sat alone in my closet, which I could decorate and re-decorate as often
as my serotonin needed a jump-start. In a way I justified my existence through Mimita’s
projected way of thinking. (47)
In the panel we see a preteen Cristy sitting among old board games (Life, Trouble and
Connect Four), a doll of the cat from the cartoon show Ren & Stimpy and boxes labeled in
Spanish. There are lights strung up among her clothes and near the back wall of the closet
hangs a Cuban flag. The reality that Cristy strives to see through is a mixture of her con-
servative Catholic Cuban family and the larger conservative Christian Right in Florida in
the 1990s. Road draws Cristy’s face with eyes closed, and a serene expression on her face. In
the closet Cristy can feel safe. She can, as Muñoz theorizes, “disidentify.” Cristy justifies her
existence using “survival strategies… to negotiate a phobic majoritian public sphere that con-
tinuously elides and punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm
of normative citizenship” (4). Her closet includes aspects of both U.S. culture and Cuban
culture, showing Cristy hasn’t forsaken one for other. However, both are oversaturated with
homophobia.
Spit and Passion is not a coming out story, but it does deal explicitly with bisexuality.
The next panel to feature Cristy in the closet is in Chapter 4, “Am I Just Paranoid? Or
Am I Just Bi?” Despite Spit and Passion being a graphic memoir about bisexuality, it does
not make the list of “100 Must-Read Bisexual Books” by Casey Stepanuik or “Queerer
Than Ever: 30 MORE Indie Titles Doing Right by LGBTA Fans” by Matt Santori. Either
these online publications don’t think Road’s memoir is considered a bisexual story and it
is not “doing right by LGBTQ fans.” Or, which I suspect is really the case, they just don’t
know about Spit and Passion. This speaks to erasure of Latinx queer graphic narratives
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from mainstream media websites, which is exactly the erasure that Road is countering by
making this graphic memoir. Cristy isn’t just dealing with figuring out her sexuality as a
queer person within a homophobic society, but she is also figuring out her cultural identity
as a queer Latina in a white supremacist society. Cristy’s story exists with the multiple axis
of oppressions as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (225). Cristy’s sexuality cannot be
separated from her Cuban heritage.
After finding out about the punk-rock-turned-pop band Green Day, the reader finds
Cristy in her closet again, devouring a cover story on Green Day from the magazine Rolling
Stone. The panel takes up about two-thirds of the lower part of the page. We see Cristy sitting
crossed legged with a curtain of clothing behind her. On either side of her Road has drawn a
calavera, or skeleton (60). Cristy’s expression shows gritted teeth and knitted eyebrows while
she clutches the magazine. In the “extradiegetic voiceover narration” (Warhol 50) at the
top right-hand corner of the panel, Road writes: “Despite these inevitable insecurities that
came with being a gay Cuban girl in 1994—I knew that I was mature now.” In the lower
right-hand corner, she continues: “Now that I had found a favorite band—an identity” (60).
Cristy continues to “disidentify,” she conceives of her identity within the dominant media
to connect with parts of it (Muñoz 4). In this case, a connection with the lead singer of the
band—Billie Joel Armstrong—while also rejecting the heteronormative conditions, Road in
the voiceover explicitly claims a “Gay Cuban Girl” identity.
Calaveras also appear throughout Redfern and Caron’s 2011 Cuban American comic bi-
ography Who Is Ana Mendieta. Both were published by the CUNY Feminist Press. Road’s
depiction of Cristy among the calaveras is like Caron’s drawings of a calavera that guides Ana
Mendieta through the biography (28–29). Road drew the calaveras with their backs to Cristy
and hands together as if in prayer. They frame the young girl like the skeletal wings of a
chimera (60). As many comics scholars have observed, graphic auto/biographies use drawing
to point out the constructed nature of non-fiction. While they do not claim an object reality,
in being up front about their construction they signal to the reader that this account is one
of many accounts of the topic.
Caron and Road’s use of the calavera adds, on one hand, a fantastic element to the nar-
rative. 2 The calaveras appear at times in each graphic narrative when the protagonist has
shifted in her journey. In Who Is Ana Mendieta the artist is scooped up by a large skeletal
hand during her art thesis performance. This happens at a time in her artistic journey
when Mendieta begins to distance herself from white feminist art and begins to incor-
porate Caribbean and Latin American practices in her work (Redfern and Caron 28–29).
For Cristy they appear in Spit and Passion when she begins to explore her sexual identity.
First, believing she is gay, or a lesbian. Then finding her attraction is to both girls and
boys, Cristy, like Hernandez in A Cup of Water under My Bed, navigates her bisexuality in
a Latinx family.
The final example of the closet I will examine occurs in Chapter 5 of the memoir, “One
of My Lies.” In a full-page panel Road draws her adolescent self-standing timidly at the
threshold of her closet, the door halfway ajar. The composition of the panel is so the door
occupies 50% of the page while Cristy stands off-center.3 In the final quarter of the page, on
the left, is Road’s voice-over narration (119). Visually the closet is an ever-looming presence,
as half the page is devoted to viewing it. Road mentions the ramifications of getting her
period. Now, that she is in puberty, her family will begin to treat her less like a child, which
results in her “butch aesthetic” being placed within the realm of childhood. Road writes, “I
was turning 13 years old that year. So then what happens” (119).
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The grotesque imagination

In this section I argue that the concept of the grotesque in the comic medium forces readers
to engage the ugly truth of racism, misogyny and homophobia. Exaggeration, or hyperbole,
is one style of comics that has evolved out of the oppressive realm of racial caricature and now
it a tool used to challenge marginalization and push for social critique. For example, Road’s
Spit and Passion often draws her teenage self as both earnest and grotesque when narrating
how her 12-year-old personality relied on identification with punk music to cope with her
repressed queerness. How does Road use the grotesque in comics to critique homophobia,
but also imagine possible queer futurities?
Here, I want to extend Chute’s analyses of the body on the page in autobiographical com-
ics, when she says, “The form of comics in this way lends itself to the autobiographical genre
in which we see so many authors—and so many women authors in particular—materializing
their lives and histories. It is a way to put the body on the page” (11). El Raife observes “our
bodies do not constitute a prediscursive [sic], material reality; rather, they are constructed
on the basis of social and cultural assumptions about class, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, age,
health, and beauty” (72). How do we place a gendered and racialized body in the historical
context of racial caricature—it was often used as a tool of dominance in print media? His-
torically, newspapers used caricatures of Black and Jewish people to uphold antisemitic and
anti-Black racist ideology throughout Europe and the United States. Consequently, when
we talk about the body in comics, I question how the racialized body has been dehumanized
in dominant historical narratives? And, if we look at autobiographical comics within this
context, how do these artists reclaim caricature as way to resist dominant histories that have
used cartoons to strip the body of humanity?
Often in Spit and Passion, Road draws her teenage self as both hopeful and distorted.
When narrating how her 12-year-old personality relied on identification with punk music to
cope with her repressed queerness, she depicts herself with a gaping chest wound covered in
duct tape—a common material used in DIY punk culture.4 Her head, which is covered in a
Florida Marlins hat, has a chunk of the top part of the skull missing. The golden gate bridge
emerges from the brain matter (71). Laflen reads this image as Road giving “visual form to
the process of consciousness raising as Cristy’s head is depicted as literally exploding” (230).
I’d like to linger more on the gory aspect of the image. How does Road use the unsettling
quality in her drawing in remembering her childhood?
The counter-narrative in Spit and Passion is most evident in how the grotesque takes form
through the comic medium. A distorted body with the insides showing. On one hand, “these
images are important visual indicator of Cristy’s emotional state” (Laflen 222). Cristy tries
to cope with her developing sexuality that is at odds in the homophobic dominant society,
which clearly produces emotional turmoil the reader can quite viscerally see on the page. On
the other hand, how can we read Road’s illustrations as extensions of Latinidad? Rodríguez
illustrates this concept, saying “colorful extravagances of Latinidad and the flaming gestures
of queer fabulousness are ways to counteract demands for corporal conformality” (6). I read
Rodríguez’s queer gestures within Latinidad as a useful frame of reference for how the gro-
tesque functions in Spit and Passion.
How does the queer and Latinx body, or the marked body, rebel against heterosexual
white hegemony in Road’s graphic memoir? In the Introduction to the special issue “Freaked
and Othered Bodies in Comics,” Aidan Diamond and Lauranne Poharec write, “the un-
marked body, then, is the body that easily and unobtrusively negotiates its environment”
(403). Cristy inhabits a clearly marked body, and Road’s drawings use the grotesque to both
114
literalize her adolescent trauma on the page and push back against dominant heterosexual
U.S. culture. The reader sees Cristy’s body transformed, chest broken open and brain ex-
ploding (Road 61). The grotesque rendering of the body allows Cristy to reconfigure con-
ceptualizations of the queer as other stereotype in comics (Diamond and Poharec 408). This
transformation is not negative or corrupt, I contend quite the opposite. As seen in Figure 8.3,
Cristy’s face is serene; her head is slightly tilted and her eyes and mouth smile in unison. The
narration box in the lower part of the panel reads: “But I would try to be as free as I could.
Contained, but free—trying not to turn my soul and brain to dust” (Road 61). What if this
is, as Rodríguez says, “a theory of queer gesture” that exists “in the interstices between sex-
ual desires and political demands” (7). Cristy’s public identity as a Green Day fan presents an
opportunity for “utopian longings,” of one day being in a queer relationship alongside the
“everyday failures” of not being able to identify openly as gay, or bisexual (Rodríguez 7).
The interstice that Rodríguez mentions, between sexual and political, is a powerful con-
cept that I first saw articulated in Anzaldúa’s La Frontera/Borderlands. Los Intersticios for
Anzaldúa meant inhabiting an in-between space, a place that provides sanctuary (42). Los
Intersticios is a transformative space, articulated in the comic as the closet. As mentioned in
the previous section, it is a sanctuary for Cristy. In the graphic form, Los Intersticios also
signals to the reader how Cristy inhabits an in-between identity. First, as a queer girl in a
Latinx family, like Anzaldúa had to reconcile her sexuality and her family’s misogyny and
homophobia. Second, as a queer Latina in a white heterosexual culture. Los Intersticios is a
way to exist for Cristy when her multiple conflicting identities are ripping her apart.
As physical interstices, how do drawn borders function in Road’s memoir? Scott McCloud,
in Understanding Comics, explains that when an image isn’t fully pictured in a frame, we as
readers still assume that image is there, even if we can’t see it; he calls this phenomenon
“closure” (60–63). Does the use of the grotesque allow artist-authors to distort closure? Can
this be a sort of anti-closure? The verbal-visual maneuvers in comics make pictorial meta-
phors, like the stereotype, the drawn narrator, and the monstrous other, culminating in how
the grotesque in graphic non-fiction becomes a pathway to remember and rectify violence
and trauma. As Frances Gateward and John Jennings in their book The Blacker the Ink offer
a new analysis of Black comics, simply put, “comics traffic in stereotypes and fixity” (2).
Historically, comics such as caricatures have been used to dehumanize people of color in
115
the United States (look to any newspaper from the early press), they are also capable of chal-
lenging existing stereotypes of marginalized groups. Additionally, they utilize iconography
and hyperbole to satirize and critique—think political cartoons. I am interested in how the
visual-verbal devices of comics negotiate “recognizable types” in order “to undermine ste-
reotypes” (Aldama 21).
The distorted mouth is a common trope of the grotesque in classical art. Often fig-
ures on buildings wore “grotesque masks, monstrous faces, with great mouths wide open”
(Wright 29). Mouths often feature prominent is Road’s graphic memoir. One such instance,
in Figure 8.4 Road recounts the times in class when her peers used derogatory words for gay
people. As the first caption of a four-panel arrangement, she writes: “The word terrorized
me, despite its inclination toward males” (Road 76). Each panel depicts a close shot of one of
her classmate’s mouths. On full display for the world to see: their blemishes, crusted tongue
and crooked teeth. Each mouth connects to a person, extending outside of the frame. Each
mouth has used the word either in direct hostility toward a gay person, or as a means to
emasculate classmates. Autobiographic comics coming out of the 1990s, according to Charles
Hatfield in Alternative Comics, “stress the abject, the seedy, the antiheroic, and the just plain
nasty” (111). Creating within this tradition, Road details the ugliness of her terrorizers,
showing how aggressive heterosexuality turns straight people into monsters. The grotesque
becomes a visual metaphor for the violence of sexual and gender conformity enacted on both
gay and straight people alike.
Viewing marginalization of characters in literature through the frame of the grotesque
is an important tool for many scholars. Such as for Mary Catherine Harper in her article,
“Figuring the Grotesque in Louise Erdrich’s Novels.” For Harper, the grotesque highlights
“themes of alienation, untenable social strictures, marginalization, abuses of power within
family and community” (Harper 23). Similarly, the distorted, ugly mouths in Spit and Pas-
sion, who used the F word without pause. The word “dripped like poison from their mouths
everytime [sic] it was spoken” (Road 76).
I want to place how Road draws her adolescent self in a larger context of what Rodrí-
guez describes as “racialized female subjects” who are “filled with rage, terror, shame and
crushing sadness” (14). In the following two panels, after she draws the grotesque mouths of
her classmates. Road positions them first in a typical class situation “playing around,” using
the f word. His hand is up ready to strike the floral cup out of his friend’s hand, who not
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surprisingly has a sad look on his face. Road narrates, “If I got a dime for every time Marco or
Laz called one another “faggot” whenever either one did anything mildly emasculating (such
as drinking out of a floral-printed cup), I would be rich” (77). In the second panel, they are in
a fantasy situation where Cristy has linked them romantically: the aggressor in the previous
panel hands his friend a bouquet of flowers, his friend swoons. Road continues, “Then, I
would spend the money bribing Laz and Marco to come out of the closet and become my best
friends” (77). Laz and Marco go from homophobic preteens to endearing lovers in Cristy’s
counter-narrative of grotesque imaginations.
Cristy has still been unable to come out to her friends and family. Road in composing
the graphic memoir can rewrite her history to make clear the possibilities of future sexual
alterities. Cristy’s fantastical supplements in her graphic life story reference a kind of sexual
future “where interdependence and mutual recognition constitutes the daily labor of making
lives livable for ourselves and each other” (Rodríguez 27). The grotesque body in the comic
form of the memoir is transformed from disembodied monstrous mouths to fully formed
human boys. While Cristy as the protagonist does not appear in this two-panel scene, she
is still part of the fantasy as, in what Muñoz might call, “a melancholy subject” (12). As she
disidentifies with the “ideological contradictory elements” of the situation so she can grip
her “lost object,” which in this case is a friendship with the two boys, “and invest it with
new life” (Muñoz 12). Ultimately, Cristy’s fantasy subverts heteronormative policing of boys’
behaviors to engage a counter-history of the 1990s that responds to “collective histories of
shame and abjection” (Rodríguez 27).
Among the final scenes of Spit and Passion, the closet bursts open, spilling forth all Cris-
ty’s baggage. Skulls tumble forward, flies buzz around clothes, garbage bags tumble into
the room, boxes inch forward and mysterious liquids ooze from the ceiling and floor (142).
Road remarks on losing friends and coming to terms with her identity, the narration reads:
“Surrounded by my things, I felt like I was drowning in the back corner of my closet—the
dampest closet in the house” (142). The reader is confronted with Cristy’s emotional bag-
gage, she can no longer hold it all in. Road in remembering her trauma also contextualizes
it for the reader. She gives it a physical place to exist, “memories of traumatic events have a
distinct quality” (El Refaie 99). Road does not come out at the end of the narrative, but she
does not keep quiet about the ugliness and distortion of living as a queer individual under the
weight of homophobia. As Road exposes her emotional trauma to the reader, her grotesque
imagings help to retell her coming-of-age story.
In March 2017 America #1 hit comic book shelves as the first standalone comic to feature
the queer Latina superhero, Miss America (alter ego America Chavez). The limited run was
written by queer Latina YA author Gabby Rivera and drawn by Joe Quinones. The signif-
icance of giving a curly haired, brown skinned Latina the superhero name Miss America
speaks to the nature of comics to as they question and reinvent ideas of what it means to
be American. How have Latina artists created new narratives of what it means to be Latina
and queer in the United States? Similar stories from Latina comic artists fill the pages
of Tales from La Vida. Like Kelly Fernandez’s “The Ciguapa,” a young afro-Domincana
follows the ravenous, long-haired creature into the woods only to encounter the creature
who is equally curious of her (58–61). Or in “They Call Me Morena,” Breena Nuñez
explores the seeming contradictions of being Latina, afro-decedent and queer: “Can I
even claim AfroLatinx as part of my identity even though the anti-Blackness runs deep
in our history? Was queerness always there too?” (20). Cristy C. Road, like these other
Latina artists, uses the comic medium to alter, critique and retell the complexity of queer
Latina experience.
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Notes
Works Cited
Aldama, Frederick Luis. Your Brain on Latino Comics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Angela, Laflen, “Punking the 1990s: Cristy C. Road’s Historical Salvage Project in Spit and Passion.”
Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels, edited by Martha J.
Cutter and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018,pp. 217–238.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,
1999.
Blain, Nancy Marie. “The Picaresque and the Grotesque: Two Beauties and the Their Beasts.” Romance
Notes, vol. 51, no. 2, 2011, pp. 161–170.
Diamond, Aidan and Lauranne Poharec. “Introduction: Freaked and Othered Bodies in Comics.”
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 8, no. 5, 2017, pp. 402–416.
Fernandez, Kelly. “The Ciguapa.” Tales from La Vida, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press, 2018, pp. 58–61.
Gateward, Frances and John Jennings. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black in Comics and Sequential
Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.
Harper, Mary Catherine. “Figuring the Grotesque in Louise Erdrich’s Novels: Of Ojibwe Play, Mod-
ernist Form, and the Romantic Sensibilities.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 24, no. 2,
Summer 2012, pp. 17–38.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Mississippi Press, 2005.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nuñez, Breena. “They Call Me Morena.” Tales from La Vida, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, pp. 20–21.
Redfern, Christine and Caro Caron, illus. Who Is Ana Mendieta? New York: CUNY Feminist Press,
2011.
Road, Cristy C. Spit and Passion. New York: Feminist Press, CUNY, 2012.
Rodríguez, Juana Maria. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York: New
York University Press, 2014.
Warhol, Robyn. “The Space between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” College
Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–20.
Wright, Thomas. A History of Caricature & Grotesque: In Literature and Art, e-book. London, Virtue
Brothers & Co., 1865.
118
9
Graphic (narrative)
presentations of violence
against Indigenous women
Responses to the MMIW crisis
in North America
James J. Donahue
Comics artists have long used graphic narratives to address real-world atrocities. Artists Art
Spiegelman (MAUS) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) used the form to explore war through
their position in (or adjacent to) historical atrocity. Others, like Gene Luen Yang (Boxers &
Saints) and Joe Sacco (Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza), engaged in meticulous research to craft
graphic narratives about wars that may be largely unfamiliar to their contemporary Western
audiences. And given their use in Literature, History, and Politics classrooms, works such
as these have long held the attention of students and scholars as well as a large popular au-
dience. It should come, then, as no surprise that many Indigenous creators have turned to
the form in order to reach a wide readership; in particular, Indigenous comics artists have
been publishing graphic narratives whose aim is to draw attention to the continued violence
against Native American and First Nations communities. The Pixel Project has noted that
“1 in 3 […] women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime,” with Indig-
enous women being “far more likely to face violence than non-Indigenous women” (Pixel);
similarly, the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women reports that “American In-
dian women face murder rates that are 10 times the national average” (Coalition). In light of
these statistics, perhaps the most persistent – and most devastating – form or violence against
Indigenous communities is the often-unacknowledged violence against Indigenous women.
Numerous government-funded studies, an Amnesty International report, and myriad ini-
tiatives from non-profit organizations and grassroots campaigns1 have, over the past few years,
confirmed a truth that Indigenous women have been speaking for years: violence against
Indigenous women is a serious epidemic that has not been properly addressed. Amnesty In-
ternational’s summary of their 2014 report on Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in
Canada opens by stating this in no uncertain terms: “The scale and severity of violence faced
by Indigenous women and girls in Canada – First Nations, Inuit and Métis – constitutes a
national human rights crisis” (n.p.). But as D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jennifer Brant note
in their introduction to their collection Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and
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James J. Donahue
Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, “[n]ot only did the Conservative government
of Canada fail to respond [to several grassroots attempts to address this issue], but [Prime
Minister] Stephen Harper dismissed the crisis altogether when he stated that the issue […] is
‘not really high on my radar’” (3). In the USA, this issue is being addressed at the state level,
but there is as yet no national initiative addressing this very serious problem.2
However, despite the almost obvious nature and widespread scope of the issue, one of the
fundamental problems facing systemic change continues to be a lack of public awareness. In
her comparison of this violence in Canada with the same violence in Ciudad Juárez, México,
Isela Pérez-Torres notes that “[m]ost media have ignored the calls of the victims’ families
for greater attention to these cases” while at the same time some public officials “have even
gone so far as to blame the murdered women for supposedly provoking the aggressors.”
As such, “[t]he Canadian media should realize that by disseminating a message that either
subtly or directly discredits and criminalizes the women […] they only reinforce impunity
and weaken any possibility of citizen support” (161). Given the reach and impact – not to
mention ubiquity – of media, especially in the twenty-first century, it is distressing that
proper coverage is not more prominent, while poor coverage can have lasting, devastating
effects on the public consciousness. Allison Hargreaves also addresses the importance of
media coverage in her study of literary texts in Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature/
Activism/Resistance; while noting that many critics have “critiqued delayed or inadequate
media coverage as itself a discursive form of violence,” Hargreaves then connects the issue to
Judith Butler’s notion of “‘grievability,’ the racialized hierarchy of human loss legible” in the
recognition and public accounting of “victims of violence,” which had led to “a dominant
public discourse characterized by apathetic, indifferent, or even incredulous responses to the
social reality of missing and murdered women” (134).3
However, this is hardly news to Indigenous feminists, many of whom have spent their ca-
reers battling the intersectional nature of gendered violence against Indigenous communities
as a result of settler colonialism. For instance, in her 1986 study The Sacred Hoop: Recovering
the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) repeatedly ad-
dresses the various kinds of violence committed against Indigenous women, where she states
in no uncertain terms that “[i]t is within the context of growing violence against women
and the concomitant lowering of our status among Native Americans that I teach and write”
(224). However, more than 30 years after Allen’s influential work, Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), in her powerful statement As We Have Always Done:
Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, claims that “[i]t is within our reach to stop de-
grading and devaluing the lives of children, Indigenous women, and 2SQ people right now
and to collectively commit to this as a radical resurgence project” (52). Of course, the under-
lying truth is that such “degrading and devaluing” continues across North America. Further,
as Allen, Simpson, and many others who have written on this topic have repeatedly noted,
violence against Indigenous women is rooted in the machinations of settler colonialism. As
lawyer and activist Sarah Deer (Creek) reminds her readers, “[r]ape and sexual violence are
deeply embedded in the colonial mindset. Rape is more than a metaphor for colonization –
it is part and parcel of colonization” (150). For Allen, such violence is one outcome of “the
ravages of colonization [that] have taken their toll” (Sacred 50); Simpson is even more pointed
in drawing together “[w]hite supremacy, rape culture […], and the attack on gender, sexual
identity, agency, and consent” as “very powerful tools of colonialism, settler colonialism, and
capitalism” (Always 93).
Allen and Simpson, themselves literary artists, also know that narrative can be a powerful
means of asserting Indigenous survivance, which Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) has defined
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as “a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry” and “an
active sense of presence” of Indigenous cultural forms, but most especially storytelling (1).
Although predating Vizenor’s formulation, Allen addresses a similar concern in the section
of her study titled “The Word Warriors,” when she notes that
The acts of aggression committed against every aspect of American Indian life and soci-
ety over the centuries […] have left indelible, searing scars on the minds and spirits of the
native people on this continent. But the voices of the spirits that inform Native America
are being heard in every region.
Those voices, Allen notes, come from both “traditional and contemporary American Indian
literature,” and have always been “a major force in Indian resistance” (53). Similarly Simpson,
as much an activist as a political theorist and creative artist, notes in her manifesto Dancing
on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence that
storytelling can become “a lens through which we can envision our way out of cognitive
imperialism, where we can create models and mirrors where none existed, and where we can
experience the spaces of freedom and justice” (33).
And it is at this point that I turn to the graphic narratives that serve as responses to the
continued violence against Indigenous women and girls in the USA and Canada. Graphic
narratives are an increasingly popular product consumed by readers across all demographic
groups but, perhaps more importantly for my concerns here, graphic novels also uniquely
engage the reader by crafting narratives dependent on visual as well as verbal storytelling
techniques.4 More specifically, as Kate Polak articulates in her study Ethics in the Gutter: Em-
pathy and Historical Fiction in Comics: “[b]ecause the graphic narrative form has two features –
multiple points of view and the gutter – that are distinct from other forms, I believe they offer
a different ‘window’ into questions surrounding the representation of historical atrocity”
(212). And although focused on a set of graphic novels that depict different world-historical
atrocities, Polak’s study provides a useful framework specifically for the study of “authors
and artists who did not ‘own’ a story in any sense of identity” (213), which is the case for
most of the authors discussed below. For while there have been an unconscionable number
of women and girls who have suffered from race- and gender-based violence, most of the
(few, but growing) number of graphic novels depicting and commenting upon such violence
have been produced by others commenting on that violence. And at this point I should also
note my own position, as a tenured, male, non-Native scholar whose research agenda focuses
on Native American/First Nations literatures and comics studies. While on the one hand I
understand that I am coming to this issue from the outside (in terms of both ethnic identity
and gender), I am also keenly aware of the importance of the issue, and the necessity to con-
tribute to the discussion. If I can use my position – and the opportunities that position allows
for – to help raise awareness and contribute meaningfully to the conversation, I feel morally
obligated to do so. That said, mine should not be the final voice heard, and I encourage read-
ers to consider this piece a starting point for further inquiry that includes a diversity of voices
from positions closer to the issue.
Of the four works discussed below, one is clearly fictional (although based on real vio-
lence); three are produced primarily by a male author, and the last is an anthology which
does not note if (or to what degree) the stories are autobiographical. I feel it is also important
to note that three of the four works were written by a male author, although one of those
titles was developed with a female co-author (Will I See?) and another was authorized by the
woman whose story is being told (Sugar Falls). I will not make any claims about authenticity
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James J. Donahue
and identity – asking who has the right to tell these stories – except to note the importance
of Indigenous creators crafting works that address a significant problem plaguing Indigenous
communities. While I am not ignorant of the politics surrounding questions of who gets to
tell which story – noting that the question has gendered as well as racialized implications – I
feel that bringing attention to these stories and the epidemic they address outweigh any
such considerations at this time. Further, by addressing this topic in a narrative medium
that continues to rise in popularity among casual readers as well as academics, these creators
are working to disseminate these stories – and force their readers to face hard truths about
violence whose victims are all too often ignored – to audiences who may not be involved in
the various discussions taking place at the UN or in federal and state governmental offices.
These authors all share the same goal: to inform their audiences about an important issue
that remains under represented in many forms of media, and ideally to turn that awareness
to action. First, I will look at three short graphic novels by David Alexander Robertson
(Cree) whose works have recounted the stories of Helen Betty Osborn (Cree) and Betty Ross
(Cree), and who also collaborated with multimedia artist Iskwé (Cree) on the short graphic
novel Will I See? I will then turn my attention to the collection of short graphic narrative
vignettes Deer Woman, edited by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe/Métis) and Weshoyot Al-
vitre (Tongva), which collects the work of various Indigenous women comics artists, many of
whom directly address the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls. In ad-
dition to telling multiple stories that contextualize the various kinds of violence perpetrated
against Indigenous women and girls in North America, these works highlight the various
kinds of aesthetic responses that comics creators have engaged to address the problem. That
is to say, the diversity of visual and narrative styles can help to, in the words of Kate Polak,
“[represent] atrocity in a way that is accessible for at least a certain audience [which] is nec-
essary for deepening our understanding of others’ experience” (8); the more variety in the
kinds of storytelling, the more diverse an array of storytelling techniques are employed, the
more audiences can potentially be reached. Or, to put it much more simply, although there
are similarities between these works, each is a unique event and a repetition of a tale oft told.
As such, these various works can and should be read for the quality of their aesthetic styliza-
tion as well as for the important social intervention they make.
With three graphic novels to his name on the subject, it’s safe to say that David Alexan-
der Robertson is committed to using comics form to raise awareness about the history and
continued practices of violence against Indigenous women and girls. In particular, much of
his work tells the story of specific individuals whose stories serve as a remembrance of those
women and their experiences while also representing the very many women whose stories
have not been preserved, but who have suffered similarly. One such woman, whose story was
popularized by the Canadian news media before becoming inscribed into official discourse
as part of a (Manitoba) Memorial Foundation Act,5 is Helen Betty Osborne. Helen Betty
Osborne – more familiarly known as Betty – was a 19-year-old Cree woman from Norway
House, Manitoba who, on November 13, 1971, was abducted, repeatedly stabbed, and mur-
dered in the town of The Pas, Manitoba, where she was then living. Four white residents of
The Pas were implicated in the crime, but only one was convicted.6
The bulk of Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story details the final hours of her life, follow-
ing her before, during, and after her brutal beating and murder. While little information of
her life is given before her murder, the reader is given two pages of Betty’s time in the Guy
Hill Residential School before jumping to the day of her murder. Although the specific
date is not noted, the reader is told that it is 1971, putting these events near the time of her
murder. These two pages show Betty speaking with her friend about their dream of one day
122
becoming teachers. As such, Betty is humanized for the readers, many of whom will only be
familiar with her as a high-profile murder victim (if they are familiar with her at all). This
humanizing is emphasized by the artwork; Betty and her unnamed friend are shown together
in all but one of the 12 panels, highlighting Betty’s genial nature and easy companionship
with her classmates. However, Betty’s comment at the end of this episode that “There’s
nothing to worry about” (9) serves as a grim kind of foreshadowing, as the reader familiar
with her story knows that she will soon be murdered. Similarly, while the author could have
selected any moment in her prior life to portray her, Robertson specifically set this moment
in a residential school, thus alluding to the history of violence against Indigenous children
perpetrated within the walls of such institutions. As such, Robertson is subtly suggesting
that Betty’s murder should be read as part of a larger history of institutional violence against
Indigenous people, and especially Indigenous women.
The narrative build-up to Betty’s murder begins at 6:00 pm, while she is eating dinner
before going out with friends. Parallel to this narrative are the events taking place at that
time at the Colgan household, with Lee Scott Colgan borrowing his father’s car to pick up
his friends for a night out to, in his words, “Drink and get laid” (12). The narratives continue
on alternate pages (or pairs of pages), showing Betty engaging with friends while Colgan and
his friends break into a home to steal wine (14) and getting drunk in a public bathroom (17).
By 2:00 am, drunk, the four young men decide to “go cruising for some squaw” because
“those Indians are always good for it” (21). It is important to note here that, before these
young men ever encountered Betty, they had already sexualized her, and had done so based
on her race. So when they came upon Betty at 2:30 am on 3rd Street West, they had already
justified to themselves the actions they were intent on committing. That they called her
“Pocahontas”(24) when they abducted her similarly inscribed her into a narrative of white
sexual fantasies with Indigenous women, given that Pocahontas is most popularly known
as a savior of John Smith (which has often been represented as a romantic gesture) or as the
husband of John Rolfe. In both cases, Pocahontas is remembered for her coupling with white
men. The reader is then shown in grim detail the final moments of her life: her kidnapping,
her humiliation in front of the group of young men, and begging for her life while being bru-
tally stabbed, all before being left naked in the snow to be discovered the following morning.
Henderson’s artwork highlights the gruesome nature of this story in multiple ways. Il-
lustrated entirely in grayscale, the narrative looks grim throughout; even the happy scenes
from the time prior to Betty’s murder are tinged with a dark foreshadowing suggested by
the color palette. Similarly, as the night progresses, the panels become increasingly darker;
this is not only realistic given that the night would be getting darker, but it also emphasizes
the increasingly gruesome actions that lead to her brutal murder. This progressive darkening
increases until page 28, where Betty is heard begging for help from behind a car, the dark-
ened trees seen through the car’s rear window taking up most of the panel along with verbal
representations of the sounds of the stabbing and Betty’s cries for help. This episode ends with
a completely black panel, with no sounds represented; at the point, the reader knows that she
is dead. Immediately following this episode is Betty’s discovery in the snow the following
morning by 14-year-old Kenny Gurba. The stark whiteness of the panels contrasts with the
increasing darkness of the previous pages, quite literally bringing to light the horrific crime
that has been committed.
This narrative is embedded within a frame tale which, like the quick allusion to residen-
tial schools, helps to situate Betty’s story within the larger narrative of missing and murdered
Indigenous women. Opening the book the reader is presented with a teenaged boy check-
ing Facebook and, after scrolling through his feed, clicking on a link by Missing Manitoba
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James J. Donahue
Women seeking assistance for finding 16-year-old Amanda Sinclair, missing from Winnipeg,
which had shared by his friend along with the comment “Is it just me, or do these come up,
like, every fricking day?” (1) Clicking the link leads to a page on “Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women in Canada,” which is represented full page on the second page of the
book. The many faces of the women are all shadowed in varying degrees of gray and black
except for one, which we later come to recognize as Betty. The following two pages then
represent a public march earlier that day demanding justice for those missing and murdered
Indigenous women, with a speaker noting the “almost 1,200” (4) such victims in Canada
over the years. This frame tale concludes on the final page, where we learn the young teen-
ager shares the Facebook post with his own social network in an effort to help spread word
of the epidemic as well as the actions being taken to combat it, providing a direct example of
Allison Hargreaves’s claim that literature can “instruct its readers in decolonizing approaches
to anti-violence resistance” (6). As such, the graphic novel is more than just an effort to
memorialize Betty by sharing her story but it is a direct plea to the readers to help spread
this information as well. Robertson is clearly calling on his audience to participate in the
dissemination of this information and suggesting that such dissemination is a necessary first
step to action (Figure 9.1).7
Robertson addresses this topic again in Will I See?, a book he adapted from a story pro-
vided by the artist Iskwé, with art by GMB Chomichuk. The story follows May, an In-
digenous teenager who spends much of the narrative walking through the city collecting
keepsakes fortuitously appearing in her path that, along with a seemingly stray cat she also
encounters, help protect her from the dangerous men she meets on her walk. Both men are
intent on committing sexual violence, with increasing danger as the narrative progresses.
The first man to approach her asks if May wants to “party,” a colloquialism that has various
shades of meaning. However, when he follows this with “I know you do” (n.p.), we see hints
of the same overt sexualization that the four young men subjected Betty to in Betty. Toward
the end of the narrative, May is physically abducted by a man who similarly tells her “don’t
act like you don’t want it” (n.p.), furthering the hyper-sexualization of Indigenous women
as a means of victim blaming/shaming. Like Betty, May is driven to a remote area where her
captor beats and attempts to rape her before she and her cat force the man off the side of a
cliff, where he falls to his death. The various keepsakes May collects are made into a necklace
by her kookum (grandmother) which, once completed, serves as a physical reminder for all
Figure 9.1 David Alexander Robertson and Scott B. Henderson, Betty: The Helen Betty Osborn
Story (p. 30)
124
the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls who, kookum tells May, “become
animal spirits, and everything those spirits represent. They become one. They are beautiful,
always” (n.p.). At the end of the narrative, May notes that “this necklace doesn’t belong to
me. We need to do something,” to which kookum replies that they will “share it, nosisim
[granddaughter], just like the flowers. So they’ll not be forgotten” (n.p.).
As with Betty, Will I See? uses one young woman’s experience to represent the larger ep-
idemic, and ends with an explicit call to share stories so that those stories – and the women
who figure in those stories – will not be forgotten. Unlike Betty, May survives this encoun-
ter, and does so by means of the power associated with the keepsakes. The reader learns at the
end of the book (in paratextual information after the narrative) that the animals associated
with (and ultimately released by) the keepsakes “represent the Seven Sacred Teachings –
natural virtues that form a foundation to achieve Mino-Pimatisiwin, the good life” (n.p.).
As such, Robertson and Iskwé suggest that one way to address the problem is through larger
community effort. As both Betty and Will I See? depict the abductions, Betty and May are
targeted because they are alone. While on the one hand this accurately reflects how kid-
nappers abduct their victims, it can also be read as a symbolic gesture that these women are
not supported by the larger communities to which they belong. The Amnesty International
report on Violence against Women and Girls in Canada addresses this latter point by noting that
“[v]iolence affects Indigenous women and girls in their own families and communities, as
well as in predominantly non-Indigenous communities, and threatens Indigenous women
and girls from all walks of life” (n.p.). In May’s case, her most significant form of support is
kookum who not only demands that May text her when she goes out but also teaches May
about the Seven Sacred Teachings that, by means of the necklace, helps to protect May from
harm. And with kookum’s assurance that the necklace will be shared with the community,
the narrative suggests that it is through the women – through the teachings of the elders
imparted to the younger generations – that Indigenous women will be protected from harm.
And while the subject matter of this book is certainly in keeping with Robertson’s other
work,8 the visual aesthetic of Will I See? departs drastically from the realistic representations
of his oeuvre. While most of Robertson’s projects are illustrated by Scott B. Henderson, Will
I See? was illustrated by GMB Chomichuk, a writer and illustrator known for his work in
occult suspense stories such as The Imagination Manifesto (2010) and Infinitum: Time Travel Noir
(2015). As with his other works, Chomichuk’s art for Will I See? abandons not only realistic
representations but also the neatly arrayed and clearly defined panels that are employed by
most comics artists. People and objects are not represented with any attempt at fidelity of
comparative size, and scenes are rendered with multiple perspectives simultaneously, as one
might achieve with double-exposed film. Similarly, there is no coherence to the size, shape,
or even use of frames, and on those pages where they are employed, characters, objects, and
action regularly ignore such borders. Additionally, the color scheme is a very dark use of
grayscale – with much of the art heavy black against a white background – with a few uses
of bright red at the appearance of the would-be rapists. But perhaps most importantly with
respect to the ethical message of the narrative, the chaotic paneling and inconsistent focaliza-
tion make for a jarring reading experience that attempts to capture the horrific nature of the
attacks. As Kate Polak notes in her study of trauma and empathy in historical fiction comics,
it is only “[o]n rare occasions, however, [that] the scene is focalized through the character”
as a means to generate empathy by having the reader “occupying the perspective of a char-
acter” (27–28). In other words, for most comics, most readers will view the events either
from the position of a non-focalizing character or from an unfocalized position. This is true
of Will I See? until the page where the dead body of the second attacker is shown, mangled
125
James J. Donahue
Figure 9.2 David Alexander Robertson, et al., Will I See? (n.p.)
and bloody, after having been pushed off the cliff. The reader witnesses this scene focalized
through May, who in the following panel is shown sitting on the cliff noting that “It’s over”
(n.p.). By focalizing this one panel through May – allowing the reader to see both as and with
her that the attacker is dead – the reader may experience a short moment of identification
with the victim (Figure 9.2).
As Polak notes, “[b]ecause identification across gender lines for men is strongly discour-
aged, recognizing rape as a traumatic crime, and empathizing with victims, is often diffi-
cult for men.” However, in this particular panel, the moment of identification follows the
attempted rape, and as such it may be an easier moment of “identification across gender
lines” (78). Similarly, by limiting such identification to this one scene, the narrative may
be attempting to avoid any potential recognition among its female audience who may have
similar experiences to May. That is to say, while many of the female readers may have ex-
perienced sexual assault, it’s unlikely that many of them share May’s experience of pushing
their attacker off a cliff with the help of a cat. As such, the artwork may be attempting to
negotiate the tricky line of using focalization to encourage empathy through identification
while trying to avoid triggering its audience. In this regard, the highly stylized artwork may
serve the purpose of representing the emotional chaos of the events while simultaneously
precluding a realistic representation that may unknowingly remind a reader of her own ex-
perience. Although much of her comments on the subject focus on “fears about retaliation,”
we should be reminded of Deer’s insistence that “[f ]or a victim of sexual assault, safety is
paramount” (158); this should include the representations of sexual assault that may (unin-
tentionally) trigger readers and run the risk of revictimization, especially given the persistent
continuation of such violence.
However, the issue of violence against missing and murdered Indigenous women and
girls is an epidemic not just because of the large numbers of victims, but because of the
various kinds of violence committed against them. Robertson reflects this in his graphic
novel Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story, which (not unlike Betty) recounts experiences
from the life of a Native woman, Betty Ross (Cree), Elder of Cross Lake First Nation.
In its narrative structure and illustrations, Sugar Falls is very much like Betty: both use a
frame tale centered on a young (presumably white) teenager who comes to a better un-
derstanding of violence against Indigenous women after engaging in research; similarly,
both graphic novels are illustrated realistically, though employing various degrees of
grayscale, which suggests a somber emotional tone. However, what sets Sugar Falls apart
126
from Betty and Will I See? is that violence against women is not the explicit focus of the
piece; rather, the violence depicted in the narrative serves the larger purpose of detail-
ing some of the many abuses committed against Indigenous children who were sent to
residential schools.9 However, read alongside Betty and Will I See?, Sugar Falls becomes
another reminder that contemporary violence against Indigenous women and girls is
rooted in the history of settler colonialism and the many cultural institutions that were
founded to advance its cause.
A young student Daniel10 is assigned to find a survivor of the residential school system and
hear their story. Daniel seeks help from a classmate, April, whose Kokum (grandmother) is
a survivor. Daniel and April are then invited into Betty’s round room “with all the sacred
medicines and within the star blanket” (4) to hear her story. Daniel’s actions here and at the
end – where he thanks Betty for sharing her story – provide a contemporary frame for Betty’s
story, which takes up most of the narrative. Betty’s story recounts many of the kinds of vio-
lence committed against Indigenous children, such as being taken from their communities,
being cruelly bathed with hard brushes “to get the ‘dirt’ off” (19), having their hair cut short
and their traditional clothing taken from them, as well as being denied the opportunity to
speak their language and practice their customs and religion. And as the painful bathing
foreshadows, much of the “lessons” imparted to Indigenous children were accompanied by
acts of violence. The reader is shown examples of a nun beating Betty for not learning Latin
well enough (23) and being slapped to the ground and kicked in the head by the same nun
for speaking Cree with a classmate (29). However, perhaps most painfully, the reader learns
that the priest who directed the school raped his students, including Betty (27). While in the
context of the rest of the narrative this can be read as one of the many atrocities committed
against Indigenous children kept at residential schools, read in the context of Robertson’s
other books the reader comes to see rape as part of a larger epidemic of violence – especially
sexualized violence – that has been explicitly committed against Indigenous girls and women
across North America (Figure 9.3).
This larger epidemic of violence against women is also one of the central themes of
Elizabeth LaPensée and Weshoyot Alvitre’s collection of short graphic vignettes, Deer
Woman: An Anthology. Although many of the stories do not focus on violence against In-
digenous women, the collection itself brings that issue to the forefront; the very first line
of the publisher’s introduction – and as such the first line of the collection – reads: “One
Figure 9.3 David Alexander Robertson and Scott B. Henderson, Sugar Falls: A Residential
School Story (p. 29)
127
James J. Donahue
in three Native women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.” Following the publication
of LaPensée’s “Deer Woman: A Vignette” – the first piece in the collection and a profound
response to violence against women – Native Realities press released this collection in order
to provide, in the words of publisher Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo), “An opportunity for
Native women to find empowerment through creative and narrative expression” (n.p.). As
such, this collection follows the trajectory of feminist comics life writing that Hillary L.
Chute identified in her study Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, where
she noted that “Some of today’s most riveting feminist cultural production is in the form of
accessible yet edgy graphic narratives” (2). And while there are a great many forms of cre-
ative expression that these artists could have employed, Chute reminds us of the embodied
nature of graphic narrative when she suggests, “the form of comics […] lends itself to the
autobiographical genre in which we see so many authors – and so many women authors in
particular – materializing their lives and histories. It is a way to put the body on the page”
(10). Going one step further than David Alexander Robertson’s graphic narrative remem-
brance of the lives of Indigenous women who have suffered and/or died as a result of gender-
(and race-) targeted violence, Deer Woman: An Anthology can be read as a materialization of
these women, a verbal and visual embodiment that – to borrow language from Patty Stone-
fish’s (Lakota) introduction to the collection – “is more than a collection of stories written by
a collection of Indigenous women. This is a group of powerful Indigenous women sharing
their power with others. These stories are medicine” (n.p.).
The anthology opens with Elizabeth LaPensée’s title story, which she introduces as “a
version of Deer Woman’s many stories” whose purpose is to call attention to the “over 1,000
missing and murdered Indigenous women of all ages” across “Turtle Island” (n.p.). Ren-
dered in a stark black and white and consisting of irregularly sized panels that combine for a
jarring effect on the reader, “Deer Woman” follows an unnamed woman who, after having
been raped on a park bench, transforms into a powerful protector of other women. While
certainly reminiscent of the Deer Woman story common among many tribal populations
(including the Anishinaabe) – and as such drawing from spiritual power – the protagonist
is also seen training in a home gym, above the caption “So that it never happens again. To
anyone” (n.p.).11 As such, “Deer Woman” suggests a multifaceted approach to survival, one
that includes physical conditioning as well as spiritual awakening. But just as importantly, this
ability to transform exists in all women. As the protagonist is getting raped, she is drawn with
deer hooves protruding from the bottom of her pantlegs, and the antlered shadow of Deer
Woman is projected on the ceiling of her apartment when she returns home after the assault.
All women, LaPensée suggests, have the power to transform; however, because not all have,
Deer Woman (now fully embodied in our protagonist) works as a protector and vigilante,
walking the streets violently maiming and killing those who would rape Indigenous women
(Figure 9.4).12
“Mama,” by Jackie Fawn (Yurok/Washoe), provides a short narrative about the life of Julz
Rich, a Lakota activist who founded the Mothers Against Meth Alliance (MAMA).13 Like
the Deer Woman figure in LaPensée’s story, Rich is presented as an activist who is willing
to use any and all means – including physical violence – to protect the women of the Pine
Ridge reservation. Rich and her compatriots save the life of a young woman, who notes
that “no one ever hears us,” referring to the many Indigenous women whose stories have
been unheard, whose complaints have been ignored, and whose lives have been lost with
little to no official response. Rich replies, “Don’t talk like that, my girl. You don’t know
what spirits could be listening. They sent us, didn’t they?” (n.p.). On the following page, a
short story within a story presents an unnamed Lakota woman who, in 1850, took her child
128
Figure 9.4 Elizabeth LaPensée, et al., “Deer Woman: A Vignette,” from Deer Woman: An
Anthology (n.p.)
and attempted to flee (presumably from violence). Upon meeting a wolf whom the woman
addresses as Unci (Grandmother), the young woman chooses to return to her people to help
“stand against the suffering the people and Unci Maka [Grandmother Earth] would face in
the coming years” (n.p.). Colored primarily in blue, this short narrative seems softer in tone
than the harsh red that dominates the main narrative, which is filled with reminders of vio-
lence; in addition to the opening event, the narrator notes that “[t]hrough it all – the alcohol,
drugs, abuse and loss brought on by KKKolonization – we’ve remained” (n.p.). The narrator
thus notes that the violence against women is but one part of the larger system of settler
colonialism that Indigenous peoples have suffered under, and subtly ties this process into a
larger national (US) conversation about racism and violence, with the reference to the KKK,
best known for anti-Black racism but is better thought of as a part of the larger machinery of
white supremacy. This vignette ends with a clear allusion to Deer Woman, with a stylized
version of Rich with deer ears wearing a bandana over her mouth that reads “No More Sto-
len Sisters,” holding a deer wearing a bandana that simply reads “DW” (n.p.), clearly tying
the figure of Deer Woman to the various campaigns working to draw attention to this issue
and provide support for victims (Figure 9.5).14
Figure 9.5 Jackie Fawn, “Mama,” from Deer Woman: An Anthology (n.p.)
129
James J. Donahue
“Deer Woman” is also the title of Maria Wolf Lopez’s15 black-and-white vignette that
opens with a highly stylized, hyper-realistic, blank-and-white rendering of Deer Woman
with two angry wolves, both of whom are wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. The first
person speaker – who could be either the author or a manifestation of Deer Woman herself –
speaks to the reader of a history of “Tears, blood, and pain,” which are “The everyday side
effects of being a woman” who cannot “speak against the abuse,” while framing an image
of women in pain (n.p.). Other pages show images of a woman being abused by men be-
fore being brought – bruised and bloody – to Deer Woman and her larger community of
women, who remind the abused woman (and, presumably, the female reader) that “you are
not weak,” that “You must push the hate away” in order to “Prepare yourself for battle”
(n.p.). For, as with the previous two stories, “Deer Woman” notes the necessity for women to
literally fight back against those who would do them harm; and as with LaPensée’s story, the
unnamed protagonist of Lopez’s story transforms into Deer Woman, standing with a pack of
ravenous-looking wolves, ready to “Stand tall, stand strong, and never submit to your fears
ever again” (n.p.) (Figure 9.6).
These graphic narratives all show, in different ways, the scope of the violence being com-
mitted while also situating it historically for the reader. Such work is important given
the profound lack of resources being devoted to the issue. To give but one example of a
study highlighting this problem, the Urban Indian Heath Institute reported on 506 cases
of missing and murdered Indigenous women, noting that the number of reported cases is
drastically lower than the estimated number of such abused women (collecting data from
71 cities across 29 US states). The primary reasons for this lack of information, according
to authors Annita Lucchesi (Southern Cheyanne) and Abigail Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), are
the “institute’s limited resources and the poor data collection by numerous cities” (1).
Addressing what they characterize as a “nationwide data crisis,” Lucchesi and Echo-Hawk
also report that of the 5,712 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women
and girls (in the USA) in 2016, only 116 were logged into the Department of Justice da-
tabase, leading no doubt to the further dismissal of these continued acts of violence as a
national (or hemispheric) problem requiring resources to address. (Further, Lucchesi and
Echo-Hawk note that 153 cases identified by the UIHI “currently do not exist in law en-
forcement records” at all! [8]) And of course, these numbers do not include the very many
unreported cases that occur every year.
Figure 9.6 Maria Wolf Lopez, “Deer Woman,” from Deer Woman: An Anthology (n.p.)
130
In an effort to combat this epidemic, Indigenous artist-activists are using a variety of ar-
tistic means to help educate, inform, and ultimately engage their audience into advocating
for change. In particular, a growing number of graphic narrative artists are using their work
to present this issue to their readers. By employing a popular form that is increasingly read by
casual readers and used as course material in high school and college classrooms, these artists
are not only raising awareness of this epidemic through popular media, but simultaneously
engaging the medium’s many kinds of visual and verbal forms of representation to charac-
terize the crisis. From nonfictional representations of the lives of real women who have been
victimized by this violence, to fictional stories standing in for the great many stories lost to
us, these graphic narratives draw on tribal spiritual practices as well as on historical details
to present to the reader the full scope of the violence against Indigenous women and girls.
And while these books are all deserving of study for their aesthetic and narrative variance,
their most important contribution to the literary landscape is as a defiant statement against
what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has characterized as the efforts “through the media,
books, and oral culture” to “justify the strangulation of Indigenous women’s body sover-
eignty and […] violence against women, which has led to the epidemic of murdered and
missing Indigenous women and girls” (Always 89).
Notes
131
James J. Donahue
developed frame tale, and ends with the teenager (named Daniel) asking if things can change, and
then being told by his mother that “Nobody can change the past […] but we can learn from it. So
maybe it happened for a reason” (qtd. Hargreaves 151). This version of the frame tale, for Hargreaves,
creates “the novel’s amenability to reproduce the indifference and disavowal it is intended to resist”
(15), given the mother’s suggestion of “a fatalistic necessity to Osborne’s end” (151). It would appear
that the later edition of the novel was revised to address this problematic frame narrative.
8 Among his many other publications are a series of historical graphic novels for children. The
seven-book Tales from the Big Spirit series introduces young readers to significant figures from
Canadian Indigenous history, including Shanawdithit (Nancy April), the last known member of
the Beothuk people; Thanadelthur, a young Dene woman who negotiated peace between the Dene
and Cree; and Pauline Johnson, the popular Mohawk poet.
9 I have written elsewhere about graphic novel representations of residential/boarding schools, in-
cluding Sugar Falls; see my chapter “Graphic Representations of Boarding Schools: Using Popular
Narrative to Teach Unpopular History” in Indigenous Popular Culture Across the Globe, ed. Svetlana
Seibel and Kati Dlaske (forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier UP).
10 Presumably the same Daniel from the earlier version of Betty, as he notes that he “just finished the
essay on Helen Osborne” (1).
11 At this point I would like to note that Patty Stonefish, who wrote one of the volume’s introduc-
tions, is a martial artist who teaches self-defense to survivors of sexual assault. Her Arming Sisters
Project is designed to provide, in her words, a “tool of healing and self-empowerment” (Smith).
12 In a nod to state-sponsored violence against Indigenous people more generally (as part of the con-
tinuation of settler colonial violence), this protagonist also kills a police officer as he was about to
violently assault an unarmed (presumably Indigenous) man.
13 Additional information about Rich and MAMA can be found in various posts on the Native Hope
blog (www.nativehope.org/) as well as the MAMA homepage (www.mothersagainstmeth.org/).
14 “Stolen Sisters” has become a common phrase used to refer to the issue, and has been employed by
many groups and authors, including Amnesty International: https://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/
campaigns/no-more-stolen-sisters.
15 No tribal affiliation for Lopez is provided in the volume, nor could I find any in her social media
presence.
Works Cited
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1986.
Amnesty International. Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada: A Summary of Amnesty
International’s Concerns and Call to Action. Ottawa: Amnesty International Canada, 2014.
Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2016.
———. Graphic Women: Life Narratives and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.
Coalition to Stop Violence against Native Women. www.csvanw.org/mmiw/. Accessed 04/09/2019.
Deer, Sarah. “Decolonizing Rape Law: A Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty.”
Wicazo Sa Review 24:2 (Fall 2009): 149–167.
Fawn, Jackie. “Mama.” LaPensée, Elizabeth and Weshoyot Alvitre, eds. Deer Woman: An Anthology.
Albuquerque, NM: Native Realities Press, 2017. N.P.
Hargreaves, Allison. Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature / Activism / Resistance. Waterloo, ON:
Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2017.
LaPensée, Elizabeth with Jonathan R. Thunder and Allie Vasquez. “Deer Woman: A Vignette.”
LaPensée, Elizabeth and Weshoyot Alvitre, eds. Deer Woman: An Anthology. Albuquerque NM:
Native Realities Press, 2017. N.P.
LaPensée, Elizabeth and Weshoyot Alvitre, eds. Deer Woman: An Anthology. Albuquerque, NM: Native
Realities Press, 2017.
Lavell-Harvard, D. Memee and Jennifer Brant. “Introduction: Forever Loved.” D. Memee Lavell-
Harvard and Jennifer Brant, eds. Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016. 1–13.
Lopez, Maria Wolf. “Deer Woman.” LaPensée, Elizabeth and Weshoyot Alvitre, eds. Deer Woman: An
Anthology. Albuquerque, NM: Native Realities Press, 2017. N.P.
132
Lucchesi, Annita and Abigail Echo-Hawk. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls: A Snapshot of
Data from 71 Urban Cities in the United States. Seattle: Urban Indian Health Institute, 2018.
Martin, Nick. “Inside the Fight for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” Splinter. Posted
04/08/19. https://splinternews.com/inside-the-f ight-for-missing-and-murdered- indigenous-
wo-1833325455. Accessed 04/11/19.
Pérez-Torres, Isela. “The Duty of the Canadian Media in Relation to the Violence against Native
Women: Lessons Drawn from the Case of Ciudad Juárez.” D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jennifer
Brant, eds. Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and
Girls in Canada. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016. 160–174.
The Pixel Project. www.thepixelproject.net/vaw-facts/about-violence-against-native-indigenous-
aboriginal-women/. Accessed 04/09/2019.
Polak, Kate. Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. Columbus: The Ohio State
UP, 2017.
Robertson, David Alexander and Scott B. Henderson. Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story. Winnipeg:
HighWater Press, 2015.
———. Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2011.
Robertson, David Alexander with story by Iskwé and Erin Leslie. Will I See? Winnipeg: HighWater
Press, 2016.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2017.
———. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence.
Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2011.
Smith, Andrea D. “Patty Stonefish Brings Her ‘Arming Sisters’ Project to Canada.” TheTyee.ca. 10/31/18.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/10/31/Patty-Stonefish-Arming-Sisters/. Accessed 05/05/19.
Vizenor, Gerald. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009.
133
10
From “accidental” autobiography
to comics activism
Tracing the development of an
Andalusian-Chinese feminism in the
work of comics artist Quan Zhou
Jennifer Nagtegaal
It has been just over a decade since the start of Spain’s graphic novel publishing boom, which has
brought both national and international recognition to many of Spain’s talented comics artists
and has spurred many new accounts of Spain’s long tradition of comics creation in its array of
forms. As the dust settles, however, it is coming to light that the names and works of female
comics creators continue to be overlooked in what has remained a rather hegemonic comics his-
tory within Spain. One response to this has been the formation in 2013 of the Colectivo Autoras
de Cómic (Collective of Female Comics Authors), whose main objectives include looking back-
wards to recuperate these often forgotten histories, and, conversely, looking forwards in the fight
for gender equality in Spain’s culture of comics. Interestingly, the work of many of these female
Spanish comics artists can be said to promote the same pair of objectives on a broader scale, that
is, the recuperation of Spain’s alternative and often overlooked histories and taking on the fight
for gender – and other – equality. This certainly summarizes the work of Quan Zhou Wu, a
Spanish-born graphic artist of Chinese descent. Recognition of Quan Zhou’s comics creation
means recognizing one of Spain’s alternative histories as well as the fight for gender and racial
equality taking place through new and innovative pathways.
Although Quan Zhou has now found her footing as a comics artist, she often tells of her
“backwards” and “accidental” incursion into the world of comics creation. The two-time au-
tobiographical comics author and producer of myriad webcomics for various news media out-
lets and social media platforms is referring to the 2015 publication of Gazpacho agridulce: una
autobiografía chino-andaluza (Sweet and Sour Gazpacho: a Chinese-Andalusian Autobiography,
Astiberri). Despite its unconventional origins, to be outlined in a moment here, Gazpacho agrid-
ulce is a novel account of an entire generation of Spaniards: the sons and daughters of a first wave
of Chinese immigrants arriving in Spain during the late twentieth century, who have come of
age while remaining largely unrepresented in Spain’s sociocultural sphere.
For this reason, the recent publication of Gazpacho agridulce is timely, as is the traction that
the autobiographical comic is gaining in scholarship, considering, as Derek Parker Royal
134
Tracing Andalusian-Chinese feminism
asserts in the Foreword to Multicultural Comics, that “[t]he politics of multicultural representa-
tions within comics is a rich field of inquiry, one that is just waiting to be tapped” (xi). Royal
also notes the medium’s ability to “take on some of [American] culture’s most challeng-
ing questions.” Gazpacho agridulce emerges as proof of the same for the increasingly diverse
Spanish culture, or, more appropriately, for the diverse “culture(s) in Spain” (Labanyi 9).
The autobiographical comic’s greatest success is that it illustrates the young author’s iden-
tity construction by retrospectively navigating questions of gender, race, ethnicity and class
throughout her childhood and adolescence. Yet the early autobiography also becomes a valu-
able pre-text for reading Quan Zhou’s more recent work, which engages with anti-racism
and feminist causes, now with a clear vision of herself as a Chinese-Andalusian woman. The
purpose of this chapter is to trace a progressive politicization of Quan Zhou’s comics produc-
tion, from its self-conscious roots within Gazpacho agridulce, to its conscious deployment in
the more recent webcomics and other artistic production.
Gazpacho agridulce was born out of a homonymous blog, when, in 2013, the Madrid-based
graphic designer turned to Tumblr as a portal for publishing single- and multi-panel comics
that illustrate anxieties that surround being a Spanish-born daughter to traditional Chinese
immigrants. Roughly 150 of Quan Zhou’s comics published over a three-year period il-
lustrate, on the one hand, the intergenerational family clashes under the roof of the Zhou
household and within the four walls of the family-run Chinese restaurant, and, on the other,
anecdotes of daily confrontations that the young artist faced growing up in the south of Spain
looking Chinese while feeling, as she often states, “Andalusian at heart.”
In 2014, the Spanish-language daily newspaper El País invited Quan Zhou to regularly pub-
lish her comics on their blog Migrados, and in 2015, on the very day the author pitched the idea
to the Spanish comics publishing powerhouse, Astiberri Editorial, she found herself signing a
contract for her first book-length autobiography. Gazpacho agridulce narrates the mobilities and
migrations that marked the young author’s life, from her birth in a taxi cab in Algeciras, to her
upbringing in Malaga where she faced reconciling desire for a social life in Spanish society with
responsibility to her Chinese immigrant entrepreneurial family, and finally to her decision to
move to Madrid in pursuit of a career in graphic design. Immediately on the heels of its release,
Quan Zhou continued creating content for Gazpacho agridulce 2. Andaluchinas por el mundo
(Sweet and Sour Gazpacho 2. Andaluchinas Around the World), which was published in 2017,
again with Astiberri.1 Moving between autobiography and biography in its first three sections,
Andaluchinas por el mundo narrates Quan’s move to Madrid and subsequent move to London as
she completes her education in graphic design, and likewise tells of her elder sister Fu’s emigra-
tion to Miami to attend an American university and her younger sister Qing’s travels to France.
The fourth and final section narrates the Zhou sisters’ reunion in their hometown of Malaga
to, together with their family, close down and sell the family restaurant.
Through the media and critical attention garnered by Gazpacho agridulce, Quan Zhou
unintentionally became a voice for the rapidly growing population of first-generation
Chinese-Spaniards. Most recently, and this time intentionally, Quan Zhou has also become
a voice for Chinese-Spanish women; the comics medium has quickly become for the young
Madrid-based artist a means of actively promoting anti-racism and participating in feminist
causes. Alongside her “official” comics creation with Astiberri and El País, Quan Zhou
has published single-panel comics through a number of social media platforms as well as
within a variety of other media forms, notably the print publication El Salto, and the digital
publication Pikara Online Magazine alongside the likes of Spanish illustrators such as Emma
Gascó, Gloría Vives and Susanna Martín. Like the feminist comics created by these artists,
the comics continually produced by the hand of Quan Zhou are anything but unintentional.
135
Jennifer Nagtegaal
In short, Quan Zhou’s early comics creation has opened up doors for timely political
engagement, and, in only a handful of years, the Spanish-born artist of Chinese descent
has moved from, as she says, “accidental” autobiography to what can be considered “comics
activism,” a term recently put forth by British comics artist Kate Evans. For her work, Evans
rejects the label of graphic journalist, a profession that implies a rather objective stance, for,
as she says, “I like my comics to do something, I have an axe to grind, I will use every tool
in my toolkit to engage the reader with the story…I will enhance the drama of the situation
as much as I possibly can insofar as it is consistent with the facts” (Davies 6). For Evans, a
preferred title to journalist or artist would be comics “activist.”
Quan Zhou can be said to share the same philosophy of wanting her comics to do some-
thing, by likewise unabashedly enhancing the drama if necessary. In a commissioned il-
lustration for a recent article in Pikara Online Magazine on so-called “Influencers” fighting
xenophobia and rumours, Quan Zhou’s self-caricature features the large overhead caption
“When they call you…DRAMA QUEEN,” under which Quan appears in the left half of
the frame, mouth impossibly agape as she feigns being taken aback, gesturing to herself with
her right hand while asking, “Me?” Pictured a second time in the right half of the frame,
Quan’s expression changes to a confident grin as she gives a flick of her wrist and responds in
her particular Spanish inflection, “Well yes. Why lie?” (Figure 10.1).
The article in which the illustration appears highlights how Quan Zhou’s comics, alongside
Barcelonan-Morrocan Muslim YouTuber Ramia Chaoui’s video content, and Basque-born
Afro-Spanish actress and director Silvia Albert Sopale’s theatre work collectively contribute
to “banishing rumours and demonstrating the intersectionality that crosses any one of our
identities” (Simón). In featuring the lives and work of these three Spanish artists, the news
article necessarily employs the term “intersectionality” (interseccionalidad), a concept which
has created a lot of conversation, and likewise a lot of confusion, since it was first coined
in the late 1980s by American civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Williams
Crenshaw. While remaining largely silent for the better part of three decades as the term
developed discursively into what Crenshaw herself now calls the “field of intersectionality
studies” (see Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013), the professor of law most recently clarified
that she understands “intersectionality as a term that captures the fact that systems of oppres-
sion are not singular; they overlap and intersect in the same way that power does” (Crenshaw
and Schulz 210). In other words, one does not separately experience racism, patriarchy or
Figure 10.1 Pikara Online Magazine, “‘Influencers’ contra la extranjerización y los rumores.”
18 April 2018
136
class oppression, but rather these multiple systems of oppression can be experienced simul-
taneously in a compounding manner. In a concluding interview remark Crenshaw asserts,
“when we talk about intersectionality, we’re talking about people who are marginal within
the movements that represent them” (218). This last statement is key to understanding what
here is called Quan Zhou’s Chinese-Andalusian feminism, the roots of which can be read in
Gazpacho agridulce, as outlined in the first part of this chapter, and the development of which
can be seen in her post-autobiographical comics production, as highlighted in the second part
of this chapter. The conclusion locates Quan Zhou’s Chinese-Andalusian feminism within
the already intersectional Andalusian Feminism movement gaining traction from Spain’s
southernmost region.
Gazpacho agridulce: illustrating intersections of race,

class, ethnicity and gender
It is precisely the young author-artist’s detection of these overlapping systems of discrim-
ination and disempowerment, as well as her early attempts to resist them, which Quan
Zhou narrates in Gazpacho agridulce. In an interview for the Spanish journal Tebeosfera,
Cristina Benito notes that Quan Zhou is special for having put in a “coctelera” (cocktail
mixer) all the ingredients that make up her life: woman, born and raised in Spain, and
descendent of traditional Chinese immigrants (Benito and Zhou). The metaphor is fit-
ting as Quan Zhou has, from the start, relied on the discourse of food preparation in the
construction of what Rocío G. Davis aptly calls a “graphic self.” From its very title, the
autobiographical comic connotes a blending of cultures. The typical Spanish dish gazpacho,
which is, like the author, Andalusian by origin, is infused with the sweet and sour flavour –
agridulce – that is staple to a Chinese menu. The adjective agridulce (translated literally as
“bittersweet”) likewise conveys the author’s simultaneous “sweet” and “sour” feelings to-
wards her upbringing.
Quan Zhou arguably creates what Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A. Di Giovine call an
“edible identity,” only here through the narrativization of food, that is by playing with food met-
aphorically, rather than through food’s literal cultivation, preparation and consumption (2).
The handful of studies that have sought to analyse Gazpacho agridulce take the title as either
a starting or culminating point within a broader argument of how the author’s migrant
condition is one of, on the one hand, cultural “in-betweenness” (Robles-Llana 136), and,
on the other, being “bicultural” (Collado 209). Amelia Sáiz López similarly concludes that
what Quan Zhou constructs – although here though through the webcomics published on
Tumblr – is a “new hybrid identity”: one that is largely achieved by enumerating the many
ideological aspects that separate the author from her traditional Chinese mother (2016: 94).
With the exception of Saíz López, however, current analyses of Gazpacho agridulce do not take
into account the author’s gender, the first “ingredient” mentioned by Benito, as an integral –
and intersecting –aspect in the author’s identity construction.
Quan Zhou is the middle daughter born to Mamá Zhou and Papá Zhou as they are solely
referred to throughout her comics, whose emigration from Zhejiang’s Qingtian County in
the 1980s was part of a mass emigration from the rural region in the south-eastern Chinese
province to Spain.2 As Paloma Robles-Llana notes, this initial boom of Chinese migration
to Spain in the 1980s has increased exponentially since the turn of century (124). Around
the time that Gazpacho agridulce and Andaluchinas por el mundo were published, there were a
reported 207,593 Chinese people registered in Spain, making them the second largest non–
European Union immigrant community in Spain behind the Moroccans.3
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Jennifer Nagtegaal
For this first generation, especially those coming from Qingtian and Wenzhou districts in
south Zhejiang province, the Chinese restaurant has been the niche economic activity (Sáiz
López 2012: 43). The fact that Quan Zhou’s life narrative is shaped by the family restaurant –
from its title to the image of the restaurant’s façade on the comic’s cover, where a tradition-
ally dressed Mamá Zhou greets the reader and beckons them in, to its internal structure as a
menu for a fusion restaurant – can be read as an affirmation that, for Chinese entrepreneurial
families, “the family and the enterprise constitute a whole, a continuum of the public and
private spheres” (41).
The first few panels in Gazpacho agridulce reveal a moment of great expectation for the au-
thor’s recently emigrated parents to Spain’s southern port city of Malaga. On the one hand,
there is the long-awaited opening of the family restaurant during what has been cited histor-
ically as Spain’s “most dynamic period for the opening of Chinese restaurants” (Nieto 230).
This fact is reflected in the confident words of Papá Zhou who states that it is “the second
Chinese restaurant in this town. It’ll go well!” (10). On the other hand, there stands the heav-
ily pregnant Mamá Zhou, signalling the imminent arrival of their first-born child, and again
Papá Zhou’s confident words: “our future son will inherit everything! We’ll finally be able to
prosper” (9). The representation of Mamá Zhou cradling her pregnant belly on one page, and
on the opposite page with her back to the reader facing the entrance to the restaurant as she ex-
claims, “It’s magnificent!” (8–9), evokes the very picture of the dual productive-reproductive
work carried out by Chinese migrant women “looking for the maximization of the family
enterprise resources and the productive and reproductive strategies” (Sáiz López 2012:53).
Starting from these opening scenes, the hand-drawn and hand-framed moments of Quan
Zhou’s narrative relate from the simultaneous perspective of the adult narrator and child-
protagonist self (here even the unborn self ) what it means to be a Spanish-born girl to a
family of first-generation Chinese immigrants. In this regard, Quan Zhou’s comic partici-
pates in a tradition outlined by Hillary Chute in Graphic Women, where female comics artists
write “if not for the duration of their narratives, then at least for a significant portion, from
the perspective of a child” (5). The emphasis on the child, according to Chute, “affords a
conspicuous, self-reflexive methodology of representation,” visually presenting a tension be-
tween the narrating “I” (the adult graphic artist) and the “I” who is the child subject of them.
In the case of Gazpacho agridulce, it is through this tension that some of the author-artist’s most
meaningful illustrations of the intersection of race, gender, class and ethnicity can be read.
One of the autobiographical comic’s most frequently cited anecdotes in both media and
scholarship alike revolves around the Zhou sisters’ anticipation of the Spanish Christmas tradi-
tion of the Reyes Magos (Biblical Magi). Criticism of this scene from the first section of Gazpacho
agridulce, fittingly titled Mini Zhou al estilo andaluz (Mini Zhou Prepared the A ndalusian Way),
largely holds that the Zhou girls are beginning the task of combining, or “accumulating” these
cultural experiences, as Collado writes, in order to form an identity that is “flexible, oscillating,
and the opposite of rooted” (203). Yet the scene also illustrates the author’s early understanding
of how gender expectations play into her cultural identity (Figure 10.2).
While Mamá Zhou responds that the tradition is “for Spanish children! A fable! We Chinese
don’t have Biblical Magi” (46), the opposite page features Dolores, their Spanish caregiver, in
the midst of explaining the Spanish Christmas tradition to Quan and her sisters, whom she has
gifted matching Barbie dolls (47). The detail of the gift, whether fact or fiction, does not seem a
casual choice in Quan Zhou’s narration of this memory. As Mary F. Rogers explains in the Intro-
duction to Barbie Culture, Barbie is a contemporary Western cultural icon inextricably linked to
identity: “Barbie has a great deal to show us about who we are, who we want to be, and who we
fear we might be or become. […] This ‘we’ is big enough to include diverse subcultures as well
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Figure 10.2 Quan Zhou Wu. Gazpacho agridulce, p. 47
as contemporary Western cultures at large” (1–2). Barbie becomes heavily symbolic as the girls
cling to their new gifts, and likewise to the Spanish tradition of the Reyes Magos. What Dolores
has apparently gifted them is the idea of identity construction – that they may be who they are
and who they want to be, in the words of Rogers – which starkly contrasts the message relayed
by Mamá Zhou on the previous page.
Here, Barbie becomes a third, female adult figure through which the girls fashion their
identities. In its conception in the 1950s, Barbie faced criticism and opposition for being the
first doll aimed at girls that was a grownup. However, as the iconic doll’s co-founder, Ruth
Handler, has repeatedly stated, Barbie was conceived as an archetypal female figure on to
which little girls could project their idealized identity, representing the fact that a woman
has choices. When it comes to expectations to marry and have children, the Zhou girls’
circumstances as traditional Chinese immigrant daughters in contemporary Spain are not
so dissimilar to those of many young girls in the mid-twentieth-century American context.
Quan Zhou recently remarked that her ability to carve out her own path being Chinese and
a woman has been very difficult: “[I]t is very important for your family’s honour that you
marry well, a woman is incomplete without a man, and I am not talking about love. The
pressure is tremendous” (Villar).
The Barbie doll cradled in the arms of the Zhou sisters, as a projection of their future
selves, presents a challenge to the assumed inheritance of the woman’s role in the productive-
reproductive spheres within the Chinese immigrant entrepreneurial family. On a broader
level, the doll challenges the representation of Chinese women in the European literary tra-
dition, which, in certain historical moments, has exemplified Spanish Otherness par excellence
(Sáiz López 2016:79). The fact that Barbie, a quintessentially Western doll, is embraced by the
young Chinese-Spanish girls emerges as a powerful contrast to a centuries-long racialized
and gendered representation of Chinese women in the European imaginary through what
Sáiz López notes to be the “China doll concept”: the literary representation of Asian women
as doll-like, beginning in the Victorian Era, in the sense that these female characters shared
“a displaced humanity, do not think for themselves, and are perceived as passive objects” (82).
Unsurprisingly, as Sáiz López continues to note, it is through the work of Chinese authors
translated and read in Spanish that this literary image has now evolved into the vision of a
young Chinese woman that is less passive, ascribing to their protagonists distinct physical and
psychological traits, while nevertheless still sexualizing them. Sáiz López however ponders
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Jennifer Nagtegaal
the measure to which these current images have “displaced, forgotten or nullified the primal
Orientalist image” (82).Arguably, Gazpacho agridulce takes one more step in the direction
of challenging this image, which is an important move in the context of Spain’s growing
Chinese population as such stereotypical images can produce negative effects for the repre-
sented group at the level of society. Crenshaw calls this phenomenon “representational inter-
sectionality”: the reinforcement of race and gender stereotypes of women of colour through
their representation in literature and media that paradoxically encourage and incite real-life
oppression against the women being depicted (1997:248).
While Quan Zhou’s post-autobiographical comics explicitly work to change the image
of Chinese women in the Spanish imaginary, as will be later discussed, the foundation for
this work can be read in the pages of Gazpacho agridulce. By drawing a Barbie in the hands of
young Quan, Quan Zhou redraws the image of a young Chinese woman, albeit through an
extreme and not uncontroversial image of Western femininity. Yet the representation fails to
escape the vision of passivity, as Barbie continues to be at the centre of a debate on toys that
perpetuate the passive-female/active-male stereotypes. Although this representation slightly
misses the ideological mark, Quan Zhou manages in other ways to depict herself in a more
active light. Notably, by taking on the role of storytelling, Quan Zhou disrupts the tradi-
tional Chinese gender system which holds the males, especially those of older generations, as
the “‘naturally’ designated interlocutors” and captures “the power of the word, that is, of in-
terlocution/representation” (Sáiz López 2016:89). Moreover, Quan Zhou illustrates the fact
that Gazpacho agridulce is very much a story of the Zhou family women: each title page is fol-
lowed by an illustrated family tree branching solely from the author’s paternal grandmother.
By flipping the family tree, Quan Zhou makes the story of her family in Spain very much
“[u]nlike the ideal Chinese family model, which favours the patriarchal line,” a restrictive
canon which results in the oppression of women, and is especially the case for rural Chinese
families (Sáiz López 2013:175, 179–181). By taking on the role of (self )representation, above
all through a medium that is highly visual, Quan Zhou, like other Spanish-born daughters
of Chinese entrepreneurial mothers, can be understood to recognize her capacity for rep-
resentation within Spain’s sociocultural sphere, which puts her in contrast to the previous
generation of women working within the ethnic niche while remaining scarcely visible – in
terms of recognition – at the societal level (Sáiz López 2016:97).
Meanwhile, the male Zhou family members are as sidelined in the main narrative as they
are in the representations of the family tree. Quan Zhou’s younger brother, “the treasure
of the family” (55), seldom appears and is only portrayed in this privileged way. A handful
of scenes show Encheng intent on whichever video game he is currently playing, and often
seated or standing tenderly at the foot of Mamá Zhou. Papá Zhou likewise seldom appears
following the opening scenes, and when he is pictured he is often found silent, speechless or
even sleeping. This is notably the case in the scene that opens the second part of the comic,
Primer plato: familia feliz agripicante (First Course: Sour and Spicy Happy Family).
Within the opening panels, an adolescent Quan tells her group of girl friends seated
around a table at the family restaurant of the recent arrival of her first menstrual period.
Quan’s admission that “[i]n my house we never speak of these things…” (60) suggests that
what today is still a taboo topic in many Asian societies remains so for the Chinese family
living in Spain. The subsequent panel offers a flashback to that moment of realization, from
where Quan sits on the toilet, which she imaginatively draws into the family living room
next to the couch where her father lays sleeping. The major gaps in knowledge about repro-
ductive health that this taboo has caused are reflected in Quan Zhou’s narration as she admits
that she “didn’t know what to do, I didn’t even know what a period was!”
140
By illustrating this anecdote, Quan Zhou challenges this taboo on various levels, and its
visualization enables what Chute refers to as an “excess of representation” while also offering “a
constant self-reflexive demystification of the project of representation” (emphasis in text 9). The
adult narrator challenges and rejects this culture of taboo on a narrative level by having young
Quan converse about a matter of – apparently – upmost privacy within the public space of the
restaurant, and likewise by erasing the boundaries between private and public spaces within
the representation of her own home. Quan Zhou also challenges the taboo on a cultural level
by its very inclusion in the autobiographical comic, a product of popular culture (Figure 10.3).
Mamá Zhou’s sudden appearance at the table in the final panel of this page turns the con-
versation back to what the space of the family restaurant symbolizes for her: “Quan, wash
the dishes” (60). Robles-Llana highlights the expectations placed upon children of Chinese
migrant families to help with the family business, noting that children’s lives are affected
as they’re “often required to run errands, serve at the family restaurant, or tend the family
shop” (125). For the denominated 1.5 generation that Robles-Llana examines, the familial
obligations and responsibilities largely resulted in “feelings of distance with Spanish peers
while simultaneously creating a bond with children of Chinese migrants that reinforced
their Chinese identities” (130). This scene and many others in Quan Zhou’s narrative suggest
that, unlike the Chinese-born members of the 1.5 generation, the first-generation Chinese-
Spaniards view their responsibilities and obligations to the family business as a dividing factor
from their heritage and a driving force towards their Spanish peers and their Spanish identity.
This notion of dividing factors and driving forces is communicated in the title of the third
section, Segundo plato: hormigas bajan del árbol (Main Course: Ants Descending a Tree). Here,
tensions surrounding work, social life and above all expectations of marriage are heightened
for the Zhou sisters as they mature and gain independence. The section title plays on the
name of the classic Sichuan dish “Ants climbing a tree” (Chinese: Ma yi shang shu), named
for the way in which the bits of ground pork cling to the glass noodles. The fact that Quan
Zhou’s play on the traditional dish’s name re-imagines the ants as descending the family tree
implies a sort of uprooting, which is further highlighted by the fact that the ants are, accord-
ingly, no longer clinging. In the pages of this section, the Zhou sisters can be seen detaching,
dislodging and disengaging from their Chinese roots, or at the very least, embarking on new
routes. They are, in short, trying to break with the expectations imposed by the Chinese
society at large, as well as those that the first-generation Chinese migrants to Spain hold for
Figure 10.3 Quan Zhou Wu. Gazpacho agridulce, p. 60
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Jennifer Nagtegaal
their children: that is to likewise become the restaurant owners or shopkeepers as the Zhou
girls state in the comic’s prologue. For the Zhou sisters, this disengagement can be read spe-
cifically in terms of the productive-reproductive roles of the Chinese immigrant entrepre-
neurial woman exemplified by Mamá Zhou. To break with these expectations is a difficult
task, as they also voice in the prologue to Gazpacho agridulce.
It is within this same section that Quan Zhou also narrates the struggle to deviate from
traditional expectations of courtship and marriage. The author openly portrays the Zhou
sisters’ initial and unsuccessful attempts to find love amongst their Spanish peers, a subject
which the author treats with humour, denominating herself and her two sisters as “The
Zhous – disgraced in love” (108). Although the tone here is largely humoristic, the use of the
adjective desgraciadas (disgraced) can be read as a deeper remark about the expectations that
surround the girls’ romantic lives, which are dictated by their mother’s adherence to tradi-
tional Chinese cultural expectations. In Andaluchinas por el mundo, Fu retrospectively com-
ments on the clandestine relationship she maintained with her Spanish boyfriend, illustrated
in the pages of Gazpacho agridulce: “it was a nuclear family bomb, even my uncles, aunts and
cousins got in the middle of it…” (61).
When Mamá Zhou confronts Quan about her knowledge of the relationship, a heated and
drawn out (in both senses) tête-à-tête ensues, at the end of which mother and daughter still find
themselves diametrically opposed, not only physically but also ideologically on their views
surrounding love and marriage (96). Resolution to this climax scene can be found in the final
pages of Gazpacho agridulce, as Quan, now a young adult, prepares to embark on the journey
to Madrid with a more assured understanding of herself as andaluchina (Chinese-Andalusian).
Quan’s embrace of her mother upon her departure to Madrid results in a subsequent mirror-
ing of bodies, only this time the closing of the physical gap suggests a move towards bridging
the ideological gap, or at least an agreement to disagree (117). In this sense, the pair appears
to the reader-viewer to be opposing halves of one complete body – Mamá Zhou facing the
reader and Quan facing and embracing Mamá Zhou – very much evocative of the Yin and
Yang; contrary yet complementary forces.
Gazpacho agridulce can be said from its cover to its concluding scenes to enumerate the
ideological aspects that separate Quan, a Chinese-Spanish girl-turned woman, from her
traditional Chinese mother, just as Sáiz López highlights of the Tumblr comics, specifically
in regard to lifestyle, relationship with money and notions of marriage (2016: 94). The auto-
biographical comic draws on these same ideological aspects as well as more subtle ideologies
that are likewise tied to the intersecting systems of gender, race, ethnicity and class: socie-
tal views on menstruation, (self )representation and societal (in)visibility, and women’s role
in the productive and reproductive spheres of the Chinese migrant entrepreneurial family.
While this section has aimed to provide a more nuanced reading of Gazpacho agridulce, high-
lighting the formation of the author’s early feminist ideals which can be read in the tension
created by the presence of an adult narrator and child protagonist, the next section traces the
transformation of these ideals into what is called here Chinese-Andalusian feminism, and the
translation of the same into Quan Zhou’s webcomics and other artistic production.
Reading Quan Zhou’s engagement with feminism

through the lens of intersectionality
Following the publication of Gazpacho agridulce and Andaluchinas por el mundo, Quan Zhou
has continued to story her daily experience as a first-generation Chinese-Spanish woman.
The mode of storytelling has changed, however, from the visual-verbal page of Spanish print
142
comics to the digital screen with the production of webcomics for multiple news media and
social media platforms. Moreover, Quan Zhou’s active role in telling her own story through
the comics medium has shifted into an activist role for the larger Chinese population in Spain
through the same medium. Much of this work has meant drawing attention to diversity and
fighting racism frame by frame. In this regard, it is notable that Quan Zhou has returned to
single-panel comics to carry out her comics activism, as her illustrations can be said to not
only do something, but, in fact, to do quite the opposite of what single-panel comics were
originally employed to do.
Perhaps not ironically, in a discussion of Asian-American comics creator Gene Luen
Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), Jared Gardner highlights the fact that single-panel
comics lend themselves to the work of stereotyping, historically employed “to work in the
service of racist stereotype,” while sequential comics are “resistant to racialist work” and
provide the means to “destabilize racialist logic” (Multicultural Comics 138, 141–142). While
racism is broached sporadically in Gazpacho agridulce, and is a major theme in Andaluchinas por
el mundo, it is in Quan Zhou’s move from broaching this subject within sequential comics to
single-panel comics that she has truly undertaken the work of destabilizing racist stereotypes.
Her ability to show it like it is within only a few frames, or even a single panel, can be seen
in her series “La vida banana” (The Banana Life) created for El País’ viral web-sharing page
“Verne,” her series “Racistas Anónimas” and “Whitexplaining” (a portmanteau of “white”
and “explaining”), as well as myriad untitled comics published sporadically on her Instagram.
A more recent and underappreciated aspect of Quan Zhou’s artistry, however, is her
engagement with feminism, specifically the way her feminist ideals are informed by her
Chinese heritage and Chinese-Spanish cultural identity. Much of Quan Zhou’s webcom-
ics production can be said to participate in the so-called fourth-wave feminist movement.
Taking advantage of the potentialities brought by the Internet, and particularly by social
media, Quan Zhou has been particularly vocal – both visually and verbally – about the fact
that she does not share patriarchal views on marriage and family. In a 2016 article created
for Migrados, Quan Zhou speaks out against extreme pressure for Chinese women to marry,
contesting Chinese culture’s still pervasive notion of “leftover women” (Spanish: mujeres de
sobra, Chinese: Sheng Nu), a designation for females over the age of 25 who are considered
incomplete in their unmarried state. Quan Zhou’s article, published to her Tumblr on 11
April 2016, notably during the author’s 26th year, draws on Chinese media and social media
as well as her own writing and illustrations as a means of responding to these traditional and
pervasive Chinese views of women’s being, but also as a cautionary to Spanish society in
which she says to have noticed echoes of the same pressure, although at a later age: “It seems
that the anguish of a ring on one’s finger and of descendents is a universal thing. Whether a
woman marries or not, has children or not, she will always be a woman. She will never be
leftover” (“De camino a ser”).
While the theme of a woman’s right to choose continues to fill the frames of many of her
webcomics, the single-panel comic created for Pikara Online Magazine engages with femi-
nism at another extreme: an encounter with sexism while shoe shopping. A reading of this
seemingly straightforward comic through feminist theory would argue that it dialogues with
the so-called Everyday Sexism Project, which has emerged as a prominent fourth-wave fem-
inist campaign alongside other social media movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up. The
action in the scene revolves around the quotidian topic (at least in Western culture) of con-
scious consumerism. Quan can be seen in the act of shoe shopping with a female companion,
whom, after deciding against the purchase, tells the sales associate that, due to other pur-
chases this month, she has decided not to buy the shoes as she wants “to be responsible with
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Jennifer Nagtegaal
Figure 10.4 Pikara Online Magazine, La Viñetera, 15 May 2019
her purchases.” The sales associate’s response that “one does not expect to hear those words
from the mouth of a woman!” leaves the consumer speechless and Quan literally sweating
his response. Quan’s agitation and discomfort can also be read in the bold, large font in the
caption at the bottom of the panel which reads “and he never knew why he didn’t sell the
VEGAN-ECO-FAIRTRADE-RECYCLED shoes.” In promoting this comics collabora-
tion on her own Instagram page, Quan further wrote, “Yes, I’ll admit, I’m a disaster with my
money…but not because I am a woman…it’s because I’m Quan” (“Este mes”) (Figure 10.4).
Quan Zhou’s own identification with the instance of everyday sexism, and her revelation
that her own troubled relationship with money is not due to her gender status but simply
because of who she is, necessitates a second reading of this comic through the lens of inter-
sectionality. Conflated in this comic, and Quan Zhou’s further remarks on social media, are
the young woman’s ideologies surrounding lifestyle and relationship with money that point
to class dynamics. It is notable that the artist draws herself standing on the consumer side of
Spain’s service sector, that is, as someone with purchasing power. This action can be read as
a tacit affirmation of her Spanishness, as it draws her very much unlike the first-generation
immigrant class who characteristically reduced consumption to the minimum level, focusing
instead on accumulating capital for the family enterprise, to consolidate and expand it in or-
der to one day see it taken over by the second generation whom they value as “human capital
of the family enterprise” (Sáiz López 2012:52).
While this contribution to Pikara can be read as a feminist (re)action, another recent
webcomic presents a feminist call to action for International Women’s Day. A medium shot
captures Quan’s head and torso in the left side of the frame, with her arms in a defensive
pose at chest-level. Her posture, together with the speech balloon to the right of her head,
and the dialogue in first-person plural, becomes highly evocative of Rosie the Riveter in the
iconic (Western) feminist cartoon. Quan’s words, “Let’s go! Let’s change the world! All you
women! Get out there!” are a call to action to the streets of Madrid, because, as her caption
to the post reads, “nothing changes from the comfort of the sofa, we’ll see you in the streets,
sisters #8M” (“Nada cambia”). Quan’s words burst the bounds of the speech balloon, sig-
nalling the power she ascribes to the movement as well as the joining of voices and forces.
Here becomes visible Quan Zhou’s growing awareness of the potential of comics for political
activism both online and offline, or, simply put, comics activism.
This personal and artistic growth becomes even more perceptible when comparing
this illustration to the 8M post from three years prior, which sees the face of Mamá Zhou
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super-imposed onto Rosie’s body, and uses humour to reappropriate the day as that of the
“hardworking” woman. By portraying Mamá Zhou in a humorous light, Quan Zhou
implies that she has an opposing, or at least slightly differing worldview. Yet the image
can also be read as homage to Mamá Zhou, as the passing years and physical distance have
begun to soften the feelings of “bitterness” towards her upbringing and have allowed her
mother’s qualities to be viewed with “sweetness.” This is already perceptible in the way
that Quan Zhou affectionately introduces her mother in the opening pages of Andaluchi-
nas por el mundo, as “bossy and snappy (respondona) like any other Chinese matriarch” (6)
(Figures 10.5a and b).
While the older 8M post can perhaps be critiqued for its “slacktivism,” a major criticism
of fourth-wave feminism, the most recent post signals a step towards comics and political
activism. The second 8M comic can be described, in Hillary Chute’s words, as “rigorously
handmade” (11). Quan Zhou’s recent comic calls attention to its hand-craftedness, demon-
strating a growth in her comics production, and also a growing awareness that, beyond being
(a)
(b)
Figure 10.5 (a) and (b) Quan Zhou Wu. www.instagram.com/gazpachoagridulce/
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Jennifer Nagtegaal
a tool for narrating one’s past through the lens of humour, comics are a serious medium that
can shape sociocultural issues faced by present and future generations – with or without in-
voking humour.
An early reflection of this sobering self-awareness can be seen in the Aliadas (Allies) paint-
ing, commissioned in 2016 for the homonymous exhibition ALIADAS: Mujeres que cambiamos
el mundo (ALLIES: Women who change the world). Aliadas can be said to capture in a single
frame the young author’s intersecting anti-racism and feminist ideals that are self-consciously
developed in the pages of the autobiographical comic, published the previous year. What is
more, Quan Zhou’s first acrylic painting can be said to exhibit par excellence a main objective
stated in the manifesto of the recently born Feminismo Andaluz project, spearheaded by na-
tional prize-winning journalist Mar Gallego in 2017: that the project is “an attempt to rescue
the intersectionality in our gazes” (“Manifesto”).
The two women standing shoulder to shoulder in traditional dress signal the notion of
roots in the same way that Mamá Zhou’s traditional dress does in Gazpacho agridulce; only
here the matching upward and outward glances of the two female figures, together with
the slight lift and crook of their left arms, create a forward – and leftward – signalling of
new routes that acknowledge these roots. The focal point becomes this out-of-frame horizon
on which the pair’s gaze is fixed, rather than the pair themselves in the foreground or the
southern seascape in the background. The scene, it seems, becomes purposefully evocative
of traditional Chinese propaganda; a costumbrista portrait characterized by bright colours,
featuring revolutionary subjects captured in a heroic pose, and set in an open-air rural scene.
Aliadas reveals Quan Zhou’s subversive use of the propagandistic style to ascribe power to
the very subjects who have otherwise experienced multiple oppressions – being women, one
of them of minority, both from Spain’s southern territory – and to promote a new image of
Spanishness in the social imaginary (Figure 10.6).
In other words, rather than presenting a negative identity construction through contrast,
the woman of Chinese descent stands as a complimentary image to the picture of the tradi-
tional Andalusian woman, mirroring the Feminismo Andaluz movement’s purpose of recu-
perating Andalusia’s diverse past, made of mixtures and coexistence between cultures. But
beyond picturing the intersection of east-west identities, within the same frame, through the
women’s gaze, Quan Zhou also introduces north-south power dynamics, effectively captur-
ing the class intersectionality that the Feminismo Andaluz movement aims to reflect, being
historically centred on the Andalusian working class as Spain’s southern Other. While the
Figure 10.6 Quan Zhou Wu. Aliadas, 8 March 2016
146
movement works to recuperate this past, largely silenced or subordinated in Spain’s history,
Quan Zhou’s artistry and activism also asserts that Andalusia’s present – and future – is
marked by new multiculturalisms and intersectionalities.
This is crucial for, as this chapter has aimed to show, Quan Zhou’s intersectional femi-
nism manifests on paper, online and on canvas with the aim of producing real effects offline
and at the level of Spanish society. In fact, Evans’ understanding of comics activism to mean
that something is done beyond the visual-verbal page applied to the case of Quan Zhou to
suggest that her webcomics can do something both on/offline, dialogues with Crenshaw’s
argument that a stereotypical cultural representation has negative effects that can be seen and
felt at the level of society. Only it works in reverse: if comics can work against rather than
reinforce stereotypical images, then perhaps the positive effects of these counter(comics)nar-
ratives will be seen and felt in society. Today, Quan Zhou is one of many local, female artists
playing a key role in the Feminismo Andaluz movement, her recent collaboration with Pikara
Online Magazine being one direct example, and Aliadas another, more indirect example. As
the Feminismo Andaluz movement plants its roots in parallel to Quan Zhou establishing her
own roots as a comics artist and activist, it can be concluded that there is a fruitful future for
comics activism in the South of Spain, especially from the hands of female minority authors.
Notes
Works Cited
Benito, Cristina, and Quan Zhou. “Quan Zhou Wu: Viñetas agridulces.”Tebeosfera. Tercera época, No.
5, 2018,www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/quan_zhou_wu_vinetas_agridulces.html. Accessed 4
July 2019.
Brulotte, Ronda L., and Michael A. Di Giovine, eds. Edible identities: Food as cultural heritage. Routledge,
2016.
Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a field of intersectionality
studies: Theory, applications, and praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38,
No. 4, 2013, pp. 785–810.
Chute, Hillary L. Graphic women: Life narrative and contemporary comics. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Collado, Adrian Alejandro. Caricaturas del Otro: Contra-Representaciones Satíricas de la Inmigración en la
Literatura y la Cultura Visual Española Contemporánea (1993–2017). Diss. UCLA, 2018.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Beyond racism and misogyny: Black feminism and 2 Live Crew.” Feminist social
thought: A reader, edited by Diana Tietjens Meyers, 1997, Routledge, pp. 247–263.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, and Patricia Schulz. “Intersectionality in promoting equality.” Equal
Rights Review, Vol. 16, 2016, pp. 205–219.
Davies, Dominic. “Comics activism: An interview with comics artist and activist Kate Evans.” The
Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, Vol. 7, No.1, 2017, pp. 1–12.
Davis, Rocío G. “A graphic self: Comics as autobiography in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Prose Stud-
ies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2005, pp. 264–279.
Labanyi, Jo, ed. Constructing identity in contemporary Spain: Theoretical debates and cultural practice. Oxford
“Manifesto.” Como vaya y lo encuentre, www.feminismoandaluz.com/manifiesto/. Accessed 7 July, 2019.
Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama with a Foreword by
Derek Parker Royal. University of Texas Press, 2010.
Nieto, Gladys. “The Chinese in Spain.” International Migration, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2003, pp. 215–237.
147
Jennifer Nagtegaal
Robles-Llana. Paloma. “Cultural identities of children of Chinese migrants in Spain: A critical evalu-
ation of the category 1.5 generation.” Identity, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2018, pp. 124–140.
Rogers, Mary F. Barbie culture. Sage, 1999.
Sáiz López, Amelia. “De imaginarios, (in)visibilizaciones y representación(es): El caso de las mujeres
chinas en España.” Representaciones de China en las Américas y la Península Ibérica, edited by Joa-
quín Beltrán Antolín, Francisco Haro Navejas and Amelia Sáiz López, Edicions Bellaterra, 2016,
pp. 79–99.
———. “Gender, development and Asian migration in Spain: The Chinese case.” The international
handbook on gender, migration and transnationalism: Global and development perspectives, edited by Laura
Oso and Natalia Ribas-Mateos, Edward Elgar, 2013, pp. 165–184.
———. “Transnationalism, motherhood, and entrepreneurship: Chinese women in Spain.”Social pro-
duction and reproduction at the interface of public and private spheres, edited by Marcia Texler Segal, Em-
erald Group Publishing Limited, 2012, pp. 39–59.
Simón, Patricia. “’Influencers’ contra la extranjerización y los rumores.” Pikara Online Magazine, 18 April
2018, www.pikaramagazine.com/2018/04/influencers-contra-la-extranjerizacion-y-los-rumores/.
Accessed 28 June 2019.
Villar, Cote. “La entrevista final.”El Mundo España, 20 March 2018, www.elmundo.es/cultura/
comic/2018/03/20/5aaf9a4f22601d5d3f8b4628.html. Accessed 23 June 2019.
Zhou Wu, Quan. Aliadas. 2016. Alianza por la Solidaridad, Madrid. Alianza por la Solidaridad,www.
mujeres-aliadas.org/catalogo/. Accessed 1 July 2019.
———. “Cuando te llaman…DRAMA QUEEN.” Pikara Magazine, 18 April 2018, www.pikaramag-
azine.com/2018/04/influencers-contra-la-extranjerizacion-y-los-rumores/. Accessed 5 July 2019.
———. “De camino a ser un pescado seco.” Gazpacho agridulce: un cuento chino andaluz, 11 April 2016,
https://gazpachoagridulce.tumblr.com/post/142625420785/de-camino-a-ser-un-pescado-seco.
Accessed 5 July, 2019.
———. “Este mes he tenido el placer de colaborar con @pikara_magazine.” Instagram, 16 May 2019,
www.instagram.com/p/BxhIUu2HoRz/. Accessed 5 July 2019.
———. Gazpacho agridulce: una autobiografía chino-andaluza. Astiberri, 2015.
———. Gazpacho agridulce 2. Andaluchinas por el mundo. Astiberri, 2017.
———. “Mamá Zhou dice que trabaje todo el mundo.” Instagram, 8 March 2016, www.instagram.
com/p/BCsnXE_sNk1/. Accessed 5 July 2019.
———. “Nada cambia desde la comodidad del sofá.” Instagram, 7 March 2019, www.instagram.com/p/
Butiz5Lgvkw/. Accessed 5 July 2019.
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11
Plea deal compounds
Black women’s anger in “the
system” of Bitch Planet
Katlin Marisol Sweeney
Scrawled across the title pages of Bitch Planet (Volume 1 and Volume 2, collecting issues 1
through 5 and issues 6 through 10, respectively) is the following: “Space is the mother, earth
is the father, and for your wickedness, your father has cast you out. You will live out your
lives in penitence and service here on Bitch Planet.” These forbidding lines beckon readers
into the universe of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro’s comic series, which
launched in December 2014 from Image Comics. These lines are preceded by the signature
Bitch Planet font printed on a planet’s silhouette and accompanied by the image of a fist,
chained at the wrist, with the middle finger raised in rebellion against the font and planet.
This paratext that opens the two bound volumes is a shortened version of what is included
in the individual issues. The longer version of this warning message is printed as the lead-in
to Issue #1 and the fist is included at the beginning of every individual issue but printed in
a different color. From Issue #2 onward, the fist is also printed with a recap of the events of
the previous issue (Figure 11.1).
Figure 11.1 Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine de Landro. Bitch Planet (2015)
149
The chained hand and warning message from Bitch Planet’s paratext work alongside the
front and back covers as the reader’s point of entry into the look and feel of the comic’s
speculative storyworld. As Frederick Luis Aldama writes in Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream
Comics, “the paratextual materials like the title and credit page” are elements of the comic
that are used to pique readers’ interest in the narrative and are critical for “introducing over-
arching themes and moods” (103). That is, the unique covers and slightly variant paratext of
the individual issues and bound volumes of Bitch Planet must not be overlooked but read in
tandem with the contents of the respective issue or volume as setting the tone for what is to
come. Aldama posits that “as we move from cover and other paratextual materials into the
comic book storyworld proper, we see how the visual devices work to complicate spatial,
temporal, and action ingredients in ways that dynamically move the story forward” (102).
In the case of Bitch Planet, the image of the shackled hand rebelling against the silhouette of
the planet placed before the warning message emphasizes two themes of the comic: first, the
plot’s attention to incarcerated citizens who build coalitions to fight against the system and
its racialized treatment of them; second, the pervasive influence of the social institutions that
both U.S. citizens and those in the comic’s storyworld are born into and raised to abide by.
According to Aldama, while themes in comic book storytelling are emphasized in part
through the verbal subsystem comprised of elements like dialogue and narration, what
brings them to life is what he identifies as geometric shaping. He argues that “the skill-
ful and willful visualizing—geometrizing—of character, theme, and plot that guides our
gap-filling processes and shapes our experience of a given comic book” ultimately “drive[s]
our co-creative insertion into a storyworld” (94). Visual elements such as the color scheme,
the style of the title’s font, the size of the panels, and the thickness of the lines inform how
readers understand and engage with the comic’s universe and its characters, especially with
its superheroes. How a superhero’s body and actions, as well as the storyworld’s setting, are
geometrized is a significant factor in how well the comic’s overarching themes are visually
emphasized.
In the case of Bitch Planet, the paratext that opens Volume 1 and Volume 2 is used not
only to establish citizen surveillance and paternalistic doctrine as the dominant ideologies of
the comic’s storyworld, but to draw attention to how this fictional system is in conversation
with the reader’s own reality. The unusual color scheme yet recognizable look of the pages
in Volume 1 underscores a collapsing of the border between the earth and the “outer space,”
and, by extension, between the storyworld of the comic and the real world of the reader.
The vivid color scheme selected for the paratext commands the reader’s attention to these
pages given their look and feel as familiar yet otherworldly. In particular, the distinct purple,
green, and white lines create strong borders around the images and letters that allow for the
choice of neon hues for the fist and words to stand out against the solid backdrops. The strik-
ing neon colors used for the chained fist on the first page “pop” against the beige backdrop
and draw the reader’s attention to the center of the page. The neon colors achieve a similar
kind of effect as those produced by neon gas and other gasses used in neon lights in that they
generate an electrical current on the page, effectively symbolizing the literal and figurative
energy of the inmate rebellion. The neon greens, pinks, oranges, and blues that shape the pa-
ratext effectively create a sense of virulence oozing from the extraterrestrial backdrop, with
these colors bearing a loose resemblance to the colors of thermograms, which become more
vibrant when radiation is detected by the camera.
Relatedly, the geometrizing of the warning message from Volume 1 and Volume 2’s pa-
ratext concisely establishes the bylaws of the Bitch Planet universe prior to the reader’s entry
into the comic. The foreground of these pages is dominated by the warning message, which
150
Black women’s anger
is splayed across the blurred backdrop of space that shows two planets—which appear to be
earth and a pink, prison planet—struggling to come into focus. The abrasive content of these
lines is geometrized through porous, capitalized letters in neon tones that are visually strik-
ing against the muted blues of the space background. The vivid colors and font set the mood
for the readers as they engage with the content of the warning message. It is written in the
second person and suggests the addressee to be in a subservient position to the maternal space
and paternal earth, while also gesturing at a sense of moral obligation being forced onto the
“you.” There is an emphasis placed on defiant behavior as being wicked or evil that necessi-
tates punitive measure, which allows the “you” to repent to the father through servitude and
further extends the significance of the chained hand visible at the beginning of the volumes
and issues.
The image of the shackled fist and the punitive, Biblical tone of the warning message are
likely to be familiar to a reader whose own lived experience has been shaped by the tenets
of a Judeo-Christian, carceral state like the United States—a system that is deeply invested
in both subtly and overtly enforcing compliance in its citizens vis-à-vis the threat of in-
carceration as consequence for insurgence or disobedience. Both in Bitch Planet and in the
United States, the governing system (comprised of entities that include the prison industrial
complex) privileges the lives and well-being of citizen-subjects who are white, cis-het, able-
bodied, neurotypical men from affluent backgrounds, including in situations where white
men fail to follow the codes of conduct that other citizen-subjects are expected to abide by.
Unlike their white counterparts, woman-identified and genderqueer people of color are
subjected to heightened surveillance and disproportionate rates of punitive measure based on
their race and gender. For Black women in particular, the primary form of compliance that
is demanded of them by the state is maintaining a docile demeanor that forgoes showing any
signs of anger or frustration, both of which have been racialized as emotive expressions of the
angry black woman stereotype.
Bitch Planet references and expands upon how white privilege operates at the expense of
people of color in the reader’s own world by geometrizing a speculative universe in which
Black women are no longer expelled to the background of white stories and are instead
represented as the superheroes at the forefront of their own narratives. In doing so, Bitch
Planet effectively troubles the conventions of the real world and the world of comic book
storytelling, both of which have historically upheld white men as the literal and figurative
superheroes of the American imaginary while simultaneously working to delegitimize the
validity of Black women’s anger with the system. I propose that through applications of
Black and women of color feminist scholars’ work on anger as superpower, Bitch Planet can
be understood as a comic that reimagines the traditional, white comic book superhero as an
incarcerated Black woman who shatters the state’s mandate for her compliance by embracing
her anger and exposing the falsehoods of the angry black woman stereotype.
In the speculative future of Bitch Planet, woman-identified and genderqueer citizens who
do not accept and perform the conventional behaviors of their prescribed, subservient social
position in all of their interactions with men are criminalized for their “non-compliance.”
These “non-compliant” women and genderqueer people are removed from society—and,
by extension, from the earth—and are transferred to and incarcerated on a dystopian prison
planet that is informally referred to as “Bitch Planet.” As Qiana Whitted describes:
The feminist sci-fi comic [Bitch Planet] satirizes a techno-dystopian future dominated
by constant surveillance and the kind of brutal spectacle that is reminiscent of the
prison exploitation films of the 1970s. Hetero-patriarchal tyranny manifests in the story
151
through the Council of the Fathers and is bolstered by a predatory consumer culture that
boxes people in and out, much like the twelve-panel grid that opens almost every issue.
(“Caged and Enraged”)
Bitch Planet puts readers face to face with these “non-compliant,” incarcerated women of
color and genderqueer people by taking the reader inside of the planet’s facility. In doing
so, the comic exposes the innerworkings of the system and how marginalized members of
society face heightened levels of surveillance and policing. Like the demographics of those
incarcerated in and targeted by the U.S. prison industrial complex, the prison population
on Bitch Planet disproportionately comprises women and genderqueer people of color, spe-
cifically Black women. Among these incarcerated people of color is Kamau Kogo, a Black
woman and a former professional athlete who is singled out by prison officials when she is
framed for the murder of fellow inmate, Marian Collins. Though Kamau is blamed and held
accountable for this crime, Marian’s murder in the facility was part of an orchestrated attack
by guards and paid for by her ex-husband. As is the case for many incarcerated people of
color whose cases may or do go to trial, Kamau is told by prison officials that the only viable
option for her to “clear” her name is to take a plea deal. By taking a plea deal, Kamau will
presumably trade her admittance of guilt for a lesser sentence, though simultaneously, her
acceptance of this deal also legally cements her as the person responsible for the crime in the
first place (Figure 11.2).
The conditions of Kamau’s plea deal in Bitch Planet involve the mandate that she re-
cruit her fellow inmates and assemble a team to compete in the televised Megaton games, a
high-velocity, rugby-style sport in which inmates compete against prison guards on a live
broadcast. The Megaton games expose how both in the real world and in the world of Bitch
Planet, Black women and athletes of color are allowed to display a performative kind of ag-
gression in spaces like competitive sports only when it is profitable for the system’s purveyors.
Their performative aggression is welcomed in a heteronormative patriarchal state like the
United States and in the world of Bitch Planet when the dominant elite maintains institutional
control of this aggression by delineating the extent to which it can manifest. When Black
women and athletes of color trade out this performative aggression for a more potent, self-
controlled anger—one that threatens the social equilibrium given its potentiality for gener-
ating insurgence—the assertiveness and aggression that Black women and athletes of color
were once revered for is now deemed a moral and systemic hazard necessary of termination.
152
Kamau’s storylines in the first five issues of Bitch Planet—which focus on the parame-
ters of her plea deal and the Megaton team formation—direct attention to both the fic-
tional and real-world public’s conflicting attitudes toward Black women’s aggression in
the athletic and political arenas. Kamau transforms from assertive to aggressive to angry,
a development that culminates with her transforming into a Black feminist superhero. In
other words, when Kamau looks past the performative aggression that she is encouraged
by the system to adopt and when she hones her feelings of anger, she is able to develop
these feelings into a self-controlled energy which she then uses as a means for coalition-
building among her fellow inmates through developing the Megaton team. In this devel-
opment, Kamau effectively accesses self-controlled anger as a superpower, one that the
prison guards attempt to keep from her when they coerce her into taking the plea deal.
Kamau’s development from assertive to aggressive to angry causes prison guards to fear her
because this anger threatens to destabilize the system given that its growth yields results
that cannot be predetermined.
The Black female citizen-subject in comics

The social institutions and dominant ideologies featured in the speculative storyworlds
of comics and graphic novels often function as allegories for real-world problems and
systems, or as conceptualized paragons of the citizen-subject. Tracking the trajectories of
characters that uphold or challenge the social institutions of their respective universes al-
lows for the comics reader to consider how these actions may operate in their own world.
Additionally, these characters often function as points of identification for readers who
either see themselves reflected in a figure or wish that they could become like the person
on the page.
The protectiveness that comics readers feel toward their favorite characters and story-
worlds demonstrates the importance of having narratives that represent characters of a variety
of identities, cultures, and experiences. Unfortunately, mainstream comics publishers, central
characters of comic books, and related fan spaces have historically been slow in addressing
the industry’s failings by allowing these spaces to be dominated by white men and boys and
exclusionary to people of color. When characters of color did appear in comics throughout
the twentieth century, like television and film, these representations helped to shape readers’
impressions of Black people in the real world and to shape Black readers’ feelings about them-
selves. As Rebecca Wanzo writes, “protagonists in comics often represent ideal citizens” with
the superhero protagonist in particular being one that many readers clamor to emulate (314).
Wanzo explains how the silhouettes of superheroes in mainstream comics offer an “expected
image” (314) that is consistent in appearance, evidenced by how “as signs of both manhood
and nation, the U.S. superhero body has paradigmatically been white and male, leaving
women and people of color to possess liminal status” (317). Sheena C. Howard and Ronald
L. Jackson II similarly write that the pervasiveness of white superhero protagonists in comics
reflects a kind of “White patriarchal universalism” that is identifiable in part by the support
of character of color archetypes such as “minority villains…minority losers…and perhaps a
minority sidekick,” resulting in “a concealed residue of minority inferiority” (2). Given that
these images of the minority villain, loser, and sidekick are as prevalent in comics as that of
the exemplary white superhero—a figure who has historically embodied nationhood and
“Americanness”—it is reasonable to assume that their existence functions in part as a subtle
assertion that Black people cannot possibly be the representative figure of the United States,
even in comics.
153
This absence of Black characters being portrayed as the universal, idealized “American
superhero” in mainstream comics and graphic novels underscores the importance of com-
ics that do seek to reframe Black characters as the leaders, superheroes, and protagonists
of their speculative storyworlds. Representations of Black characters in comics like Bitch
Planet as confident, powerful, and aspirational aid in demonstrating the fictional and related
real-world viability of systems and movements led by Black women and Black genderqueer
people, despite attempts made by the hegemonic elite to portray this leadership as ineffec-
tive. Additionally, comics that center the leadership and voices of Black characters can also
propose different futurities and alternate universes presently unexplored in the real world. As
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley writes regarding Black female leadership in comics, “as national
subjects involved in nation making, Black female characters may choreograph social relations
and political operations on a small scale to, in the words of comic book character Martha
Washington, ‘weave the fabric of a new world—and a new society’” (16–17). Indeed, comics offer
a productive narrative space for telling people of color’s stories, particularly those that have
been silenced or erased in the mainstream. The unique visual and narrative capabilities of
the medium allow for emotions like Black women’s anger and rage—which have been his-
torically marginalized in the real world—to be visually represented on the page and thereby
expressed to an audience.
Legacies of the “angry Black woman” in popular culture

My approach to reading Kamau’s anger as superpower in Bitch Planet draws from Audre
Lorde’s seminal work Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. In particular, I apply Lorde’s argu-
ments regarding the longstanding dismissal of Black women’s anger to underscore how the
plea deal that Kamau is forced to take and her ongoing tension with the correctional program
officer (CPO) in Bitch Planet, Miss Whitney, are allusions to the history of Black women’s
voices being silenced in and by the mainstream. I use Lorde’s framing of Black women’s an-
ger as productive for successful coalition-building to supplement my reading of the CPOs as
attempting to control Kamau’s anger at the system through compulsory participation in the
Megaton games. I propose that by encouraging Kamau to express her anger solely through
the controlled environment of the Megaton arena, the CPOs believe that they can prevent
her from empowering herself and the other inmates into channeling their frustrations into a
self-controlled anger that forms into a productive coalition.
Throughout this chapter, I also draw from recent work by Brittney Cooper and Soraya
Chemaly regarding the potential empowerment for women of color who access their anger
to fight back against systemic injustice. Additionally, I draw from J. Celeste Walley-Jean’s
work on the harmfulness of the angry black woman stereotype and Rachel Marie-Crane
Williams’ work on how Black women’s representation in Bitch Planet recalls the stereotype.
My work seeks to draw connections between each of these scholars’ contributions to consider
how Bitch Planet conceptualizes a futurity for Black women vis-à-vis an embrace of anger
as superpower that effectively liberates and empowers them and genderqueer Black folks to
overthrow the prison industrial complex.
Stereotypes of African American, Afro-Latinx, and Black women have been widely cir-
culated in mainstream media and used as a mode of delegitimizing them from being read as
valid citizen-subjects in the United States. As Rachel Marie-Crane Williams explains:
Black women are often presented in popular culture as characters with finite possibilities–
as mammies, Jezebels, welfare queens, the all powerful matriarch, the Hottentot Venus,
154
gold diggers, soul queens, gangsta bitches, prude church ladies, and sista’ saviors. These
stereotypes threaten to crowd out accurate representations of black women seeking to
build authentic selves and liberation from tiny cultural pigeonholes. (“How Does ‘Bitch
Planet’ Deconstruct”)
Angry and disruptive are typically the defining characteristics of reality stars and fictional
characters who are portrayed in this manner, such as Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie Lyon in
Empire (2015–present), the titular character of Tyler Perry’s Madea films (1999–2019), the
Afro-Latina reality star Joseline Hernandez—who was a cast member of Love & Hip Hop:
Atlanta from 2012 to 2017—and Tamar Braxton from Braxton Family Values (2011–present).
Relatedly, variations of the angry black woman stereotype such as the “sassy black
sidekick”—who are typically part of a dynamic, different-race duo and exist solely as the
supporting character to the white protagonist—perpetuate the notion that all Black women
are sassy, short-tempered, and queued up to fight at a moment’s notice. Notable examples
include Stacey Dash’s Dionne Davenport in Clueless (1995), Regina King’s Rhonda in A
Cinderella Story (2004), Regina King’s Sam Fuller in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
(2005), and Vanessa Williams’ Wilhelmina Slater and Yaya DaCosta’s Nico Slater in Ugly
Betty (2006–2010).
Additionally, Black women in the spotlight, unlike their male counterparts, consistently
face media coverage that accuses them of being difficult to work with or focuses on either
confirmed or alleged feuds with other celebrities. One of the most significant examples of this
is the ongoing feud between Nicki Minaj (who is Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian)
and Cardi B (who is Afro-Latinx of mixed Dominican, Trinidadian, and Spanish descent)
which began in 2017, with this coverage at times eclipsing the actual accomplishments of
both artists. Black female politicians who are confident decision-makers and who come out
strongly against the behaviors and policies of their white male colleagues are either encour-
aged to downplay their rage or accused of being emotionally unstable, such as in the cases
of former First Lady Michelle Obama, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congresswoman
Ayanna Pressley, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Senator for California Kamala Harris, and
Stacey Abrams, former Minority Leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and the
Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia in 2018.
Relatedly, Black athletes have a higher likelihood of facing punitive measures from offi-
cials on the court or on the field for reacting “emotionally” to gameplay. In the case of male
Black athletes like Colin Kaepernick, their decision to kneel during the national anthem
in protest of injustice generates heated backlash from the general public that jeopardizes
their career on the basis of showing “disrespect.” Mainstream media has paid increasing
attention to the consistency in which female Black athletes like tennis star Serena Williams
have faced heightened surveillance and punitive measures in their careers that bear mark-
ings of racism, sexism, and projections of the angry black woman stereotype. A notable
example is the 2018 U.S. Open final when BBC News reported that “Williams received a
code violation for coaching, a penalty point for breaking her racquet and a game penalty
for calling the umpire a thief. And later, a fine of $17,000,” all of which singled her out as
displaying misconduct that was presumably unlike how other athletes expressed frustration
in similar situations (Prasad). That same year, Elle reported that at the 2018 French Open,
Williams wore a full-body compression catsuit to help with blood clots after a difficult
pregnancy, which the president of the French Tennis Federation proceeded to ban from
future gameplay, stating that “one must respect the game and the place” and that this outfit
had “gone too far” (Friedman).
155
Due to the pervasive legacy of the ongoing circulation, reinvention, and acceptance of
these images in the American imaginary, Black women’s frustration, especially in the form
of rage against the system and its purveyors, is rarely received as legitimate, logical, or war-
ranted in the ways that the frustration of white citizen-subjects is. Relatedly, Black women
are told that if they do not act properly or manage their anger, they will not be accepted by
those members of society who are deemed proper citizen-subjects and as a result, they may
be subject to punitive measures. The existence and normalization of the angry black woman
image generates a pressure for Black women to abide by the conventions of “respectability
politics” to avoid behaving in any manner that could be used as an affirmation of this stereo-
type. As J. Celeste Walley-Jean explains:
The negative impact of this stereotype on African American women is not confined
solely to how others perceive and interact with African American women. Awareness
and internalization of the stereotype can also affect how African American women per-
ceive themselves and, most importantly, how they experience and express anger. (73)
Walley-Jean argues that even with the lack of empirical evidence to back the claim made by
these mainstream images that Black women are angrier than other women, the angry black
woman stereotype, along with the mammy, the jezebel, and the sapphire, has become an
accepted, “typical” representation of Black women in media that is then expected of Black
women in their daily lives by the masses (70). These representations make it harder for Black
women to feel comfortable expressing their anger toward the “racist, sexist, and classist so-
ciety” that they live in and instead preserve the notion that anger is “a potentially dangerous
emotion that must be controlled” (71).
Audre Lorde pushes back against these dominant representations of Black women’s anger
as baseless and unavailing by calling for a reframing of Black women’s anger as “loaded with
information and energy” (127). She characterizes their anger as “potentially useful” for so-
cial movements when self-controlled and directed toward a self-selected cause, as opposed
to inherently destructive, as dominant society would lead people to believe (127). She states:
Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being si-
lenced, at being unchosen, at knowing when we survive, it is in spite of a world that
takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of
its service. I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orches-
trate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through
them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. (129)
The emphasis that Lorde places on service underscores how women of color’s potentiality,
particularly that of Black women, has long been understood in the context of their bodies.
That is, Black women’s value has historically been linked to how their labor benefits the
system and how the reproductive capabilities of some Black women and genderqueer peo-
ple can sustain the labor force exploited by capitalism. What Lorde proposes instead is for
women of color’s potentiality to be rooted in their abilities to productively organize and
develop coalitions that extend across racial and cultural difference. However, she explains
that Black women’s anger has been targeted within feminist movements and dominant social
institutions and demeaned as ill-founded so that those in power do not have to address their
own contributions to systemic oppression. By delegitimizing Black women’s anger, social
institutions can continue to enforce normalized racial- and gender-based power imbalances
156
that sustain the U.S. economy and society. Similarly, by also partaking in this delegitimiza-
tion process, non-black feminists can avoid the validity of Black women’s critiques that white
women are often complicit in upholding dominant power structures that harm woman-
identified and genderqueer people of color.
Transformative rage: the super-powered potentiality

of expressing anger
The pressures to conform to respectability politics and a history of silencing imposed by
social institutions and non-black feminists have resulted in Black women’s suppression of an
anger that should instead be embraced as what Brittney Cooper refers to as “eloquent rage”
in Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Her work builds on Lorde’s pro-
posal that Black and women of color’s anger is both “reasonable” and “potentially useful” by
putting forth the following argument:
Rage is a kind of refusal. To be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to

stand for anybody’s bullshit. It is a refusal of the lie that Black women’s anger in the
face of routine, everyday injustice is not legitimate. Black women’s rage is a way of
looking these mischaracterizations in the face and responding, ‘You got me all the way
fucked up.’ (151)
Rage as a refusal—as an impassioned disregard for the warning by the mainstream that one
will be labeled as an angry black woman if they resist—informs how Black women’s anger
has been reclaimed and reframed by Cooper and others as a source of power—one with the
unbridled potentiality of a superhero’s powers. I propose that Bitch Planet’s Kamau Kogo is
not only the comic’s protagonist but a superhero-protagonist whose superpower is her ability
to hone her anger with the system into coalition-building efforts that empower her fellow
inmates to tap into their own suppressed feelings of anger so that they can work to overthrow
the prison planet. Her process of accessing the anger within her occurs in steps: first assertive-
ness, then aggression, and then anger.
As Soraya Chemaly explains in Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, while these
terms are often conflated, it is crucial that their distinctiveness be maintained to ensure that
their independent meanings are not lost. She defines assertiveness as “the act of stating a
position with confidence” that consists of “direct, clear, and honest communication” (264).
Aggression is marked by its formation as “a more directly confrontational behavior, less civil,
but in many cases respectful” (265). Chemaly contends that these two emotions are similar to
one another in part because they are not contingent on the individual showing rage. Instead,
what is required is that the individual demonstrate behaviors that are typically identified as
decisiveness: certainty in communication and a polite yet forward tone.
Assertiveness and aggression function as the initial and secondary stages of confident emo-
tion that Kamau expresses before tapping in to her full-fledged, rage-infused anger. In Issue
#2, readers learn that after she has been accused of Marian’s murder, Kamau has been locked
in a holding cell comprised of television screens that enforce compulsory viewing of prison
programming; this cell is similar to the bedrooms seen in the “Fifteen Million Merits” epi-
sode of Black Mirror (2011–present). A large-scale feminine figure fills the screens and shouts
accusations at Kamau in an attempt to get her to “admit” that she is the perpetrator of the
crime; Kamau’s physical and aural immobilization are visualized by the pink and white
speech bubbles criss-crossed around her body (39). When Kamau finally “breaks” and can no
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longer take this emotional torment—which is visualized by her breaking one of the screens
and screaming, “You lie!”—the prison sends in a CPO named Miss Whitney to offer her a
plea deal (40). Miss Whitney makes it clear that she is “not here to take [Kamau’s] confession”
but is instead offering her the “chance” to repent for her alleged crime with a plea deal that
uses her skills as a past professional athlete to form a team to compete in the Megaton games
(44). Miss Whitney remarks that these games show the prison’s “love” for the inmates by al-
lowing them to express their feelings through sport and that televising the games to viewers
on earth helps to offset the costs associated with running the prison planet (45). Upon hearing
the terms of this deal, Kamau refuses to take it and is released into general population while
she awaits different sentencing (Figure 11.3).
Kamau’s interactions with Miss Whitney are demonstrative of how on Bitch Planet, pris-
oners do not have the right to legal aid or defense council; they are not read any rights
when they are expelled to the prison planet and they have no outside guidance when CPOs
discuss the terms of their sentence. These conditions mirror the circumstances that cause
many people of color in the United States to take the plea deal that is offered to them rather
than to take their case to trial. As Emily Yoffe explains in a September 2017 article for The
Atlantic, plea bargains are increasingly utilized in the criminal justice system because “a time-
consuming and costly trial is avoided” for the courts and defendants will presumably get less
time (“Innocence Is Irrelevant”). Yet despite these supposed benefits, “plea bargains make it
easy for prosecutors to convict defendants who may not be guilty, who don’t present a dan-
ger to society, or whose ‘crime’ may primarily be a matter of suffering from poverty, mental
158
illness, or addiction.” As Gaby Del Valle writes in an August 2017 article for The Outline,
because they cannot afford their bail, low-income and poor people of color “are more likely
to plead guilty, studies show, because it’s typically the fastest track to getting home” (“Most
criminal cases end in plea bargains”). Similarly, in a New York Times article published in
August 2017, Beth Schwartzapfel reports that in states like New York, “98 percent of felony
arrests that end in convictions occur through a guilty plea, not a trial” because of provisions
that allow prosecutors to postpone “turn[ing] over witness names and statements and other
key evidence known as discovery, which backs up criminal charges” (“Defendants Kept in
the Dark”). According to Schwartzapfel, these permitted restrictions are often what prompt
defendants to take the deal that is offered to them “without seeing all the evidence” to avoid
“risk[ing] a trial that could end in a prison sentence much longer than what they might get
under a plea.” These pressures to take the deal without considering other options—and
without entertaining the possibility that the defendant could be proven innocent rather than
guilty—are visualized through Miss Whitney’s forcefulness with Kamau that taking the plea
deal and forming the Megaton team is her sole opportunity to repent for her alleged sins.
In the pages following her initial interaction with Miss Whitney, Kamau is shown running
alongside other inmates on a track, with this track surrounded by the same compulsory view-
ing screens as the holding cell. Two other inmates of color—Violet and Meiko— approach
Kamau and vocalize their support for her to take the deal. In the scene titled “Violet’s Pro-
posal,” Violet appears next to Kamau on the track and encourages her to assemble a Megaton
team (47). The duration of the three-page scene consists of Violet and Kamau debating the
usefulness of participating in the Megaton games, with Violet noting that she has already
compiled a preliminary roster for Kamau’s use (49). The next two-page scene, titled “Meiko’s
Proposal,” shows Meiko also advising Kamau to take the deal as a way of appearing to give
the CPOs what they want while subtly aiding in the inmate rebellion “movement” that is
trying to overthrow the facility (Figure 11.4).
The panels in “Violet’s Proposal” and “Meiko’s Proposal” show the inmates running side
by side on the track to visualize Kamau’s process of getting “caught up” with Violet and
Meiko, who have already accessed their own super-powered anger and channeled it into
self-controlled energy for organizing. In these scenes, Violet and Meiko reveal themselves to
be knowledgeable about the prison system and emphasize that if Kamau can lead the resis-
tance, she, along with her team, can use this access to the guards as an opportunity to take
control of the facility. Meiko also divulges that she helped to design an important ship that
the system’s administrators will be congregating on soon. If Kamau can help her to break
out of the prison and get on that ship, Meiko can then disable the system and stop those
controlling it from causing more harm to “non-compliant” members of society. Immedi-
ately following these conversations, Kamau requests that she be taken by CPOs to see Miss
Whitney to discuss the terms of her plea deal.
Kamau demonstrates assertiveness during these negotiations—stating a position with con-
fidence, as defined by Chemaly—for the first time. Rather than passively taking the deal,
she unabashedly outlines what is needed for her to organize the Megaton team and identifies
what the limits of her participation are. Before this meeting, Kamau has effectively been
mentored by other women of color in the prison who consult with her on how to best handle
her plea deal. By learning about the system’s innerworkings and about the existing inmate
movement from people who have been in these spaces longer—Meiko was already incarcer-
ated prior to Kamau’s arrival and Violet is seen organizing in Issue #1—she feels more pre-
pared to negotiate the terms of her “compliance” so that she and the coalition are put in the
best possible position for future rebellion. Her responses of “Then never mind,” “I’m out,”
159
and dismissive body language whenever Miss Whitney counters her terms demonstrate her
newfound confidence from forming alliances with other incarcerated women and gender-
queer people of color (52). Kamau’s dialogue with Miss Whitney in the holding cell at the
beginning of the issue is hostile and distrusting, with nothing accomplished other than her
successfully making clear that she does not like her or believe her. In contrast, this scene at
the end of Issue #2 reflects Kamau’s evolution in argumentation and advocating for herself
after having met with Violet and Meiko; she is unflinching in her terms and she is prepared to
turn her back on the deal if Miss Whitney does not respect her proposal. In this way, Kamau’s
newfound confidence in the form of self-assured assertiveness in negotiation introduces her
for the first time in the comic as the leader of the coalition and a viable threat to Miss Whit-
ney’s authority when her powers are self-controlled.
The preliminary coalition-building that happens between Kamau, Violet, and Meiko in
Issue #2 is further developed in Issue #4 when the newly formed Megaton team participates
in a scrimmage match against other inmates. Before the scrimmage begins, Kamau finalizes
her roster of athletes with Miss Whitney and is informed that she is not allowed to include the
fourth inmate on her roster—whose identity is blocked from view and whose weight is listed
as 175 pounds, which Kamau needs for her team’s cumulative weight in the match. This sup-
posed “glitch” in the computer is the first hint that the CPOs will enforce new rules when
it suits their agenda (99). During the scrimmage, Kamau’s teammates reveal themselves to
be much better at the game than the guards expect. This becomes apparent in the following
page—the only portion of this match that readers are shown.
160
This page appears to be emblematic of the whole match; Penny, a Black woman of size,
blocks three opponents at once, and with Meiko’s speed, their combined efforts allow for
them to score easily. The scene ends with Penny and Meiko relishing in their victory through
laughter, smiles, and taunting their opponents. The team’s celebrations continue into the
next scene in the showers, where Penny and Meiko lead their fellow teammates in high-fives,
hugs, and chants in front of the guard on duty. The display of joyful indulgence that takes
place in the arena is supplemented by Kamau standing on the sidelines, next to Miss Whitney,
with her arms crossed and a tight-lipped smile, remarking proudly of Meiko: “Damn. Like a
cheetah, that girl” (100). In this moment, Kamau is no longer simply filling the meaningless
role of team captain as it has been constructed by the guards. Through her team’s success
in the match, she demonstrates herself to be an effective leader who can mobilize other
woman-identified and genderqueer inmates to yield a desired result (Figure 11.5).
In contrast, Miss Whitney’s face appears shocked at the unexpected sight before her. Her
confident facial expressions and body language that are visible before the match have dis-
appeared and been replaced with her stunned expression and her asking Kamau to explain
what she is seeing (100). Similarly, the shock that the CPOs feel at the team’s unexpected
win is further intensified by the scenes in the arena and in the showers of Penny and Meiko’s
indulging in their victory as a source of empowerment and delight.
These sequences in the arena and in the showers represent Kamau and her teammates
breaking the codes of performative aggression that they have been encouraged by the prison
161
guards to adopt and replacing them with displays of self-controlled aggression. Even as they
beat the guards at their “own game” and celebrate their victory, Kamau and her teammates
exhibit decisiveness in strategy and collaboration that is more characteristic of aggression
than self-controlled anger. Indeed, the scrimmage reveals the players’ aggression: directly
confrontational behavior that is less civil, but still relatively respectful as outlined by Che-
maly. Though Penny and Meiko revel in their masterful take-down of their opponents and
Kamau gloats to Miss Whitney, neither they nor their teammates act out beyond taunting
their opponents in an environment that ultimately remains controlled by the system and en-
forced by the CPOs. Kamau exhibits aggression as a leader through her confidence to briefly
boast about the capabilities of her players in a game that is stacked against them. Relatedly,
Penny and Meiko laugh their way through the match and taunt their opponents when they
score, but their conduct otherwise remains within the bounds of the game. While they some-
what refuse to display proper decorum against their opponents, Kamau’s team still remains
forwardly respectful of the existing power system by not pushing their indulgence so far as
to act out of term during the game or to question the game’s structure.
The opposite occurs during the second scrimmage match that Kamau’s team participates
in against a rival team of CPOs in Issue #5. The issue opens with a title page that leads into
the events of the scrimmage. This page shows halves of 14 faces of different inmates who are
members of Kamau’s Megaton team and part of the inmate rebellion in later issues. These
faces are visible through a transparent version of the Bitch Planet font and are shown next
to smaller font that restates the full-length version of the “Space is the mother, Earth is the
father” warning message that is included in Issue #1 and on which the paratext of Volume 1
and Volume 2 is based on.
This title page offers readers a look at the faces of Kamau’s roster—which consists of
mostly woman-identified and genderqueer people of color—before the individual members’
criminal records are flashed throughout the issue as characters prepare for the match. These
criminal records reveal that the images from the title page are larger, half-faced versions of
each individual’s “mug shot” that are included in their files. The records also show that their
“crimes” range from seduction and disappointment (115) to unpermitted birth (120) to being
a bad mother (127). The combination of the roster-style title page and the criminal records
throughout the issue provides additional context for the kinds of disobedience that “necessi-
tate” punitive measure in the speculative storyworld of Bitch Planet.
These images show the disproportionate incarceration of woman-identified and gender-
queer people of color in the prison facility, with many of them being locked away on charges
that bear racist and sexist undertones. The inclusion of the names, faces, and brief back-
ground of each of these characters also demonstrates how the comic seeks to draw attention
to the many incarcerated people of color who are contributing to rebellion efforts for resis-
tant “nation making”—as characterized by Whaley—rather than attributing the power of
this movement to only the leaders. Additionally, the title page visualizes the combined power
of a coalition comprised of powerful individuals who join forces to access their controlled
anger together.
Unlike the assertiveness and aggression that inmates exhibit throughout Issues #1 through
#4 of Bitch Planet, self-controlled anger becomes the dominant energy source for the inmates’
rebellion in Issue #5. While assertiveness and aggression can take on different meanings
depending on the circumstance, anger usually carries a negative connotation. It is generally
characterized as being more abrasive than states like assertiveness and aggression and less
concerned with decorum. Chemaly proposes anger as both “rational and emotional response
to trespass, violation, and moral disorder” (xx). She contends that it “begets transformation”
162
in that it “bridges the divide between what ‘is’ and what ‘ought’ to be, between a difficult
past and an improved possibility” (xx). In this regard, anger functions as both emotional and
rational signpost for an individual’s feelings of violation and subsequently acts as a motivator
for coalition organizing and thus creates a bridge toward social change. Anger, particularly
that which is self-controlled as Lorde and Cooper argue, pushes the individual and the col-
lective forward by conceptualizing and advocating for a better future for those who have
been violated in the short term and historically marginalized. The potentiality of organizing
efforts that are led by Black women, supported by non-black women and genderqueer peo-
ple of color, and center self-controlled anger as a fuel gives way for a “symphony of anger”
to flourish. An individual’s self-controlled anger joining forces with the anger felt by other
individuals effectively turns this anger into a stronger power source with the super-powered
capability of transforming an entire system.
This kind of self-controlled anger that Chemaly describes is what materializes during the
scrimmage match in Issue #5 of Bitch Planet. During this match, Meiko once again demon-
strates her skills at scoring, with the game’s commentator noting that the guards “‘are gonna
be looking for payback for sure’” given that they are being consistently tackled by other
players and prevented from blocking Meiko (119). As the game continues, the CPOs break
the primary game rule outlined by the training video Kamau’s team watched before their
first scrimmage: “‘all manner and degree of grappling is allowed, the only rule is that it must
be one-on-one’” (98). Marilyn, one of Kamau’s teammates, remarks when two guards attack
Penny at the same time that this action is against the rules, with another player replying
that “‘they change the rules when it suits them’” (124). This attack on Penny by the guards
is followed by one of the guards wielding their protective mask as a weapon against their
opponent. When Kamau shouts out of term and demands that Miss Whitney stop the match
because of this action, she is taken out of the game because of the new rule that challenging a
play necessitates removal (129–130). Once Kamau is out of the game, Penny and other players
are restrained by the guards; by clearing the field of the strongest players, the CPOs gain full
access to a now-vulnerable Meiko, the top-scorer. Meiko turns to laugh at one of the CPOs
as she is about to score and flashes a defiant hand with a raised middle finger that resembles
the image of the chained fist from the paratext. Her laugh triggers a response from the guard,
who warns her against continuing to laugh; in the next scene, the guard grabs Meiko and
breaks her neck while remarking, “‘Who’s laughing now?’” (131).
This scrimmage marks the point in the comic’s narrative when Kamau’s team must hone
a collective, controlled energy beyond assertiveness and aggression—super-powered anger
against the CPOs and the system. Based on Chemaly’s definition, anger consists of both “ra-
tional and emotional response to violation” and prompts some kind of transformation. The
results of the scrimmage in Issue #5 best represent this kind of anger, as the violation that
takes place is both a continuation of systemic injustice and an unexpected affront to Kamau
and her team, resulting in Kamau’s full embrace of her future as a Black feminist superhero.
The teammates’ response to these combined violations demonstrates their unwillingness to
suppress their rage any longer. The scrimmage effectively shows how the prison planet is
an overall system of the CPOs changing rules in the facility when the inmates start to gain
traction in their mobilizing efforts. This system is enforced by figures like Miss Whitney,
whose ongoing protection of this cheating ensures that the actual events of a match or larger
violation will be documented differently in the official prison records.
Kamau’s respected position by her fellow inmates as the official team captain and the ap-
pointed leader of the rebellion is reflected in her being the only inmate who officially requests
that the match end due to foul play. Her teammates on the field do what they can in their
163
respective game positions to prevent guards from attacking them and each other, but none of
them formally call out to Miss Whitney or act as the official voice of the collective. K amau’s
attempts to regulate the match based on the “official” rules and her demands that Miss Whit-
ney stop the CPOs who are acting out of term reflects her development from aggressive to
angry. More specifically, she transforms into a Black feminist superhero who reclaims anger
as a useful power source and repurposes it to become a key member of the alliance that de-
molishes the prison industrial complex on Bitch Planet and on earth (which is explored in
Issues #8, #9, and #10) rather than being literally and figuratively shackled to the restrictions
of the angry black woman stereotype.
By calling out Miss Whitney during the scrimmage match in Issue #5 and by sustain-
ing this resistance in later issues through mobilizing inmates to join the large-scale prison
rebellion, Kamau shows that she no longer abides by the codes of performative aggression,
such as accepting the guards’ cheating, which she does when the unnamed inmate is denied
for her roster, or when she taunts her opponents but remains overall respectful of the arena
and the system in place. Her body language and statements—a finger accusingly pointed at
misconduct, confident glares at Miss Whitney, screaming out instances of cheating as fouls,
declaring the game to be rigged—reflect how Kamau sees what is happening around her and
recognizes what the prison could look like if these issues were corrected. In Issue #5, it is
clear that based on her team’s past success, Kamau begins to imagine a better future for herself
and her teammates—one where justice is enforced in the prison planet facility, where she and
her teammates have a fair chance at “winning,” and where guards are held accountable for
their wrongdoing. This is what prompts her to make her demands to Miss Whitney and to
lead the inmates in the large-scale rebellion in Issues #8 through #10; had she not believed
in the possibility of systemic injustice being corrected, she would have never sought out cor-
rection of these offenses at all.
Meiko’s murder—which is committed in part because of her knowledge about the system
and in part because of her joyful indulgence in her victories during gameplay—effectively
acts as the catalyst that mobilizes Kamau and her team to shift gears from aggression to anger.
The case could be made that Meiko’s death disproves that Kamau’s leadership is effective—
visualized through Issue #5 ending with Meiko’s body stripped of color and replaced with
a black-and-white outline to represent her fading from life. While Penny and the other
inmates crowd around Meiko’s body and mourn her, Kamau is shown off to the side with
her fist clutched tight in her hair and a look of sorrow on her face. Miss Whitney is shown
standing above the field with her back to the Megaton team, her facial expression obscured
through shadows (Figure 11.6).
Though Kamau’s body language could be read as a look of disbelief and speechlessness
and Miss Whitney could be read as the victor, it is more appropriate to read Kamau’s stance,
like Meiko’s stance during gameplay, as another variation of the chained fist from the para-
text printed in the individual and bound volume versions of the Bitch Planet comics. That is,
Kamau’s stance indeed reflects her distress but simultaneously signals the point in which she
can no longer disguise her actions as assertiveness or aggression. Kamau is portrayed in the
subsequent issues of the comic as fully embracing her anger rather than trying to conceal it.
She no longer shies away from her position as the leader of her facility and instead channels
her energy toward strategizing how to scale the inmate rebellion to overthrow the carceral
state that, like its counterpart in the real world, relies on paternalistic doctrine entrenched in
Biblical ideologies to control its citizen-subjects.
Kamau’s development from assertive to aggressive to angry from Issues #1 through #5
of Bitch Planet culminates with her ascension to empowered Black feminist superhero who
164
wields the superpower of anger. Her status as a superhero with the superpower of anger is
identifiable and traceable through the work of Black and women of color feminist scholars on
the productivity of harboring self-controlled anger to combat both the legacy of the angry
black woman stereotype and the insidiousness of plea deals in the criminal justice system.
Kamau’s growth takes place within “a symphony of anger” as Audre Lorde describes in Sister
Outsider vis-à-vis her being mentored by Meiko and Violet, which provides her with a frame-
work to tap into the self-controlled anger that they have already accessed. This framework
consists of the types of assertiveness, aggression, and anger that Soraya Chemaly outlines
in Rage Becomes Her, with these qualities functioning as recognizable steps toward a praxis
for self-controlled anger that the readers can also apply to their own experiences within the
carceral system that is the United States. Kamau’s progression—both individually and as a
member of women and genderqueer people of color coalition organizing—shows signs of her
embracing “rage as refusal,” particularly in her refusal of her anger being silenced, which is
reflective of what Brittney Cooper proposes as the superpower that is “eloquent rage.” In do-
ing so, Kamau effectively disrupts the “White patriarchal universalism” that Sheena C. How-
ard and Ronald L. Jackson II identify in the history of mainstream comics by moving to the
foreground of a superhero narrative and cultivating a superpower that the United States has
long attempted to prevent Black women from embracing. By tapping in to her superpower as
anger, Kamau is a Black feminist superhero that replaces what Rebecca Wanzo defines as the
“expected image” of the white male superhero in the U.S. imaginary.
165
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Williams, Rachel Marie-Crane. “How Does Bitch Planet Deconstruct the Stereotypes of Black Women
in Prison?” Bound By Law: Bitch Planet Comics Studies Round Table (Part Two), Qiana Whitted, editor.
The Middle Spaces. 8 Mar. 2018, www.themiddlespaces.com/2018/03/08/bitch-planet-2/. Accessed
22 Feb. 2019.
Yoffe, Emily. “Innocence Is Irrelevant.” The Atlantic, Sep. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar-
chive/2017/09/innocence-is-irrelevant/534171/. Accessed 5 Jul. 2019.
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Part III
Back to the future
Taylor & Francis
12
Panels of innocence and experience
Reading sexual subjectivity
through horror comics
Sara Austin
The fetishization of his childhood innocence leaves no room for the child as a sexual subject.
In his conclusion to essay “From Kiddie Lit to Kiddie Porn: The Sexualization of Children’s
Literature,” Eric L. Tribunella gestures toward a knowing child reader, opening up the pos-
sibility for the child as sexual subject claiming, “kiddie porn can be defined by who watches,
not who is watched” (153). Current theoretical work such as Tribunella’s examines depictions
of sexualized children in adult media. In this chapter, instead of beginning with adult desires
for a nostalgic childhood, I explore depictions of adult sexuality in children’s texts as a neces-
sary element of children’s culture that allows child readers space to develop sexual subjectiv-
ity. I ground this discussion in the horror comics that typified moral panics, those featured in
the 1954 Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, led by Rep. Carey Estes Kefauver from
Tennessee. EC horror comics from the early 1950s including Tales from the Crypt and Vault
of Horror serve as examples of the fetishization of innocence. In these comics narratives of
power, desire, and pleasure are communicated through image-grounded depictions of sexual
scripts, relying on a knowing audience to read and understand them. In drawing connections
to other examples of children’s culture that rely on adult bodies to narrativize sexual scripts,
I argue that such texts were necessary for children navigating the changing sexual mores
of the 1950s, and continue to be necessary for contemporary childhood socialization and
development.
Moral panics and sexual innocence

Any discussion of horror comics must acknowledge the cultural legacy of psychologist Fredric
Wertham and the 1954 moral panic surrounding comics and juvenile delinquency. Already
a household name for his anti-comic book articles in ladies’ journals, in 1954 Wertham pub-
lished Seduction of the Innocent, which blames a rise in juvenile delinquency rates on comic
books popular in the 1950s. Wertham argues that “the difference between the surreptitious
pornographic literature for adults and children’s comic books is this: in one it is a question
of attracting perverts, in the other of making them” (Wertham 183). While this assertion
is perhaps not entirely genuine, meant to grab the attention of parents rather than build an
argument about child development, it does acknowledge the possibility of child readers as
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sexual subjects. In likening comics to pornography, Wertham suggests that children might
derive pleasure from the comic book depictions of sexuality, and that it is precisely this plea-
sure that the moral panic surrounding comics seeks to curtail.
Bound up with the moral panic’s concerns over preserving middle-class morality are the
nostalgic desire for innocent childhood and attempts to govern the child as cultural con-
sumer. Andrea Friedman discusses how moral panics mobilize rhetoric about the potential
damage done to the innocent child in order to censor material deemed immoral or offensive.
She notes how children are labeled as the most “vulnerable viewers” of obscenity, those most
fragile of subjects who will be harmed by anything objectionable (202). Because children are
constructed as vulnerable and fragile, they are often centered in rhetorics that police social
behavior, including extreme examples such as moral panics. Angela McRobbie’s work details
how moral panics “act as a form of ideological cohesion which draws on a complex language
of nostalgia” (183). Katharine Bond Stockton takes up this idea of innocence as nostalgia.
She claims that innocence as a projection onto children actually does violence and that the
idea of the child as a “carefully controlled embodiment of non-complication” has actually
“gotten thick with complication” because real children cannot possibly live up to the stan-
dard of childhood established by adults (5). Thus, maintaining childhood innocence is not
only about maintaining cultural hegemony over adults through nostalgia and reproductive
futurity, but also about maintaining absolute adult control of the figure of the child.
The cultural use of the vulnerable child as an ideological carrot and stick attempts to pro-
tect childhood sexual innocence by removing sexual subjectivity from children and young
adults and by policing the consumer goods that children have access to. Embedded in this
rhetoric is a recognition that children will use the scripts of consumer culture to develop
their own sense of sexual subjectivity. In 1948, 14-year-old David Pace Wigranskys’s letter
to the Saturday Review confirms children’s readings of comics as a place to build subjectivity.
Wigransky challenges the “utter and complete ignorance of anything and everything except
the innocuous and sterile world that the Dr. Werthams of the world prefer to keep [young
people] prisoners within from birth to maturity” (Wigransky quoted in Wright 96). He
continues: “It is time that society woke up to the fact that children are human beings with
opinions of their own” (Wigransky quoted in Hajdu 114). Wigransky illustrates both his
desire for subjectivity and his understanding that adults would keep it from him. According
to Bond Stockton, children who do not fit the adult model of innocent childhood (i.e., all
children) are disciplined or coerced into this model. This control cannot completely remove
childhood from any association with sex, partly because, as James Kincaid points out in Child
Loving, innocence is erotic, but also because real children push back against this limitation
(Kincaid 10). Thus, panics about consumer goods like music, movies, or comics are based
not only in classed assumptions about what kinds of texts children should read, but also in
adult desires to maintain at least a façade of compliant innocence.1 This façade of innocence
becomes more important in times of rapid cultural change, such as the post-war period re-
flected in the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s.
Horror comics offend this classification of children by identifying children as sexual sub-
jects rather than aligning with the larger cultural identification of children as sexual objects.
While any media aimed directly at children is always vulnerable to the subject/object di-
lemma, horror comics in particular allow children to explore taboo depictions of violence
and sexuality without adult interference. That is, children can afford to buy or trade comics
without adult approval and can read comics without adult support.2 Furthermore, horror
comics do not speak down to readers. These comics address their audience as equals who are
aware of social scripts, including sexual scripts. Many of the storylines, quips, and twists in
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horror comics rely on a knowing reader who understands what the in-frame sexual innuendo
must be alluding to outside of the panels, such as a husband’s line that he and his wife “have a
honeymoon to finish” (Crypt 161). To paraphrase Maurice Sendak, children know about sex
and violence, but they must be careful not to let adults know that they know (Weiss).
Meditations on sexual politics and sexual relationships account for between 50% and
75% of the plots in horror comics, depending on the book.3 Despite Wertham’s fears that
comics were touting homosexuality and promiscuity, the sexual scripts of horror comics
are often conservative in their treatment of sex, rewarding the married heterosexual couple
and punishing any other form of desire. Horror comics offer formulaic story lines in which
an economic or romantic partnership functions at the center of the narrative. For example,
about half of the stories in Vault of Horror issues 1–6 contain a business relationship in which
one partner deliberately murders the other or a prank between friends goes horribly wrong;
the other half deal with sexual relationships. This focus on romantic and sexual relationships
makes horror comics fruitful ground for representations of sexual scripts in children’s media.
Horror comics are particularly interesting because, unlike romance comics whose target
audience were adolescent girls, horror comics had to appeal across lines of gender. In another
departure from romance comics, horror comics were not constrained by realistic depictions
of relationships, and so the underlying cultural assumptions and sexual scripts might be
thrown into stark relief by the outlandish plots. As Jeanne Emerson Gardner points out in
“She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American Romance
Comics, 1947–1954,” romance comics presented a wide range of feminine identities. In con-
trast, I suggest that horror comics tend to rely on stock characters, depicting men as heroes
who protect their mates, jealous villains who do not deserve the love of the woman they pur-
sue, or dupes who are taken in by a beautiful seductress. Women also fall in to predetermined
categories: wife/ingénue, seductress, madwoman, or monster. I argue that by combining
these tropes in different formulas, horror comics generate story lines that reassert cultural
expectations for heterosexual relationships and gendered behavior. Though the sexual scripts
themselves might not be transgressive, horror comics allow young readers to access these
scripts from the point of view of a participant in them, acknowledging child readers as sexual
subjects and allowing them space to build that subjectivity.
The newlywed hero

Perhaps the most salient example of how horror comics might build a reader’s sexual sub-
jectivity are stories featuring the newlywed hero. In these stories the reader is cast as the
new husband who protects his beautiful young wife from whatever threat they meet. Some
panels are from the husband’s perspective either showing his hands or from a point of view
behind his head (see Figure 12.1). The husband is also cast in profile or shadow closer to the
reader, with closeups on his facial features only in panels where he asserts narrative control.
The reader is never given a panel from the female perspective. Several times the wife looks
directly at the reader, as if speaking directly to them (see Figure 12.1). The wives’ hair,
clothes, and makeup also remain perfect while the husbands’ become rumpled as if the hus-
band/reader experiences the tension of the story more directly. The reader’s sense of tension
is based on protecting the innocent female character with whom the husband/reader has an
intimate relationship. The wife touches the husband/reader for comfort throughout the story
to heighten the dramatic and sexual tension, and at the resolution of the narrative, sex is
promised as a cathartic mechanism. The trauma of the story brings the couple closer together
while allowing the reader into that romantic space through the perspective of the husband.
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Figure 12.1 “The Ghost Ship” from Crypt of Terror number 19 (1950). Feldstein, Albert B.,
William M. Gaines, and Russ Cochran. Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1, Issues
1–6. Timonium, MD: Gemstone Pub., 2006
In “The Ghost Ship” from Crypt of Terror number 19 (1950) and “Terror Ride” from Tales
from the Crypt number 21 (1950), the reader can access sexual subjectivity from the narrative
perspective of the newlywed hero as he assumes the dominant role in both his romantic
relationship and the story as a whole. “The Ghost Ship” features a young couple flying to
Bermuda for their honeymoon. Don and Carol crash into the ocean and board a strange
ship. They see skeletons all over the ship and find a ship’s log which explains the captain was
murdered in a mutiny and cursed his crew. The sailor who led the mutiny is then killed, and
the others drown as the ship sinks. Don and Carol see a commercial ship, but it passes right
through the deck they are standing on. They flee to a life raft and are rescued by the com-
mercial ship. When the couple is rescued the ship’s crew suggests they need “plenty of rest!”
since they obviously hallucinated the whole ordeal (Crypt 86).
Carol’s role in the story is to look feminine and vaguely threatened. She wears a pink
dress that bears her shoulders and legs and maintains her perfect blond curls and lipstick
throughout the plane crash, ghost encounter, and rescue. Carol’s body language and dialogue
show she is afraid. She holds Don’s arm or hand in five separate panels and crosses her arms
in front of her chest or lifts her hand to face in ten of the thirteen panels that show her below
the neck. In almost every panel where we see her body Carol is protecting herself by hiding
behind her hands or her husband. Carol’s dialogue is alarmist: “Hurry, Don! We’re sinking
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fast…” (Crypt 81), “I’m afraid! There’s something…strange…about it…” (Crypt 82), “Don!
I’m afraid!” (Crypt 83), “I think I’m going to faint!” (Crypt 86). All of her dialogue either
directly moves the plot by encouraging Don to read the ship’s log that they find or shows
how afraid she is (see Figure 12.1). The romantic relationship of the text puts the reader in
the position of Don. Carol is innocent and almost childlike in her fear. She generates tension
in the story because the reader is concerned for her safety.
A similar script operates in “Terror Ride,” when George and Ruth stop at a carnival that
appears to be closed for the season. We learn in panel eight that George and Ruth are new-
lyweds on their honeymoon. They touch in almost every panel, but what begins as intimate
contact becomes a protective posture. George attempts to use a mill ride as an excuse to kiss
Ruth in the dark, but as the couple rides along, flashing lights illuminate horrific displays of
murder and torture. The first tableau does not phase George’s attempts at a kiss, but after the
second image Ruth screams, “How horrible!” and George decides the ride “isn’t funny any-
more!” (Crypt 157). After the third tableau the boat catches on a floating corpse. Ruth begins
to cry as she and George wade out of the boat toward the exit. As they walk George realizes
the displays use real corpses, and this is too much for Ruth who announces, “I’m tired! I’ve
got to rest, George!” (Crypt 159). They rest on another display which they can tell uses real
bodies and are so frightened they rush on toward an empty display instead. This panel shows
George’s profile in shadow and Ruth’s face in half light. The reader’s eye is drawn to the
brightest colors on the page, Ruth’s brown hair and red mouth. Behind Ruth is the menac-
ing figure of the ride’s owner holding a chain. The panel positions Ruth closest to the killer,
emphasizing her role as the sympathetic object of the story (Crypt 159) (see Figure 12.2).
George’s tie is undone and his shirt wrinkled, but Ruth’s symbolic femininity, her hair and
makeup, remain perfect (Crypt 160). The ride owner chases the couple and corners them near
the exit before slipping on a wet board and falling beneath the water wheel. After the villain
is “destroyed” by “his own diabolical ride” George is ready to “get away from here” because
he and Ruth have “a honeymoon to finish!” (Crypt 161). Like the line in “The Ghost Ship”
about getting plenty of rest, this comment about finishing the honeymoon suggests that both
stories end with a promise of sex.
Figure 12.2 “Terror Ride” from Tales from the Crypt number 21 (1950). Feldstein, Albert B.,
William M. Gaines, and Russ Cochran. Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1, Issues
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Stories of the newlywed hero also contain a female ingénue character to act as wife and
complete the heterosexual duo. The women in these stories do not offer a point of reader
identification, but rather an object of desire. These female characters embody desirable in-
nocence, the same sexual objectivity culturally attributed to child readers. Here the comics
build reader subjectivity by identifying them with the hero and giving them charge of the
textual woman/sexual object. The wife characters act as children in the story, trusting their
male protectors implicitly, following instructions, and allowing themselves to be led to safety.
This relationship draws a parallel not only between wives and children but also between hus-
bands and fathers, reinforcing heterosexual reproductive futurity. Other than asking for help
or expressing fear, their dialogue serves to move the plot, narrating what the readers see in
the panel. The wife’s vulnerability also contributes to her desirability, engaging in what Kin-
caid would call “erotic innocence.” She clutches at the hero/reader in moments of tension.
She sheds one perfect tear. Her lips part in shock. The desire to protect the ingénue/wife
builds dramatic tension, contributing to the reader’s pleasure at the story’s resolution. Just as
romance comics end with a dramatic kiss or embrace to symbolize a strengthened relation-
ship and happy home, horror comics end with an allusion to sexual satisfaction, mirroring
the release of tension at the climax of the story.
The villain
While newlywed heroes act as a point of reader identification, and ingénues an object of sex-
ual desire, other horror comic tropes, the seductress and the villain, are cautionary tales. In
these stories the reader takes pleasure in witnessing the punishment of characters who trans-
gress sexual mores. These transgressions, like the problems of romance comics, can differ
from story to story but often rely on selfishness and extremes of gendered behavior. Unlike
the newlywed hero comics that mobilize erotic innocence, villain comics elicit the pleasure
of punishment, specifically that the child can watch, and through reading enact, punishing
the adult. Bond Stockton discusses the desire to watch others punished as an extension of
Mulvey’s scopophilia, pleasure in looking, a type of voyeurism (Bond Stockton 74–76, 174).
Yet, child readers are only allowed to enact punishment on those who violate sexual norms.
Characters who are punished for operating outside of social boundaries in horror comics
might be men who are too controlling or women who are too sexually aggressive. Stories
such as “The Maestro’s Hand” from The Crypt of Terror number 18 (1950) and “The Thing
from the Grave” from Tales from the Crypt number 22 (1950) include men who violate the
sexual contract by pursuing another man’s wife. These stories act as a counterpoint to the
newlywed hero stories by illustrating the limitations of masculine power and desire. Men
who desire married women are inevitably killed as the virtuous man returns from the grave
to defend his beloved’s honor.
In “The Maestro’s Hand” and “The Thing from the Grave,” a jealous man kills a woman’s
husband in an attempt to seduce her, not because he truly loves her, but to use the woman as
a status symbol. These villains want not only another man’s wife, but his money and prestige
as if these things are interchangeable objects of desire. In “The Maestro’s Hand,” Virginia
breaks her engagement to Dr. Hellman when she falls in love with a concert pianist, Mr.
Borrstein. Dr. Hellman’s ego is bruised because Virginia dared to reject “the great doctor,”
“the renowned surgeon” and he believes “she will come back to me!” “She must! I’ll make
her forget him if I have to…” (Crypt 47). The comic begins with Dr. Hellman approaching
the cabin and gazing into the fireplace, remembering the story. Dr. Hellman’s face is orange,
depicted above the flames as if he is burning in Hell. In the panels that follow, Dr. Hellman
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is positioned looking at Virginia, but never as the object of her gaze. He touches her shoulder
as she recoils. The panels do not suggest Virginia has any regard for Dr. Hellman. In fact,
she looks directly at him in only one panel as she pleads for him to help her fiancé. When
Borrstein cuts himself and seeks the doctor’s help Dr. Hellman severs his hand, preventing
him from playing piano again. Mr. Borrstein jumps in front of a subway train, but instead
of returning to her former fiancé, Virginia confronts him screaming, “You’re Evil…I hate
you HATE you…HATE YOU!” (Crypt 49). Virginia then commits suicide and Dr. Hellman
goes to a cabin in the woods to forget her. He receives a package containing the severed hand
which chokes him to death.
Unlike the newlywed hero who acts as a point of identification for the reader, Dr. Hellman
is both narratively and visually separated from reader empathy. Narratively, Dr. Hellman is
a villain, who any comic book fan knows will not survive at the end of the story. Visually,
while the reader often sees through the newlywed hero’s eyes, Dr. Hellman is portrayed
from the front. Because Dr. Hellman’s eyes are hidden behind glasses that resemble the
hypno-specs advertised in the back of comic books, seeing him directly is jarring and cre-
ates distance from the reader. Profile images are more sympathetic, and Dr. Hellman only
has three moments where the viewer is placed behind him: when he watches Virginia listen
to Mr. Borrstein play for the first time, when Virginia shouts that she hates Dr. Hellman,
and when he opens the box containing the hand. These moments do not put the reader in
Dr. Hellman’s place by giving his point of view, but rather place the reader above him both
morally and spatially to watch key moments in Dr. Hellman’s undoing. Dr. Hellman is also
always grimacing or sweating as the comic depicts his guilt. The story ends with Hellman
imagining a severed hand chasing him, but in fact strangling himself, suggesting that this
guilt kills him. The reader is invited to watch him wrestle with his guilt in the form of the
severed hand, before finally succumbing to it. Dr. Hellman’s guilt is paramount in the story
as the final panels offer a closeup of his own hand around his throat.
Just as Gardner claims romance comics end with “a sudden epiphany on the part of a
female character who abjectly repudiates her ‘selfish desires’” men whose romantic pursuits
are purely selfish are subject to the infamous horror comic twist ending (22). In a similar
storyline, “The Thing from the Grave” tells how Laura and James plan to marry, but Bill kills
James. When Bill proposes to Laura, she turns him down and Bill confesses to the murder.
Figure 12.3 “The Maestro’s Hand” from Crypt of Terror number 18 (1950). Feldstein, Albert
B., William M. Gaines, and Russ Cochran. Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1, Issues
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Sara Austin
Laura screams, “I hate you…you…you maniac! Hate you…hate…” and Bill decides to kill
Laura so that “If [he] can’t have [her], no one else will either!” (Crypt 185). Bill locks Laura
inside a cabin and sets it on fire, but Laura’s screams raise James’s corpse, which rescues the
unconscious Laura and then pulls Bill into a grave and buries them both. In each case, the
villain wants a woman who loves another man and is already married to him, or is engaged.
The reader knows that this desire is more about the villain’s ego than the woman in question
since the villain is willing to harm the woman who rejects him and because the villain’s own
language reaffirms this jealousy is about egotism rather than love. These men step outside of
culturally acceptable sexual scripts, and so the reader is invited to witness their punishment,
placing the reader in the role of the society that would condemn these actions, rather than
the men who commit them.
The seductress, the madwoman, the monster

The sexual scripts of these stories do place specific limits on male behavior, but in doing so
they reinforce feminine passivity and monogamy. The good women in these stories have
agency over bad men only when they embrace gender roles. Even if these women have very
little character development, yelling the same dialogue at their respective villains, they are
able to triumph and exact revenge through passivity and silence by luring these bad men to
their deaths using the men’s own guilt against them. Women who do not honor their mar-
riage vows, however, violating precepts of submission and fidelity, are the most lurid villains
in horror comics. These seductress figures kill their husbands because their desires include
extramarital sex. Just as with romance comics, women are the gatekeepers of sexual behav-
ior and these horror comics suggest that extramarital desire and murder are, if not of equal
severity, then certainly related in both cause and punishment. In “The Dead Will Return”
from Vault of Horror number 13 (1950), and “The Hungry Grave” from The Crypt of Terror
number 19 (1950), seductress figures are dispatched first since they are the guiltiest as origi-
nators of the murder plots, and, by extension, the affairs. Seductress characters are the most
likely, if not the only, women who readers see depicted in a lover’s embrace. Readers derive
similar voyeuristic pleasure in watching the seductress with her lover as in watching her
death. While the ingénue/wife represents social constructions of childhood sexuality in her
naiveté and innocence, the seductress is pure adult—manipulative, melodramatic, and taboo.
The seductress is the female counterpart to the villain, using men for personal gain. Often
married for money, the seductress is willing to murder her husband, and sometimes her lover,
to get what she wants. In “The Dead Will Return” from Vault of Horror number 13 (1950),
Flo and Bert murder Flo’s husband and dump his body in the ocean. He keeps washing up
near their lighthouse until one night his corpse reanimates and murders the couple. In “The
Hungry Grave” from The Crypt of Terror number 19 (1950), Jim and Ida plan to poison Ida’s
husband Ed. Jim retrieves Ed’s body wrapped in a sheet. He carries the body to the cemetery
and as it begins to stir Jim locks the casket. He buries the body and returns to the house,
where Ed answers the door with a hatchet and reveals that Jim has actually buried Ida.
In these stories the woman is the principal actor, the one who commits the violence or
betrayal and often the first to die at the end of the story. In “The Dead Will Return,” Flo
suggests that she instigated the relationship with Bert saying, “I couldn’t help myself! When
Bert came…. I fell in love with him” (Vault 50). Flo kills her husband so that she and Bert
can be together and have his “over $16,000! A fortune!” (Vault 48). Immediately after the
murder she embraces Bert and tells him “Darling! I’m rid of him at last…” (Vault 46). Since
Flo violated her marriage vows, she dies first as Hank’s corpse chases her up to the top of the
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lighthouse. In “The Hungry Grave,” Ida is also after her husband’s money, complaining that
her husband Ed is “Hateful! Stingy! He’d never buy me nice clothes!” (Crypt 88). Ida’s desire
for money leads her to begin poisoning her husband and then into the affair with Jim. Perhaps
because Ida is the instigator of violence, Jim’s death is not portrayed in the story, but only
promised at the end. Jim is not capable of committing violence. When the body in the sheet
starts to stir, he thinks “I’m going to beat you…until…” but then decides, “No! I… I can’t do
it! I can’t HURT anyone! Ida knew that! That’s why she did the…the killing! All I ever did
was dig…” (Crypt 92). The men in these stories are punished for their role in the affair and
the murder, but they are often killed outside of the visual frame of the story, perhaps granted
some sympathy if they were taken in by the seductress.
As a counterpart to the newlywed hero tales where the emotional release of the story
centers around protecting the object of desire, the pleasure in villain and seductress tales
resides in the final panels as the reader takes vicarious revenge on those who violate sexual
norms. The seductress character is killed at the climax of the story, often through a series of
panels in which she knows that death is imminent. The reader can watch her run for her life
or be placed into the grave and buried. Even in stories such as “The Hungry Grave,” where
the twist demands that her body and facial expressions are not on display, the death sequence
takes several panels and the text makes it a point to show that she is conscious and that her
death will be slow and painful. While hero tales end with a closeup of the couple, villain and
seductress tales end with the hovering ax or the sinking corpse, a closeup on the instrument
of death (see Figure 12.3).
Some stories play with the ingénue/wife and seductress tropes by combining these char-
acter traits into one, creating literal monsters such as vampires and werewolves. While se-
ductress characters may be wicked, the comics are transparent from the first panel as to
these women’s motivations and story lines. Mad and monstrous women are meant to fool
the reader and the male hero of the comics by hiding violent natures behind an appearance
of youth and innocence. Tales such as “Horror in the Night” from Vault of Horror number
12 (1950), “Werewolf Concerto” from Vault of Horror number 16 (1950), and “The Beast of
the Full Moon” from Vault of Horror number 17 (1950) describe women whose beauty and
apparent innocence lure men into protecting them. Only in the final panels does the reader
see the true animalistic nature of these women as they turn into murderers, vampires, or
werewolves. These stories are not consistent in how they dispatch the female monster. Some
mad women are killed by their husbands, others locked in asylums, and still others proven
sane. Werewolf and vampire women might be killed by their fiancés or husbands, but they
are just as likely to escape. The presence of monstrous women does not outline sexual scripts
in the same way that other story lines do, instead these comics suggest that not all women
who appear virtuous really are. While villain and seductress comics warn readers against vi-
olating sexual taboos, mad and monstrous women warn readers against trusting appearances
or becoming romantically or sexually involved with someone they do not truly know. Hero
and villain storylines both end with an emotional catharsis offering the reader a form of voy-
euristic pleasure, but monstrous women storylines can resist this emotional release, carrying
a reader forward to the next story in the comic.
This divide between child/adult and wife/seductress mirrors the subject/object split in
sexual agency, as well as Kincaid’s erotic innocence and Bond Stockton’s voyeurism. In each
case the pair illustrates a producer of desire (the object) and a consumer of desire (the subject).
Because horror comics present an object of desire, they also invite readers to act as a subject,
consuming images of erotic innocence or sadistic discipline. Acknowledging a childhood
desire to consume such images breaks down the social construction of childhood as sexless.
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Even if children do not directly engage in voyeuristic pleasure, the sheer act of reading these
comics requires an understanding of the emotional release the storylines construct, the sexual
mores the villains and seductresses have violated, and the sexual desirability of the innocent
wife, and, by extension, the innocent child.
Contemporary sexual subjectivities

Horror comics are perhaps so troubling to adults not because they depict sex and violence,
but because they destroy the image of the unknowing innocent child. Judith Roof claims,
“the fantasy of the Child produces our fantasy of pornography as that which must be kept
from the realm of the Child in order for both categories to continue to survive” (37). If
Roof ’s analysis of this interdependent relationship is correct, then Wertham’s assertion that
comics are like pornography has some merit.4 Horror comics deconstruct the innocent child,
letting the reader in on the sordid affairs of adults and occasionally casting the child reader as
part of the romantic plot by telling stories in the second person or using the visual perspective
of one character. What these comics challenge is the split between child and adult, knowing
and innocent, sexual object and sexual subject.
If the sales numbers of horror and romance comics are any indication, acknowledging
children as sexual subjects is also good marketing. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, in
1947 Crime Does Not Pay was selling 1,000,000 issues a month, and by 1949 20–25% of all
comic book sales were romance comics (Hajdu, Gardner). Therefore, I argue that the de-
mise of horror comics and the restrictions placed on romance comics in 1954 led directly to
the popularity of other children’s media that allowed children access to sexual subjectivity.
Barbie’s introduction in 1959 set sales records for Mattel, and spawned an entirely new type
of toy, the fashion doll (Simpson). Fashion dolls provide children access to adult and teen
bodies that they can use in imaginative play to construct sexual subjectivity. Barbie is based
on the Bild Lilli, an adult novelty doll, strengthening the connection between Barbie’s body
and sexual scripts. Though children could no longer access the narrative spaces of horror
comics, toys such as Barbie and G.I. Joe (1964) provided examples of physical culture where
children might enact sexual scripts.
Fashion dolls also offer an example of how the same questions about childhood and sub-
jectivity that drove the 1954 comic book panic persist in contemporary discussions of chil-
dren’s media. A Google search for “are fashion dolls a bad influence” yields 379,000 results. A
primary concern on mommy blogs is that these toys are too sexual.5 Public figures like Peggy
Orenstein have decried Monster High and Barbie as part of a larger trend of sexualizing chil-
dren,6 while scholars Mardia Bishop, Hannah Hardy, and Karen Robinson all make similar
arguments about the sexualization of girls ranging from age six to twenty-one. Bishop’s study
does not talk to the girls it talks about because “obviously, their age and level of understand-
ing of sexuality prevent collecting data from elementary school children” and “most girls are
too young to associate specific feelings to their clothes” (Bishop 49). Bishop decries “porn”
fashions for making young children grow up too fast, focusing too much on the body, and
“distract[ing] hormonal 4th and 5th grade boys” (50). This last concern suggests that boys can
have sexual subjectivity at least by fourth grade, it is only girls who do not understand what
they are doing or at least should not be allowed to make these choices.
Even if Bishop’s rejection of sexual subjectivity is valid for pre-adolescent girls, Hardy
and Robinson apply similar reasoning to “porn chic” fashion on college campuses. While
concerns about making girls and women into sexual objects are valid, this moral-panic-style
rhetoric erases sexual subjectivity, leaving “object” as the only available positionality. These
178
girls are not asked about how they see themselves or what knowledges they possess. The
younger children are assumed to be innocents, and the young adults, dupes. There is no
in-between space for children of any age, especially girls, to assert themselves as sexual sub-
jects. The moral panic around horror comics is a foundational example of how attempts to
protect children often remove a child’s ability to speak for themselves. Current rhetoric sur-
rounding child sexuality and media could learn from David Pace Wigransky and others like
him. Sexual subjectivity is only one component of a more general human subjectivity, which
real children are entitled to, even if that right threatens the cultural construction of the child.
Notes
Works Cited
Beatty, Bart. Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2005.
Bishop, Mardia J. “The Making of Pre-Pubescent Porn Star: Contemporary Fashion for Elemen-
tary School Girls.” Pop-Porn: Pornography in American Culture. Ed. Ann C. Hall and Mardia J.
Bishop. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. 45–56.
Bond Stockton, Kathryn. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2009.
Feldstein, Albert B., William M. Gaines, Jonathan T. Craig, Marie Severin, Wallace Wood, Harry
Harrison, Harvey Kurtzman, Graham Ingels, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kamen, and Jack Davis. The Vault
of Horror Vol.1. Timonium, MD: Gemstone Pub., 2007.
Feldstein, Albert B., William M. Gaines, and Russ Cochran. Tales from the Crypt, Volume 1, Issues
1–6. Timonium, MD: Gemstone Pub., 2006.
Friedman, Andrea. “Sadists and Sissies: Anti-pornography Campaigns in Cold War America.” Gender
History 15.2 (2003): 201–227.
Gardner, Jeanne. “Girls Who Sinned in Secret and Paid in Public: Romance Comics, 1949–1954.”
Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946–1962: Essays on Graphic Treatment of Communism, the
Code and Social Concerns. Ed. Chris York and Rafiel York. New York: McFarland & Company,
2012. 92–102.
Gardner, Jeanne Emerson. “She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in
American Romance Comics, 1947–1954.” The Journal of American Culture 36.1 (2013): 16.
Hajdu, David. The Ten-cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
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Sara Austin
Harvey, Hannah B. and Karen Robinson. “Hot Bodies on Campus: The Performance of Porn Chic.”
Pop-porn: Pornography in American Culture. Ed. Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop. Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2007. 57–76.
Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge,
1992.
McRobbie, Angela. “Rethinking Moral Panic; For Multi-Mediated Social Worlds.” Feminism and
Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000. 180–97.
Park, David. “The Kefauver Comic Book Hearings as Show Trial: Decency, Authority and The
Dominated Expert.” Cultural Studies 16.2 (2002): 259–288.
Roof, Judith. “Panda Porn, Children, Google, and Other Fantasies.” Pop-Porn: Pornography in
American Culture. Ed. Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. 27–44.
Simpson, Margaret. “History of Barbie.” Inside the Collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences,
11 Oct. 2018, maas.museum/inside-the-collection/2010/08/25/history-of-barbie/.
Tribunella, Eric L. “From Kiddie Lit to Kiddie Porn: The Sexualization of Children’s Literature.”
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33.2 (2008): 135–55. Project MUSE. Web. 8 Nov.
2014.
Weiss, Sasha. “Art Spiegelman Discusses Maurice Sendak.” New Yorker, May 9 (2012).
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
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13
Teenage biology 101
Serializing a queer girlhood in
Ariel Schrag’s Potential
Rachel R. Miller
The cover of the first issue of Ariel Schrag’s comic book Potential finds Ariel in trigonometry
class dreaming of biology. Specifically, the biology of her new on again, off again hookup,
Alexis, who appears hovering in a balloon just above Ariel’s head during class, naked with
vacant eyes and a wide smile. Under a banner reading, “Unit One: The Cell,” markers
point to Alexis’s anatomy—“lysosome” at her mouth, “mitochondria” and “centriole” at her
breasts, and a cluster of identifiers obscure her vagina—as Ariel stares, bug-eyed just beyond
the cover, lost in an anatomical daydream. Ariel will start the issue in a relationship with
her boyfriend Darren, “the nicest boy imaginable.” And although, “potential bounced off
of everywhere,” as she confesses that Darren writes her songs and calls her “every night just
to say sweet dreams,” she can’t help but think about girls (1). Making her way through the
packed halls of her high school, Ariel looks out at the reader: “I had thought I’d dealt with
this problem last year by after much anxiety and disturbance proclaiming myself…” looking
right, then left, she scribbles on a piece of crumpled paper that she presents to the reader,
“Bi.” She continues her march. “However, that apparently hadn’t seemed to—suffice,” she
admits as she slams into the chest of a naked girl proclaiming, “I only like girls” (2–3). Over
the course of this first issue, Ariel will unceremoniously dump Darren, begin hooking up
with Alexis, and throw her bouquet of bisexuality aside as she proclaims, “DYKEDOM
HERE I COME!”
During the summer of 1997 after her junior year of high school, Schrag began serializing
the comics she had written about that school year with indie comics publisher Slave Labor
Graphics. Having self-published the first two issues of her comics documenting her fresh-
man and sophomore years of high school, Awkward and Definition, she continued to use her
comics as a confessional, autobiographical space. This new series, Potential, however, would
reach a much wider audience than just her friends at school. Over the course of six issues,
Schrag draws readers in to the intimate details of her life from her parents’ failing marriage,
her confusing trysts in bathrooms across Berkeley, CA with her first girlfriend, Sally, her
attempts to lose her virginity with her best guy friend, Zally, and the more mundane rituals
of high school—biology tests and proms and senior pranks. Schrag treats even these ordinary
rituals of teenage life with reverence—particularly her adoration of biology class, which she
pays homage to in each issue of Potential by creating covers that mimic her biology textbook’s
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illustrations and diagram her discoveries about her sexuality, relationships, and gender iden-
tity. Her letters pages are stylized “Case Studies,” and the comic’s backpages often contain
her study materials xeroxed from biology and calculus class. In 2008, when Touchstone, an
imprint of literary publisher Simon & Schuster, collected and reprinted Potential as a graphic
novel, the cover aped that of Ariel’s biology textbook, which she can be seen throughout the
comic lugging from home and school.
Though Schrag’s self-publication of Awkward and Definition makes her a part of a cohort
of girls and young women self-publishing their own comics in the 1990s – what I call the
“girl wave” of comics1 – she was one of a small number of this cohort to make the leap
from self-publication to serializing her own single-author comic book at an independent
publisher. In fact, Schrag joined the few women who did get single-author serialized comic
books in writing about queer experiences and ideas in her series Potential. Roberta Gregory,
who began serializing her comic Naughty Bits with Fantagraphics in 1990, introduced queer
characters into her strips starring Bitchy Bitch, as well as more autobiographical strips fea-
tured issue to issue. Similarly, French-Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet frequently delved
into phantasmagoric explorations of her own gender, sexuality, and presentation in a series of
strips that found her drawing herself as a man in Dirty Plotte, which was serialized by Drawn
and Quarterly from 1991 to 1998.2
But Schrag’s work stands apart from her contemporaries and even the now-canonical
representation of queer girlhood in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as she narrates her
coming to terms with her queerness from an autobiographical space that is situated in close
proximity to her lived present and is allowed to unfold serially from issue to issue. Through-
out her meticulous study of women’s life writing in comics, Hillary Chute animates the
distance between the autobiographical subject inscribed on the page and the “older, rec-
ollective narratorial voice” (175) as a special manipulation of time and space modeled by
contemporary graphic memoirs by Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, and Marjane
Satrapi. Schrag’s comics in Potential, which pre-date much of the graphic life writing Chute
investigates, flatten this distance between Schrag as the author, her “narratorial voice,” and
Schrag as the autobiographical subject inscribed in the comic’s pages. The blurred boundar-
ies between her actual lived present and its ordering into confessional comics in Potential are
on the one hand, a product of her actual proximity to the events she is narrating. It is also,
perhaps, a by-product of making autobiographical work before the graphic memoir’s habit
of triangulating the autobiographical subject between past, present, and future had become
convention in the 2000s.
The intimate proximity between Schrag, who is creating and publishing her comics, and
Ariel, the autobiographical subject of her comics, constitutes a queer reorientation of the
narrative structure of the graphic memoir. As opposed to narrating Potential from some fu-
ture that is far-off for the autobiographical subject, Schrag’s comics resist the reflection of an
older, perhaps more mature or wiser narrator and instead invest in an unfiltered present in
which she is still working out and working through her feelings, sexuality, and the choices
she makes (or doesn’t make) in the series of failed relationships she details. If, as Darieck Scott
and Ramzi Fawaz suggest in the recent issue of American Literature of the same name, there
is something “queer about comics” (197), then Schrag’s mid-1990s chronicles of her queer
girlhood offer readers an encounter with the queer potentials of serialized autobiography,
even as she makes and unmakes her investment in the concept of “potential” itself. Indeed, in
one of the only scholarly assessments of Schrag’s “High School Comics Chronicles,” Emma
Maguire brilliantly documents the ways in which Schrag’s stories of dashed expectations undo
the teenage rituals that construct and reinforce the heteronormative conveyances of girlhood
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such as losing one’s virginity and consummating the perfect prom night. Failing, Maguire
reminds us through Halberstam, is a queer art. Schrag’s stories forcefully counteract her “de-
sire to participate in highly symbolic, mainstream teenager rites-of-passage” (55), she argues,
by documenting her ultimate failure to emulate an experience that satisfies her expectations
about these teenage rites and rituals. Nevertheless, these failures, according to Maguire, help
carve out a space for the representation of non-normative, queer girlhoods like Ariel’s.
In what follows, I endeavor to map the interior of this space that Schrag carves out in her
episodic, recursive, and, most crucially, serial instantiation of storying her queer girlhood in
comics. Elsewhere I have contextualized Schrag’s queer relationship to “potential” through
the experiences she had and the expectations readers placed on her as she serialized her com-
ics chronicles with Slave Labor Graphics.3 In particular, I document how the letters pages
included in several issues of Potential showcase an initial readership that was highly critical of
Schrag’s presence in comics, obfuscating their disapproval by demanding that Schrag “grow
up” and come in to her own as a cartoonist. This, I argued, ultimately burdened Schrag with
the responsibility of making good on the potential her readers projected onto the work of a
young cartoonist, a fraught situation that many girls who made media such as comics, zines,
and webpages faced during the 1990s.4 Here, however, I attempt to return to the narrative
mechanics of Schrag’s comics in order to ask what is queer about the mode of serialized life
writing that comics can inhabit through their publication. I will first briefly reassess Schrag’s
life writing in view of its serialization in comic book form as episodic and recursive, investi-
gating how Schrag returns readers again and again to sites that represent potential lost, such
as her girlfriend, Sally’s, trundle bed.
I will then engage the proximity of Schrag’s autobiographical and narratorial subjects to
one another throughout Potential. Though this proximity could be read as merely a product
of writing about her experiences in her junior year of high school immediately after they
took place, this narratorial stance, I argue, flattens the relationship between the past, present,
and future autobiographical selves that graphic life writing typically relies upon. The viabil-
ity of the future-self as a tenable place from which to write a queer coming-of-age story is,
then, radically destabilized in Schrag’s work. As Lee Edelman reminds, “the fate of the queer
is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity” (30). Bechdel embodies this fate through
her meticulous process of dressing up as her father and producing reference photos for her
drawings, literally becoming the figure that “cuts the thread of futurity” as she excavates her
father’s suicide, his closeted queerness, and her own coming-of-age as a lesbian woman.5 But
Schrag’s wholesale rejection of her future-self as a possible narrator models, I argue, an even
more radical mode of queer life writing that reorganizes the heteronormative drives that are
often reified through coming-of-age narratives.
“Potential so thick you can sink your teeth in it”:

seriality and queer life writing
Ariel shakes a chicken leg at her readers during the opening salvo introducing her first install-
ment of Potential. From her panel pulpit, she intones, “Junior year and that means business.
Times have been fun, I know it, but from here on out we’re talkin’: A’s to plow for, virgin-
ities to lose, proms to attend.”6 Her enumerations are each separated into their own panels,
which find Ariel gesticulating wildly with her drumstick until the last panel makes good on
her visual pun. “We’re talkin’ – Potential so thick you can sink your teeth in it.” The comic’s
title unfurls in block letters above the speech’s last panel, in which Ariel bites down on her
chicken leg.
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As with the two previous installments comprising her “High School Comic Chronicles,”
Potential is divided into untitled chapters and bound together by the word that has come to
define that year for Schrag. Nearly twice as long as its predecessors, what most sets Potential
apart from Awkward and Definition is its new publication format, which finds Schrag straying
far from the original conceit she lays out in her opening speech in serialized issues that are
episodic and recursive. Although two chapters are devoted in part to her attempts to lose her
virginity and attend prom (not much space at all is given to the “A’s to plow for”), the bulk of
Potential narrates the rituals, routines, and ultimate failure of Ariel’s first significant relation-
ship with her girlfriend, Sally Jutes. Though Ariel gestures toward the foundational sites of
“potential” achieved or lost—such as the classroom, the hotel room in which she attempts to
lose her virginity, and the prom’s dancefloor—the comic is more preoccupied with drawing
us into spaces that might seem somewhat foreign to these conventional coming-of-age back-
drops. Spaces like the trundle bed Sally rolls out whenever Ariel sleeps over, or the bathroom
stalls they frequent at house parties, queer club nights, and at school are the points of interest
that each installation of Schrag’s comic spends most of its time navigating.
Sally’s trundle bed is often the last space Ariel inhabits over the course of Potential’s issues,
and as their relationship becomes increasingly ambiguous, this space becomes particularly
fraught. Though they profess to be girlfriends, Ariel’s expectations about what that label
implies are routinely dashed when Sally begrudgingly allows her to sleep over, pulling the
trundle bed out from under the bed in which she sleeps and exiling Ariel to spend another
night alone. Often, either Ariel or Sally will move from one bed to another, initiating sex
or, at the very least, a makeout. In one such episode, Ariel finds shelter at Sally’s house after
a disastrous day spent celebrating her father’s birthday in the midst of her parents navigating
their messy separation. After a tense dinner with her family and a car ride home in which
her sister tells her mother that she hates her, Ariel returns to her house, shaken, to call Sally.
“All I wanted was Sally I just needed Sally,” she confesses in a text box as she exits her mom’s
car, clutching her biology textbook. “…Sally, Sally, Sally, my Sally who helps me, she always
helps me, she asks if I’m ok” (143).
Perched on the edge of Sally’s bed several pages later, Ariel will begin to enumerate the
days events in Sally’s school planner. The panels break from the present moment to the af-
ternoon’s events, filling the reader in on what has taken place over the course of her father’s
birthday in short bursts that seem to be elicited by Sally’s presence on the bed next to Ariel,
which she reads as a show of support and evidence that Sally cares deeply for her. The words
and images of the panels that recall the somewhat traumatic events of the day, then, are
elicited through the emotional connection Ariel feels exists between her and Sally. As she
lists the significant moments of the day—“Eight. Beach. Raining.” And “Nine. Dad starts to
talk. Don’t know what to say.”—which are followed by a panel depicting these key points,
a thought bubble simultaneously contains her inner chant addressed to Sally as she holds
onto Ariel: “I love you Sally. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you” (146)
(Figure 13.1).
Compared to the dysfunction and chaos of the panels depicting her afternoon spent with
her father, the present moment with Sally is serene and touching. Ariel’s eyes widen, swal-
lowing her face as the bad feelings from the afternoon vanish and are replaced by the fulfill-
ment of feeling supported by and connected to her girlfriend.
Whereas the words and images in this sequence seem all but generated out of Sally’s care
and attention toward Ariel, this idyllic space of communion between Sally and Ariel soon
fades as they find themselves falling into a well-worn pattern. Ariel passes the rest of the night
studying for a biology test on the floor of Sally’s mom’s office, gazing lovingly up at Sally.
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Teenage biology 101
Figure 13.1 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997
Her thought balloon overflows with the jargon on her biology textbook—“A depolarizing
stimulus of sufficient strength will change the membrane potential to a critical level called
threshold potential. This triggers a different type of response called action potential unlike a
graded…”— conflating Ariel’s studies about “action potential” with her feeling that events of
the night have significantly changed things between her and Sally (149). When Sally word-
lessly pulls out her trundle bed for Ariel to sleep on, Ariel is sent into a tailspin of yearning for
Sally to come lay with her despite the evidence pointing to the contrary. The next 12 silent
panels linger over Ariel, frozen in the trundle bed, as Sally returns in her pajamas, lays down
next to Ariel, begins to initiate a physical interaction, before closing her eyes and snapping
“Don’t. I’m busy” when Ariel attempts to reciprocate (150–151). Sally crawls back into her
bed up top, leaving Ariel to feel the familiar drain of confusion over having her expecta-
tions and desires dashed yet again. Indeed, as Sally turns away from Ariel, letters spelling
“DRAIN” drip down Ariel’s spine. “Not a big deal, clam down, just like grids just organized
like grids,” Ariel attempts to collect herself as she did earlier in the evening (Figure 13.2).
But this exchange cannot be organized in a way that makes sense to Ariel, and, just as the
panels depicting the day’s events were generated, the page falls into disarray as unlined grids
descend on Ariel, alone in Sally’s trundle bed. “Just grids and preterminals, in the morning,
better mood, just bad mood, time to sleep, grids and sleep,” Ariel thinks as she drifts off. The
image of her lying in the trundle bed is almost all but obscured from view by the increasingly
dense white grid that overtakes the panel.
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Rachel R. Miller
Lingering over Sally’s trundle bed as a site of potential felt and lost, Schrag subverts the
conventions of queer coming-of-age stories that Michael Cart and Joan F. Kaywell chart in
their chapter “The History of Queer Young Adult Literature.” Indeed, as Cart and Kaywell
point out, though the 1990s saw an increase in the number of queer young adult novels
published—up to 75 compared to the 36 of the 1980s—these narratives almost exclusively
cohere around coming out as the major plot and problem for queer teenagers, a trend that
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Teenage biology 101
would not be broken until the 2010s (4–5). Queer YA novels of the 1990s by and large
“replicated” the tropes of queer representation in the 1980s (4), such as that of a straight
female protagonist discovering that her boyfriend is gay and the overwhelmingly negative
representation of lesbian teenagers (3). Schrag’s comics in Potential, by contrast, constitute a
serial, on-going story, with each issue depicting a lesbian relationship that is neither wholly
positive nor negative, but instead filled with an ambient “potential” that Ariel chases. Re-
turning again and again to this site that is fraught with such meaning, such potential, Ariel
and Sally wordlessly and ambivalently negotiate their physical chemistry and their feelings
for one another.
Potential, then, visualizes a much different kind of storytelling about queer young adults
that lies somewhere off-course of coming-of-age as coming out and the more contemporary
turn toward “just being” queer, where queerness is taken as a given, normative, and inciden-
tal to the lives and experiences of the characters (Cart and Kaywell, 5). Sally’s trundle bed
has the capacity to generate or evaporate the words and images of the comic itself. Schrag’s
panels, it seems, are as co-dependent as her actual relationship with Sally. Viscerally depicting
her desires for and failures to communicate with her girlfriend, Schrag does not merely carve
out a new space for the visualization of queer girlhood, as Maguire suggests (54–59). Rather,
Schrag depicts her queerness as dynamic, an ongoing way of being, a fraught working out of
personal, flawed expectations against an equally ambivalent reality. That Schrag carved out
a visual and textual space to figure and reconfigure her queer girlhood through serialized
issues of a comic book is all the more significant, as she was telling these stories in the mid to
late-1990s well before the more flexible conventions of narrating queer lives came to the fore
to an audience that was not, itself, necessarily queer.
Just as Sally unfolds the bed beneath her own, often to the dismay of her girlfriend, so,
too, does Schrag draw a recursive loop throughout her comics, back to this site of failure
in order to provide a space in which her queerness can be unfolded and worked out. Even
as Ariel feels the drain of disappointment, Schrag often takes the opportunity to leap from
Sally’s trundle bed into Ariel’s dreams, which are miasmic, shifting recalculations of her
waking hours that reveal as much as they obscure. In the dream following the panicked
foreclosure of the comic’s panels into whited-out grids, Schrag depicts her anxieties over
the eating habits she has adopted in an effort to please Sally. Like the other dream sequences
throughout Potential, this dream is drawn in a more realistic style that sharply contrasts the
cartoony, wide-eyed characters that populate Ariel’s waking hours. Wandering through her
house looking for something to eat, Ariel is tempted by an apple tart and a rotisserie chicken,
both of which are less-than-ideal options for the diet she wants to maintain for Sally. “Hmm
apple tart, wish I could have some…gotta lose…weight…fat = butch, can’t be butch,” she
muses before spotting the chicken in the next panel. “Oh! A chicken, I wish that was my
chicken, nope…vegetarian….” (155). Betraying Sally, for whom she has become vegetarian,
Ariel eats a small piece of the chicken and spends the rest of the dream arched over the toilet
trying to throw it up (156). The final panel shows her panicked face in sharp relief as her
inner monologue riddles the space between dreaming and waking with anxiety: “NO! Can’t
faint! Only pathetic, a pathetic fainted mass with a clog of strawy chicken in my throat! Stop!
I can’t! Wake up! Wake up!” (Figure 13.3).
Excising, literally and figuratively, the co-dependent impulses, missed chances, and mis-
communications of her first relationship with another girl, Schrag does not idealize her
experiences as a queer teenager, but, rather, shows queer coming-of-age as a recursive, often
episodic narrative that draws her back to sites of failure, regret, and anxiety. As I have argued
elsewhere, the serialized unfolding of deeply personal fiction and autobiography that comic
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books, particularly alternative comic books and anthologies, afford can carry on and help work
out the discourses and life narratives of marginalized groups.7 Leah Misemer argues that the
dynamic “counterpublic” constructed over the course of many decades by the Wimmen’s
Comix Collective and their eponymous anthology, “mobilized serial publication to turn
readers into comics creators as part of an activist mission” (12). And indeed, Schrag capital-
izes on the serialization of her story to articulate and reexamine the personal hang-ups about
her own sexuality and its expression as she lives through it. While Potential does not draw
upon the multiple points of view and stories that an anthology like Wimmen’s Comix or Gay
Comix does, it is still a valuable, serialized dialogue between Schrag and the past selves that
so intimately inform her present.
Working through her own thoughts and feelings about her gender presentation, the
expression of her sexuality, and the execution of her relationships with other girls, Schrag’s
life writing practice produces an intimate and unvarnished excavation of her own queer-
ness. From her uneasy equation of “fat = butch” to her theoretical exploits as she attempts
to find a biological explanation for queer sexuality (61–63, 136–137), Schrag depicts herself
in the constant flux of trying to work out her queerness as opposed to working toward the
narrative distillation and dispatch of her queerness as “coming out” or “ just being” queer.
Her documentation of the lengths she will go “to try and become sexually appealing” to
Sally, such as becoming a vegetarian, avoiding presenting as “butch,” and dutifully playing
the role of the top doing their makeout sessions, she writes, “ just brought back the whole
what is this homosexual business anyway” (136). Addressing her reader, she admits, “My
constant companion biology book was not a very soothing reference. The only answer I
could really come up with was that homosexuality was the phenotype of a dominant allele
mutated by a base-pair substitution, insertion or deletion…Similar to Huntington’s dis-
ease!” Over the course of Potential’s six issues, she will return to this thought experiment
again and again, even going so far as to raise the topic with her beloved art teacher, an
after-hours “popular dyke scenester” and, as Ariel describes her, the “perfect role model
material…my guiding light” (61).
Far from trying to deny homosexuality as a viable way of being in her efforts to find a
scientific explanation for its occurrence, Ariel’s messy and inchoate explorations, in fact, avoid
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the ways in which pop culture narratives that represent queerness and coming-of-age have
historically upheld heteronormative lifeways. By depicting herself as questioning, unsure, and
always exploring her sexuality and gender presentation—indeed, the sixth chapter of Potential
opens with an diagrammatic sequence in which Ariel describes her issues surrounding her
“clothes imbalance” (131)—Schrag does not position queerness as something to be attained
through the culturally legible, terminal narratives of coming out or the uncomplicated “just
being” queer without comment. In fact, her scientific thought experiments reveal deeper anx-
ieties about how she relates to Sally: how she can please her sexually if Sally is also attracted
to men; what counts as having had sex or “losing” one’s virginity in a queer context; can she
fit into the kind of “punk dyke” scene her queer role model does, or is there something else
out there for her? Several chapters earlier, Schrag predicates her and Sally’s conversation about
queer sex with Ms. Salt on a panel in which Schrag draws herself alone in the center of a white
backdrop, she holds up her hands in a shrinking shrug, her eyes wavering. “but two girls can’t
have sex….?” she questions in a quasi-address to the reader that melts into her conversation
with Ms. Salt, perched with Sally on a drafting table in the art room (61).
Turning her fears and anxieties into a question that begins in the negative and quickly
transforms into “what is sex with a girl?” several panels later, Schrag gives herself room to
return, to question, to investigate her ideas about queerness in each installment of her comics
chronicles. While she very often returns to personal sites of failure, her comics also work to
expose the flaws in her thinking about human sexuality while acknowledging the true na-
ture of her hang-ups. While she obsesses over whether or not “two girls [can] have sex,” her
real fears about not being sexually attractive to her partner and her frustrations over Sally’s
ambivalence over being intimate with her materialize as she returns again and again to the
confusing scenes that take place in Sally’s trundle bed. Potential, then, models a generative
narrative of coming-of-age and coming-into queerness as a deeply personal, often fraught
process that is not front-facing and performative like coming out might be. In her study of
queer girls’ engagement with pop culture, Susan Driver writes that “Listening to the queer
desiring voices of girls throws into question the very typologies that might restrict girls” (2).
Schrag makes material this process of listening through the serial comics installments of Po-
tential. Failure, misunderstanding, and flawed thinking are, in fact, celebrated parts of a jour-
ney that has no termination, no end goal. As Sally puts it in one scene in which she and Ariel
dissect their frustrations over not fitting into the queer scene, “We’re proud to be ashaaamed!
Let’s hear it for shame!” (125).
“The high point in the story for me was when ‘Ariel’ gets
into bed with Alexis”: Potential’s queer proximity
to the autobiographical subject
In the second issue of Potential, “Unit Two: The Gene,” Schrag includes a page of letters from
readers of the first issue. In keeping with the pretense that each of her comics dispatches is
a unit in the study of human biology, her letters pages are labeled “Data Analysis.” They
showcase a primarily West-coast readership dominated by men. Along with other girls and
women who were either self-publishing their comics or else had their own serial comic book
during the 1990s such as Doucet, Gregory, Ariel Bordeaux, and others, Potential’s “Data
Analysis” allows Schrag to showcase the fraught nature of reader reception and response
to her comics. Some readers write in with multi-paragraph dissections of her abilities as a
cartoonist while others seem to misunderstand Schrag’s work entirely. Patrick J. Lee from
Burbank, CA, writes in that “The high point in the story for me was when ‘Ariel’ gets into
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bed with Alexis.” To which Schrag bitingly responds, “Me too – ‘Ariel’” adopting the scare
quotes Lee has installed around her name.
Lee’s missive to Schrag and her sharp response pointedly collapse the fraught nature of
utilizing a visual and textual medium like comics to depict and publicly circulate queer life
narrative, particularly the queer life narrative of a teenage girl. Chute writes of the “risk of
representation” the graphic life writing undertakes when it seeks to bear witness to lives that
test the boundaries of cultural norms and narrative practices, visualizing the “unrepresent-
able,” the unspeakable, the invisible (2–3). One of the “risks” particular to Schrag’s project,
then, is the burden of having to visually depicting herself and other teenage girls exploring
their ideas about sex and sexually experimenting with one another for an audience who, at
the time, was partially comprised of young, adult men like Lee. Schrag’s brief account of
attending the Alternative Press Expo (APE) in Definition, in fact, documents a convention
floor crawling with young men and artists tabling under names like “Kikass Komix” and
“Smack Boy,” all of whom largely ignore Schrag and her tablemate Shannon Szmigelski,
who self-published the comic nEuROTIC girl in the mid-1990s (61). Lee’s letter is extremely
telling of how straight, cisgendered, male readers might be predisposed to consume Schrag’s
comics, where the visualization of young queer female sexuality is little more than a visual
turn-on or provocation. While Lee slavers over a glimpse of two girls making out with one
another, this “high point” of the first issue of Potential is, in actuality, a brief, somewhat di-
sastrous hookup between Ariel and Alexis that fizzles out when Ariel asks her partner if they
should consider using protection.
Perhaps even more revealing, however, are the scare quotes Lee installs around Schrag’s
name, rendering her a character, “Ariel,” in his estimation as opposed to an actual person,
Ariel. This estrangement of Schrag from the self she projects as a character in her comics
might be little more than an annoyance to her, as she bitingly reinstalls these scare quotes
around her own name in her sign-off. But Lee’s insistence that the Ariel of the comics he
reads is somehow less “real” or authentic than Schrag herself, that the “Ariel” we meet in
Schrag’s comics is a performance, in fact bolsters his objectification of her queerness as some-
thing that is intended for his eyes (and fantasies) only.
This reading is a misrepresentation of how Schrag situates herself as the creator of her
comics chronicles in relation to the autobiographical subject we meet on the page. There
is, in fact, a queer proximity to the autobiographical self that Schrag models in her comics
that denies the artifice of “Ariel” as a character and draws her intimately close to her
real-life counterpart. This proximity or closeness to the autobiographical self reconfigures
the conventional structure of graphic life writing, where, as scholars like Chute and Jared
Gardner have pointed out, there is a triangulation between the autobiographical subject in
image, their narratorial voice in text, and the author making the comic. “Unsettling fixed
subjectivity,” Chute writes, graphic memoirs “present life narratives with doubled narra-
tion that visually and verbally represents the self, often in conflicting registers and differ-
ent temporalities” (5). While it is certainly true that Schrag’s comics chronicles present
the autobiographical self “in conflicting registers and different temporalities”—see, for
instance, the different visual registers Schrag employs to differentiate her dreams from her
waking life (Figure 13.3)—there is a significant flattening of the distance between these
selves. As I have acknowledged earlier in this chapter, this flattening is a product of the
circumstances under which Schrag created her “High School Comic Chronicles,” which
were written and drawn shortly after the events that they depict. Indeed, the most visible
and canonical examples of queer life writing in comics, such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
(2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012), Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), and even
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more recent examples like Tillie Walden’s Spinning (2017), are all narrated from a tem-
poral vantage years after the events that they depict take place. Bechdel as an adult looks
back on her childhood and young adulthood while Cruse details a fictionalized version of
his experiences of growing up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. Schrag,
however, endeavors to write and draw her experiences a matter of weeks or months after
they occur.
The proximity between Schrag and her autobiographical self manifests in the self-reflexive
presence of Schrag’s other comics, Awkward and Definition, throughout Potential. Sally’s initial
interest in Ariel, for instance, is generated from her recognition of Ariel as the author of Defi-
nition. “I read ‘Definition’!” Sally proclaims by way of introduction to a star-struck Ariel. “It
was so great! I loved it! I have to show you my favorite part! Oh, and I wanna make T-shirts,
I have a silk screening kit at school” (16). Definition also becomes a point of bonding between
Sally’s sister, Harriet, and Ariel. When Harriet and Ariel get high together after school one
day, Harriet asks if Ariel “keep[s] a record or something for the comic book” (41), prompting
Ariel to reveal a set of files in her desk drawer, all bearing labels with her friend’s and lover’s
names—“harriet,” “Alexis” inscribed with a heart, and one at the very back ominously la-
beled “The Truth” (42, Figure 13.4). The panels crumple and become dogeared on the page
as Harriet and Ariel continue to smoke and reflect on Ariel’s comics making practice. “Wow,
this is giving me a really weird feeling like we’re in the comic book, like everything I say
is a new panel,” Harriet confesses, her words slipping and sliding around her word balloon.
“Yeah,” replies Ariel, “I get that a lot…” Slumped on the floor beneath Ariel’s drafting board
and her file drawer, Harriet opens up a copy of Definition: “It’s like we’re trapped in the comic
book and we can’t get out.”
Not just the stoner musings of Ariel’s friend, this deeply reflexive scene finds Ariel rec-
ognizing that her life often feels like an extension of or, at least, proximal to her comics
making practice. Materializing both her comics making process (the file folders full of notes
beneath her desk) and its outcome (the book, Definition, which her friend Harriet holds in her
hands) within the pages of yet another installment of her graphic life writing, Schrag’s reality
as author becomes closely and queerly aligned with her self-representation in and through
comics. Barely anything but a small file folder labeled “The Truth” stands between her life
as she lives it and its representation on the page, situating her comics in a temporally queer,
intimate conjunction with her lived experiences. As she sits on the floor with Harriet, Ariel
takes Definition from her hands, opening it to the chapter in which she turns 16. Now at the
end of her 16th year, a kind of elliptic loop is illuminated as Ariel devotes a panel of Potential
to a reproduction of panels from Definition that anticipated when “sweet sixteen” might be
like. Now, those future-oriented panels are reproduced in miniature and held by her in the
present, perhaps a moment of disillusionment but more likely the uncanny materialization
of her self-reflection (Figure 4). Her life and experiences are always actively arranging them-
selves into comics for Schrag such that there is not much temporal distance between her life
as she lives it and its reproduction in comics.
This flattening of the distance between author, narrator, and the autobiographical subject
that inhabits the page in Schrag’s comics engenders a queer proximity between Schrag and
her autobiographical selves that bolsters the narrative’s experiential and serial “working out”
of queerness. I designate this proximity as “queer” because of its implicit rejection of an au-
thorial self that is situated far in the future of the events depicted. Potential, much like Awkward
and Definition, refuses to narrate Ariel’s coming-of-age as something that moves in a straight
line toward an adulthood in which her queerness is, perhaps, partially defined through her
achievement of certain heteronormative life markers such as marriage, domesticity, starting a
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family, etc. That Schrag herself has kept the details of her personal life relatively private, even
in her latest collection of autobiographical comics, Part of It (2018), in which she held to an
authorial presence that close to the present tense, further evidences a willful rejection of the
demand that she model a “grown up” or mature authorial voice through her life writing. Her
comics are, instead, fixed queerly in the present, lacking the “mature” perspective of a much
older version of herself who might look back on and take stock of the events and romantic
entanglements Ariel finds herself in much differently than her present self.
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The proximity between Schrag the author and the autobiographical selves in text and image
throughout Potential allows Schrag to depict her ideas about sexuality and relationships as an
ever-evolving, on-going process, and a messy one at that. Reflecting on a kiss with her new
girlfriend Sally, “the best kiss I had ever had in my entire life,” as she lays in bed one night,
Ariel cycles through emotions ranging from “optimum joy” to deep anxieties and fears about
her ability to please Sally sexually (110). Two panels that appear to find Ariel in her bed, mas-
turbating as she thinks about how she was “so turned on by one kiss” with Sally, are suddenly
interrupted by a text box holding her close-to-present-tense reflection that Sally might like
“having sex with boys” more than she does with Ariel. Huddled on her side, staring wide-eyed
into the dark of her bedroom, Ariel thinks, “This would mean that no matter how good the
kiss was or how much she enjoyed it there was still that ultimate potential she could fulfill with
boys and no way she could get there with me.” Her panic spirals out as she is haunted by an
abstract vision of the “perfect fit” between Sally and Damian, and Ariel’s narration spins into a
run on sentence in a text box that seems to crush down on her as she lies in bed pulling at her
hair: “And she should want it because that’s really what is natural and biology says so and even
if I did get bored making out with boys and even if it wasn’t exciting I knew how it felt and I
knew it felt good and if she thinks about his hard dick between her legs then that’s just natural
and natural selection is the production AND I CAN’T DO THAT AT ALL!”
The affective weight of Ariel’s anxiety is materialized by a narratorial voice that becomes
increasingly present and pressing on the page. Indeed, Ariel’s thoughts are animated by
letters that grow in size, unbound from the once-straight lines of her text boxes as the pos-
sibility that Sally prefers having sex with boys over girls bears down on Ariel. Reflection so
closely aligned with her present is shown to burden Schrag with inchoate thinking patterns
that appear to trap her in a battle between what she perceives as “natural” and her sexual
desire for her girlfriend. While Ariel’s way of thinking is frequently reductive, an authorial
hand situated in her future is not present to course correct, sweep away, or excuse her present.
Rather, Potential is a raw account of Ariel’s struggles with and against all the possibilities the
future holds (such as the possibility that her girlfriend will leave her for a boy) made from an
authorial vantage point that is as proximal to her present as possible.
Schrag, in fact, struggles against the pressing demands and possibilities of the future
throughout Potential by deploying the idea of “potential” itself as a placeholder for the future
that by turns oppresses, confounds, and ambivalently confronts her. “Potential” can describe
the ambiguous way Ariel feels about a relationship, as she describes in the opening page of the
comic that going out with Darren, “the nicest boy imaginable” makes her feel like “poten-
tial bounced off of everywhere: he wrote songs for me, made art projects for me, and called
me every night just to say sweet dreams” (1). Despite these seemingly innocuous displays of
affection from Darren, Schrag depicts herself amid a bustling hall of students, peering anx-
iously out at the reader with wide eyes as she clutches a book to her chest, looking uncertain
even as “potential” is imagined to be “everywhere.” In the final moments of Potential, Ariel
and Sally dance around the possibility of breaking up. Ariel is once again confined to Sally’s
trundle bed after an intimate moment that Sally cuts short. Attempting to kiss Sally as they
conclude their discussion about breaking up, Sally once again rejects Ariel’s advances and
Ariel climbs up into Sally’s bed, alone, from the trundle bed. “And as I climbed into the top
bed, even though I was slightly crying, I noticed it was without a drain,” she writes. “For the
first time, no matter how sad it was, it was like I was free from that. It really was just a matter
of no obligations, so no expectations” (224). Clutching the bedsheets to her chest in the last
panel of the comic she concludes, “In other words, no more potential,” as the future she had
fantasized about with Sally dissolves into the darkness of the bedroom.
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Rachel R. Miller
Coda
Potential provides few straight lines to growing up over the course of its six issues. Return-
ing to ambivalent sites of loss and failure that are unconventional to both representations of
queer youth and teenage culture more broadly in pop culture, Schrag’s comics remain deeply
self-reflexive about her present as they showcase a “working out” of her queer girlhood from
panel to panel, issue to issue. When the weight of all that potential—which could also be
understood as all of the narrative conventions that are thrust on teenagers as they come- of-
age—in the comic’s final panel, Potential carves out a flexible, fluid space in comics from
which queer youth can tell their stories.
Notes
Works Cited
Cart, Michael and Joan F. Kaywell. “The History of Queer Young Adult Literature.” Paula Great-
house, Brooke Eisenbach, and Joan F. Kaywell (eds.), Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to
the English Language Arts Curriculum. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 1–9.
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Writing & Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010.
Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002.
Driver, Susan. Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting, and Creating Media. Bern: Peter Lang
International Academic Publishers, 2007.
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Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Fawaz, Ramzi and Darieck Scott. “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” American Literature, vol. 90,
no. 2 (2018): 197–219.
Kearney, Mary Celeste. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Maguire, Emma. “Potential: Ariel Schrag Contests (Hetero-)Normative Girlhood.” Prose Studies,
vol. 35, no. 1, (2013): 54–66.
Miller, Rachel. “Revolution Girl Style Later: Wimmen’s Comix in the 1980s.” Brian Cremins and
Costello Brannon (eds.), The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics’ Crucial Decade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2020.
Miller, Rachel. “When Feminism Went to Market: Issues in Feminist Comics Anthologies in the 1980s
& 90s.” Aldama, Frederick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2019, https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190917944.001.
0001/oxfordhb-9780190917944-e-42.
Misemer, Leah. “Serial Critique: The Counterpublic of Wimmen’s Comix.” Inks: The Journal of the
Comics Studies Society, vol. 3, no. 1, (2019): 6–26.
Moore, Anne Elizabeth. Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet. Minneapolis: Uncivilized
Books, 2018.
Robbins, Trina. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines. San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1999.
Schrag, Ariel. Awkward and Definition. New York: Touchstone, 2008.
———. Potential. New York: Touchstone, 2008.
Tahneer Oksman and Seamus O’Malley, editors. The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place
Inside Yourself. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
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14
Genre, gender, sexual,
textual and visual, and real
representations in Bande Dessinée
C(h)ris Reyns-Chikuma
French comics are called bandes dessinées, or BD, in French-speaking countries, including
France, francophone Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, and many African nations. It is com-
monly accepted that bandes dessinées started in the 1830s with the French-speaking Swiss
citizen Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846)’s “littérature en estampes” (Kunzle, History). Töpffer’s
long narratives in images, although satirical, are quite conservative on a number of topics
(Kunzle, Father 3), such as sexuality and gender, as expected for nineteenth-century main-
stream publications. Indeed, his work never addresses issues of sexuality other than from a
traditional perspective, which often satirizes progressive ideas. For example, the narrative of
and most images in Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois (1827–1836; Obadiah Oldbuck, London,
1841, then New York, 1842) are stereotypically gendered, although some pictures may seem
very audacious for the time.
Similarly, his followers Cham (1818–1879) and Gustave Doré (1832–1883) and some
others published some graphic narratives that were rediscovered in the last 30 years (Kunzle
2007, 143–181; Groensteen and Peeters, Töpffer 161–204) and that rarely represent women
other than as marginal characters. (Figure 14.1). As written by Benoit Peeters, many comics
Figure 14.1 1830, Oldbuck by Rodolphe Töpffer
196
Representations in Bande Dessinée
authors felt that they had to explain the quasi absence of women in their drawings, citing
their difficulty in caricaturing a pretty woman (Peeters, Bande 81–82). Simultaneously, by the
mid-nineteenth century, caricatures (see Daumier and Grandville), as one of the ancestors
of comics (Smolderen), like other medias and arts, would often use gendered stereotypes to
represent allegories of the nation (e.g., Marianne) and more common social and political situ-
ations (e.g., women’s vote). Most of these images and stories were for adults and many contin-
ued to be published first in newspapers and specialized political journals (like La Caricature,
Le Charivari, Le Rire, Le Canard enchaîné, etc.). They often were misogynistic and contained
sexist jokes and innuendoes similar to the ones produced until very recently in most comics
magazines, including the now sadly world-famous Charlie Hebdo.1
New beginnings: forgotten girls and women

By the end of the nineteenth century, what we nowadays see as the first typical comics,
i.e., strips made of several frames, were published mostly in mainstream family-oriented
newspapers and children’s magazines. Given their readership, they would continue ignoring
sexuality and gender issues other than within the implicit form of mainstream conventions
of the period. Comics, like many other activities and institutions, were segregated. Some
comics were created for the family like La Famille Fenouillard (1889–1893), in which gender
roles of the four characters (the self-satisfied father, the strong rigid mother, and their two
simpleton daughters) were very clearly delineated.2 To reach a broader market, other comics
were explicitly created for both sexes and genders. They would often feature a brother and a
sister, hence avoiding any amorous ambivalences, and the brothers would usually be the lead-
ers. This is the case in Fripounet et Marisette (1943–1945), in which the boy is a “petit fripon,”
i.e., a mischievous teen, and his sister (or cousin) is often a much quieter side-kick.3 These
BDs were often very didactic. Until recently, it was believed that these strips were made
only or mainly by and for boys and men. Many of the first BDs for boys were translations
of American comics like Pim Pam Poum, translated from Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer
kids (1897), published in French from 1911 onward. Story-gags Les Pieds nickelés created by
Louis Forton in 1908 staged three male adult slacker-anarchists and were often more sub-
versive than stories mainly for kids, but not where gender issues are concerned. Interestingly
enough, there were no comics specifically for women, a genre “invented” much later (1980s)
and much further (in Japan).4
The BDs for girls were as numerous but less adventurous and usually even more didactic.
The first famous example is the female adult character Bécassine, created in 1905. Female
submissiveness is reinforced by her poor and provincial origin. Symbolic of this submissive-
ness is that she is drawn without a mouth in a time when suffragettes were protesting in
various countries, including France (Figure 14.2).
The character in general and its absence of the mouth have been studied in many publica-
tions including academic ones but more in general political terms (popular vs. bourgeois, and
provincial vs. Parisian), and very rarely and only very recently within a critical gender frame.
Similarly, for a long time credits were given only to the male artist, Emile Pinchon, and not
to the female script writer, Jacqueline Rivière.
From the beginning and contrary to French boy comics, BDs for girls were mainly pub-
lished in girls’ magazines like La Semaine de Suzette, Fillette, Lisette, Bernadette, etc.5 and were
mostly co-created by men in various positions of power (artists, editors, publishers). How-
ever, a lot of women also collaborated, although often anonymously. Comics specialists re-
cently emphasized that, contrary to other arts, the ninth art has no memory,6 and this is even
197
(a)
(b)

Figure 14.2 (a) 1900, Bécassine by Pinchon & Rivière. (b) Catel (permission of the author)
more the case for BD for girls. Because they were considered doubly inferior (i.e., comics
and for girls), they did not develop any type of mechanism that would favor memory of these
girl BDs until very recently.7 For example, in France, unlike for some comics for boys, there
was no policy of publishing these girl comics in “albums” (books). Hence, they existed only
in disposable magazines while albums were kept on private shelves and public libraries. Also,
many women authors like Manon Iessel (1909–1985) and Jacqueline Duché (1892–1973)
never made it into histories of BD that were written only by white male authors. Therefore,
these female BD authors were never able to transmit their style, themes, or perspectives to
subsequent generations. One can easily say that this lack or erasure of traces will have neg-
ative consequences on the next generations. Not only will women still be discriminated
against in the various parts of the comics world (caricatures, comic strips, comics books), but
the few who can circumvent these discriminatory (implicit or explicit) rules will have no
founding role models, as Hergé, Franquin, and Goscinny are for subsequent generations of
(mostly) male comics artists.
The great masters: no girls and no women allowed

Hergé is probably the first and only world famous BD author. His iconic character, Tintin, is
the most recognizable francophone hero, and consequently he is also the most parodied, spe-
cifically for his [non-]sexuality. Although Tintin grew up a bit (from a pre-teen at the series’s
beginning to a young teenager), he never had a girlfriend, either sexually speaking, or simply
a friend who was a girl, a sister, or a “real” or putative mother for that matter. Created in
1929 for the conservative Catholic press for children (Delisle 2010), gender segregation and
rigid gender identities were the norm. In reaction to such puritanism, hundreds of parodies
and caricatures have been created from the 1950s on to represent the young teen protago-
nist in non-mainstream sexual images and adventures. From zoophilia with his dog Milou
(Snowy) to homosexuality with his friends, especially Captain Haddock, non-normative but
male-oriented and mostly misogynistic and homophobic pornography came out in the un-
derground comics world. As it is now widely known, the only women represented in the 20+
Tintin albums were a few female servants and Bianca Castafiore, an opera singer. Castafiore
is the most important female character, who first appeared marginally in several albums and
is a central character in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (1962, The Castafiore Emerald). Her name
198
was very quickly parodied as Castrafiore (castrating flower) for her role and impact on other
characters, especially Haddock (Peeters, Bijoux).
The character Tintin gave birth to the eponymous magazine Tintin in 1945 that produced
numerous other characters that would quickly become popular in the francophone comics
world. The name-title of the magazine and the clearly masculine names of the other adven-
tures (Alix, Ric Hochet, Michel Vaillant, Blake and Mortimer, etc.) clearly show that it is
a boys’ comics world. These adventures also mostly avoided any representation of girls or
women, and when they did represent them, they were limited to minor, subaltern, or mar-
ginalized roles such as traditional homestay mothers in the family (e.g., Boule et Bill, 1955–),
shrews, servants, or secretaries. The few represented couples reproduced the same traditional
and heteronormative conception of the relation between a man and a woman. In addition,
the immense majority of collaborators of the magazine Tintin were male.
The now world-famous Schtroumpf village (the Smurfs, created in 1958) is a good, cute,
and caricatural illustration of the limited representation of sexuality and gender that persisted
until the 1960s and beyond in the BD world: for the 20+ “male” Schtroumpfs, there is only
one Schtroumpfette-Smurfette who was created in 1966, eight years after her co-villagers. The
way she appeared in this male world is telling: she was created by the evil wizard Gargamel to
punish and sow dissent among the Schtroumpfs. Its success first in Belgium, France, and Eu-
rope, and then quickly in the USA and the world, might be a proof of its “quality” (cuteness,
creativity, etc.) but also of continuing sexism in the comics world.8 In reaction, Katha Pollitt,
an American journalist, coined the term Smurfette principle in 1991 in the NYT,9 to designate a
story in which there are many male models for one female stereotype (Figure 14.3).
Similarly, Tintin’s competitor in the francophone BD world, Spirou, is a young male
teen, protagonist of many adventures, although contrary to Tintin, more often local than
global. The numerous characters created for its eponymous journal in 1938 and under the
influence of its Catholic publisher are also overwhelmingly masculine. As noted by Delisle,
“as an example, in 1947, all the characters of Dupuis publisher that give their name to a series
are boys or men, Spirou, Tif et Tondu, Buck Danny, Lucky Luke, L’épervier bleu, Valhardi,
Blondin et Cirage” (2016, 47). Similarly, all the magazine creators, artists, and script writers,
and most employees working for the magazine are male, since its publisher officially refused
to hire married women, on the grounds that women were expected to be good wives and
good mothers (Delisle 2010).
Figure 14.3 1950, Schtroumpfette (Smurfette) by Peyo (Dupuis)
199
All these years that saw the emergence of many Francophone (male) characters were under
the strong influence of either Catholic or lay authorities, all of which were conservative insti-
tutions from a gender studies perspective. Hence, even Communist newspapers and magazines
for children (like Vaillant, 1945, that later became the very popular Pif Gadget, 1969) applied
the same rigid conventions as far as sexuality and gender issues were concerned. After World
War II, partly to counter the “invasion” of American comics and their “immoral” stories and
because BD was then considered mainly if not only media for children, a strict censorship code
supported by both Catholics and Communists was strictly enforced through the passing of sev-
eral laws in France and Belgium (Crépin; Groensteen and Crépin). As was the case in the USA
(with the CCA in 1954), “the peace obtained by these publishers was paid at a high price by the
dulling of their magazines and albums” (Lesage, Publier 39, my translation).
The sexual liberation/s, sex for and by white straight males

In the 1960s, comics became increasingly adult-oriented. This change was due to various
factors, such as rapid post-WWII dechristianization and the official “laïcisation” (secular-
ization) of French society as a State policy (and to a lesser extent the Belgian and Swiss ones
too), coupled with the sexual liberation and the capitalist commodification of new youth
audiences’s dreams of freedom and rebellion. That new liberated atmosphere first produced
the magazine Pilote in 1959. Although its leading adventure of Astérix (and Obélix) is very
similar to the previous stories in that it existed without female protagonists and had only
marginal, stereotyped female characters, Pilote became the magazine that rallied the post-
WWII generation (Michallat). Meanwhile, magazines with comics for girls started to com-
pletely disappear.10 Moreover, just after Pilote, there were teen-adult magazines like Hara-kiri
(1960), Charlie Mensuel (1969), L’Echo des savanes (1972), Fluide glacial (1975), etc., in which sex
was increasingly obvious and, to some (limited) extent, debate on sexuality and gender too.
However, even if a systematic analysis is still needed, one can say that perspectives on gender
roles and sexuality were still very male-dominated, as much in terms of production (90+% of
artists were males), as of reception (apparently BD audience had become even more mascu-
line), and visual and textual representations (through objectification of women, heteronor-
mative gaze, and male-oriented humor11). These new 1960s-BDs presented some interesting
but contradictory female representations: strong independent women acted within progres-
sive narratives but were drawn with obviously sexualized pin-up-like bodies, as is perfectly
illustrated in the Natacha series (1965/1970).12 These paradoxical representations were typical
of many stories of the time and continue today (Figure 14.4).13
An interesting case was Jean-Claude Forest’s proto “graphic novel” Barbarella on which
many scholarly publications have been written. If it is undeniable that this SF BD, published
as an album in 1964 by the free-spirit and scandalous publisher, Eric Losfeld, played a key role
in presenting a sexually emancipated woman, I believe it is still ambivalent. For example, if
Barbarella is only slightly sexualized by the period’s standards, she is presented by crashing
the rocket she was driving on a foreign planet, which reflects the common stereotype that
women are bad drivers. Further, putting Barbarella’s emancipation into question is that she is
saved by a giant angel-like man at the end (Figure 14.5).
It was also around this time that a whole new genre, erotic BD, would boom. In the
1960s–1970s, with the liberation of mores and economical and political liberalism,14 these
pornographic images in erotic stories (or the reverse?) would become especially popular,
regardless of whether they were presented with creative avant-garde or high-quality aca-
demic drawings in either experimental or traditional narratives, all of which were heavily
200
Figure 14.4 1965, Series Natacha by Marc Wasterlain (Dupuis)
Figure 14.5 1962, Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest (Humanoids)
dominated by the male gaze.15 These erotic BDs also developed within the new media of the
adult BD magazines cited above. These were liberated in terms of showing things that were
previously censored, especially quasi-naked women often in unambiguous poses (Peeters,
Bande;16 Groensteen, “Nu”). Several Italian artists like Guido Crépax (e.g., Valentina, 1965)
and Milo Manara (e.g., Le Déclic, 1984) were quickly also published in France, showing how
attractive Paris had become in the 1960s for European and Latin American male comics art-
ists, and how porous the artistic, mediatic, and ideological borders were.
Also, although the French comics world was not isolated from other arts and media
(Hollywoodian productions from the USA, Italian roman-photos, etc.), BD probably had a
stronger effect on society and especially youth. Practically, it was more popular among young
people since first it was cheaper and second, it was seen as rebellious and subversive, among
other reasons, because it was still looked down upon by the adult and academic worlds. It
must also be emphasized that different fields and media had various tempos. Women and
other sexual minorities’ points of view therefore boomed at different moments in “écriture
feminine,” history of women, and sociology of gender. But the lateness of cultural studies
201
and gender studies being recognized as academic fields in France, often in opposition to what
was ambivalently perceived as a form of US imperialism, did not help advocate for feminist
perspectives or challenge male-dominated institutions, in general (Celestin et al. 225–285;
Chaponnière and Lempen 30; Fassin) and in the comics world in particular. Hence, few
women and other gender identities could take advantage of the “sexual revolution” to present
alternatives to the sexuality represented in comics that were vastly male-oriented in their
production and reception processes.
Finally, some women

If Claire Bretécher (1940–) was not the first woman artist to draw alternative comics to male
perspectives, she was undeniably the most popular and most effective one in the French
comics world and beyond. Bretécher’s comic strips were published first in various alternative
magazines like Pilote (1959–) and L’Echo des savanes (that she co-founded in 1972). But from
1974 they were published in the then-popular socialist-social democrat weekly magazine, Le
Nouvel Obs[ervateur] and therefore went largely beyond the circles of BD fans. The women,
men, and other genders that she included in her comics and her “feminist” perspective are
not only funny but sociologically interesting and challenging (Barthes and Bourdieu17). Not
only are her female characters not simply beautiful pin-ups but even when “emancipated”
(independent, strong, etc.), they are often self-questioning, so that even in Bretécher’s very
caricatural drawing style, no one is presented as a stereotype (Figure 14.6).
Ah! Nana is the only feminist comics magazine ever published in the Francophone world.
It was produced by and for women, and explicitly with a woman’s perspective (nana is slang
for women used by men and here, the term is reappropriated in a fun way). There were then
so few French female authors that many non-French creators (e.g., Trina Robbins) collabo-
rated with the magazine so that it immediately became transnational. However, it lasted only
two years (1974–1976) since it was quickly forbidden by law to be publicly advertised in any
way. Ironically, this French State ruling against Ah! Nana was for pornography because the
magazine presented women’s bodies through a reappropriation of the male objectifying gaze.18
Although female BD creators are few compared to male authors, they are still so numer-
ous that it is impossible to review all of them and their female or gender-challenging charac-
ters. But it is important to emphasize that from the 1970s on, although most of them were not
Figure 14.6 1975, strips and albums by Claire Bretécher (Dargaud)
202
then famous (and certainly not as commercially popular as their straight male counterparts),
they were the first strong generation that allowed new perspectives on gender issues and en-
abled the next generation to flourish.
Following her graduation from an Art and Design School in 1969, Chantal Montellier
(1947–) often worked as the only woman in several leftist journals and magazines. After the
album Odile et les crocodiles (1983) about rape and revenge, she published several explicitly fem-
inist graphic novels in which women’s issues were central (Miller). Florence Cestac (1949–),
besides publishing numerous BDs (many dealing with social issues including some that could
be called feminist and within the French “gros nez” [big nose] tradition), played a crucial
role in the French comics world by co-founding the book store Futuropolis, which would
later become a key publishing house for alternative comics and perspectives in France.19
After publishing some short graphic stories in several magazines, Annie Goetzinger (1951–)
published the “roman graphique” Casque d’or with mainstream publisher Glénat in 1975. It is
inspired by the true story of a prostitute caught between two gangs in Paris. Later, she also
published L’Avenir perdu (1992; [Lost Future]) about AIDS. As testament to the difficulties of
being a successful solo female artist in the comics world, she went on to publish works that
were quite popular despite their classical narratives and drawing styles, but these were mostly
in collaboration with male scenarists Victor Mora or Pierre Christin.
Some exceptional male authors still succeeded in presenting interesting strong women pro-
tagonists. For example, Jacques Tardi (1946–) published his Adèle Blanc-Sec series (from 1972)
in a genre that was then usually dominated by male characters, with his eponymous character
as an adventurous, strong, independent, and funny woman who was never objectified.
Real alternative comics and new sexualities

In Quebec, after six decades of comic strips completely dominated by Catholic institutions
(Lemay),20 the 1960s saw a “printemps” (Spring) in comics, although these were also domi-
nated by men (Lemay).21 The first non-conventional female comic was Mélody (1985) by Sylvie
Rancourt (1965–). Mélody is an autobiography telling the story of the author as a nude dancer.
It “raises important issues about sex work, affect and female desire” (Ty 122). Ty concludes
that “[w]ith her use of autography, her method of self-publication, and her non-judgmental
depiction of exotic dancing, Rancourt is able to garner sympathy and understanding for a
woman who was a sex worker” (138). First self-published, then only known within a small
group of BD specialists (Groensteen), her work was rediscovered in 2012 (when reedited by
Ego comme x) and was then translated into English (Drawn and Quarterly 2015).
Julie Doucet (1965–) is certainly one of the most interesting female comics artists. She has
been the subject of many academic articles, especially in English, that emphasize her revolu-
tionary perspectives in gender in comics (Figure 14.7).22
Dirty Plotte was first self-published in 1988, then in English only by Drawn & Quarterly
from 1991 to 1998. It is anchored in the reality of the biology of the female body and is
mostly about the difficulty of being a woman. The title is bilingual, where “plotte” refers to
both the female sex in French Canadian slang and “plot” in English, alluding to her non-
conventional storylines and dense “dirty” drawing style.
In France, from the 1990s on, these challenging representations of sexuality and gender be-
came more common. It is impossible to cite them all, but I will discuss some notable examples.
These changes in the 1990s are due to multiple factors, namely the boom of new alter-
native publishers, especially Ego comme x and L’Association. Although both were domi-
nated by white straight males, the emphasis on freedom and the opposition to mainstream
203
Figure 14.7 1986, Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet (Drawn & Quarterly)
Figure 14.8 1990, Journal by Fabrice Néaud (Ego comme x)
publication was conducive not only to formal experiments but also to the development of
new themes, new genres (essentially autobiography), and the discussion of new social issues
such as gender. Journal by Fabrice Néaud (1968–) is an autobiographical diary of a gay author
about gay life including gay love and homophobia that was published by small publisher
Ego comme x first as a series of stories in their magazine, then as several book-volumes
(1994–2002) (Figure 14.8).
But mainstream comics also started to integrate questions about sex and gender issues.
“Titeuf ” by Swiss author Zep (1967–) demonstrates this change in subjet matter. Titeuf is
the name of a young boy who is the protagonist of the Titeuf series (15 albums as of today).
Tootuff (in English) was published by the commercially oriented publisher, Glénat, first in its
magazine Tchô! from 1992 on. It was the greatest moneymaker in the Franco-Belgian comics
world until 2015. It quickly appeared as the subject of numerous tie-ins from albums, figu-
rines, t-shirts, and animation to videogames. It also inspired a special book on sexual educa-
tion as well as a huge exhibition entitled “Le Guide du zizi sexuel” (the guide to the sexual
weewee) in the serious Cité des Sciences in Paris from 2007 to 2009 (almost two years!). His
first album, Dieu, le sexe et les bretelles—God, sex and suspenders, in 1993, was an enormous suc-
cess that revealed a huge change in the public sphere for publications for children. His recent
204
Figure 14.9 1993, “Titeuf”: Dieu, le sexe et les bretelles (Suspenders) by Zep (Glénat)
album, A fond le slip—In the panties, dates from 2017. Although not exclusively about sexual-
ity, the topic is dominant and presented as gags through questions that an eight-year-old boy
asks about sex in general, condoms, gayness, AIDS, etc. As evidence of its broad consensual
success, it was the topic of a special supplement published by the (inter)national newspaper Le
Monde in 2018 (Figure 14.9).23
A new century/millennium: alternative BD

and sexualities go mainstream
Although it cannot be seen simply as feminist literature, many elements in Persepolis make
women’s issues central. First, it is the story of a young girl growing up in a world dominated by
patriarchy. The veil (which is also the title of the very first chapter as well as the only chapter
title repeated twice) plays a key role in affirming an opposition to gender discrimination im-
posed by a patriarchal government (the Mullahs and their police).24 At the age of six, Marjie says
that she wants to be a prophet, to which all the previous (male) prophets reply disbelievingly
“a woman?” (6). Similarly, we see her mother protesting in the street (6). Much later, in the
amusement park project she creates for her college course, one woman is a warrior and skilled
equestrian leading the way to the hippodrome, showing that discrimination was not always
part of Iranian culture (329). Many more ideas, texts, and images reveal these incidents of dis-
crimination and the way Satrapi questions them. This “feminist” challenge is also obvious in
the way she re-appropriates art history from a female perspective, such as in the doubly subver-
sive reference to the Pietà (153, 281) (Reyns-Chikuma and BenLazreg 2018).
Although published by a then small alternative publisher (L’Associaton), since 2000,
Satrapi has indisputably become the most famous female bande dessinée author in France
and beyond. Outside of France, especially in the USA, she is at the top of both popular and
academic lists (Beaty and Woo). Satrapi’s popularity certainly explains, at least partly, why
her work is also decisive in the Middle East. In addition, research shows that many Middle
Eastern comic artists, especially graphic novelists, are women, including several Francophone
Lebanese artists (Reyns-Chikuma and BenLazreg, “Marjane”).25
With the success of Persepolis, alternative, literary publishers in France (e.g., the prestigious
Gallimard) and also other mainstream general publishers started to publish “graphic novels”
205
in a broad sense of the term. If these are often for a more limited audience (compared to
comics or manga), they are also distributed on a world scale (Baetens et al. 2018). Interest in
comics and BD from countries with a smaller or newer comics tradition bloomed. Often in
collaboration with a country with an established comics tradition, some artists from African
descent started to publish their comics. For instance, Marguerite Abouet (script) and Clément
Oubrerie (art) published six volumes of Aya de Yopougon from 2006 to 2010. Set in the late
1970s and early 1980s when Ivory Coast was going through an economic boom, it tells the
story of three female teens (Figure 14.10).
Part of it relays their amorous life and addresses audacious topics, although not at all in a
visually explicit way. Marla Harris argues that the series “may be read on one level as a kind
of ‘Sex and the City’ transposed to 1970s Yopougon, a working-class suburb of Abidjan, in
Ivory Coast” (2009, 119).26 “Throughout the series, Abouet explores this tension through
the main characters, Aya, a young woman with hopes of being a doctor, and Innocent, a
young homosexual hairdresser who immigrates to France in hopes of escaping prejudice
and persecution in the Ivory Coast” (Bumatay 2013, 32). These BDs also showed that BD
was multicultural and not only about or for white women, which helped bring up issues of
intersectionality in debates about gender.
By 2012, as a poll showed, relatively few women read BDs (Evans et Gaudet 2012, 4).
However, these stats ignore new reading practices through digital devices. Alternative pub-
lishing also came out through the internet, where a new advantage for women creators is that
there are no gatekeepers at all. Many women and other minorities, including gays, created
comics blogs.
Among these internet blogs, partly under the influence of Bridget Jones’ Diary, appeared
the “BD girly.” This “girly” BD was very controversial. On the one hand, it was presented
as created by “celibattantes,” that is, single [célibataires] and female winners [battantes]. But
on the other hand, many, including many women and French feminists,27 argued that the
topics of these blogs were limited to the domestic sphere, i.e., guys, shopping, and fashion
and beauty advice. These female authors seemed to try to appeal to a new female audience,
that is, post-feminist, decomplexed consumers of women’s magazines, fashion, and advertis-
ing. However, after some years of maturation, some authors succeeded in leaving this often
superficial world. This is the case of Pénélope Bagieux, for example, who has been publish-
ing the famous “Culottées,” about unknown extraordinary women, first in Le Monde since
2017,28 then in albums. “Culottées” is a pun referring to women wearing pants (culotte) and
Figure 14.10 2005, Aya, by Abouet and Oubrerie (Gallimard)
206
Figure 14.11 2016, Culottées (Brazen Rebells) by Pénélope Bagieu (Gallimard)
being self-confident, cheeky women (être culotté.e). It was translated and published as Bra-
zen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World, and adapted into an animation (forthcoming 2020)
(Figure 14.11).
Similarly, some women auteures have been regularly publishing books on extraordinary
women, either forgotten or unknown in the West, like Catel (Mueller) did on Olympes de
Gouges, Josephine Baker, Kiki de Montparnasse, Benoite Groult, etc., including gender and
sexual issues in the story and the images, although only in a non-graphic way.29
In 2007, a group of women created the Artemisia prize, first exclusively by and for women
authors. Association Artémisia is a French organization that awards le Prix Artémisia every
year to a graphic narrative by a woman. The prize is named after the Italian Renaissance
artist Artemisia Gentileschi. It is awarded on the 9th of January, the birthday of existen-
tialist philosopher and feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir. This openness also reached
authors who are interested in poor working-class women like Tanxxx (1976–) who published
Esthétique et filature (2009). The work was awarded the Artemisia prize, reinforcing the pos-
sibility of interclass dialogue and intersectionality.
Despite that significant anti-gay marriage and anti-gender studies demonstrations took
place in France in 2014 (Zeller 2013), openness on sexuality and gender has been mainstream
since the 2010s. In light of this prevailing attitude, I’ll briefly survey more examples of chal-
lenging and popular BDs made by women questioning gender identities. In Fraise et chococolat
(2006–2007, vol. 1 & 2), aurelia aurita [sic, no capital letters] uses a simple sketchy drawing
style to ingenuously tell her autobiographical story about the discovery of her sexual desires
and prowesses with her lover (Reyns-Chikuma and Gheno). In Bleu est une couleur chaude
(2010), Julie Maroh tells the story of a progressive “coming out.” The BD was adapted into
a successful movie (2015). Mauvais genre (2013) by Chloé Cruchaudet received the ACBD
“grand prix de la critique” (French Comics Association of Critics) in 2014. It was based
on the research done by two historians on a real story in which a man pretends that he is a
woman in order to avoid returning to the trenches in 1917. Through the story and the im-
ages, the work clearly presents gender roles as performative (Figure 14.12).
Finally, although magazines and collections for children are still conservative, some
non-conventional mainstream stories have begun to be published too. For example, Les
Nombrils, an extremely popular BD for teens, has a lesbian character, and Tamara from the
eponymous adventure series also for teens is a young woman who sometimes struggles with
being slightly overweight.
207
Figure 14.12 2013, Mauvais Genre by Chloé Cruchaudet (Deserter’s Masquerade (2017))
(Delcourt)
One can say that the creative part of the BD world is moving toward a much more diverse
production. This is due to several factors. Among them, there is the fact that women are now
a majority in the student body of the specialized schools that flourished in the last 30 years all
over France and Belgium. However, one can also say that there is a discrepancy between this
openness and the French critical discourse, especially in academics. French and francophone BD
researchers have yet to demonstrate a direct and explicit professional interest in gender issues.30
If it is true that a lack of diversity is obvious in the whole media world and beyond (including
in the Anglo-Saxon world31), it is all the more striking in the BD field. This is partly because
French legitimizing gatekeepers, mostly male, in the comics world, are still ambivalent. On
the one hand, they recognize the necessity to change the male-dominated system, but on the
other hand, they refuse to integrate the tools that would facilitate this change such as quotas and
explicitly including the topic in research and conference presentations. Often their reaction is
defensive: they designate such multiculturalist activism as American, meaning “not French.”32
A good example of this lack of awareness by gatekeepers in the French and francophone
comics world is the 2016 Angoulême-Festival scandal. In January 2016, the Angoulême
award committee selected 30 candidates, all of whom were men, for its 43rd “Grand Prize.33
Ironically, some months before, as if they felt it coming, some 100+ women authors gathered
to create “bdégalité” and wrote a “chart” against sexism in the world of French comics.34
Also symptomatic of this lack of direct professional interest, Comicalités, the most important
francophone journal dedicated exclusively to comics (and BD, manga), has never dedicated
an issue to gender issues in its ten years of existence.35 Until today, their various review com-
mittees are also overwhelmingly male.36
It is clear that a lot of work is still to be done. A good starting point might be to acknowl-
edge ignored women bédéistes, as did the American artist, Trina Robbins, in many of her
works, for mostly American comics artists and even some French ones (Robbins 2001). Sim-
ilarly, English researchers have set an admirable precedent with the Marie Duval Project 37
and in Quebec, Mira Falardeau gives new names to women creators, such as Andrée Brochu
(1948–), who was active in the 1980s (127). Smaller French-speaking communities next to
France, like Belgium and Switzerland, often follow the French examples although in a com-
plex dynamics with their linguistic counterparts but they don’t do much better in terms of
opening on gender and sexuality issues.38
208
Finally, many comics and manga dealing with sexuality and gender have been translated
and well received in France and francophone countries. Some still have a strong impact on
the French-speaking comics world and francophone cultures, in general and in particular,
on issues of sexuality and gender. For example, because BD by and for girls and women had
almost disappeared in Francophone countries by the 1960s, in the 1990s, shojo and josei
manga created a strong niche in the French-speaking zone. But this discussion warrants
another chapter.39
Notes
209
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du Triomphe, 1993.
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com/1991/04/07/magazine/hers-the-smurfette-principle.html
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Muninn, 2018.
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Novel. Eds. Jan Baetens et al., 2018, pp. 405–425.
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about the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, 2017, pp. 758–775.
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15
A comics Écriture Féminine
Anke Feuchtenberger’s feminist
graphic expression1
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam
Helene Cixous writes, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has
been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger
on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion,
the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech
at the same time” (“The Laugh of Medusa,” 880). Indeed, the cover of East German com-
ics artist Anke Feuchtenberger’s first publication, Mutterkuchen (1995) by Jochen Enterprises
(Figure 15.1), demonstrates many of the visual characteristics typical of her early feminist
graphic art. The spiral-haired figure presented to the reader is the same one that populated
many of Feuchtenberger’s theater and political posters. As a representation of Feuchtenberger
herself as well as an artistic experiment that stands in for all women, she is also the protagonist
of most of the artist’s early comics, including those in the volume protected by the cover on
which she stands. Furthermore, her eyes, a striking purple color, share their hue with the East
German Women’s Movement and thus recall Feuchtenberger’s political engagement before
and after German unification. Accompanied by a glare that is simultaneously menacing and
Figure 15.1 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, cover
213
all-knowing, Feuchtenberger’s spiraled-hair protagonist makes direct eye contact with the
viewer, challenging her reader to gaze into her labia.
However, with her small breasts, exaggerated ears, strong brow, hunched posture and
angular appendages, Feuchtenberger takes every precaution not to sexualize her Kunstfigur.2
Yet, the most striking element is still her vulva, which she pulls apart to present an interior
view of her vagina to her reader. But instead of exposing her sex organs, the figure’s exposed
and stretched labia form a circle, revealing a blue universe within the woman’s body. The
implications here are twofold. At first glance, Feuchtenberger’s figure seems to be referenc-
ing the female role in human reproduction – that women have ultimately given birth to all
of the individuals who populate our universe. A second reading of this image, however,
speaks to Feuchtenberger’s aesthetics as a feminist project in itself, inscribing her definition
of femininity into the very core of her visual language.3
Answering the call of 1970s French feminist author Hélène Cixous to develop an
écriture féminine or feminine writing,4 Feuchtenberger’s image unites the female body with
the writing process through its implication that her artistic production emerges out of the
spiral-haired protagonist’s vaginal canal. Situated as she is on the cover of Mutterkuchen, the
figure’s position suggests that all the content to follow flows out of the cosmos represented
within her genitalia. This reading is reinforced by the title of the publication, Mutterkuchen,
which is the German word for “placenta.” While it is an appropriate title for Feuchtenberg-
er’s first book, as the themes of motherhood and birth are the most prominent (Figure 15.2),
it references the volume’s production as well, merging the process of artistic creation with
bodily functions. As a collection of Feuchtenberger’s comics from between the fall of the
Berlin Wall and its publication, Mutterkuchen is the afterbirth of the author’s first artistic ex-
periments in the comics medium. Moreover, as the cover art suggests, for Feuchtenberger,
artistic production is akin to birth. The labor required yields a maternal relationship between
the artist and her art, in which the graphic narratives become her children and their publi-
cation is the afterbirth of that process. For Feuchtenberger, the vagina therefore represents a
world of feminine creation, but it is also the physical mediator of her art. Feuchtenberger’s
stories emerge from within the bodies of her female protagonists, giving voice to one of the
most powerful symbols of femininity, the vulva. With her legs spread across Mutterkuchen’s
cover, Feuchtenberger’s Kunstfigur sets the tone for reading her sequential art, framing the
artist’s project to inscribe femininity into her art within the very labia of her protagonist.
Figure 15.2 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, title page
214
However, the cover art is not the only manifestation of Feuchtenberger’s impulse to cre-
ate a feminine form of graphic expression. There are gestures toward this project through-
out the volume in both its form and content. Looking specifically to the second graphic
narrative from Mutterkuchen’s collection, the untitled story that I refer to as “Marian La
Luna und der Gottvater” [“Marian La Luna and God the Father”] after its primary char-
acters, this chapter identifies one such example (Figure 15.3). Examining the feminist
visual, verbal and narratological language Feuchtenberger develops within its panels, I read
Feuchtenberger’s revisionist parable of the Fall of Man, as, in fact, the Fall of Woman.
By drawing attention to the trend in feminist art to undermine patriarchal master narra-
tives, this chapter begins by paralleling Feuchtenberger’s graphic narrative to other similar
endeavors in feminist art history. Then, interpreting the formal qualities of this specific
graphic narrative through the lens of feminist methodologies, I demonstrate how Feucht-
enberger’s art incorporates femininity into its very form. Ultimately, through my close
reading of this text, I posit Feuchtenberger’s most important artistic intervention – the
invention of a feminist form of graphic expression – positioning her work alongside other
important innovations in the feminist visual arts.
Anke Feuchtenberger (born 1963, in East Berlin) is one of the most important teachers and
practitioners working in German-language comics today. Trained during the GDR’s most
experimental decade of artistic production, Feuchtenberger brought elements of the East
German avant-garde, traditional printmaking techniques, the legacy of German expression-
ism and politics of German unification to art comics after 1989. She thereby pushed German
graphic novels into a new realm of artistic production – often in feminist terms – redefining
the medium in cultural, political and aesthetic terms. Today, Feuchtenberger is an important
teacher of graphic art, having joined the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften in
Hamburg in 1997. Consequently, she has had a lasting impact on comic art as it emerged both
throughout the 1990s and today.
Mutterkuchen collects the Feuchtenberger’s initial experiments in the comics medium,
illustrating the inward turn of Feuchtenberger’s feminism that began with the East German
Women’s Movement. A collection of nine stories produced between her adoption of the
comics medium and its publication, Mutterkuchen is the artist’s most aggressive, candid and
unpolished work. Moreover, it is in Mutterkuchen that Feuchtenberger lays out the terms of
her engagement with patriarchal master narratives and the iconography of that project, which
in turn lends insight to her later work.
However, it also signals the beginning of Feuchtenberger’s move to producing art for
private consumption. After her disillusionment with the political process in her collaboration
with feminist and activist groups before and during German unification, Feuchtenberger’s
art turned away from public political discourse, as she began to investigate similar issues of
gender identity and politics through graphic narrative. The texts within Mutterkuchen still
nevertheless engage German politics through their feature of the spiral-haired protagonist,
who also populated Feuchtenberger’s political and theater posters during the 1990s. Through
this character, Feuchtenberger creates a bridge between the two spheres of her artistic pro-
duction, rendering Mutterkuchen the continuation of the political activism and gender critique
the artist began with the East German Women’s Movement in paneled anecdotes on the
struggles of her spiral-haired self-representation.
The narratives thematize tropes of masculine oppression, but by embracing feminine
sexuality and subjectivity, Feuchtenberger’s art subverts dominant patriarchal paradigms.
By integrating narrative techniques that draw attention to the female body in the writing
practice, the violence of language, which marks the body of her spiral-haired protagonist,
215
and the ambivalence of hegemonic myths of womanhood and femininity, Feuchtenberger’s

graphic narratives destabilize misogynistic tropes and paternalistic forms of storytelling.
Feuchtenberger thereby develops an intertextual mode of feminist graphic expression that
draws on myth and fairytales to retell patriarchal master narratives through a feminist lens. In
“Die Strudel Petra,” Feuchtenberger rewrites Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter, casting
a young girl in the role of the archetypal troublemaker; in “Living next door to Alice,” she
retells Alice in Wonderland from the perspective of the classic children’s story’s namesake, Alice
Liddell; and in “Marian la Luna und der Gottvater,” the subject of this chapter, she rewrites
the story of original sin as a masculine offense.
Feuchtenberger’s revisionist project recalls the artistic production of other feminist creators
working in the visual arts since the 1960s. In their 1987 article “The Feminist Critique of Art
History,” Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews demonstrate that the reinterpretation
of history, in terms of both art history and art practice, is essential theme in feminist art (342).
They cite Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1973–1979) as their primary example, whose mon-
umental installation piece, a triangular table with place settings for 39 famous women from
Western history, was a feminist revision of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. As Chicago
writes, it reinterpreted the Last Supper from the “point of view of women, who, through-
out history, had prepared the meals and set the table” (as quoted by Havens Caldwell 36).
Mobilizing the methods, aesthetics and themes of craftwork, Chicago sought to break many
conventions of “high art” (Snyder 30). Furthermore, Chicago’s The Dinner Table is an import-
ant example of feminist art’s impulse to reinterpret specifically biblical narratives, setting a
precedent for artistic work that inverts Christian themes, such as Feuchtenberger’s, to come.5
Significantly, a second point of intersection between Feuchtenberger and Chicago’s proj-
ects emerges in the representational strategies of these two artists’ visual language, namely,
the use of the female anatomy as a fundamental structuring principle. First of all, the triangle
table of The Dinner Party recalls the shape’s associations with the ancient symbol for the fem-
inine, while its equilateral nature evokes the feminist goal of equality (Havens Caldwell 37).
Yet, it is the imagery on the plates featured as the focal point of every setting that truly speak
to what Chicago refers to as the work’s “central core” imagery. With all 39 plates present-
ing an abstracted version of the female anatomy, Chicago celebrates female genitalia as the
central image of female body identification (Semmel and Kingsley).6 While this strategy
of representation problematically reduces the female gender to female biology, a criticism
frequently directed at Chicago’s work, as I state in the note at the beginning of this chapter,
it is not the project of this chapter to identify the problems with these politics of represen-
tation, which are already well documented. Instead, I use these parallels between Chicago
and Feuchtenberger art as an opportunity to put the two in dialog, demonstrating how
Feuchtenberger’s work echoes the artistic strategies of the larger category of feminist art and
thereby integrating Feuchtenberger’s into a history of feminist artistic practice that all too
often focuses its inquiry on more traditional forms of the visual arts.7
“Marian La Luna und der Gottvater” and the Fall of Woman

The vaginal themes of Mutterkuchen’s cover art re-emerge in the volumes second graphic
narrative, “Marian La Luna und der Gottvater.” Here, Feuchtenberger makes her most im-
portant intervention in patriarchal traditions of narration to cultivate a feminine aesthetics
of storytelling. The break with the conventional linear paneling style of the comics medium
recalls older traditions in the visual arts, and the mise en abyme sequence, while the repetition
of the cover art’s visual strategies immediately marks the narrative as significant. In a series
216
of 12 circular panels, which resemble the medallions of thirteenth-century illuminated

manuscripts or the format of tondos, Renaissance circular paintings, the untitled comic
recounts a revisionist parable of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Through
this reevaluation of the biblical origin story, Feuchtenberger illustrates the archetypal events
of female oppression, rewriting the history of original sin as a masculine offense.
The first medallion depicts Feuchtenberger’s spiral-haired protagonist, who is typi-
cally represented naked, wearing a long dress and headpiece the drapes down to her knees
(Figure 15.3). The costume resembles a nun’s habit, and the halo hovering above the figure’s
covered head reinforces that association. Yet, the imagery also recalls the iconography and
conventions of representing Mary, as Marian’s name would also have us believe. Seated and
crying, the figure resembles a pieta. A puddle of tears has formed around her feet, implying
that she has been in despair for quite some time. However, instead of Jesus lying across her
lap, the woman presents a dead fish to the viewer, a symbolic representation for Christ. The
fish skeleton, a biblical allusion, refers both to the fish as the symbol for followers of the
Christian faith and to Jesus’ command to his disciples: “Follow me, and I will make you
fishers of men” (Stroumsa 199, Matthew 4.19).
The narrative, symbolism and typically religious format of both the medallion and the
tondo immediately situate Feuchtenberger’s second graphic narrative within a biblical
context. However, despite the overt religious criticisms within the text, Feuchtenberger’s
adoption of biblical themes functions to do more than simply lambaste Christianity. Feucht-
enberger also uses the symbolism as a strategy to situate her story within typically masculine
forms of narration. As a prototypical paternal narrative, the Bible is arguably the invention
of paternalistic conventions in storytelling and countless masculine narrative tropes have
emerged from within its pages. Like Feuchtenberger’s feminist retelling of the Struwwelpeter
story in “Die Strudel Petra,” here, too, the artist rewrites the story of the original sin from
the perspective of the opposite gender, Eve.
Immediately, within that first medallion (Figure 15.3), Feuchtenberger’s graphic narrative
undermines the conventions of the artistic genre of religious painting, situating her story in
direct opposition to the story of Mary. With the proclamation “Ich sass nicht immer so!”
[“I didn’t always sit like this!”], which simultaneously refers to her seated position as well as,
more colloquially, doing time in jail, she stands up, casting the dead fish aside, and lifts up her
dress to reveal her genitalia (Figure 15.4). Her tears have dried as the figure spreads open her
Figure 15.3 Feuchtenberger, untitled comic, in Mutterkuchen (Berlin: Jochen Enterprises,

1995), n.p.
217
labia revealing the cosmos in between her legs. She calls out “Look!” in English as the panel
zooms in on her vulva. Here, Feuchtenberger collapses the form and content of her graphic
narrative as she merges the female body with the writing process, producing a mise en abyme
within the image. As we continue to zoom in on the protagonist’s genitalia, the subject of
the panel – her vulva – combines with the now diegetic lettering of the Feuchtenberger’s
command, and the figure’s vaginal opening becomes one of the Os in “Look!” (Figure 15.5).
Feuchtenberger takes this one step further, and in a third tondo featuring the spiral-haired
figure’s vulva, the artist continues to unite the female body with the aesthetic strategies of
her storytelling (Figure 15.6). Here, the protagonist’s labia come to frame Feuchtenberger’s
tondo, marrying the subject matter of the panel with the formal qualities of the comics me-
dium and rendering all previous and successive circular panels vaginal. With the woman’s
hands still visible at the edge of her vagina, the reader concludes that the rest of the story takes
place within her body and all panel walls to follow are actually the spiral-haired figure’s labia.
This is not the first time Feuchtenberger has used the theme of the vaginal cosmos in her
work. In addition to its appearance on the cover of Mutterkuchen, Feuchtenberger produced an
image for the cover of the 1996 winter issue of On the Issues, a progressive, feminist quarterly
print publication from 1983 to 1999 (Figure 15.7). However, instead of presenting the viewer
with a window into the universe between her legs, the spiral-haired protagonist on the cover
Figure 15.4 Feuchtenberger, untitled comic, n.p.
218
Figure 15.7 Feuchtenberger, cover, On the Issues 5.1 (Winter 1996)
of this women’s magazine is sewing her labia shut, perhaps in response to the question posed
in bold lettering to her left: “What is justice for a rape victim?” The figure presented here,
much like Marian La Luna in Mutterkuchen, is also responding to a masculine transgression
but with a distinct alteration in the visual tone. Instead of presenting a story within her own
body, the spiral-haired protagonist on the cover of the magazine weeps as she sews her vag-
inal opening shut, closing the cosmos within her body off from the rest of the world. With
jagged edges where her labia should be, the image implies that act of rape tore open a gaping
hole within her that she is then forced to mend herself. While Feuchtenberger’s parable in
Mutterkuchen is not one of rape, the parallel does draw very violent comparisons between the
consequences of female oppression by masculine forces and foreshadows the panels to come,
in which the spiral-haired protagonist suffers a brutal dismemberment.
As we look deeper into Marian La Luna’s vaginal cosmos in Mutterkuchen, we see an earlier
version of the protagonist. She stands on a planet only slightly larger than her shoulder width,
leaning forward and staring into space. At this point in her story, her spiraled hair is more
than simply a hairstyle, as it features a snake’s head at its end – yet another biblical reference
that unites Eve with the serpent corporeally (Figure 15.6). The figure is presented as Marian
La Luna, “Autorin ihrer Selbst” [“Author of herself ”], explicitly themetizing female agency
in a story that is traditionally condemning human will.
219
The comic continues by introducing a male figure (Figure 15.8). His hair radiates from
his head like sunbeams, positioning him as the inverse of Marian La Luna. Looking down
onto Marian below, the male god-like figure, who stands on a balcony with an angel peer-
ing over his shoulder, asks, “Will sie von niemandem bessessen sein? Gehört ihr die Nacht
allein?” [“Does she want to be possessed by no one? Does the night belong to her alone?”]
Marian, who crouches next to a monkey breastfeeding a human child, does not notice the
man observing her, and upon encountering him in the following panel, he is hiding a dagger
behind his back. Marian appears ignorant of his wicked intentions, stating “Da kommt Sonne
in mein Megaherz” [“Here comes sun into my mega-heart”]. The man replies, “Lass uns das
Wild beim Namen nennen, dann gehört es uns!” [“Let us name the wild things – then they
will belong to us!”] This retort perhaps alludes to God giving the creatures of the Garden of
Eden to Adam to name, which is referenced again in the pair of graphic narratives “Rosen”
and “No Roses” to come and reiterates the importance of ownership for this figure who will
soon be identified as God the Father.
Immediately, the angel begins to dress Marian (Figure 15.9). Confused, she questions:
“Ist’s Leben? Liebe?” [“Is this life? Love?”] Without acknowledging her inquiry and while
her eyes are covered, the man takes his knife to the throat of the snake coiled around Marian’s
head and declares “Deinen Garten bring’ ich in Ordnung, Schlange!” [“I’m straightening
220
up your garden, snake!”] In the next panel, Marian stands alone again, clothed in the long
dress in which she is first introduced at the beginning of the comic. The snake atop her head
has been decapitated, leaving only the coil, which the reader now recognizes as the spiraled
hairstyle of Feuchtenberger’s Kunstfigur. The angel offers Marian a comforting embrace and
a lily, a symbol of virginity and purity, which is also a common attribute of the Madonna
and the flower of the Assumption, but she can only stare down onto her bloody garment in
despair, declaring that “Gottvater hat mich angeschissen!” [“God the Father screwed me!”]
In the final panel, we see Marian again, still in the long dress but with straightened hair
(Figure 15.10). She wanders a labyrinth along with an upright-walking monkey and its baby.
With her eyes cast downward, Marian observes, “Sieht aus, als wäre dieser Irrgarten des
Herrn eine Sackgasse!” [Looks as if this labyrinth of men is a cul-de-sac!”]
The biblical parallels in this graphic narrative are not subtle. The protagonist’s name,
Marian, is clearly a reference to Mary, while the snake, the angel, the male figure identi-
fied as God the Father and the references to a garden reinforce a biblical interpretation of
Feuchtenberger’s comic. However, it also retains connections to other mythological texts,
as the snakehead could be referencing the myth of Medusa. Whatever the particulars of
Feuchtenberger’s symbolism, however, by inverting the events of the story of the Garden of
Eden, a critique of the patriarchal foundation of Christianity emerges. Instead of the Garden
being a place inhabited by both men and women, this “Irrgarten” (“Labyrinth”), which trans-
lates directly to “wander-garden” as well as to “garden of madness,” is a maze in which
Marian is trapped. Importantly, in Feuchtenberger’s recount of the Fall of Woman, it is not the
snake that entices Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The snake, which
is a symbol of both knowledge and sexual desire, is her companion, and Marian La Luna
walks naked and free with the symbol of her carnal impulses atop her head, represented as an
extension of Marian’s innate character. Therefore, in order to take possession of Marian, God
the Father needed to literally detach Marian from her sexuality and cover her naked body.
A metaphor for the subversion of feminine sensibilities to masculine priorities, Feuchten-
berger’s story warns that the persistence of male dominance ultimately leads to a dead end,
a “Sackgasse.” Furthermore, echoing Cixous, it suggests that feminine knowledge is derived
from female sexuality. Robbing women of their sexuality therefore traps them in a labyrinth
of masculine devise in which humanity is unable to progress and in which evolution, implied
by the upright-walking monkey, stagnates.
221
Figure 15.11 Lilith

Adler, Foundation, 1996
In this context, the allusion to the form of the illuminated manuscript is particularly
striking, as the parallels between the relationship between text and image in comics and illu-
minated manuscripts make for an interesting comparison. However, it also speaks to Feucht-
enberger’s formal training in the arts and marks yet another way in which the artist integrates
innovative narrative strategies. Instead of reading “Marian La Luna und der Gottvater’s”
panel sequence as functioning like in conventional comics, integrating an understanding of
the relationship between word and image found within illuminated manuscripts adds a dif-
ferent dimension to the analysis of the graphic narrative.
Looking to the thirteenth-century Bible moralisée in Vienna, for example, an illumi-
nated manuscript that features the same circular paneling or medallions as Feuchten-
berger’s untitled graphic narrative, we see the potentials for integrating this art historical
methodology into comprehension. With the figure of Mary also its subject, the Bible mor-
alisée offers a moralizing tale in which the first medallion relates an episode of the Bible,
while the second offers an accompanying allegorical interpretation with text (Hurlbut).
The medallions do not operate in sequence in a comics sense and the space between them
is not intended to be a liminal space where the reader knits the story together, as is the
case with closure in Scott McCloud’s theory of comics (68). Instead, similar to illumi-
nated manuscripts, Feuchtenberger’s medallions provide vignettes into moments of the
action, which are not situated within any realistic understanding of time and space and
perhaps function to disrupt conventions of continuity and narrative sequence in comics
in a Brechtian sense. Like the Bible moralisée, Feuchtenberger adopts an allegorical – and
equally moralizing – interpretation of the traditional story of the Fall of Man. Yet, instead
of replicating the ethics espoused in biblical teaching, her graphic narrative undermines
traditional readings of the Christianity’s most recognizable parable to make a statement
about the role of religion in the oppression of women.
This critique of the Judeo-Christian religion, however, is not new, nor is Feuchtenberger’s
integration of text and image to impart it. Artist Lilith Adler was working toward similar
aesthetic goals in the 1990s before her death in December 2000. A Jewish woman born in
1961 in Brookline, MA, Adler was part of the same generation of artists as Feuchtenberger
and also used her work to explore the relationship between men, women, religion and
oppression. In her 1996 piece Foundation (Figure 15.11), for example, Adler draws attention
to the place of the church in training individuals and, specifically, young women how to
think. Adler writes:
222
Religious training begins young. Theoretically this is to give a firm grounding in ethics,
which should be a child’s foundation for every decision he or she makes for the rest of his
or her life. You might also say that religious training starts before a person has enough
experience to be able to reason.
This is important, because religious beliefs are meant to replace reason.
That’s alright, nothing wrong with faith. You just hope the people who tell you
what’s right and what’s wrong are not teaching you values that are against your best in-
terest. Because they got you young. And you will never get their voices out of your head.
More contentious, however, is Mitzvah (Figure 15.12), Adler’s painting of a revised version
of a morning blessing in the Jewish Traditional Prayer Book that reads: “Blessed art Thou,
Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not created me a woman.” Inscribed below the
image of a young devoted worshipper, as if a caption within a comics panel, Adler launches
her most powerful criticism at religion: “The religious values inform the social values, and
to women, the religious and social values are just insulting” (Adler). The potent combination
of text and image in both Adler and Feuchtenberger’s work adds to the weight of their reli-
gious criticism. Underscoring the importance of language in the Judeo-Christian faith, both
Adler and Feuchtenberger lend credibility and clarity to their feminist attacks on religion by
integrating the very thing upon which it is founded, the written word.
There is a second biblical allusion that emerges through further analysis of Feuchtenberg-
er’s Fall of Woman narrative. While many of the protagonist’s characteristics suggest her
affiliation with Mary as well as Eve, there is also an argument to be made that she instead
represents Lilith or some combination of all three women. With the figure’s sexual self-
confidence and serpentine hair, which recalls a long tradition of representing Lilith as half-
snake, Feuchtenberger’s spiral-haired protagonist exhibits a number of qualities that align her
with Adam’s first wife.8
Consistent with this representation, Lilith is often associated with the snake that tempted
Eve and in some references is even thought to be the serpent itself. Her long flowing hair,
another convention in depictions of Lilith, functions to illustrate her potent and inviting
sexuality as well as perhaps to symbolize male castration.9 Also made of the earth at the same
time of Adam’s creation, Lilith, according to Rebecca Lesses’s entry in the Jewish Women: A
Figure 15.12 Adler, Mitzvah, 1996
223
Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, considered herself Adam’s equal. However, the two soon
quarreled over who would be on top during sexual intercourse (Lesses). Refusing to yield to
Adam’s command, thereby becoming a symbol of a pure female autonomy (Wolf xii), Lilith
fled the Garden of Eden.
Until the women’s movement in the 1960s, the figure of Lilith was associated with the
kidnapping and murdering of children and characterized as a seductress of men. However, in
1972, the first Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow wrote a midrash, or non-halakhic
literary interpretation, that elevated Lilith to a feminist role model and helped form the
foundation of a movement in feminist biblical revisionism (Dame et al. xvi). “The Coming
of Lilith” reconsiders the role of Adam’s two wives in the context of each other, the Garden
of Eden and the established patriarchy within the Judeo-Christian religion.
Lilith, the outcast rebel, and Eve, dutiful but curious, encounter each other and form a
sisterly bond that exposes the oppressive paternal agenda behind God and Man, thereby ad-
vancing an imagined transformation of the Garden of Eden.
One day, after many months of strange and disturbing thoughts, Eve, wandering around
the edge of the garden, noticed a young apple tree she and Adam had planted, and saw
that one of its branches stretched over the garden wall. Spontaneously, she tried to climb
it, and struggling to the top, swung herself over the wall.
She did not wander long on the other side before she met the one she had come to
find, for Lilith was waiting. At first sight of her, Eve remembered the tales of Adam and
was frightened, but Lilith understood and greeted her kindly. “Who are you?” they
asked each other, “What is your story?” And they sat and spoke together of the past and
then of the future. They talked for many hours, not once, but many times. They taught
each other many things, and told each other stories, and laughed together, and cried,
over and over, till the bond of sisterhood grew between them.
Meanwhile, back in the garden, Adam was puzzled by Eve’s comings and goings, and
disturbed by what he sensed to be her new attitude toward him. He talked to God about
it, and God, having his own problems with Adam and a somewhat broader perspective,
was able to help out a little—but he was confused, too. Something had failed to go ac-
cording to plan. As in the days of Abraham, he needed counsel from his children. “I am
who I am,” thought God, “but I must become who I will become.”
And God and Adam were expectant and afraid the day Eve and Lilith returned to the
garden, bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together. (Plaskow 32)
Through Plaskow’s text, Lilith becomes a self-assured woman, who, in refusing to yield to
the arbitrary authority of Adam, determines her own path and assists Eve in shirking the
masculine oppression of the Garden of Eden.
The story of Lilith, and specifically Plaskow’s version, already represents an alternative
to the typically misogynistic narrative of the Fall of Man that restores a sense of agency to
the women of the Bible and thereby enhances the message behind Feuchtenberger’s graphic
narrative. With a protagonist that represents Lilith, Eve and Mary simultaneously in a format
the recalls the moralistic narratives of medieval illuminated manuscripts, Feuchtenberger re-
writes the story of the Fall of Man to highlight the ingrained prejudice against women of the
Judeo-Christian religion. Moreover, Feuchtenberger takes her criticism of religious dogma
one step further to undermine religious teleology fundamentally through the incorpora-
tion of an upright-walking monkey, suggesting an evolutionary narrative that contradicts
Judeo-Christian doctrine altogether.
224
This graphic narrative about Marian La Luna is key to understanding other comics in
Feuchtenberger’s artistic production. In particular, it sets up the symbolic language required
to interpret the feminist interventions of the following two stories, “Rosen” and “No Roses,”
as well as some of Feuchtenberger’s poster work. In this sense, the Fall of Woman becomes
the origin story for Feuchtenberger’s Kunstfigur, and through the interpretive lens of this one
graphic narrative, the spiral-haired protagonists of all of Feuchtenberger’s subsequent comics
are cast in a new light. With the serpent’s head severed in all other representations of the
spiral-haired figure, the reader assumes that each narrative begins with its protagonist already
subjugated by misogynist devise, making a feminist reading of Feuchtenberger’s early graphic
narrative not only productive but essential.
Feuchtenberger’s feminist graphic expression

In Mutterkuchen, Feuchtenberger sets up the visual, verbal and narratological language
that she engages for the next decade of her artistic production. She brings together myth,
metaphor, literary history and artistic traditions to develop a new form of feminine – and
feminist – graphic expression that subverts misogynist conventions of storytelling and unites
her feminist politics with the comics form. In this example, Feuchtenberger rewrites argu-
ably the Western world’s most important patriarchal master narrative to undermine the very
foundation of the Christian religion. However, to a similar end, the first comic in Mutter-
kuchen, “Die Strudel Petra,” adapts a classic narrative of paternal morality by adopting the
rhetoric of commercial advertising to forward a criticism of contemporary society and the
oppression of feminine subjectivity, while in “Rosen” and “No Roses,” the third and fourth
graphic narratives featured in the volume, Feuchtenberger deconstructs traditional male/
female dichotomies to redefine the symbols of femininity and masculinity. By tearing apart
the signifieds, signifiers and signs of love, domesticity and romance, Feuchtenberger disman-
tles contemporary conceptions of gender norms.
Through detailed analysis and an examination of her methodologies, Feuchtenberger’s Mut-
terkuchen is revealed to be an important feminist project that demonstrates how her art is already
in dialog with the larger history of feminist artistic practice. By writing herself into her graphic
narration through her spiral-haired protagonist and incorporating the female body into her vi-
sual language, Feuchtenberger renders the very process of writing corporeal. She thereby joins
Helene Cixous’ project on feminine writing by constructing a feminist form of graphic expres-
sion and artists such as Chicago and Adler in her pursuit of a revisionist Christian mythology.
Feuchtenberger’s art thus illustrates the importance of positioning feminist comic art in general
alongside other important innovations in the feminist visual arts, eliminating any question of a
hierarchy of artistic practice, which itself is also a feminist act.
Notes
225
as metaphor, an impulse toward the universalization of female experience, the reduction of the
female gender to female biology and the absence of an intersectional perspective on female oppres-
sion that also acknowledges the spectrum of gender identity. However, it is not the project of this
article to reiterate the criticisms of second-wave feminism already well defined by other scholar-
ship. Moreover, this research joins the work of scholars, such as Meagher, to reclaim second-wave
feminism despite its problems. For more information, see Michelle Meagher’s “Telling Stories
about Feminist Art” in Feminist Theory, vol. 12, no. 3, 2011, pp. 297–316; Cathryn Bailey’s “Mak-
ing Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the Vicissitudes of Feminism” in Hypatia,
vol. 12, no. 3, 1997, pp. 17–28; Jonathan Dean’s “Who’s Afraid of Third Wave Feminism?” in Inter-
national Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 11, no. 3, 2009, pp. 334–352; and Stacy Gillis’ “Genealogies
and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism” in Women’s History Review, vol.
13, no. 2, 2004, pp. 165–182.
4 Helene Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975, translated in 1976) was written at a pivotal
moment in French feminist theory. It argued that literature and philosophy were inherently phallo-
centric, leading Cixous to argue for political and social revolution through women’s writing. Col-
lapsing prose, philosophy and activism, “The Laugh of Medusa” appeals for the empowerment of
female voices through the development of a new form of writing, calling for female authors to in-
vent new and feminine modes of representation. This “feminine writing” would reconnect female
writers with their bodies and encourage women to document their experiences of masturbation,
sex and intimacy. Insisting that language is a possible form of political intervention, Cixous’ treatise
instructs women to write as women – to bring their bodies into dialog with their words – and, in
doing so, change the world.
5 Other examples of feminist artists revising Christian themes are The Last Supper (1973) by Anita
Steckel (USA), Christa (1974) by Edwina Sandys (Britain), Crucified Woman (1976) by Ahnuth
Lutkenhaus-Lackey (Canada), Bosnian Christa (1993) by Margaret Argyle, Ecce Homo (1998) by
Elisabeth Ohlson (Sweden), I.N.R.I. by Serge Bramly and Bettina Rheims (France), Yo Mama’s
Last Supper (1996) by Renée Cox (USA), Our Lady (1999) by Alma López (USA), The Blood Ties
(1995) by Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland), and Passion (2001) by Dorota Nieznalska (Poland). For a
comprehensive and critical overview of contemporary art accused of blasphemy, see S. Brent Plate’s
Blasphemy. Art that Offends (2006); Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Kevin White’s Negotiating the
Sacred. Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society (2006); Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Maria
Suzette Fernandes-Dias’s edited volume Negotiating the Sacred II. Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts
(2008); Elizabeth Burns Coleman’s “The Offenses of Blasphemy. Messages in and through Art” in
Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 45, 2011, pp. 67–84; Jojada Verrips’s “Offending Art and the Sense of
Touch” in Material Religion, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 204–225; and Eleanor Heartney’s “The Global
Culture War” in Art in America, vol. 99, no. 9, 2011, pp. 119–123.
6 This representational strategy is also referred to as a “female form language” in Chicago and
Miriam Schapiro’s article “Female Imagery” in Womanspace Journal, vol. 1, 1973, pp. 11–14.
7 The expansion of this research project will look at issues with the generational model of historiciz-
ing feminism more acutely, while also addressing the problems of Feuchtenberger’s feminist comics
from an intersectional perspective.
8 See Hugo van der Goes’s Fall of Adam and Eve (c. 1470), Michaelangelo’s The Fall and Expulsion from
Garden of Eden (1509–1510), Raffaello Sanzio’s Adam and Eve (1509–1510) and Hieronymus Bosch’s
Paradise (c. 1510).
9 See Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–1868) and John Collier’s Lilith (1892).
Works Cited
Chicago, Judy and Miriam Schapiro. “Female Imagery.” Womanspace Journal, vol. 1, 1973, pp. 11–14.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–893.
Dame, Enid, et al., editors. Which Lilith?: Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman. Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004.
Feuchtenberger, Anke. Mutterkuchen. Jochen Enterprises, 1995.
Feuchtenberger, Anke. Untitled. On the Issues, vol. 5, no. 1, 1996, cover.
Gouma-Peterson, Thalia and Patricia Mathews. “The Feminist Critique of Art History.” The Art
Bulletin, vol. 69, no. 3, 1987, pp. 326–357.
226
Havens Caldwell, Susan. “Experiencing “The Dinner Party”.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 2,
1980–1981, pp. 35–37.
Hurlbut, Jesse. “Comics Theory for the Ages: Text and Image Relations in Medieval Manuscripts.”
International Comic Arts Forum, Columbia, SC, 16 April 2016. Conference Presentation.
Lesses, Rebecca. “Lilith.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, 20 March 2009, Jewish
Women’s Archive. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lilith. Accessed 30 July 2019.
“Lilth Adler.” Contemporary Art, The Art History Archive. www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/
contemporary/LilithAdler-ArtistsStatements.html. Accessed 30 July 2019.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Kitchen Sink Press, 1993.
Meagher, Michelle. “Telling Stories about Feminist Art.” Feminist Theory, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 297–316.
Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith.” The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual
Ethics, 1972–2003, edited by Donna Berman, Beacon, 2005, pp. 23–34.
Semmel, Joan and April Kingsley. “Sexual Imagery in Women’s Art.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 1,
1980, pp. 1–6.
Snyder, Carol. “Reading the Language of “The Dinner Party”.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 1, no. 2,
1980–1981, pp. 30–34.
Stroumsa, Gedaliahu G. “The Early Christian Fish Symbol Reconsidered.” Messiah and Christos: Studies
in the Jewish Origins of Christianity, edited by Ithamar Gruenwald, Shaul Shaked and Gedaliahu G.
Stroumsa. J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992, pp. 199–205.
Wolf, Naomi. “Introduction.” Which Lilith?: Feminist Writers Re-Create the World’s First Woman, edited
by Enid Dame, Lilly Rivlin, Henny Wenkart. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. xi–xiii.
227
16
“I’m trapped in here!”
Gender performativity and
affect in Emma Ríos’s I.D.
Mikel Bermello Isusi
In Spain, comics and graphic novels that combine science fiction with LGTBQIA+ charac-
ters and/or topics are scarce. While there are movies (one example is Almodóvar’s La piel que
habito, 2011) and novels that use the genre of science fiction and include LGTBQIA+ charac-
ters and topics (authors Aranzazu Serrano and Cristina Jurado, for instance), it is not so easy
to encounter both in graphic novels from Spanish authors. It is possible to find either science
fiction or LGTBQIA+ topics or characters, but it is not so easy to encounter both of these
elements together in a single work. Science fiction is a popular genre that is gaining attention
in the graphic novel medium in Spain, with examples also arriving in the US market, such
as Albert Monteys’s Universe! (2017), Marcos Prior and David Rubín’s The Grand Hotel Abyss
(2019), or Ana Galván’s Press Enter to Continue (2019).
Emma Ríos’s I.D. (2016) is an exception to this trend, not only because it is a science
fiction but also because the graphic novel includes LGTBQIA+ topics in a balanced way.
I.D. sets the reader in a dystopian future where body transplants are possible, although these
are still in the early stages and are made available to a select few who would be willing to
go through with the transplant process. Moreover, one of the characters to go through the
transplant is Noa, a trans teenager. LGBTQIA+ comics, authors, and characters may be re-
current, as we can find in El violeta (2018), by Marina Cochet, Juan Sepúlveda, and Antonio
Mercero; or in the second short story in Nadar’s El mundo a tus pies (2015), among other
comics. We can also find these concerns explored by Spanish authors Sagar and Álvaro Ortiz
in the US Anthology Love Is Love (2017), which raised money for the victims of the Pulse
Shooting in Orlando, Florida in 2016. In I.D., Ríos used the genre of science fiction to talk
about LGTBQIA+ issues, by having a neurologist – Miguel Alberte Woodward – help her
detail the ways in which the transplant could be more realistically conceived in the graphic
novel. The graphic novel presents important topics – such as gender identity, the body, and
depression – through a popular genre like science fiction, and, as a result, the text takes com-
plex issues to a popular audience in approachable ways. Consequently, this work combines
two fields that are rarely seen together in the comics medium: sci-fi and LGTBQIA+. As
stated earlier, there may be examples in Spanish graphic narratives, but these are rare and
fall short of the balance achieved in I.D., and examples include Nazario Luque’s Anarcoma,
228
Gender performativity and affect
as it includes a robot and several LGTBQIA+ characters. Also, in the already mentioned
Press Enter to Continue, by Galván, there is a character who can change their gender identity.
Additionally, Miguel Brieva’s extra-terrestrial narrator in Memorias de la Tierra has seven
different sexual shapes which every being of their species experiences throughout their lives
(106). However, unlike these examples, and as said earlier, Ríos’s work is different, since in
her graphic novel, the use of science fiction and LGTBQIA+ issues it raises are balanced. The
sci-fi genre and the LGTBQIA+ focus are the main concerns in I.D.
I.D. begins with the interviews to the three main characters by the doctors and it finishes
with two of them transitioning to a different body, whereas the body of the work deals with
the problems they carry with them and the likely issues arising from the operation. The
premise closely ties with issues of identity, as it raises questions about our own bodies from
the very beginning, as the subtitle of the work is Why Don’t You Like Your Body? Noa’s char-
acter, a transgender adolescent who claims to be trapped in his body (19),1 which is socially
understood as a woman’s, expands and makes evident the relations between identity, social
construction, and body that can easily be seen in this work, all of which is still understood
in a very similar way to the present. Society’s understanding of Noa’s body and identity, to-
gether with his being affected by it, also helps us understand how these social constructions
influence the other two main characters, Charlotte and Mike, who, even as cisgender and
straight people, are affected by them. Therefore, in this chapter I first analyze how the con-
struction of gender is seen in the graphic novel through gender studies (Butler, Lane, etc.).
Then, I turn to affect (Spinoza, C, Gregg and Seigworth, etc.) to understand how these con-
structions influence these three characters in Ríos’s work, and mainly Noa. Finally, through
comics narratology (Mikkonen, Polak, McCloud, etc.), I show how Ríos effectively uses this
medium’s resources to build new narratives beyond linguistic representation, since she builds
safe spaces without categorical statements that determine one form of safe space creation
over others, but through communication and empathy. Thus, we can appreciate both the
character development and how they stop being affected by the issues that do affect them at
the beginning of the graphic novel. This is done through the need to relate to the characters’
issues, which is and has to be developed both by the readers and by the characters, so they
move on more satisfactorily.
Gender roles, gender performance

First, it is important to consider how gender roles and gender construction is understood, be-
cause it is one of the main issues in I.D. Social construction is one of the issues that make Noa
so affected at the beginning. This is exemplified by society’s perception of him as a woman,
since he was assigned female at birth because of his reproductive system. Consequently, so-
ciety conceives him as a woman, as he is treated as such, expecting him to be and behave in
a certain way. Regarding gender roles and gender performance, then, it is good to start off
with Judith Butler, who, following Simone de Beauvoir, states that
gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed;
rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a
stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body
and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, move-
ments, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered
self. (270, emphasis in the original)
229
Figure 16.1 Emma Ríos. I.D. ImageComics, 2016
Butler’s statement is useful because it is obvious from the very beginning in I.D. Identity’s
lack of stability and that it is “constituted in time” can explain all of the characters’ present
situations – even more so in Noa’s case, since he is repeating acts that are socially understood
as “female,” but he wants to be socially conceived and treated as a man. The image before
the beginning of Chapter 1, through a total of 15 close shots of the three main characters,
in which small gestures are captured and focused on in small circles, already makes Butler’s
statement evident through a total of 15 close shots of the three main characters, in which
small gestures are captured and focused on in small circles (Figure 16.1).
About this specific page, in an interview, Ríos argues: “When I drew this first page I
wasn’t truly aware of how important it was going to be for the narrative later. But now that I
see it from some distance I think it was definitely a settlement, a decision of how the charac-
ters were going to communicate for real in the story, and a tip on how they should be read:
by paying attention to their eyes and hands” (Shapiro). Because the entire graphic novel deals
with this transition, from the interviews by the doctors and the characters’ meeting for the
first time, the importance of the body is then evident in the construction and performance
of these characters, and it is through their bodies that we also see the characters change,
adapt. Butler keeps reminding us that “[a]s an intentionally organized materiality, the body is
always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical con-
vention. In other words, the body is a historical situation” (272, emphasis in the original). In
this work, this “historical situation” is seen and well established from the beginning. Even if
set in the future and the particular country or society to which they belong is not specified,
the understanding of gender roles can be understood as similar to that of the present moment,
and it is seen through the beginning, when, for instance, Noa states that he is a man and that
he is trapped in this body (19).
Another of these early clashes between their own identity and society’s imposition shows
how Mike and Charlotte, more in line with heteronormative society than Noa, make him
feel bad through paternalistic behavior toward him. After Charlotte asks him “Why are you
choosing this one [method]?” (22), Mike tells him that “[c]hanging to another body isn’t
like getting new ink done, kiddo.” As Noa says “I can’t stand being this weak anymore”
(23), and since “my metabolism doesn’t allow me to be the man I want to be” (22), Mike
says, “Weak! My God…,” and Noa ends up leaving affected to the women’s restroom. After
this, Mike realizes he had made a mistake in talking to him that way. Charlotte follows Noa
230
and – wrongly – jokes by saying “You really grew a pair to stand it all,” as Noa lets her know
the joke is not appreciated or appropriate (23). Hand and eye gestures are still important,
as they keep helping the reader see how their identities are built, and the dialogues help to
expand. Through these gestures, we perceive how all three characters evidently understand
their own bodies and gender identities through the historical situations that have been men-
tioned earlier, and they are constructing their own context, their social relations in this small
group. And Noa, who is the most affected character, at first, is starting to share his feelings,
his own situation.
What seems most important to Noa is society fully recognizing him as a man. His sup-
posedly female body prevents him from being addressed the ways he wants to be addressed.
As Alexandra Howson reminds us, “the body is central to the establishment and maintenance
of social life.” Plus, “labour markets favour particular kinds of bodies and, by implication,
people,” and “we cannot reduce our sense of who we are (or identity) to our bodies or to parts
of our bodies” (3). In Noa’s case, transitioning is important, for it is to many trans people, as
Riki Lane reminds us (138), while giving importance to the reasons behind people’s transi-
tions. And the reason is he is a man in a socially understood female body. The way he has al-
ways been treated, glimpsed through the conversations he has with the doctor – and also with
Mike and Charlotte – does not correspond to his real self. The two other main characters are
of course also affected by these social constructions, but Noa’s case is significantly different.
Whereas masculinity apparently demands of Mike a performance he certainly cannot bring
about – hence his reason to lie about the reasons he has lost his license as a psychiatrist – and
sexism affects Charlotte in a different way, Noa is affected by sexism and transphobia, as well
as people’s inability to even start to grasp what he is going through. This, however, does
not allow him to be fully understanding with everybody else’s situation, as he fails to treat
Mike as more than an attractive body Charlotte and Noa desire, although in very different
terms – Noa wants it for himself, Charlottes does for sex. Naked, covered with a blanket
at Charlotte’s, he throws the table in a gesture that resembles Noa’s very same action at the
beginning of the graphic novel as he loses the blanket (Figure 16.2 and 16.3).
Noa’s reaction is to tell him “Gimme that body of yours already” (50), to which he re-
plies by saying he would “give away all my guts, and then straight to cremation.” Charlotte
and Mike agree that it would be “a waste” (51), as they joke as if he were no more than
a body. Their joke on Mike’s body ends up with a toast by all three and with Mike and
231
Charlotte having sex (53). Their socializing leads to the three of them being more and more
comfortable with each other and, in the case of Noa, he is becoming less and less affected
as the graphic novel’s narrative moves forward. As the group becomes more of a safe space
to him, first, and as society in general becomes so as he gets the body transplant he has so
much desired for so long later in the work. Plus, as Howson says and has already been stated,
the relation between mind and body is important, even if it is considered that the mind is
the source through which “the self ” is produced and that the body is subordinated to the
mind, we cannot forget that it also works the other way, and everybody’s minds are subju-
gated to their bodies and to what society tells them they are, how and why. Therefore, the
three characters in I.D., to a certain extent, try to break with the system’s normative – and
binary – conception of understanding the body, as society assigns gender and educates people
accordingly depending on the genitals with which people are born. They try to break because,
even if they are aware of these limitations, they nonetheless have to move within society, and
despite their attempts to understand gender identity and expression, education and social-
ization are traditionally conceived as binary and heteronormative. This is evident in Ríos’s
I.D. They move within society as they try to change their lives, the way they see themselves,
and, consequently, how society sees them. They search for this change so they are no longer
affected by the issues – at either a social and/or an individual level – that do affect them at the
beginning of the work. In order to see that, it is important to establish how affect is seen, as
well as how it is formed and changed.
Affect and its formation

Society’s understanding of the bodies and of gender roles has emotional effects on Noa. He
wishes to be perceived as a man, even if he is not, due to his body, which makes him anxious
and yell often and emotionally unstable, as seen throughout the work. He cannot effectively
perform socially because this clash between his self-perception and that of society differs sig-
nificantly, and they expect him to perform in ways he cannot. That is why he is affected,
and here Affect Theory is considered. Baruch Spinoza defines affect in the following way:
“By emotion [affectus] I understand the affections of the body by which the body’s power
of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these
affections” (278). In other words, he understands affect as potentially limiting. Melissa Gregg
232
and Greggory Seigworth say that it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities
to act and be acted upon.” Furthermore, it is located “in those intensities that pass body to
body” (1). Although Brian Massumi states that affect is pre-social because it comes before
cognition, before the actual beginning of socialization, he also states that affect is “asocial,
but not presocial – it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to
other levels of functioning and combines them according to different logic.” This can happen
“[o]nly if past actions and contexts were conserved and repeated, automatically reactivated but
not accomplished; begun but not completed” (30). Despite the interest this statement raises
with regard to the fact that affect mixes social elements with others – which he does not get
to define – it could still be argued that it is inherently and evidently social, reconstructed and
reformed in socialization. The fact that it mixes social elements with others does not mean it
can ever be asocial, because life is imminently social, and we move in and around society. We
shape these affects and see them shaped as we socialize, unable to control them as we wish.
Massumi reminds us of Gilbert Simondon’s conception of affect and its configuration:
The challenge is to think that process of formation, and for that you need the notion of
a taking-form, an inform on the way to being determinately this or that. The field of
emergence is not presocial. It is open-endendly social. It is social in a manner “prior to”
the separating out of individuals and the identifiable groupings that they end up boxing
themselves into (positions in gridlock). A sociality without determinate borders: ‘pure’
sociality. (9)
Then, affect is social, and linked to the process of formation, if understood as limiting. Just as
Patricia C. Clough states, very much in line with Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
and Henri Bergson, affect is to be understood “as pre-individual bodily forces augmenting
or diminishing a body’s capacity to act and who critically engage those technologies that are
making it possible to grasp and to manipulate the imperceptible dynamism of affect” (2–3).
She continues arguing that “focusing on affect – without following the circuit from affect to
subjectively felt emotional states – makes clear how the turn to affect is a harbinger of and a
discursive accompaniment to the forging of a new body, what I am calling the biomediated
body” (3). It is pre-individual, pre-socialization, but it is modified in this process of social-
ization. In it, people are still affected, limited, and it can change, as it helps in “the forging of
a new body,” as Clough says, whether literal or not. And, in a way, it can also be understood
in a similar way to trauma. And trauma, Anne Whitehead reminds us, “overwhelms the
individual and resists language or representation” (ctd. in Earle 32). Affect does, too, escape
language or representation. But it can be empathically glimpsed, understood in relation. This
can also be done in Ríos’s I.D. Hence, the need to discuss in depth comics narratology and
how the medium can be understood to work. Like affect, comics are understood to work in
relation, that is, in the readers’ need to relate the panels among them. This is now seen in the
following section.
Comics narratology: relating the panels

For us to understand the importance of the readers’ ability to relate the panels to grasp the
meaning of each work, it is useful to first define a very important feature of the medium: the
“gutter” as understood as the comic critic Scott McCloud defined it. In his essayistic graphic
novel Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994), McCloud defines it as “that space between
the panels,” and, as he says right afterward, it “plays host to much of the magic and mystery that
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are at the very heart of comics!” (66, emphasis in the original). This “gutter” is tightly linked to
another term he previously introduces, and it is the concept of “closure,” which he defines as
“the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). Although this seems to be
the most important aspect of comics, as no whole actions are portrayed, and these are found
in them, McCloud still conceives the gutter as the most important feature of the medium.
Harriet E. H. Earle, when talking about trauma and irrepresentability in comics, agrees with
him as far as to state that “the gutter is the most important aspect of the comics form” (47).
However, there is certain dynamic within the medium of which McCloud is aware, as he
states it in his already mentioned book, but to which he does not seem to give quite as much
importance as to the gutter itself. Also, while linking closure and the gutter, he recognizes
that “closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified
reality. If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is the grammar. And since our
definition of comics hinges on the arrangement of elements, then, in a very real sense, comics
IS closure” (67, emphasis in the original). As seen from now on, and in line with Kate Polak
and Kai Mikkonen, it is this closure and the readers’ position to understand this that seem the
most important aspects of the comics.
McCloud’s statement about the importance of the closure can quickly be expanded
through Polak and Mikkonen. As the first of the two reminds us, “Neil Cohn insists that ‘the
gutter does not provide any meaning – the content of the panels and their union does’” (12).
Mikkonen goes further, pointing out “the importance of the panel relation, not the space in
between” (40). McCloud does perceive and tell of the importance of closure, but his focus
still moves around the gutter in itself, as if it were evident on its own. However, Polak and
Mikkonen already point out in the direction of the reader and their need to engage with not
only the content but also the form, that is, the story and how it is told. The importance, thus,
lies also on the reader, on their ability to break the gaps, to build some bridges between the
characters in the story, between the author and the reader. Polak, later in her introduction to
her book Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, reminds us that closure
automatically has an ethical dimension; who you are and who you are prompted to iden-
tify with, how you are prompted to make inferences about what is and isn’t depicted,
how you make sense of your own imagination in relation to what is depicted, these are
only a few areas in which comics create a different ethical universe for the reader. For
example, identifying with a perpetrator and identifying with the victim are two very
different ethical relationships with a text. (15, emphasis in the original)
The aspect of identification to which she refers is crucial toward the readers’ engagement,
independently of the topic or genre. The gutter can still be important, of course, but it is not
necessarily the most important, because, also, it may not be present in the work or, at least, not
in every page. In Comics & Sequential Art (1985), Will Eisner, central figure in comic stud-
ies for being one of the most important creators as well as essayist, reminds us of this as he
speaks of the possibility of comics to lack linguistic narration. He says that “[i]mages without
words, while they seem to represent a more primitive form of graphic narrative, really re-
quire some sophistication on the part of the reader (or viewer). Common experience and a
history of observation are necessary to interpret the inner feelings of the actor” (24). Even if
he refers to sophistication merely from a technical point of view, sophistication should also be
considered from an ethical perspective, through empathy, since reducing the work of art to
just technique erases all other emotional and/or human aspects that are present. In the case
of Ríos’s I.D., it is not only how she portrays this story but also how the characters relate to
234
each other and how we, as readers, relate to the story and the characters, both individually
and collectively, who and what we are and how we relate to the other characters and their
circumstances. By focusing and analyzing these relations, the reasons why the group becomes
a safe space for Noa become evident. These reasons help him carry on with the project and
go through the body transplant into a socially understood male body that he is being offered,
despite the possibility of the procedure not being successful as explained by the doctors,
whether it is due to the operation itself or due to the patients’ suicide during rehabilitation.
Relating to their relations

Noa’s affects – starting from Spinoza’s definition – are perceived from the beginning of the
graphic novel, as already stated. The frequency with which he yells and his violent reactions
while socializing can prove his affected state. The second image that appears above in this
chapter can work as an example, since a not very kind interaction with Charlotte and Mike
leads him to throwing off the table at the coffee shop where they are hanging out. While
Mike’s identical reaction comes afterward, he quickly gathers himself after it, and is back to
his habitual self, whereas Noa is still dealing with these issues during and but also a while
after the event. Here the reader can perceive what Gregg and Seigworth state about affect,
and as said earlier: that it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and
be acted upon” – Noa’s capacities to act and be acted upon. Plus, if it is located “in those in-
tensities that pass body to body” (1), it can be understood then that Noa responds as he does
during socialization, as seen in the café, and also earlier, when he yells at the doctor when
sharing the reason why he does not like his body: “Well, I’m trapped in here… I’m a man!” as
he is shown shouting at him. This particular scene portrays Noa embodying the social con-
struction of his (female) body as the doctor automatically considered him a young woman,
addressing him as “sweetheart,” and asking him how old he is. Then, when summarizing
the visit/encounter, the doctor misgenders and describes Noa as “female,” and asks him why
he does not like his body, while the reader can see Noa’s verbal and facial response, which
finishes with him shouting at the doctor that he is a man (19).
As the work advances, though, he is increasingly less affected. His awareness of the process
and the development of socialization of the group ease him, making him react and partic-
ipate less affectedly. In Chapter 3, the three main characters are gathered to be told how
this process usually develops. When they are told that “six months after the process, up to
two-thirds of patients are alive and able to walk and care for themselves,” Mike is the only
one verbally responding, by saying “[t]hat sounds dangerous!” while both Charlotte and Noa
remain quiet. They are then told not to panic because “these statistics include post-suicidal
behaviour,” as they appeal to the difficulty of rehab (38). Mike would later not go through
the operation, but Noa and Charlotte would. Although very differently, in both cases the
idea of suicide is used in some way. Noa has admittedly considered suicide earlier in his life,
although he is not explicit with regard to the exact moment as to when that happened. He
says so as he and Mike talk about Charlotte’s reasons, and Noa replies to Mike: “I wonder if
just being bored, or lonely, is enough to do this” – by suggesting that the body transplant “is
better than suicide.” His response – “Perhaps… Didn’t think of it that way” (44) – evidences
the different paths they have gone through to get there. But Noa has thought of suicide
before, as he admits. Depression is glimpsed through this conversation more evidently than
in the rest of the work. As the opportunity to change his body to be fully recognized as a
man, together with the formation of this safe space, helps him go through the operation,
regardless of the risk. This is linked to what Tania Poteat says: that “[the] attitudes toward
235
transgender people are less favorable than towards LGB.” Plus, “[t]he stigma and discrimina-
tion faced by transgender people… have been associated with increased risk for depression,
suicide” (23). In this graphic novel, Noa’s case seems to be one of those with depression and
suicidal thoughts.
Charlotte decides to use the idea of her suicide as a narrative device to start over new.
She is first glimpsed writing a note (60) with the body with which the readers and the main
characters meet her. Then, Mike and Noa, who is already in his new body, mention a suicide
note she wrote, as well as the local newspaper report “of her death a month after we split up.”
As they talk in a bench, an unknown woman behind them is seen standing up and walking
away with a walking stick, just as Noa is seen using one (64). Four pages after this, the reader
can assume this woman to be Charlotte (68), who has gone through the operation and rehab.
She is smiling as she smokes and sees Noa and Mike return after they throw away the ashes of
Noa’s former body. But she leaves them alone and does not make any kind of contact, unlike
Noa and Mike who are helping each other. The reader can quickly understand this meeting
was Noa’s idea, since Mike thanks him for calling and Noa confesses: “I did it for me, mostly.
I needed a doctor to check on me and thought you’d get more involved” (63). This Noa that
the reader now finds is significantly different from the Noa we saw earlier. He is socializing
unaffectedly. He is relaxed and seems to no longer be depressed. Even though still in rehab
and despite the fact that he spent a “year and a half at the hospital” (64), he seems happy and
in control. His body, older than the previous one, fits him a lot more. He is more himself
in it, even if he has had it for far less time, and it is a body he likes. Bearded and older, he is
socially accepted as a man and he can finally show he is a man, and not be questioned for it,
or treated otherwise (62, Figure 16.4). There is no gap between his gender identity and his
gender expression, between his identity and how society conceives him, which was the main
source of conflict.
Both Mike’s happy reaction when he recognizes Noa also and Charlotte’s following them
show the evolution of this group and the way they related to each other. Noa needed the
opportunity to go through the process beyond the standard way of transitioning. As he ad-
mits during the graphic novel – and as stated earlier – “my metabolism doesn’t allow me to
be the man I want to be” (22), but he also needed the creation of this safe space that is built
throughout the work. Before he goes through with it, he needs to see acceptance and a real
possibility of change. The hope that continues to grow in him as the story develops, with a
236
potential body he liked and a loving and accepting group, beyond the unfortunate begin-
ning, helps him think positively of this process, of this opportunity. Hence, he accepts and
goes through, and now society does not inflict any kind of pain around this issue, it does not
affect him anymore. As the group relations develop, first, and as he is socially seen as a man,
later, he is redefining his emotions, and his affects stop being so.
I.D. is an example that proves the links between gender identity as a construct, as argued
here, and the tight relations these constructions have with affects toward LGTBQIA+ com-
munities. Noa sees a radical change at an emotional level from the very beginning to the
very end, and the lack of conflict between society’s understandings of identity, expression,
and expectations has certainly to do with this. These preconceptions of gender identity and
expression that Butler defines, as “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts”
(270), is the source of conflict for Noa. These preconceptions, these repetitions become the
expectation, the norm that Noa cannot attain, cannot follow, since he was born with another
socially understood body. This repetition is inherently constructed socially, and it is this social
assignment of gender identity and expression depending on the reproductive system which
is the cause of conflicts for Noa, who is continuously affected by these constructions and,
therefore, by society. However, just as these social constructions are constantly reinforced or
changed, these limiting affects that Noa is feeling can change. These are constructed, recon-
structed, modified, or promoted in relation to society, to other people, whether consciously
or not. Seeing and perceiving one thing – for instance, one physical attribute at birth – does
not necessarily imply one way of understanding it. At the very least, it should not, even if
society has historically done so.
Ríos portrays these inner selves with their conflicts also in relation among the panels and
among the different characters, and she does so dynamically. Her portrayal of the characters’
gestures and ways of relating to one another comes in line with Polak’s statement about
closure and the readers’ need to empathize, to relate to the content and the characters in the
graphic novel. Even if people do not entirely relate to fictional characters as we do to out-
of-text society and people, the readers’ approach and understanding to these people’s prob-
lems and affects are certainly meaningful toward their own understanding of the world and
society. Going back to Clough’s quote, affect can be understood “as pre-individual bodily
forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act and who critically engage those
technologies that are making it possible to grasp and to manipulate the imperceptible dyna-
mism of affect” (2–3). If affect is pre-individual and pre-personal – presocial in Massumi’s term
(30) – so is the readers’ approach to Ríos’s work. Once they get to know them, once they
see how the characters relate, the reader starts filling in the gaps, “perceiving the whole,” as
McCloud would say. In the reader’s relation to the content and the characters, they see how
Noa, Charlotte, and Mike relate to each other/to others and function socially. When Noa ad-
mits his previous thoughts of suicide (44), a scene told earlier in this text, both the reader and
Mike are relating or, at the very least, Mike is, which is another step he takes to empathizing
with Noa. If the reader does empathize as well, they may see that Noa’s statement as true in
the gesture they are shown, but his honesty proves that he is comfortable in that relation, as
Mike understands him (Figure 16.5).
The more the graphic novel advances, the more the characters relate to each other, as
should the reader. Noa accepts the operation and changes his body, because he is accepted
and understood in the group, he feels comfortable. Mike and Charlotte reach him, and he
reaches them, as he feels understood. And this understanding from these two toward Noa is
an exercise the reader has to do, as they have to fill in and see they understand Noa and know
where they stand around Noa’s transition. Mike and Charlotte’s response is not necessarily
237
Figure 16.5 Emma

Ríos. I.D. ImageComics, 2016
that of the readership, but it certainly addresses that question of where people stand regard-
ing trans people’s transitions and understanding of their sufferings and pains. The safe space
created by the three friends challenges the necessity to question one’s own positionality in
terms of gender identity and gender expression. The many safe spaces that Noa definitely did
not find before the beginning of the graphic novel also address this and talk about the read-
er’s response. Polak’s statement about the “ethical dimension” that closure has is important,
because the reader may be “prompted to identify with” Noa, but, also, they may not (15).
Their choice, whether conscious or unconscious, promotes a way of relating to LGTBQIA+
people and characters, to their traumas and struggles.
Ultimately, this proves how comics can be useful to ponder on these issues. The reader’s
need to relate to the characters is evident in different ways to other artistic mediums. Here,
Ríos portrays a range of topics within the LGTBQIA+ community, as well as within the
medium of graphic narratives and the genre of science fiction. It is a good example of how
a work can address an issue such as trans people’s trauma and need to transition and do it
eloquently and without grandiose explanations, but by showing understanding and empathy
toward someone who has been struggling.
Note
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Fem-
inist Theory.” In Performing Feminisms. Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-Ellen
Casel, John Hopkins UP, 1990, pp. 270–279.
Brieva, Miguel. Memorias de la Tierra: El otro mundo. Vol. 2. Random House Mondadori, 2012.
Clough-Gorr, Kerri M., Patricia A. Ganz, and Rebecca A. Silliman. “Older Breast Cancer Survivors:
Factors Associated with Change in Emotional Well-being.” Journal of Clinical Oncology, vol. 25, issue
11, 2007, pp. 1–22.
Cochet, Marina, Juan Sepúlveda, and Antonio Mercero. El violeta. Drakul Editorial, 2018.
Earle, Harriet E. H. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. U of Mississippi P, 2017.
Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Poorhouse Press, 1985.
Galván, Ana. Press Enter to Continue. Fantagraphics, 2019.
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Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader,
edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 1–25.
Howson, Alexandra. “Introduction.” In The Body in Society: An Introduction. Polity, 2004, pp. 1–13.
La piel que habito. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar, performances by Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya,
Marisa Paredes. El Deseo, 2011.
Lane, Riki. “Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy.” In
Hypatia, Vol. 24, no. 3, Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Real-
ities, Summer 2009, pp. 136–57.
Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Kitchen Sink P, 1993.
Mikkonen, Kai. “Time in Comics.” In The Narratology of Comic Art, Routledge, 2017, pp. 33–70.
Monteys, Albert. Universe! Panel Syndicate, 2017.
Nadar. El mundo a tus pies. Astiberri, 2015.
Spinoza, Baruch. “Ethics.” In Spinoza. Complete Works, edited by Michael L. Morgan, Hackett Publish-
ing Company, 2002, pp. 213–382.
Polak, Kate. “Introduction.” In Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics. The Ohio
State UP, 2017, pp. 1–36.
Poteat, Tania, Danielle German, and Deanna Kerrigan. “Managing Uncertainty: A Grounded The-
ory of Stigma in Transgender Health Care Encounters.” Social Science & Medicine, no. 84, 2013,
pp. 22–29. www.sciencedirect.com/journal/social-science-and-medicine/vol/84/suppl/C
Ríos, Emma. I.D. ImageComics, 2016.
———. Interview by Jake Shapiro. Fast & Enough. June 6, 2016. https://bookriot.com/2016/06/15/
interview-emma-rios-on-craft-i-d-and-island/ Last accessed, February 10, 2019.
Rubín, David and Marcos Prior. The Grand Hotel Abyss. Archaia, 2019.
Various Authors. Love Is Love. IDW Publishing, 2016.
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17
Empirical looking
Situating the multiple elements of
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of
Love and Fallout as vehicles for articulating
a place for women in science
Lisa DeTora
This chapter draws on the notion of expanding critical approaches to comics studies in part
by exploring the potential for semiotic theoretical perspectives as a model of quantum atomic
behavior—the ability to be more than one thing at once. In the following pages, I will examine
Lauren Redniss’s acclaimed graphic narrative Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love
and Fallout (2010; hereafter Radioactive) and the means it uses to situate women in science. In
particular, I will examine how the idea of an empirical gaze, as connected to Michel Foucault’s
construction of a clinical gaze in Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1994),
can be brought to bear on this work, or, in other words, how Redniss’s Radioactive can be read
as reconstructing a scientific mode of thinking. Of particular interest in the following discus-
sion is the means by which Redniss organizes her book, a National Book Award finalist, around
the difficulties of rendering conceptual realities like love or radioactivity into a visual context in
order to promote recognition and understanding. In other words, I see a central preoccupation
of Radioactive as the question of how to visualize the “invisible forces” (52) that shape life on
earth and what those forces mean when considering the personal and scientific lives of Madame
Curie. Ultimately, I see Redniss’s graphic novel as a means of situating the invisible forces of
women in science, a means of making visible once again work that has been hidden.
Traditional studies of graphic narrative, insofar as traditional studies exist in this novel
and burgeoning area, have tended to concentrate on the means by which what Thierry
Groensteen referred to as comic art, convey meaning (2008, 2013). To Groensteen, this art
…is an organic totality that brings together multiple parameters and procedures, a com-
bination of elements and codes, of which some are specific and some are not. They are
all interrelated, and it is the simultaneous mobilization of all these components that
constitutes the unique language of comics. (Groensteen 2008, 89)
The idea of simultaneous mobilization of varied elements and components is a key figure for
the discussion that will follow. For Groensteen, the operation of what he calls arthrology,
240
Articulating a place for women in science
a means of articulating what he calls the “simultaneous mobilization” (89) of varied visual
and textual elements on the page, differentiates comics, comic books, and graphic narratives
from other written and illustrated forms, imbuing them with the ability to convey meaning
that goes beyond text or image or layout alone. This simultaneous mobilization of elements
is then played out, as previously suggested, in the mechanisms described by theoreticians qua
storytellers like Wil Eisner and Scott McCloud, who emphasize elements like the enforced
sequence and closure in the operation of graphic narratives. Studies of narrative complement
this work, describing how and why graphic narrative can operate within accepted patterns
of representation such as plot (Mikkonen 2017). However, semiotic and narrative conven-
tions are not the only studies of the graphic narrative and new critical studies of comics are
underway.
Thematic and archival/material studies in popular culture have emphasized specific can-
ons of work: superhero comics of the golden, silver, or bronze ages, underground comics, and
national traditions. Recent trends like Graphic Medicine emphasize the use of graphic nar-
rative as a means of relating and expressing experiences that cannot reasonably be expressed
in mere language. Graphic Medicine, functioning primarily through medical memoirs like
Stitches (2009) or Cancer Vixen (2006), has offered important means of bridging medical prac-
tice with the experience of patients, leading to a recent manifesto from an interdisciplinary
group at Penn State (2015). The Comics Studies Society’s move toward Critical Comics
Studies, similarly, has expanded the scope of studies of graphic narrative, emphasizing modes
of literary and cultural interpretation of content as opposed to or in conjunction with formal
attributes (Giddens 2020). Graphic narrative studies are even cropping up in rhetoric societies
and, thus, what could be construed as the newest form of critical cultural inquiry has become
imbricated into the oldest. The current volume is devoted to the placement of comics in
gender and sexuality studies, which I will address through recourse to the role of women in
science generally and the particular linkage of science and sexuality in Radioactive.
An empirical gaze
It is a truth universally accepted that comics are a visual form and, therefore, must be un-
derstood at least in part by the ways that they constrain and construct gendered and other
identity. Works like Jenell Johnson’s Graphic Reproduction or Kriota Willberg’s The Wander-
ing Uterus (Furor Uterensis) and Contemporary Applications of Ancient Medical Wisdom (2016)
take up the question of what it means to represent women’s bodies through specific sites of
gender difference, such as the womb, and thus function synecdochally on sites of difference.
However, most theoretical constructions of gendered looking relations enter into criticism
and critique via psychoanalysis, specifically the Lacanian model on which Laura Mulvey’s
initial foray into analyzing the workings of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was
based (1975).
Mulvey constructed her model of the gaze as inherently gendered, with men doing the
looking and women functioning as objects to be seen. Bracha Ettinger’s “matrixial gaze”
provided a site in which the elements of gendered identity had not yet emerged, leaving the
possibility for a viewer to experience states that precede the Lacanian Real (1995). In con-
trast to Mulvey’s reading of Hollywood cinema, Ettinger discussed the gaze in art history,
considering the viewing experience of static forms and considering how self-referential prac-
tices, like empathy, enabled viewers to simultaneously recognize and overcome the divide
between the self and the other. A 2008 volume, Situating the Feminist Gaze, sought to locate
the then-current series of constructions and critiques of Mulvey’s foundational ideas. One
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Lisa DeTora
author suggested that a quantum understanding of the gaze could transform the affordances
of gendered looking relations by relocating the power to establish identity in the eye of any
beholder. This “quantum gaze” drew on the fact that quantum states of particles are not only
multiple things at once, but established and created by the act of empirical looking (DeTora
2008). In other words, a quantum gaze is one that draws on modes of scientific looking that
create and transform material reality, troubling not only Mulvey’s original notions but also
providing a potential counterpoint to Ettinger. In this model of a gaze, even seemingly essen-
tial characteristics like gender or species remained uncertain until fixed by a look.
Of course, inherent problems emerge when attempting to adapt theories of looking at
film or art history to comics or the graphic narrative. Even if Eisner and McCloud each
make a convincing case for the existence of comics, or at least a certain segments of comics,
as sequential art, the comic art still does not operate semiotically or conceptually in the same
way as film. Groensteen, for example, explained that film is intended to operate as though
it creates the depicted events in real time, while graphic narratives do not pretend that “the
events are taking place as we read” (2011, 82). In other words, the simultaneous mobilization
of elements in a graphic narrative represents reading experience rather than the unfolding of
the narrative content. Thus, while films can play with the viewer’s point of view in certain
ways because of the way they constrain the sequence of images, graphic novels must con-
struct the reader’s gaze differently. I will argue that Redniss’s book, in contrast to many other
graphic novels, enjoins the reader to construct a useful narrative, following the reading habits
encouraged by empirical, rather than narrative inquiry. In so doing, it can be seen to leverage
the affordances of Foucault’s description of a clinical gaze as well as the idea of a quantum
gaze that establishes and reconstructs identity.
For Foucault, the clinical gaze coalesces at the intersection of language and spectacle,
rendering the formerly invisible, visible. This clinical gaze arose at the moment that medi-
cine transformed from a series of personal encounters into a scientific discipline, based on an
awareness that forces and creatures that were not discernible to the naked eye nevertheless
existed. Critically, Foucault describes the “ability to hear a language” (108) as an essential
function of the clinical gaze in part because language, as he later explains in the Archaeology
of Knowledge, is an essential component of knowledge. Without the ability to convey and
exchange ideas and information through language, knowledge cannot exist. I see Foucault’s
clinical gaze as a model for empirical perception, an empirical gaze that can account both
for an ability for the act of looking for fix and change material reality—as in the quantum
gaze—and also as a site that renders the formerly invisible into a perceptible spectacle. This
empirical gaze is situated at a site where knowledge comes into being and thus precedes and
enables a quantum gaze.
These quantum gazes, like the quantum states that they metaphorically utilize as a fram-
ing device, can apply within forms and also to their reception. In a forthcoming paper, “The
Quantum Gaze as a Model for Simultaneous Mobilization in Graphic Narrative” (2020),
I discuss the possibility for a hybrid empirical or quantum gaze to account for the operation
of quantum realities within graphic narratives as well as in certain types of fan experiences.
In other words, many comics and graphic novels explicitly develop quantum states as plot
points, but fans might have to manage myriad different permutations of characters, story
arcs, or multiverses across comics, films, and other media. In this discussion, which focuses
on superheroes in the DC and Marvel Multiverses, fan experiences, and series such as Fables,
a quantum gaze operates both as a means of directly representing affordances of quantum
physics that allow for multiverses to exist and as a way of accounting for fan experiences.
These fan experiences rely on the ability of an individual to manage the competing and
242
possibly conflicting representations of an individual character like Spiderman, Superman,

or Mickey Mouse across graphic narrative and other forms. In this model of a quantum
gaze, the superposition of states, or the ability of one particle to be in multiple states at once,
provides a framework for understanding fan experiences generally as well as many specific
representations.
When considering Radioactive, I suggest that the operation of an empirical gaze is possible
insofar as Redniss’s novel participates in tandem with other visual, historical, and biograph-
ical information, creating a site for articulating myriad cultural, artistic, and scientific ma-
terials. This empirical gaze might allow for a consideration of certain figures, perhaps such
as Madame Curie, to exist in many states, thus producing a possible site for a quantum gaze.
Yet, unlike the serial works mentioned above, Radioactive was designed within a different sort
if intellectual matrix therefore provides a model of the empirical gaze that renders visible the
formerly unseen, a valuable vantage point for readers and others to understand not only the
story of Pierre and Marie Curie, but also their situatedness in a larger culture. Specifically,
I see the book as offering an anchoring point for the work of women scientists. I also see in
Radioactive, the operation of an empirical gaze that calls on the reader to perform a type of
reading usually reserved for peer-reviewed or other highly technical scientific material. This
reading may result in, but does not require, the operation of a quantum gaze, which by its
very nature transforms that which it sees.
Reading science
One of the primary functions of an empirical gaze, figured through Foucault’s clinical gaze,
is to permit researchers to perceive and identify formerly unknown or invisible things, prop-
erties, or circumstances and then incorporate them into the realm of knowledge. This latter
activity means that perceptions are meaningless unless they can be successfully conveyed
in language, and science is a particularly challenging realm of verbal communication. For
example, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine comment on the
“complexity” of scientific communication with the public, which “stems from the diversity
and interconnectedness of its [science’s] many elements” (np). In other words, the National
Academies see scientific material as deriving from varied sources that must be placed in a spe-
cific context to create meaning for readers, especially lay audiences. Obstacles to successful
communication derive in part from the sources of science communication: scientific inquiry
and peer-to-peer publications and presentations that ground their meaning in specific types
of esoteric jargon. Yet, as the National Academies point out, jargon is not the only, or even
the major, obstacle to understanding scientific communications, which they see in the mul-
tifactorial diversity of its sources. In other words, the major problem in scientific commu-
nication is managing multiple things simultaneously, which evokes Groensteen’s comments
on the unique language of comics. And these problems extend into the jargon-laden source
discourses.
The figure of simultaneous mobilization is useful here because material conditions of
reading for most scientific publishing differ profoundly from reading narrative forms, or
even the types of comics that Eisner and McCloud associate with sequential art. In contrast
to forms that seek to direct the reader along a determined path to a discernable and specific
outcome or resolution, scientific findings are intended to contribute to ongoing research
and development and to be made use of by other researchers engaged in a further quest for
knowledge. Thus, scientific experts like Allen Renear and Carole Palmer (2009) describe
the reading practices of most scientists as broad and strategic, requiring the reader to manage
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many different texts at once. In other words, a single text is rarely consulted on its own, and
the scientific reader is then left to “…simultaneously to search, filter, scan, link, annotate,
and analyze fragments of content” (828). This model parallels that presented by the National
Academies, with its diverse and interconnected elements, and explicitly uses the idea of si-
multaneity, which in a distinct context, Groensteen associates with unique means of making
meaning. Renear and Palmer describe how the scientific reader is responsible for managing
the layout and contents of the text in order to develop a meaningful narrative and to extract
relevant information.
I argue that while a specific narrative of the life of Madame Curie and her daughters can
be located in Radioactive, the book as a whole nevertheless demands that a reader be able to
“search, filter, scan, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content” (828) and place them
into the appropriate context for their own needs. In other words, it is reasonable to claim
that in designing and producing Radioactive, Redniss referenced, drew inspiration from, and
created multiple sites of interconnectedness that parallel scientific ways of seeing. As neuro-
scientist Matteo Farinella observed in “Science Comics’s Super Powers” (2018), Radioactive
is one of a number of works in which a “storytelling … language is built upon visual meta-
phors” (220), and these metaphors help make science “pop” (218).
Not your average graphic novel

It is important to realize that in Radioactive, Redniss created something that certainly can
be classed as a graphic narrative, but in many ways is much more. In her essay, “The Seeing
Eye of Graphic Biography,” Candida Rif kind describes Radioactive as participating in a more
general discourse of scientific graphic biography like the works of Jim Ottaviani. She char-
acterizes Redniss’s graphic biographical style as unique because she “incorporates cartoons,
drawings, photographs, diagrams, and words into a visual-verbal collage of the discovery
of radium” (1). Furthermore, Radioactive not only considers specific biographical details in
its bricolage-like display, but situates its subject matter both historically and ahistorically.
Redniss, as Rif kind states, “extends beyond the Curies’ lifespans to depict how their discov-
ery of radioactivity eventually led to theories of the nuclear atom, the development of the
atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl” (1). This broader context is vital to Radioactive as “a tale of love and fallout”
because it illustrates the current stakes of understanding the work of the Curies and their
contemporaries, like Albert Einstein and Paul Langevin, as well as the legacy of their chil-
dren and grandchildren.
Radioactive has also been imbricated in other forms of public display and communication
partly as a result of the scholarly and artistic conditions under which Radioactive was pro-
duced. The New York Public Library (NYPL), for instance, presented in 2011 an exhibition
“Radioactive: An Exhibition at the New York Public Library” (www.nypl.org/events/exhi-
bitions/radioactive) that connects the book and its production not merely to Redniss’s cre-
ative process but also to her extensive research into the Curies, radioactivity, and the history
of science, as well as historical images and documents available in the libraries collections. As
the library’s ongoing online exhibition main page states, Redniss worked on her book while
“a fellow at the Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers” and “combines history,
science, and original artwork to tell the story of Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie and
a history of radioactivity” (np). The tale of a single woman of science is not here considered
as the only, or even perhaps the core, function of Radioactive, which develops multiple narra-
tive threads, presenting the reader with diverse, yet interconnected elements (to paraphrase
244
the National Academies). Therefore, any attempt to read Radioactive as a means of situating
women of science goes slightly against the grain of the novel as written. As Redniss herself
mentions in an interview on National Public Radio, she followed the advice of the Curie
family in “not forgetting Pierre” (np). And the exhibition is specifically laid out, not sequen-
tially, but as “a landscape” (NYPL Radioactive Main, np).
The historical research that informs Radioactive is not merely related to thematic ele-
ments and storytelling, but extends to every level of the visual presentation. Redniss’s orig-
inal artwork includes the production of a novel and intentionally “somewhat imperfect and
handmade” (NYPL Designing) typeface called “Eusapia LR after Eusapia Palladino, the Ital-
ian spiritualist medium who fascinated the Curies and other prominent intellectuals” (np),
and based on historical research into the development of fonts (see Figure 17.1). The New
York Public Library also links the production of Radioactive to Redniss’s pedagogy as “stu-
dents from Parsons continue to interpret the themes of love, science, and discovery” (NYPL
Radioactive Main, np). Thus, Radioactive can be seen as a site of simultaneous mobilization
of research, creativity, storytelling, learning, and teaching that extends beyond the pages of
the graphic novel and into the public domain at multiple sites—the New York Public Library
online exhibit, the people involved in the Curies’ story, and the creation of textual elements
(cyanotypes and fonts)—making it susceptible to the model of empirical gaze I suggested
above. The reader of the New York Public Library online exhibition must behave like a
scientist insofar as they must choose which elements to read and consider in order to build
understanding.
One of the critical elements of the New York Public Library presentation of Radioactive
is the connection of Redniss’s final graphic narrative to the historical images and elements
Figure 17.1 Lauren Redniss. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010)
245
Lisa DeTora
in the library’s collections. The exhibit also seeks to explain the means by which Redniss
researched and developed her text, which comprises many scientific, geographic, and his-
torical images as well as her own original artwork. The website, for instance, includes dis-
plays of cigarette cards—“The Du Barry,” “Atom Under Bombardment,” and “Man-Made
Lightning (Five Million Volt Flash)”—as well as other historical images from the eighteenth
century (“Twelve Fashionable Headdresses of 1780”) and a sixteenth-century anatomy book
Compendiosa: totius Anatomie delineatio (1545), among other influences. Figures 17.2 and 17.3
present historical images similar to those presented on the New York Public Library Radio-
active online exhibit, thus demonstrating how Radioactive, by virtue of its construction and
presentation in various formats, invites the consideration of additional images and contents.
Just as the New York Public Library exhibit makes visible, as a means of contexualizing
Redniss’s book, materials that are generally lost from public view, reintegrating them into a
current discussion of radioactivity, each reader can integrate similar images. Thus, Redniss’s
text can be read not only as a graphic narrative in its own right but also as a site for reintegrat-
ing prior graphic traditions, such as medical illustrations (see Figure 17.2), cigarette cards, and
fashion plates (see Figure 17.3). These renderings link visual objects, setting a stage for the
representation of invisible forces like radioactivity, connecting cultural expression and sci-
ence, and illustrating the importance of science in transforming everyday life. Furthermore,
the integration of historical documents, ephemera, and artifacts allows for an articulation of
this new narrative of a life (or lives) of science against prior ones.
It is telling that a key element of Redniss’s original artwork in Radioactive, the cyanotype
(NYPL Cyanotype), derives from historical and scientific source materials that uncover a
hidden woman of science, botanist Anna Atkins. This early form of photography and pho-
tocopying, most commonly associated with blueprints, was invented in 1842 and widely
used into the twentieth century. Scientist and comic artist Randall Munroe also drew on
this esthetic and technical tradition in his highly popular works “Up Goer Five” and Thing
Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (2015). Cyanotyping uses a chemical reaction
to produce a characteristic cyan coloring and a sort of indistinct glow (see Figure 17.4).
In an interview on National Public Radio, Redniss explains that the cyanotype afforded
what she calls a “twilight quality” (NPR) that could parallel the luminosity of radioactivity.
Cyanotyping, as she comments, creates a sort of glowing and luminous visual that evokes
Figure 17.2 Detail from Andreas Vesalius. Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis (1543). https://doi.
org/10.3931/e-rara-20094. Image is in the public domain
246
Figure 17.3 Eighteenth-century hairstyles (coiffures). Image is in the public domain
Figure 17.4 Image of Dictyota dichotoma from Anna Atkins’s 1843 volume, Photographs of British
Algae. Image is in the public domain
radioactivity, a largely unseen force. For those not already aware of the connection between
botanist Anna Atkins and the cyanotype, the New York Public Library exhibition provides a
context. Atkins produced the first book illustrated with photographic images, Photographs of
British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843; Figure 17.4), which utilized the new technology of
cyanotyping only a year after it was developed. The New York Public Library online exhi-
bition includes images of the book’s cover and Furcellaria fastigiate (np), thus explicitly linking
Atkins’s images and Redniss’s practice of cynaotyping, and integrating a forgotten woman
scientist into a narrative about the world’s most famous woman scientist.
Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae, not intended as a book of art, was a series of im-
ages of scientific phenomena, various species of algae, identified by their Latin names, each
hand-lettered. This volume, a work of science and technology, participated in a Victorian
intellectual exercise of cataloguing and classifying elements of the natural world. The aim
of the volume was to present images of various algae for audiences who did not have access
to living samples. Atkins, who produced and hand-lettered the images herself, used what at
the time was cutting-edge technology developed by family friend Sir John Herschel in order
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Lisa DeTora
to produce her self-published volume. Over the intervening years, the collection of British
algae was expanded and Atkins produced volumes on ferns and flowering plants (Cyanotypes
of British and Foreign Ferns [1853] and Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and
Ferns [1854]) in collaboration with her friend, Anna Dixon. As a work of science, Photographs
of British Algae explicitly creates an empirical gaze, attaching specific language to particular
spectacles, the images of algae captured and fixed by a novel chemical and technological
process. Redniss’s use of cyanotyping, in contrast, revives this older technological practice,
grounding a cultural and artistic production against historical scientific work by a currently
largely overlooked woman scientist. As Joanna Moorhead noted, Atkins, a botanist, is a no-
table woman of science and the first female photographer (np) and should be famous, but is
not. This practice contrasts with Munroe’s insofar as he chose blueprints for thematic, rather
than historical purposes (2015).
Redniss’s reference to Atkins’s work is important in part because the initial cyanotype
volumes, never many in number, have not been well preserved and are currently valued for
their esthetic rather than scientific uses. The existing copies of Photographs of British Algae are
housed in various august institutions, including the New York Public Library, the British
Library, the Rijksmuseum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A copy of Cyanotypes of
British and Foreign Ferns is housed at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is worthy
of note that despite the scientific and technical importance of Atkins’s work at the time of
publication, the cyanotype prints are currently being preserved in institutions oriented to-
ward esthetic and artistic works. Thus, Radioactive affords a vantage point for highlighting the
importance of Atkins’s work as well as suggesting a technology for rendering invisible forces
into perceptible spectacles. In fact, the New York Public Library online exhibition renders
Atkins visible by articulating her work against that of Redniss. And Radioactive may be read
as reinscribing the scientific, as well as cultural, importance of esthetic choices or specific
technologies like cyanotyping even as they pass into an artistic space.
A quick look at the New York Public Library online exhibit, then, reveals that Radioactive
has been presented in such a way as to encourage audiences to engage in the sorts of reading
practices that Renear and Palmer describe as part of scientific reading. What becomes inter-
esting here, also, is not only the indirect means of integrating the work of women scientists
into current visual forms, but also how Redniss’s attempts to make visible the invisible,
drawing on historical documents and practices to make sense of science, art, and personal and
professional histories. The cyanotype links Radioactive to science as a technology, a medium
for conveying scientific information, and as historical and cultural practice. While the cya-
notype in the New York Public Library online exhibition functions as a site of a gaze that can
be at once empirical and esthetic, the larger narrative of Radioactive also directly encourages
its readers to engage in what I have termed a scientific practice of reading, engaging with
an empirical gaze as a site of handling many different pieces of information at once. When
considering Radioactive as a book that participates in cultural performances of sexuality and
gender, its discourse of the seen and unseen provides a launching point for additional theo-
retical and material considerations of the placement of women in science.
Unseen forces made visible

About a quarter of the way through Radioactive, Redniss begins a new chapter, “White Flash,”
with the following observation: “Electricity, the telegraph, x-ray, and now, radioactivity—at
the turn of the twentieth century a series of invisible forces were radically transforming daily
life” (52). This phrasing and its placement serves as a means of coalescing a series of ideas
248
about the unseen, what Redniss terms “invisible forces” (52) that inform both her graphic
novel and the scientific work of Pierre and Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, physicist Paul
Langevin, Irene Joliot-Curie, her husband Jean-Frederic, and their daughter Helene. As
Redniss herself says in an NPR interview, “It [the book] is largely about invisible forces….
Love and radioactivity, these things that we can’t see. To make a visual book about that was
an intriguing challenge” (NPR np). The means by which Redniss makes love and radioac-
tivity discernible to her readers parallels the images in the New York Public Library online
exhibit, combining multiple elements in order to convey scientific, cultural, and personal
information. This choice, the combination of public and private identity, was conscious, a
reintegration of the overlooked into what many people believe they understand as historical
and scientific truth.
Radioactive juxtaposes multiple elements from the first page. The book begins with an apol-
ogy to Madame Curie for connecting her work and personal life (5), followed by schematic
representations of polonium and radium, the classical electron configurations of elements
Pierre and Marie Curie discovered (6). But the next textual element in the book, an excerpt
from performer Loie Fuller’s 1911 lecture on radium (7), provides an essential context for the
rest of the novel. Beginning with an explanation of “magic” (7), Fuller discusses the means
by which science makes former mysteries visible, connecting spirituality, the human soul,
radiation, and the investigation of atoms (7). Thus, before either of the Curies is formally
introduced to Radioactive’s audience, the reader has already been presented with a series of
unseen things: love (3), fallout (3), the “connection between” Madame Curie’s personal life
and scientific work (5), electron shells (6), and the difficulties and promise of rendering visible
that which was formerly unseen (7). This is heady stuff in a visual artistic production and it
signals that extraordinary reading practices will be necessary. Furthermore, despite Redniss’s
stated intention not to forget Pierre Curie, Madame Curie’s voice opens the volume and
precedes our introduction to her husband, mentor, and teacher.
The first lines of Redniss’s narrative text in the story of Marie Curie simultaneously
prefigure Pierre Curie’s death and ground the events around the ensuing “tale of love and
fallout” in a circumscribed area of central Paris. Pierre Curie was born on the rue Cuvier, a
short walk from the laboratory where he worked and the Pont Neuf, where he lost his life
(96). “Catastrophism, a geological theory” (14) espoused by Georges Cuvier, the father of
comparative anatomy and paleontology, describes how “time lurches forward in sudden di-
sasters” (14). As Rif kind also noted, disasters like Pierre Curie’s death (96–100), the atomic
bomb (46–47, 77–85, 138–143), World War I (152–162), and Chernobyl (114–117) punctuate
the text, and the tale of love and fallout that characterized Madame Curie’s personal and
professional lives. These disasters contribute to what the New York Public Library exhibit
characterizes as a “formal yet tender” presentation of information, gently connecting the
fairy-tale romance of the Curies (and later their daughter Irene and granddaughter Helene)
to the horrifyingly destructive potential of the new technology as well as the deleterious
effects of moral judgment on scientific inquiry. In fact, coverage of Madame Curie’s adul-
terous affair with fellow student and colleague Paul Langevin (121–129, 132–137, 144–145,
148) punctuates information about nuclear weapons development. In contrast, the treatment
of Curietherapy (70–71) and X-rays (156–159), despite their actual and possible importance
in medicine, seems more difficult to locate in the text. One reading for this circumstance
of textual construction is that the role of disaster in this tale of love and fallout constrains
sexual relationships that are inevitably formed and carried out in conjunction with scientific
endeavor. Here, then, an empirical gaze can be applied not only to science but also to what
Madame Curie termed “the events of private life” (5).
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Competing gazes
As discussed above, the gaze, as figured through psychoanalysis, is a means of managing the
visual representation of gender, and specifically the means by which heteronormative look-
ing relations, in Mulvey’s initial model, are reinforced by narrative and visual elements in
popular culture. The operation of a quantum gaze allows for the viewer to establish essential
attributes, such as gender, of a body being seen. In Radioactive, one narrative thread—the
story of Madame Curie and her daughters—considers the relationship between sexual iden-
tity, love, and science and is thus susceptible to these gazes. Much like the more general
reading I offered above of the workings of an empirical gaze that requires readers to manage
varying pieces of information simultaneously, the narrative at once confirms and challenges
the connections between what Madame Curie herself called “my scientific work and the
facts of private life” (5). Yet, clearly, these worlds were imbricated and intertwined from the
outset of Redniss’s text. As the New York Public Library exhibition notes, the public press
was “captivated” by the Curie’s shared life and began stories about them with the fairy-tale
phrase “once upon a time” (np).
A scene in Radioactive (Figure 17.1, 45–46) illustrates a critical moment in the scientific life
and love of Pierre and Marie Curie. The left panel (45) describes the connections between
Pierre’s work, that of his brother, and the investigations that would lead Pierre and Marie
Curie, then newly married, to undertake an investigation into the heart of atomic matter
that would expand the periodic table, uncovering the as-yet unseen elements and forces that
bound and comprised the universe. Although the visual presentation seemingly segregates
the scientific apparatus on the left (45) from the romantically entwined figures on the right
(46), the narrative connects life, romantic attachment, and the development of a new branch
of science that would extend beyond the life’s work of two people and into the present day.
These connections are informed by earlier text that describes prior love failures for both the
Curies and which caused Pierre to swear off love (18–21). Thus, although their conversation
becomes “friendly” (27), the promise of “a great affection” (33) seems to cement a bond as
bound up in scientific exchange as romantic passion. And despite Madame Curie’s profound
grief (106) at the loss of her husband, the narrative continues to connect love (or at least sexual
congress) and scientific work for Madame Curie and her daughters.
After Pierre Curie’s death, Paul Langevin, another of Pierre Curie’s students (121), not
only becomes Madame Curie’s lover (122–123) but recommends Frederic Joliot (Irene Curie’s
future husband) for a job in the Curie lab (164). Public outcry over Langevin and Madame
Curie’s affair does not, ultimately, negatively impact their scientific work, largely because
figures like Albert Einstein (135) emphasize their value as scientists, a value not shared by
Langevin’s wife. And the “Daughter Elements” (151), which carry on the Curie tradition of
Nobel Laureate winning, remain connected to the life and work not only of their parents
but also of their mother’s former lover. These historical and biographical details can draw
added meaning from the opening words of Pierre Curie’s narrative within Radioactive (14),
not only insofar as Irene Curie enjoys a working partnership with her husband (thus avoid-
ing a sudden catastrophe), but also echoing the circumscription of these women’s scientific/
romantic lives. While Pierre Curie died within a 30-minute walk of his home, laboratory,
and birthplace, his daughter and granddaughter met her fate and future within the laboratory
itself. Thus, Radioactive’s use of maps and other visual and textual mentions of travel and relo-
cation also serves as a gentle reminder that the lives of great scientists may have far-reaching
consequences even if they seem completely wrapped up in a series of immediate and intimate
relationships.
250
The visual narrative of embodiment in Radioactive also hints that the collapse of life,
love, and science is the inevitable conclusion of the story of love and fallout. Not only does
the narrative reunite Marie and Pierre Curie in the Pantheon (183), but the visual narrative
of Madame Curie’s death (170–171; Figure 17.2) presents an eerie parallel of the image in
Figure 17.1 (45–46). In the depiction of Madame Curie’s death, we see a lone figure, sur-
rounded by radiant energy, occupying a space that used to be shared with her husband and
lover. The words that connected the apparatus of science and the married pair have been
displaced, overlaid on the body of a woman slowly dissolving under the freight of her own
discoveries, blind and unable to hear, slowly dwindling physically and mentally. In this,
the narrative mirrors Pierre Curie’s own experiences with radium, creating lesions on his
own body (70) and rejoicing in the power of radioactivity to destroy flesh, a property that
ultimately is linked to medicine, nuclear power, infidelity, and the devastating power of the
atomic bomb (Figure 17.5).
The bodily discourse of Radioactive explicitly connects particular events in the lives and
deaths of Pierre and Marie Curie with revelations about the world that are organized through
the scientific understanding of radioactivity, thus reinforcing the idea that readers must man-
age multiple different themes and what Renear and Palmer called “fragments of content”
(828). I opened this chapter by claiming that Radioactive provides an anchoring point for
making visible the contributions of women to science and connecting the work of botanist
Anna Atkins to Redniss’s artistic production. Ironically, when considering the idea of invis-
ible scientists, however, it seems that the sexual partners of a certain woman scientist, Marie
Curie, too, have been relegated to the realm of obscurity. Thus, Redniss’s text makes visible
not only the work of Madame Curie, her daughter Irene, and granddaughter Helene, but
also that of Pierre Curie and Paul Langevin as well as Pierre Joliot (Irene Curie’s husband)
and Michel Langevin (Helene’s husband and Paul Langevin’s grandson). These lives and loves
add to the freight of information Rif kind identified in the “visual-verbal” collage that is Ra-
dioactive, a series of unique and interrelated elements that must be interpreted and combined
by the reader.
In this chapter, I suggested that an empirical gaze, figured through Foucault’s clinical
gaze, is an important model for rendering the unknown into knowledge, managing infor-
mation, or reading across multiple sources. Radioactive is a compelling text for creating such a
Figure 17.5 Lauren Redniss. Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (2010)
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Lisa DeTora
theoretical model because the text itself comprises many and varied elements that interweave
cultural, scientific, historical, and personal information into a story that extends beyond the
boundaries of biography. These models of understanding might be useful as ways of reading
the body of science comics Farinella and Rif kind identify. However, I believe that further
work would be needed to refine the workings of what I termed a quantum gaze in con-
nection with Radioactive, in part because of the intellectual and artistic context of Redniss’s
work. It is difficult to make claims about the unseen possibilities within a book that takes as
its project finding ways to visualize invisible forces. Nevertheless, I believe that Radioactive
deserves further scholarly attention.
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Taylor & Francis
Part IV
Counterpublics
Taylor & Francis
18
From anodyne animals
to filthy beasts
Defying and defiling safety,
sanctity, and sexual suppression in
underground animal comics
Daniel F. Yezbick
It is a very human thing to imagine ourselves as animals, especially when our fantasies are
constructed around stories of sex and gender. As we look toward the inevitable climate crises,
potential extinction events, and probable human rights abuses of the encroaching Anthro-
pocene, it may now be even more dangerously anthrocentric to misconstrue the animal
elements of humanity, especially those concerns relating to sexuality, gender identity, and
the countless, comingling drives that pleasure and procreate both human and animal bodies.
The complex erotics of animal-centered, anthropomorphized, or otherwise “animeta-
phoric” comics – especially those that prowled the psychedelic fantasies, outlandish visions,
and bizarre realities of the Underground press – represent some of the most innovative,
eccentric, and empowering comic art of their times (Lippit 166). In Paul Wells’ terms, the
Underground’s always bold and often shocking efforts at “cross-species engagement” helped
to foster a newly transitive, “performance of identity” whose “unreal settings and impossible
situations” fostered playful and ambivalent perspectives on “contemporary issues” of sex,
gender, agency, and belonging (Wells 66).
To effectively understand the sequential animal’s role within the Underground’s anar-
chic politics, limitless perversity, and impenitent pornography, we should first consider the
conventional gender dynamics of the mainstream, “overground” Funny Animal types and
anthropomorphized characters that oppositional, outlaw artists so frequently appropriated
and gleefully defiled throughout the 1960s. The typical Funny Animal figure owes its mul-
timodal design to a wide range of art historical traditions keyed to concerns of culture and
desire. Its myriad contexts include fables and fabliaux, the sigils and crests of heraldry, alle-
gorical emblemata and illuminated incunabula of all sorts, the transgressive grotesques of car-
nivalesque frenzy and fantasy, the visual and material cultures of juvenile lessons and leisure,
the animal’s role in decorative arts and graphic design, and most especially the polygraphic
print and media cultures of iconotextual advertising, commodity exchange, and spectacu-
lar entertainment (Yezbick 2018, 32). As Glen Willmott observes, “what remains genetic
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to the Funny Animal and endures, however, is the plastic inhumanity or animalism of the
grotesque – now removed from the blank wall, cornice, or page of ornamental arts and
placed in a narrative of characters, plots, and the imagined social worlds that sustain them”
(Willmott 2018, 59). It is this plastic, playful inhumanity that so comforted and conformed
midcentury Americans with its slapstick inanities, and provoked later Underground revolu-
tionaries to new extremes of scandalous desecration.
Animal comics of all forms have been historically marginalized by fans and scholars as
primitive, infantile, insipid, or just plain bad.1 Despite the aesthetic vigor of foundational
texts like George Herriman’s dada-esque Krazy Kat, Carl Barks’ swashduckling Disney sto-
ries, or Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, Animal comics – developed across newspapers
and pamphlet periodicals for much of the last century – “came to largely define the art form
for many casual readers” who assumed they were aesthetically and ideologically little more
than childish trifles (Alaniz). As Lara Saguisag argues, however, animal comics’ lowly “kids’
stuff” status also helped to attract the interest of Underground creators and fuel their more
vehement “excoriations and parodies” of adult arrogance, elitist egoism, and highbrow hy-
pocrisy (72). At the same time, even conventional Funny Animal comics, developed for the
amusement of children and families, could produce what Paul Wells conceives as a provoc-
ative, “bestial ambivalence” concerning human and animal endeavor in the quickly shifting
commodity-driven cultures and conformity-crazed communities of postindustrial America
(Wells 72).
As Les Daniels observes in “Dumb Animals,” his perceptive essay on animal comics,
“animal creations achieved levels of imagination and insight which made them genuinely
worthy of respect. The mere fact beasts were performing in a human manner suggested by
the obvious contrast that a level of satiric comment might be present” (49). Most animal
comics, especially in the United States, are also closely bound to the licensed properties of
multimedia franchises developed out of animated Hollywood studio shorts, as well as once
ubiquitous Saturday morning TV shows, and children’s “after school” programming. For
most of the twentieth century, the bulk of these iconic characters, including Walt Disney’s
Donald Duck, Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny, Walter Lantz’s Andy Panda, MGM’s Barney
Bear, Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound, and hundreds of others, were adapted to comic
books via Western Publishing and Dell Comics, a symbiotic collaboration that dominated
the lion’s share of the American market for decades (Wright 18).
After World War II, Dell and other publishers also enjoyed an unprecedented “Animal
Comics Boom,” where middlebrow anthropomorphic slapstick humor reached new heights
of diversity and popularity. This flood of blatantly innocuous titles like Animal Antics, Funny
Animals, Happy Comics, Giggle, Goofy, and Ha Ha helped to establish the long-running bias
against comic books as mindless hokum or dangerously crude distractions from more whole-
some or productive interests, but it also sowed the creative seeds that would eventually yield
ground-breaking, politically poignant Underground satires in the following decade. At the
time, however, silly and “straight” animal farces dispersed across cinema, TV, and comics
held surprisingly cathartic, restorative purpose for children and adults struggling with post-
war shifts in gender, labor, and culture:
The power and beauty of these images came less from their appeal to a preadolescent
audience than from the fascination they held for their creators. The animals first of
all provided a link with a vision of America that was rapidly disappearing; a world of
small towns and barnyards that most of these men had known. Donald Duck makes it
clear in several stories that he “lives” fictionally in Burbank, but he is obviously from
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From anodyne animals to filthy beasts
much further East. Ducks live in Missouri and Kansas, not in Southern California. The
comics business was precarious – fantasy-ridden and fantasy-mongering - and for the
men who created these strips (as so obviously for the great Disney himself ), the animal
images were echoes of the collective past they had left behind. At the same time, it is not
surprising that men who were pressed for deadlines, who lived by their wits, who were
misfits in other occupations, who had lived through the Depression, should embody
their preoccupations with money and how to get it in the figures of irascible ducks and
shifty crows. … It is only temporarily amazing that out of such mixed motives emerged
such an enduring art, for the creators of these stories, apart from using figures that have
sources in great antiquity (Aesop’s fables for one), were appealing to basic human emo-
tions of insecurity and inequality. (Daniels 53–54)
Like many early comics historians, Daniels ignores non-masculine animators and cartoonists –
not to mention the diverse genders of myriad readers! – who struggled along with children
and adults of all ages and regions in American’s psycho-sexual midcentury identity crises.
Among the strange new fads and fetishes that arose to assuage its gender-driven anxieties,
a variety of hyper-commercial but incredibly comforting trivialities developed including
ultra-feminine Barbies, mega-macho G.I. Joes, and the frolicking hordes of Funny Animal
comedy (Alexandratos and Yezbick).
Many foundational texts within Animal Studies identify the seductive allure of the car-
toon animal as an especially troubling epistemological fissure or crack in the continuities of
human/animal relations.2 Funny Animal characters typically comprise what Groensteen has
identified as charming “little graphic machines,” ingeniously designed biomorphic signs of
human ascendency over and control of animal experience (32). The funny animal’s anthro-
pomorphic politics seems especially keyed to how it is humanized, or the extent to which
its body, its world, and its uses are removed from normative animalistic behaviors and wild
habitats. This distinction is crucial to understanding the revolutionary sexual qualities of
Underground comics surveyed in the following section.
The midcentury Funny Animal, in most genres and across most media, makes us imme-
diately aware of our own sexualized habits and gender codes, but via a strangely suppressed
and encrypted series of clues, hints, and suggestions. Conventional funny animals present
themselves with decidedly firm secondary sex characteristics, but never any emphasis on gen-
italia or even the slightest suggestion of their capacity for sexual pleasure or procreation.
Males – even those that don’t care for pants like Porky, Daffy, and Donald – are dressed in
traditional hetero garb and tend to stride, speak, and socialize through familiar cis idioms.
Females are derived as softer, more curvaceous copies of their male counterparts, prone also
to declaratively feminine clothing, cosmetics, and behaviors. Also, most female anthropo-
morphs present some subtle suggestion of human breasts placed near or very close to their
upper torsos, a uniquely human evolutionary characteristic shared by few other mammal
species (Williams 42). The strangely specific, but non-explicit formula not only suppresses
the natural sexual anatomy of multiple species including Homo sapiens, but also promotes
a perversely unyielding form of biomorphic repression that makes consumers of all ages less
comfortable, familiar, or interested in the sensual, erotic, or erogenous potential of their own
and other living bodies.
Moreover, the traditional Funny Animal performs only a thinly rendered whisper or hint
of traditional gender roles, suggesting that non-heteronormative or LGTBQ identities are
somehow less present, relevant, valid, or equal to straight male/female binaries.3 Thus, the
supposedly anodyne amusements of Funny Animal comedy actually perpetuate a severe and
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potentially debilitating orthodoxy that perpetuates fantastically sexless but overtly gendered
bodies, almost completely devoid of eroticism. As Alaniz notes, the typical Funny Animal
personality encourages “the strategic blurring of the boundary between human and animal”
and radically “destabilizes both” (Alaniz).
Yet, the very act of anthropomorphic juxtaposition or intertwining highly gendered bod-
ies, suggests another more effusive, anarchic, and potentially subversive theme within animal
comics. Willmott explains that these fabulous “stylized persons” signify a “transcultural
process in human ontogenetic development” rooted in the slippery pleasures of performa-
tive hybridity (55). In other words, the hybridized structure of anthropomorphic animals is
inherently sensual in its eroticizing of outlandish, zoomorphic bodies which transgress or
transpose – humorously, monstrously, or both – established realities of science, language,
species, and identity. Chaney also sees anthropomorphic transformation, or the intermeshing
of human self and animal other, as an evocative, appealing “queering of the [human] body”
that can become as liberating and revelatory as it is mysterious and seductive (Chaney 134).
A considerable portion of this pleasurable remixing or exploratory intercourse is bound
up in the sexual politics of anthropomorphism. Steve Baker identifies two differing strategies
of playfully sharing, fusing, or coupling organic bodies across species. Both are crucial to the
ongoing analysis of the sequential animal and especially relevant to experiments with anthro-
pomorphic pleasure in many Underground comics. Baker differentiates between singular
therianmorphic fusions of blended animalized humanoid individual bodies like Scooby-Doo
or Cerebus from wholly theriomorphic worlds that intermesh human concerns with broadly
animalized people such as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar’s
McConey and Dungeon series (Baker 1993, 108). Following in the universally theriomorphic
traditions of Herriman’s Kokonino Kounty or Barks’ Duckburg, these are human worlds
made over as animetaphoric realms, sometimes even with lushly rendered Wilderness-driven
camouflage like David Peterson’s Mouse Guard or Ash Macko and Ashley Witter’s Squarriors.
Theriomorphic worlds generally function without consistent human figures, emphasizing
the peculiar appeal of their curiously re-mastered beast people.
Baker’s other, individualized therianthropic mode involves a more adamantly sensual, mu-
tational, and potentially fetishistic enhancement, modification, or disguise of human bodies
with animal features, forms, and abilities. Therianthropic characters develop animal-esque
pieces, parts, or accoutrements that advertise their difference, purpose, or uniqueness through
extended senses, talents, or signifying identities such as Schulz’s Snoopy, Davis’ Garfield and
Odie, or Conley’s Bucky Katt. It also applies more loosely to a number of animal-themed
super-hero genres and tropes as in Ditko and Lee’s Spider-Man, Trina Robbins’ Panthea, or
Grant Morrison’s celebrated revamp of Animal Man. Such characters may function within an
otherwise human world like Batman or even Man-Bat, but their super- or posthuman talents
are generally more emphatic, ambivalent, and outlandish within their narrative contexts.
Two other modes of traditional sequential animal narrative contribute to the Under-
ground’s pervasive revision of sexual themes and conflicts. First, animal comics of all forms
and origins are deeply invested in the culture of pets and their intimate relationships with
their owners, companions, and communities. Barney Google and Spark Plug; Little Orphan
Annie and Sandy; Tintin and Snowy; Rueben Flagg and Raoul; and Captain Marvel and
Chewie/Goose, her pet cat/flerken partner; each suggests the complex gender dynamics
associated with the companion animals of comics culture.4 Lastly, the Underground’s in-
herently oppositional perspectives on the hypocrisies of mainstream life, art, and belief also
introduced the first adamantly angry, openly eroticized, animal agency in American com-
ics.5 Though editorial cartoons, polygraphic newspaper comics, and even Tijuana Bibles
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frequently featured uproarious animals in their broad satires of human vice well before the
rise of Underground and Alternative animal comics, key titles like Yellow Dog, Insect Fear,
Bizarre Sex, and, somewhat later, Quack! and Raw, introduced shocking variations on the
timeless animal allegory that used sadism, sex, and violence to confound, critique, and con-
demn callous human failures.
Funny animal abuse: animal sex and animetaphoric revolt

Rape, incest, bestiality, cannibalism, scatology, genocide, infanticide, and child sexual abuse
are just some of the more disconcerting taboos explored through Underground and Alter-
native animal comics. Generally, “Underground comics both reflected and transmitted the
counter-cultural message: unlike the first adult comics of the 19th century, they were satiri-
cal and revolutionary. Produced outside the commercial mainstream, they were often called
‘comix’ (sometimes ‘komix’) both in contra-distinction to their straight counterpart and to
denote their ‘x-rated’ content” (Sabin 36). Developed mainly out of scurrilous alternative
press movements in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, the Undergrounds took their
creative cues from Harvey Kurtman’s Mad and its many imitators including Help!, Trump,
Cracked, and Sick, as well as the sardonic traditions of college humor magazines and mail or-
der fanzines, which also toyed occasionally with anthropomorphic forms (Rosenkranz 26).6
The earliest Underground comics arose largely out of the counter-culture newspapers –
notably California’s The Berkeley Barb and LA Free Press, New York City’s East Village Other
and Screw (Sabin 37). Their comics sections’ most enticing innovation was an obvious decon-
struction of established cute, childish, or otherwise innocent and innocuous “Disneyesque
drawing style, contrasted with subject-matter involving explicit sex, sophisticated politics,
and drugs” (Sabin 37). From their inception, Underground comics “acknowledged and
evoked comics’ connections with childhood,” and their “recurrent explorations of the over-
lap between” their anti-establishmentarian interests and genres like Funny Animal comedy
helped to develop their uniquely styled dissent and dissolution (Saguisag 72).
In fact, one of the Underground’s longest running anthologies, Yellow Dog, derived its
spiteful perspective from newspaper comics’ long traditions of scorn, satire, and slander.
Originally developed out of the alternative press, Don Shenker notes that “Yellow Dog was
designed to be a naughty paper,” with its titular canine mascot “pissing originally on Herman
Melville’s Captain Ahab” to “show contempt for symbolism” supporting any highbrow or
elitist presumptions (Estern 54). Historian James Estern observes, “The Yellow Dog is the
underground answer to Alfred E. Neuman – like the Mad-man, the Dog traces his ancestry
straight to the Yellow Kid” (54). With 25 issues produced between 1968 and 1973, Yellow
Dog “came out more times than any other underground comic,” and its wide variety of
features, both animal and otherwise, were generally defined by its scatological masthead
whose vulgar antics became more rambunctious and offensive with each issue.7 Such animal
behaviors, quite natural and familiar to non-human experience, immediately foreground
the Underground’s oppositional or outlaw perspectives on accepted standards of constructed
human privacy, decency, and propriety. These concerns would find even greater voice in the
Underground animal narratives themselves, some of which would become too scandalous for
their targets to legally tolerate.
Anthropomorphic narratives and animal themes were seminal to Underground comics
from their earliest incarnations, and various creators were especially ingenious and relent-
less in their shocking assaults on the anodyne sexlessness of mainstream Funny Animal art.
Disney characters were favorite targets, especially Mickey Mouse himself, and scandalous
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Daniel F. Yezbick
parodies of Uncle Walt’s marquee mouse were legion, including Rick Griffin’s infamous
1967 Sunday Funnies poster and high-profile 14 September 1968 Rolling Stone cover featur-
ing a Mickey parody lighting up a spiff in an All-American Cowboy stance ( Rosenkranz 81).
Other Underground mousecapades included Wally Wood’s 1967 x-rated assault on ther-
iomorphic innocence, the Disneyland Memorial Orgy, published as a centerfold in Paul
Kassner’s The Realist, Robert Armstrong’s Mickey Rat series, and the landmark satires of Dan
O’Neill’s Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates and Dan O’Neill’s Comics and Stories (Yoe 144).8
O’Neill’s depictions of a fornicating, drug snorting Mickey Mouse in 1971 earned him
years of harassment from Disney’s legal department, but his all-too-faithful renditions of
their iconic mouse were nowhere near as vulgar or explicit as an earlier Tijuana Bible that
featured Mickey, Minnie, and Donald in shocking sexual escapades including vaginal, oral,
and anal penetration. O’Neill’s Air Pirates narrative reveals a sexually insecure Mickey Mouse
lamenting aloud, “Why won’t anybody fuck me?” Desperate circumstances eventually
weaken Minnie’s resistance, and she allows him the pleasure of cunnilingus, again depicted
directly and with worrisome attention to the iconic features of both copyrighted characters.
By contrast, the 1930s Tijuana Bible titled “Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck” explicitly
describes a raucous anal ménage a trois between Mickey, Minnie, and Donald that makes the
Air Pirates version seem relatively mild (Merkin 41). The contrast across time and format reveals
that the perverse urge to eroticize Funny Animal icons – literally stripping off their protective
layers of andyne decency – is not specific to the Underground, or even necessarily to anthro-
pomorphic comics. Even the first panel of the first story of Zap Comics, the watershed publica-
tion that arguably launched the Underground industry, includes a diminutive M ickey-esque
mouse who publically taunts and abuses Crumb’s famously miserable Whiteman in the midst
of an existential tantrum over his own wasted privilege (Figures 18.1 and 18.2).
Several of the Underground’s most popular satires depicted otherwise cute, courageous,
or charismatic anthropomorphs engaged in rude, lewd, and nude shenanigans. The most in-
famous examples include R. Crumb’s salacious feline lothario, Fritz the Cat; Gilbert Shelton’s
snout-screwing super-beastie, Wonder Wart-Hog; Robert Williams’ orgiastic Coochy
Cooty adventures; Jay Lynch’s quirky bromance between Nard and his nearly human cat pal,
Pat; Bill Griffith’s Tales of his shiftless Toad (once criticized by Screw’s Al Goldstein for its
“anti-sexual” assaults on normative erotic media); Bobby London’s parodic Dirty Duck and
Weevil bromances that borrow heavily from Herriman’s Krazy Kat scenarios; and perhaps
Figure 18.1 “Early antics in pre-Underground Tijuana bibles confirm that the erotic desecration
of iconic animal pals is an urge common to all eras of American comics”
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Figure 18.2 Dan O’Neill’s purposely scandalous 1971 Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates
most outlandish of all, Victor Moscoso’s full-page phantasmagoric mutations of iconic Funny
Animal icons (Rosenkranz 106). 9 Moscoso’s surreal works were loosely constructed, barely
narrative dreamscapes populated with wildly eroticized Disney-esque ducks and mice whose
bodies would fuse and float through numerous sexual postures and positions like an acid-
fueled, lava lamp of disassociated theriomorphic desire (Figure 18.3).10
Other more obscure creators continued the Underground agenda of debasing and defiling
the forced innocence and hetero-normative restrictions of overground Funny Animal frolics.
Like Sheldon, O’Neill, and Crumb, these texts laid bare the taboo elements of human vice
and animal urges with explosive emphasis on “drugs, sex (accurate drawings of penises, va-
ginas, and other necessary evils), shit, religion, snot, politics,” and “worst of all… these topics
are Right Out in The Open” (Estren 17). Funny Animal-themed anthologies like Insect Fear,
Funny Aminals, Cloud Comics Presents All Duck stories, No Ducks, Bizarre Sex, and the Alter-
native Press’ later Quack! series from Star Reach’s Mike Friedrich each dedicated the bulk of
their contents to scurrilous deconstructions of anemic Funny Animal tropes and traditions.
Like his iconic house mouse, Disney’s Ducks were generally assaulted and abused in perverse
homage to the ambivalent allegories of Carl Barks’ influential work with Dell’s Uncle Scrooge
and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories titles.
Figure 18.3 Victor Moscoso’s two-page spread from Zap No. 3 (1969)
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Daniel F. Yezbick
Barks himself was a shrewd master of imbuing greed, lust, and wickedness into other-
wise antiseptic anthropomorphs and Underground cartoonists reveled in scraping away the
layers of propriety that kept his ducktagonists neat and tidy (Yezbick 778).11 Exaggerating
the thrilling violence of Barksian satire, Ned Sonntag, Peter Bromley, and others intro-
duced brutally explicit duck tales involving Manson-esque murder cults like “Noah Esca-
rol”/Jay Epstein’s “Ronald Duck, the Sex Maniquack,” and Bill Skurski’s “Flexi-Duck, the
Malleable Mallard” (“He’ll stretch your mind!”) whose “Other Lips…Other kisses!” episode
in Cloud Comics No. 2 ends with climactic, self-satisfied bestiality.12 Tim Boxell’s No Ducks
title explored the opposite side of theriomorphic excess by purposely avoiding all Barks
duckisms and focusing instead on the predator’s perspective, especially Boxell’s child-eating,
duck-murdering Lone Wolf.
Other recurring features introduced a more feminist perspective on animalized sex. Evert
Geradt’s Ma Cow shorts from Snarf and Bizarre Sex used classic Funny Animal design to
expose the sexual miseries of a troubled heifer house wife doomed to serve the needs of her
endlessly horny and lazy husband-steer.
In one especially witty episode, Ma Cow’s spouse begs her to consider anal sex to spice up
their intercourse after the tedium of 20 years of marriage. Shocked and dismayed, Ma Cow
weeps and wonders, “Of all the dirty things! Oh how can I ever respect you again?” Her
husband dismisses her concerns declaring, “I guessed you’d say that. Oh, skip the dramatics.
I’m going to hit the hay.” In Geradt’s witty conclusion, Ma Cow acquiesces, but only on
one guiding condition: “OK Big Boy, you can fuck my ass if I can fuck your ass first!” She
then produces an enormous dildo whose pending purpose repulses her hetero-hypocritical
husband. His protests conclude the story as he declares, “Of all the dirty things!” Ma com-
pletes his thought by appropriating his earlier cavalier dismissal of her own sexual prefer-
ences, “I guessed you’d say that!” Through Geradt’s eroticizing of Funny Animal forms,
his Underground sensibilities expose not only the artificial innocence of cartoony cows,
but also the inherent hypocrisy of those who take more than they give in human sexual
relationships.
Similar theriomorphic sex fables also informed one of the Underground’s most vehement
send-ups of arrogant jock culture in Jim Himes’ 1973 Big League Laffs, whose cover literally
lays bare the violence and misogyny of contact sports. The anthology’s longest, most narra-
tively complex tale, “Derby Disaster,” develops as a tell all, true crime story describing the
tragic love of a canine couple. It slips in and out of competing narrative strands – human
and bestial – with unparalleled grace, remarkably intricate draughtsmanship, and shocking
emotional intimacy. Even this story, however, is not as sexually potent as Himes’ “The Doity
Boids” two-pager which revels in the sexual comeuppance of Biggy, a homophobic jock
eagle, at the “hands” of Billy, a trans-gendered girly bird (Figure 18.4).
Another example, the 1972 one-shot, all-star jam, Funny Aminals, touted as the cute little
creatures’ “kollege of karnal knowledge,” may remain the Underground’s single most in-
fluential anthropomorphic publication. Including a lengthy commentary on the differences
between prostitution and companion animal experience by Shary Flenniken; Jay Lynch’s
hilarious “Stinky the Pig” short story; several animal fetish features by Crumb and Lynch, a
Bill Griffith Toad tale, and an unusual anthropomorphic entry from Justin Green exploring
his signature theme of Catholic guilt. Most importantly, the title also introduces Art Spiegel-
man’s first efforts to apply animal metaphors to his family’s Holocaust experience entitled
“Maus.” Even here, on its very first page, animalized sexual violence comes to the fore as
a grinning Nazi cat viciously assaults a Jewish mouse with forced fellatio on a Luger pistol.
Later, Spiegelman’s more meticulously crafted Maus mini-comics from Raw Magazine would
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Figure 18.4 Jim Himes’ “The Doity Boids” from Big League Laffs (1973)
famously expand this theriomorphic prototype into boundary-shattering reportage on his

family’s complex interactions in the wake of genocide, suicide, and dysfunction.
Other creators would focus more directly on animalized sex and sex work as social com-
mentary. Beginning with a number of low print fanzines and eventually becoming the mar-
quee feature of the long-running Underground anthology, Bizarre Sex, Reed Waller and
Kate Worley’s thoughtful, patient, and endearing theriomorphic soap opera, “Omaha, the
Cat Dancer,” spoke out for a variety of sex-positive concerns as it condemned racketeering,
civic corruption, and urban renewal.13
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Worley herself has received posthumous appreciation as a rediscovered animal comics

auteur, whose gift was fusing sexual politics with anthropomorphic forms. As her 2020 New
York Times “Overlooked” obituary observes, she “gave the comic its distinctive voice and
helped cultivate its wide-ranging fan base,” rooted largely in how she “expanded the cast,
giving Omaha a best friend, Shelley, who used a wheelchair, and adding gay, lesbian and
bisexual characters, making the comic book relatable to a wider audience”(Gustines). The
subject of several international pornography and free speech legal battles, a 1990 Indecency
Publications Tribunal in New Zealand not only exonerated Worley and Waller’s Omaha the
Cat Dancer, but even praised it for its mature representation of sexual activity, “portrayed
in the context of permanent, loving relationships between articulate, caring and reasoning
characters” (Gustines).
Developed in homage to the Bohemian lifestyles of those who cavorted in 1970s Minne-
apolis’ seedy “Block E,” Omaha’s celebration of all forms of sexual expression, from exotic
dancing and sex work, to open hetero and homosexual relationships, helped to critique the
“ulterior motives behind decency”:
Omaha carved out new territory, depicting sex in a far more positive light than earlier
underground or alternative comics had. …Through its depiction of sex workers and
adult entertainers as real people living in a real place, it engages in activism on sex work-
ers’ behalf. It creates a counterpublic of readers who sympathize with sex workers, rather
than seeing such people in the dehumanizing light in which most media texts present
them. (Kashtan 57)
Though Reed and Waller’s sex-positive saga became the most romantically sensitive and
narratively sophisticated of the Underground and Alternative press’ animal statements about
sexual diversity, other creators continued to defy restrictive traditions or abusive assumptions
about sexual identity.
As LGTBQ-friendly anthologies like Bizarre Sex, Gay Comics, Young Lust, Wimmen’s
Comix, and Tits & Clits pushed the boundaries of sequential eroticism, even more excit-
ing, imaginative, and empowering animal comics arose to speak for all manner of gender
perspectives.14 Jay Lynch may have broken boundaries when his Nard and Pat serial fea-
tured a heartfelt moment where, at one point, the human “character is two-timed by his
own pet,” but several women cartoonists took themes of anthropomorphic sex, bestiality,
and animal resistance even further artistically and politically (Horn 88). Developing a
new and more progressively focused “sexualized visual idiom” for Underground Comix,
women creators brought fierce new bite and lush lyricism to their theriantropic creations
(Misemer 7).
As Galvan and Misemer have argued, the sexual politics of non-hetero and female Un-
derground creators are more politically poignant, narratively sophisticated, contemplative
and controlled, though no less modest or uncompromised than their male counterparts. As
a group, these later, but more thoroughly realized, aesthetically sophisticated, and politically
charged works provided rich representation and dynamic agency through a “flourishing of
marginalized perspectives” that pushed “the spirit of the Underground forward” (Galvan
94). This follows, in part, because a new generation of “Runaway daughters, ” including Lee
Marrs and Trina Robbins, was concerned with Pacifism, sexual freedom, and mind-altering
drugs,” and to promote their interests they decided “to use the comics medium to tell stories
that were more valid,” innovative, and sexually responsible (Robbins and Yronwode 79).
Disappointed and disgusted by the heavy use of sexual violence, misogyny, and homophobia
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in much of the Underground output, they banded together via what Misemer dubs “Feminist
correspondence zones” to forge their own stories, titles, and collections (9).
Animal comics of all sorts were crucial to the Underground Feminist address. The inside
back cover of the 1972 premiere issue of Tits & Clits even boasts a hilarious full-page beauty
pageant send-up, “The Miss Universal Udder Contest,” were contestants – all goats – are
scored according to “horniness” and “udder size and firmness,” among other objectifying
criteria. Several installments of Wimmen’s Comix include anthropomorphic covers, including
Edna Jundis’ nude duck-billed skinny-dipper from the second issue, and Melinda Gebbie’s
“Ms. Gazzalina Tindent” from No. 4 evokes a startling confessional where the artist admits
she was sexually attracted to Donald Duck as a child because he never wore any shorts.
Gebbie’s juvenile arousal helps to critique the supposed sexlessness of carefully sanitized,
anodyne animal commodities, but other creators would build startling statements of sexual
independence, experiment, and protest out of even more ambitious stories.
Animal-theme stories and theriantropic figures arise throughout Underground women’s
anthologies. Tits & Clits 2 (1976) and 3 (1977) featured the continuing frustrations of Lyn
Chevli and Joyce Farmer’s aging feline, Persephone, who has “prowled around plenty” in
her time but now seeks the elusive comforts of intimacy, companionship, and community
among her menopausal peers and ex-lovers. The powerful use of a loyal companion crow
from Karen Feinberg and Joyce Farmer’s recurring adaptations of “The Sisters of Barrow”
from Tits & Clits 4 (1977) and 5 (1979) is even more intriguing for their vivid and positive
portrayal of an unorthodox solidarity between women and animals that perpetually foils the
plots of unsavory or dishonest men.
Appearing across a number of Underground and mainstream periodicals including the
lauded humor magazine, National Lampoon, Shary Flenniken’s “Bonnie and Trots” stories
appropriated the sweet pet-centered pastorals of Clare Briggs’ “When a Feller Needs a
Friend” and Edwina Dumm’s “Tippie” and laced her “girl and her dog”’ hi-jinks with
fierce satires of human and animal cruelty. Other Underground feminists helped to revise
the gender dynamics of the companion pet comic in many ways, including Michelle Brand,
whose trippy tale of trust and loyalty between a cosmic explorer and her dog, “There I
Was…,” brought beauty and optimism to the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix. A later one-
page tale from Wimmen’s Comix No. 6, “Reactionary Comics,” by Margery Peters, cred-
ited as Petchesky, rewrites history. In this Feminist parable, Pocahontas dresses down John
Smith as a “dirty old misogynist” with a “girl on every continent.” An entire chorus of
companion animals posse up to support her throwing shade on Eurocentric abuses of Native
American heritage. Their grudges ranging from the offensive names of professional sports
teams to Jay Silverheels. The animals flock to Pocahontas, who eventually does decide to
sleep with John Smith of her own free will, but the cautionary creatures include a deer,
a skunk, a butterfly, a walleye, a woodpecker, a rabbit, a beaver, and a mallard – quite a
dissonant menagerie to squeeze into a single page story. More intimate portrayals of the
bonds between women and animals arise in Aline Kominsky’s one-page gross-out, “Yusef
the Hair Sucker,” the tale of her loyalty to a neurotic Abyssinian cat who compulsively licks
its owner’s hair while she sleeps. Though she finds Yusef ’s “eccentric behavior endearing,”
the cat’s obsessive sucking of her body hair is focalized in two astonishing abstracted panels
that reveal his erect genitalia, Kominsky’s satisfied expression, and endless gobs of stream-
ing cat saliva. The sequence pushes past Derrida’s animalscéant boundaries which generally
define normative or proper pet ownership and forces readers into the more extreme human/
animal zones of shared bodily intimacy discussed by Donna J. Haraway and Mel Y. Chen
(Kominsky 166) (Figure 18.5).
267
Daniel F. Yezbick
Figure 18.5 Aline Kominsky’s “Yusef the Hair Sucker” from Titters (1976)
Like Kominsky’s dynamic rendition of cross-species familiarity, Melinda Gebbie’s tale,

“My Kitty Loves to do the Chacha,” pushes feminist eroticism ever closer to extremes of
bestiality that Misemer describes as daring, but “disturbing eroticism” (Misemer 23). In
Gebbie’s 1974 story from Wimmen’s Comix No. 5, signed Clothide, a randy housecat named
Ramona urinates in the candy box given to its male owner’s lover. Ramona then embarks
on an urban sexual odyssey involving several cross-species partners including cats, dogs, and
eventually a ménage a trois with her human owner. The story concludes when female par-
ticipant borrows Ramona “for a few days” in order to enjoy her prowess at licking enticing
areas and used undergarments. Like Kominsky, Gebbie uses spastic, unorthodox mise-en-page
to hint at the intensity and variety of Ramona’s trysts, but even the extremity of this story
cannot match the work of Dori Seda, the Underground’s true auteur of hilariously aesthet-
icized bestiality.
As shocking and frank as her all-too-brief, free-spirited life, Seda’s comics continually
evoke companion animal relationships to question her intimate experiences with men and
women.15 Several stories including “The Artist Meets a Swinger, or Crabs Eating Raoul”
from Weirdo No. 9 in 1983, “Yuckaroonies” from Viper in 1985, and “Laundry Day Delights”
from Lonely Nights No. 1 in 1986 all explore the truly animalscèant limits of human/pet co-
habitation. Through antic portrayals of shared de-lousings and secret “no humans allowed”
animal orgies, Seda fearlessly explores her vivid and intense affection for her unflappable
268
Doberman, Tona. So much so that in Lonely Nights’ outré “Fuck Story,” Seda’s own charac-
ters abandon her in the middle of an orgy and jump off her drawing board Pirandello-style
because she goes too far and gets Tona involved in all of their tonguing and humping. Seda
apologies and admits, “I was only trying to make the plot a little more interesting,” but Tona
himself gets the last laugh, confirming that this is “the best story she ever did.”
In some cases, Underground feminists’ “best work” with animal comics could take years
to surface. Comics pioneer and herstorian, Trina Robbins often appropriated superhero
and superheroine themes for her lively Panthea material in Gothic Blimp Works, the comics-
focused supplement of the East Village Other. Panthea comprised “a creature half lady and half
lion who was transported from Africa with painful results,” like so many human slaves and
exotic animal commodities under postcolonial control (Daniels 176). Robbins also included
anthropomorphic comment in her one-shot anthologies like the ground-breaking 1970 It
Ain’t Me Babe, where Elsie the Cow joins the cover’s parade of rebellious female characters,
and “Fatima and the Lion” from another 1970 one-shot, All Girl Thrills, wherein an intrepid
adventuress and her lover are transformed into a pair of lions who dine on the body of their
antagonist, the evil wizard Ben Hasoun.
Yet, one of her most intriguing animal comics, completed in 1979, but unpublished until
2008 is “Pets,” a lush full-color, two-page science fiction story where reptilian aliens keep
naked humans as their companion animals. In the story, these supposedly superior lizard peo-
ple share quality time watching how their new female human interacts with Mithrid, the hu-
man male who has “always been the pet in the unit.” As they chaperone their newly adopted
female’s behavior towards with the surprised Mithrid, they comment wryly, “Oh! They’re
fighting! On their home planet, they always fought.” Once the human couple initiates in-
tercourse, the alien parents use their mating pets as lessons in responsible companion animal
care for their own offspring. As any reasonable parent might tell their children watching
animals mate, the lizard “Parent-Fraction” decides, “We’ll let her have one cub then we’ll
have to castrate him” (Robbins 2008, 105). Judging from these and other examples, animal
comics became a consistent and diversified element of the Underground Feminist perspective
on sex, gender, and the seemingly timeless frustrations of patriarchal privilege (Figure 18.6).
Eventually, like Trina Robbins’ pets, the more misogynistic, irresponsibly sexist ele-
ments of the Underground comics industry would more or less castrate themselves, implod-
ing on their own rebellious excesses and contrarian egos. The surviving sequential species
would evolve into more enduring countercultural concepts and migrate towards the more
Figure 18.6 Trina Robbins. “Pets” (1979)
269
Daniel F. Yezbick
sustainable habitats of the Alternative Press. Though these new small press animal comics
were never as ideologically radical, shockingly sexual, or wickedly transgressive, many did
refine their animetaphoric address to further probe the gaps between human and animal
experience. By the end of the 1980s, a host of fascinating creature comics arose in a new
“black and white animal boom” that blended Underground innovation and self-published
entrepreneurism with heady perspectives on anthropomorphism and animalscèant crisis.
These would include Larry Hama and Michael Golden’s Bucky O’Hare, Arn Saba’s Neil the
Horse, Joshua Quagmire’s Cutey Bunny, Steve Moncuse’s Fish Police, James Smith and Mike
Richardson’s Boris the Bear, and especially the trio of 1980s independent animal comics epics,
Dave Sim’s relentlessly irascible Cerebus the Aardvark; Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s global
sensation, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; and Stan Sakai’s remarkable ongoing fusion of
Japanese and American comics traditions, Usagi Yojimbo.16 Each of these angry anthropomor-
phic hybrids owes a foundational debt to the post-WWII Funny Animal boom when herds of
happily sanitized playpals thundered through popular culture. Their unique theriomorphic
and therianthropic storyforms, their defiance of conventional themes and genres, and their
resilient emphasis on the intimate connections between animal sexuality and human gender
identity comes from a more dangerous narrative niche. It derives, rudely and richly, from the
animetaphoric excesses of the Underground’s randy, radical sex-beasts.
Notes
1 Though many acknowledge a variety of landmark works in Animal Comics, the stain or shame of
ineptitude lingers over the genre as a whole as Barrier (2015), Witek (2016), and others have shown.
2 Berger identifies the artist and engraver, J.J. Granville as a seminal conduit in the art history of such
Funny Animal simulacra (Berger 17). Granville’s satiric visions generally depict theriomorphically al-
tered humans who are transmuted or intermingled with incongruous animal features. Often appear-
ing in interspecies groups that reflect their human occupations, Granville’s manimals are carefully
gendered, clothed, and contextualized in human terms that force viewers to consider the uncom-
fortable, often culturally dissonant epistemological gaps or slippages between human culture and
animal experience. These nineteenth-century humanoid beast people provide a defining innovation
in Funny Animal signification, especially for the conception and design of later remediated anthro-
pomorphs, especially at Disney and Warner Brothers Studios. Similar formulas seem to dictate the
design of multimodal animated icons from before McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur to beyond Pokemon’s
Pinkachu. The engineering of charismatic mice, ghost-hunting hounds, burger-flipping sponges, and
politically problematic frogs thus perpetuate Granville-esque fantasies of anthrocentric control and
exploitative pro-human hierarchies which trouble many theorists and scholars. Baudrillard condemns
the process as a simulacral denial of animal agency. Deleuze and Guattari conceive the process as a
perverse, self-destructive urge towards “becoming animal,” which Derrida likens to a spectacular
chimerical mask or desperate impersonation. Mizuta Lippit also addresses the animetaphoric replace-
ment of real animals with supposedly innocuous electric simulations, while Chaudhari examines the
same human exploitation of animality as a transgressively performed zooësis across species. Finally,
Willmott coalesces many of these perspectives in his analysis of inherently conflicted “problem crea-
tures” that all somehow cloak, obscure, or enshroud the animalescent rift between heavily mediated
human experience and frameworks of non-human instinct-enabled agency.
3 There are of course some fascinating exceptions including Herriman’s gender-switching Krazy Kat
and Bugs Bunny’s perpetual urges to cross-dress, but these and other variations require further,
individualized scrutiny.
4 Some comic strips like Edwina Dumm’s frantic Cap Stubbs and Tippie, Clifford McBride’s charm-
ing Napoleon and Uncle Elby, Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and Brad Anderson’s
Marmaduke have even involved themselves directly in the politics of animal rights, ethical pet care,
and the networking of pro-animal agencies.
5 Even in terms of companion animal comics, this is accurate. Fan favorite, Richard Corben, devel-
oped Rowlf, a sword and sorcery bestiality fantasy involving the gorgeous Maryara and her canine
270
savoir, the dog, who at times transforms into her human lover through dreams (Horn 1980, 211).
Even Art Spiegelman’s exercise in Art Deco eroticism, “Shaggy Dog Story” for Playboy, transforms
interspecies pet sex into a 12-panel essay in sensual design.
6 R. Crumb and his brother Charles had practiced their own private defilement of Funny Animal
formats with the juvenilia of their Funny Friends collaborations featuring Brombo the Panda in the
late 1950s, as well as three issues of their Foo fanzine before Robert launched his landmark Zap and
Snatch anthologies, loaded with Funny Animal excoriations (Estern 46).
7 By the end of its run, Yellow Dog’s namesake had taken over both its front and back covers, pissing,
humping, and hound-doging his way to iconic Underground status. The dirty dog remains, in
many ways, the ideological opposite of the smiling Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Porky Pig
logos which guarantee unquestionably clean, family friendly shenanigans to consumers of Disney
and Warner Brothers entertainments.
8 The story of O’Neill’s influential assault on Disney and the subsequent legal battle for the rights of
satirists have been well documented in Levin’s The Pirates and the Mouse.
9 Crumb’s theriomorphic “Dirty Dog” and “Fuzzy the Bunny” features from XYZ and Zap Comics
and the monstrous legions of vulture dominatrix demonesses from the Eggs Ackley installments
of Big Ass Comics are equally shocking in their portrayal of rape fantasies, sadistic misogyny, and
polymorphous fetishism.
Perhaps Crumb’s most outrageous assault on the warmth and innocence of commodified animal
pals arises in the much later tale, “Super Duck, the Cockeyed Wonder” from 2002s Mystic Comics
No. 3 which features theriomorphic waterfowl that resemble MLJ’s lesser known Super Duck cast
developed by Al Fagley and others between 1944 and 1960, rather than Carl Barks’ more iconic
Disney characters. Crumb’s tale is overrun with sexual dysfunctions including rampaging priapism,
vomiting, child abuse, and domestic violence. As powerfully as these explicit stories destroy and
debunk the anodyne animal playpals of Disney and Dell, they also exemplify what Galvan and
Misemer critique as an indulgent “male narrative” which “merely perpetuate an exaggerated ver-
sion of the heterosexism of mainstream media”(1).
10 Moscoso could also work with more focused animal erotica, as his sexual riff on Rumpelstiltskin
from 1975’s Zap No. 8 reveals. Before the orgiastic three-pager concludes, the titular dwarf has
boffed his “damsel in distress” several times, followed by a string of equally horny visitors that
include an especially well-hung Frog Prince, a nearly naked Goldilocks in search of bear-sized
satisfaction, and Doc and Dopey from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
11 This anxiety of influence comes full circle in the retired Barks’ later work with anthropomorphic oil
painting, which focused on nude duckling humanoids engaged in orgies of sex, avarice, and indul-
gence. Dell/Western Publishing frequently censored Barks’ Disney work for its potentially sugges-
tive or ethnically incorrect content, but Barks’ series of non-Disney duck paintings tore the modest
feathers from his theriomorphic waterfowl to reveal more frenetically foul urges and behaviors.
12 Several artists in Cloud Comics and other Underground titles periodically used pseudonyms, perhaps
to avoid the legal reactions of the Funny Animal interests they insulted.
13 Something of an Underground animal specialist, Waller also worked on the No Ducks title and
Worley’s own anthropomorphic fantasies first appeared in Vootie, a Funny Animal-themed fanzine.
14 As well as the 1988 British AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia) an-
thology featuring LGBTQ+ animal-themed work from many North American Underground and
Alternative creators.
15 Seda is powerfully profiled in the Les Blank and Maureen Gosling-directed 1987 documentary,
Gap-Toothed Women, for which Seda herself provided promotional artwork featuring women and
animals cavorting joyously together.
16 For more comprehensive treatment of the Alternative Press Animal comics and their debt to the
underground, please see (Yezbick 2012, 2018).
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19
Wonder Woman’s complicated
relationship with feminism
George Thomas
The bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, has a special place in the world of superheroes.
The destruction of Superman’s planet, the death of Batman’s parents, and many more such
stories have been retold time and time again, always setting the stage for the next iteration of
the massively influential characters they produce. A new take on an origin story is a popular
way for a new writer to establish themselves in the character when the old writer has handed
off the baton, but core elements tend to remain constant. Regardless of whether they’ve
picked up a Spiderman comic book or not, almost any American can complete the phrase
“With great power…”1 With this in mind we will look at four interpretations of Wonder
Woman’s origin by four different writers, from the very first appearance of Wonder Woman
to one of her most recent reimaginings. Wonder Woman’s origin story is traditionally di-
vided into two major setpieces. The origin of the Amazons, the basis of their powers, and
the events leading up to their separation from the outside world forms the first half before
Wonder Woman herself comes to be. The second half is centered around Wonder Woman’s
“birth” at the hands of Hippolyta, and the means by which she leaves Paradise Island (or New
Themyscira) and enters the “man’s world.” The existence of this island of women is arguably
as important as the main character; so rarely in comics do we see women exist as the majority
of characters in any given setting that an island consisting entirely of women is as significant
as the hero herself.
We will begin, however, with Wonder Woman’s real-world origins. After her introduc-
tion in All Star Comics #8 in late 1941, she was given the center stage in Sensation Comics #1
in January of 1942. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, was a prominent psychologist
who wrote under the pen name Charles Moulton for most of his lifetime. Marston was a
self-identified feminist in his time, born and raised at a pivotal period in the history of the
women’s suffrage movement, studying psychology at Harvard University during World War
I and seeing the growing social unrest in the form of public protests and their resulting
arrests. By the time Marston completed his PhD in 1921, the 19th Amendment had been
ratified and the central aim of first-wave feminism had been achieved.2 Marston could hardly
have been unaware of this environment; by 1920 he was already working professionally with
the woman who would soon become his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, an outspoken supporter
of the feminist movement. In 1925, not long after his marriage, Doctor Marston met Olive
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Wonder Woman’s relationship with feminism
Byrne. She joined the Marstons in their home, and the doctor fathered two children with
each of his partners between 1928 and 1933. During his earlier life and then through his new
partner, Dr. Marston became aware of Byrne’s aunt, Margaret Sanger, a major proponent of
women’s suffrage and legal birth control. The frequent usage of chains and bondage imagery
in the propaganda of these movements would have a major influence on the character of
Wonder Woman and her development as a hero.
Yet for all his claims of support for the cause of feminism, Dr. Marston’s ideals don’t hold
up under closer scrutiny. He frequently clashed with the editors at DC, as well as academ-
ics like Josette Frank, an expert in children’s literature who spoke out about the frequently
cruel treatment of Wonder Woman in her eponymous comic strip. Dr. Marston claimed that
“Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe,
should rule the world.”
Modern feminist critics would be quick to point out that female superiority, much
like male superiority, is not in line with the feminist ideal of gender equality. 3 Yet even
this claim of Marston’s is suspect, given his real-life exchanges with editors and critics.
On one occasion, Dorothy Rubicek spoke out about Wonder Woman’s repeated sadis-
tic treatment at the hands of her creator. Rubicek, an editor for both Wonder Woman
and Superman, wrote several issues of Wonder Woman in the 1940s, making her the
first (though uncredited) writer of that series.4 Despite all of this, when she appealed to
Marston through an intermediary about reducing how often his character was pictured
in ropes and chains, his reply was blunt. “Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek
to understand all this. After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psycholog-
ical principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never
in psychology… The secret of woman’s allure [is that] women enjoy submission—being
bound.” Even given the historical context in which he lived, Dr. Marston’s status as a
feminist was questionable at best, and as we dive into our examination of the texts we
will see even more evidence of this.
Wonder Woman, July 1942

Mere months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US involvement in World War II had
already become a fact of life. Hundreds of thousands of US servicemen had already departed
for the European front, leaving a vacuum of labor in their wake that women were quick to
fill. As demand for military goods and manufacturing skyrocketed, and the supply of men
to occupy the relevant jobs decreased, the number of women employed in manual labor and
factory work reached record levels in the USA. With their new positions came financial
independence that most women had never experienced before. Women joined labor unions
to ensure the security of their newfound financial liberation, and many established a degree
of control in the household that lasted long after the war itself. With a source of income,
women found a voice that they had been long denied in the day-to-day financial decisions
of their families.
In this turbulent time for gender politics, it is perhaps unsurprising that Wonder Woman
had her own emergence, splashed across the page in her debut self-titled work, Wonder
Woman #1. This first issue featured a cover drenched in patriotism: a dark-haired woman
in a star-spangled skirt, astride a stallion stomping its way into a trench full of Nazis. In the
background, soldiers likewise mounted follow close behind, weapons drawn. Within, the
comic featured multiple calls for its readers to invest in war bonds, something it shared with
many newspapers, films, and radio programs of the time.
275
George Thomas
The origin story itself, however, leaves something to be desired in the way of empowered
women. The comic opens with the discovery of a lost history, a rivalry between the god of
war, Ares, and the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Ares creates the race of men, who are depicted
murdering each other and selling women as commodities. In response Aphrodite creates a
race of superwomen, the Amazons, who establish the city of Amazonia. There’s a single
caveat: Aphrodite grants their queen her golden girdle, and states clearly that the Amazons
will be unconquerable only so long as it remains around her waist. This condition is repeated
multiple times, both by the queen herself and by Hercules, who is inspired by Ares to wage
war on the Amazons.
A note on the general quality of the writing is in order. The comics of the 1940s are a far
cry from what we see today. Ares is interchangeably referred to as Mars, backgrounds consist
of a single solid color, and sound effects are a selection of campy “KONK” and “BONG”
onomatopoeias. This was all perfectly in line with the state of the medium in general. The
comics of the time were not made to tackle serious issues or to display the heights and depths
of human emotions; they were zany, escapist adventures with a healthy dose of war propa-
ganda and patriotism sprinkled in. When we evaluate the artistic and narrative elements of
these older works, our standards must be adjusted accordingly. Specifically, our interest is in
the relative depictions of men and women: the narrative agency they are given, the differences
in their visual presentations, and the consequences of those differences.
With this in mind, the narrative vacillates between empowered women and feeble paper
cutouts while leaving men entirely within their own agency. Hercules is the strongest man
alive, not because he is a mortal agent of a god or because of any supernatural aid, but be-
cause he is a man and therefore strong. The Amazon queen Hippolyta, meanwhile, is entirely
reliant on her golden girdle for her power, and lacks even the mental fortitude to resist the
romantic advances of Hercules immediately after their battle. In a tent after Hercules’ defeat
at Hippolyta’s hands, the Amazon queen finds herself taken by his false declarations of love.
She even states aloud, when he asks to hold her girdle, that “I ought not—but I cannot resist
thee!” (Figure 19.1).
Mentally outclassed by the man, she is then helpless to fight back against him and is
thrown in chains. The entire Amazon army immediately crumbles before their opponents
when the girdle is taken from them, and in the space of three panels the women are being
bound and beaten by the men, whose strength is unaffected by the presence or absence of an
article of clothing.
Figure 19.1 Wonder Woman #1 (1942)
276
This trend of ambivalent female agency continues through Wonder Woman’s own or-
igin. When the Amazons eventually escape to Paradise Island, Wonder Woman is shaped
from clay and given life as Princess Diana, animation breathed into her by Aphrodite
herself. The girl rips trees up by their roots and outruns deer, enjoying the eternal life and
prodigious physical abilities granted to her by her divine matronage. Her independence
lasts a single page; the first full scene the audience sees of her adulthood is her discovery
and rescue of Steve Trevor, a US soldier whose plane crashes in the ocean near the island.
Diana, a brilliant scientist with her own laboratory, falls immediately in love with the
unconscious man and labors day and night to invent a device that will save his life. Once
again, the narrative dissonance is strong here. Our protagonist Diana, a formidable charac-
ter mentally and physically, is still entirely at the mercy of her affections for a man, just as
her mother was before Diana’s birth.
Even the Amazonian trials in the aftermath of Steve Tyler’s rescue cannot settle on the
issue of female empowerment. Aphrodite commands Hippolyta to hold a competition, with
the winner escorting Steve back to America to “fight war and evil.” The trials begin well
enough, with the Amazons engaged in mounted combat armed with swords, but the action
quickly strikes a sour note. Diana’s friend Mala is pinned during a wrestling match with a
character named “Fatsis,” whose weight prompts Mala to exclaim “Whoosh! If I don’t get
this two-ton grease heap off me quickly, I’ll suffocate!” It hardly needs to be stated that at
no point in the comic is attention brought to the body weight of any male character. Hav-
ing won the tournament by deflecting bullets with her bracers, Diana is awarded a uniform
crafted by the goddess Aphrodite herself. Yet the narrator cannot resist a cut even in Wonder
Woman’s moment of triumph: “Diana, like any other girl with new clothes, cannot wait to
try them on!”
Many narrative elements of the comic can be overlooked based on their historical context.
Diana conceals her identity from Steve Tyler by simply putting on a pair of glasses, but since
we see Superman pull the same trick as Clark Kent, we know that this is not any special
commentary on the attention paid to Diana’s gender by the characters around her. Similarly,
when she falls for the simple ploys and traps laid by her villains, Wonder Woman is simply
acting in the fine tradition of the superheroes that have come before her. Yet even given all
of these exceptions, there are too many scenes in which Wonder Woman’s gender is the sole
basis for unequal treatment to grant Dr. Marston much credit as a true supporter of the fem-
inist movement, even in the context of his time.
This discrepancy in treatment is most evident in the artistic direction of the comic. As
previously established, the visual simplicity of the piece is a product of its environment, but
this does not explain the difference we see in the treatment of men and women. Take Her-
cules and Hippolyta: both are military leaders, conquerors, and warriors in their own right.
Yet when they meet on the field of battle, and later in the tent after dark, there are stark dif-
ferences in their visual presentations. Hercules has a square chin and a deep brow, framing his
face in sharp lines and throwing his eyes into shadow. His jawline is carefully traced in every
shot of his face, regardless of the angle and ambient lighting, the creases on his forehead, and
frown lines on his cheeks lending harshness to his poisonous smiles and impassioned shouts.
Even his body, bare save for a loincloth and a lion skin draped over his back, has every muscle
painstakingly inked whether he is striding across a battlefield or laying in a tent in the dark-
ness. Hippolyta, meanwhile, is a paper doll, an airbrushed cutout with perfect makeup and
no wrinkle in sight. A single dash denotes a cheekbone or a chin in one shot or another, but
even in a closeup shot of Hippolyta’s weeping face after a brutal fight, her lipstick is perfectly
applied and her mascara doesn’t have a single smudge.
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George Thomas
Even when we’ve left the men behind and we have no masculine standard to compare
the Amazons to, their presentation is decidedly lacking when it comes to expressive facial
features. Mala, the aforementioned wrestler, survives multiple grueling rounds of physical
combat, and yet in the closeup of her face after being shot in the arm she is an impassive
supermodel (Figure 19.2).
There is no emotion or physical fatigue displayed in her features or her body language,
rendering her indistinguishable from the hundreds of seated women behind her. When there
is such a stark difference between the male and the female characters, a constant imbalance
of narrative and artistic attention, we cannot help but doubt Marston’s claims about being a
feminist, even an early one.
Wonder Woman, May 1958

The publishing of The Second Sex by French author Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 is often
considered to be the beginning of the second wave of feminism. Beauvoir’s argument that
women were second-class citizens as a consequence of their societal and reproductive sub-
ordination laid the groundwork for many of the issues that would arise in the 1960s and
1970s, from workplace inequalities and the reproductive rights of women to the many de
facto inequalities that the 19th amendment didn’t address or solve. More than a decade af-
ter Beauvoir’s book hit the shelves, new artists (Ross Andru and Mike Esposito) and a new
author (Robert Kanigher) decided to reimagine Wonder Woman’s origin story in the 98th
issue of her comic. Significantly, issue #98 was published during the development of the
very first legal prescription birth control pill, resulting from the efforts of activist Margaret
Sanger, philanthropist Katharine McCormick, and biologist Gregory Pincus, among oth-
ers. The advent of prescription birth control was a major piece of female liberation in the
USA, which included the women’s suffrage movement through World War I and continued
through the financial independence that many women experienced during World War II.
At the same time as second-wave feminist activists were pushing for the rights of a woman
to control of her body, the Cold War was in full swing and the importance of the American
nuclear family was being pushed on the country more strongly than ever. Nonconformists
to the traditional patriarchal structure were subjects of suspicion and hostility, with members
of the LGBT community constantly dogged by scrutiny and abuse. In this contentious en-
vironment, Wonder Woman became even more popular, selling more than 200,000 copies
278
per issue under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority.5 Despite the uncertain
times, comics as a whole were finding their footing as a recognizable art form. Narratives
were beginning to be carried across multiple issues more frequently, comic art was held to
a higher standard for the big-budget productions like DC, and the Silver Age of comics saw
the resurgence of the superhero genre in the mainstream.
As a visual narrative form, the new iteration of Wonder Woman was several steps ahead
of the original. The colors were more defined, the linework was cleaner, and the proportions
were more believable. This was a product of the increased revenue of and budget for comics,
new methods in printing, and the natural advances made in the field of short-form visual
narratives by the illustrators and layout artists. Even the storytelling had noticeably improved
in the 16 years since Wonder Woman’s introduction. In the same number of pages as before
the dialogue had become marginally more believable, the panel layout was varied to match
the pace of the action, and the characters’ poses were more dynamic. The mission for the
greatest woman among the Amazons to enter the outside world was now a goddess-given
geas, rather than being sparked by the arrival of a strange man. Perhaps most significantly
of all, the power of the Amazons was not reliant on a magical girdle for superiority. They
are simply powerful warriors in their own right. The only caveat to their power is that the
Amazons will lose their divine gifts if a man sets foot on Paradise Island, a location that the
Amazons retreated to after establishing peace in the known world, rather than being forced
there by a superior foe. At first glance, this is much more in line with the ideals of feminism
that Dr. Marston claimed to support.
The story that follows is still a step in the right direction, but with undercurrents of the
same brand of sexism and heteronormativity that fed into the nuclear family. In the interest
of fairness the Amazons obscure Wonder Woman’s identity during the trials by having every
woman wear a mask exactly resembling Diana’s face, but in doing so there is an unspoken
assumption that every woman on the island is identical from the neck down (Figure 19.3).
Aside from pushing every woman into an ideal body type, this removes even the possi-
bility that any of the Amazons have variations in skin color, an assumption that runs counter
to the intersectionality movement of third-wave feminism which had yet to enter the wider
public arena. The carbon-copy bodies rob the Amazons of their individuality, as well; the
numerous men introduced later in the story all have unique body types, but the only women
we see on the page are a pair of nearly identical faces in a crowd with different hair colors.
Even in a story that begins on an island inhabited exclusively by women, men make up a
disproportionate number of characters with speaking roles and relevance.
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After the Amazon trial, Wonder Woman rescues Steve Tyler and makes her way to America
on a mission to turn a penny into one million dollars. During her adventures she encounters a
submarine firing missiles at her and she subsequently destroys it, but in the process she winds
up on shore near a group of children with a live explosive about to go off. After neutralizing
the missile in a display of superhuman strength, she grows faint and shaky thinking about the
harm that might have been done, and has to be comforted by Steve Tyler, who is chaperoning
the children on their beach trip. Happenstance aside, fragile female nerves in a battle-tested
superhuman don’t give Wonder Woman the credit she is perhaps due, and there are numerous
subsequent examples of this same brand of casual sexism at work. Steve Tyler’s immediate
response to being saved by Wonder Woman is to ask her on a dinner date, which she accepts
without hesitation. The man in charge of a construction project calls attention to the fact that
she’s “Only a woman—a girl—not a whole construction company!” Time and time again, in
small ways, unconscious sexism at the level of the society is acted out on the main character of
a superhero comic in a way that Batman and Superman simply do not experience.
The visual elements present their own problems. The crowd scenes are overwhelmingly
male, with female faces only included if they have lines. The group assembled at a challenge
to throw a penny across the river consists only of men, all decked out in full suits and hats.
The aforementioned example of the identical female bodies is plausible only because every
Amazon on the island is in fact drawn to be indistinguishable from the neck down. The lack
of defining facial features is on display just as it was in Wonder Woman’s debut, if not quite
as strongly. Wonder Woman sweats on one occasion to show tension, but her face is still pol-
ished as smoothly as marble when compared to the faces of the men she interacts with. Even
the background characters can’t escape this emotive whitewashing: in a shot of a group of
children all standing in the same light at the same angle, the boys manage to cast more shad-
ows on their faces than the girls. Women, yet again, are relegated to setpieces and storefront
displays, beautified and less human than their male counterparts in every setting.
Wonder Woman Volume 2, February 1987

The third wave of feminism is difficult to pin down by the means we generally identify the
first, second, and fourth. Just a few short years after the second run of Wonder Woman began
in 1987, the Anita Hill hearings became a very public reminder to many women that the
struggles of feminism were far from over, and that the work of previous and current genera-
tions could not be taken for granted. The issue of intersectionality came front and center in
the debate. Gender inequality overlapped with other unequal power structures like race and
class, and continues to do so in our present day in ways that weren’t widely explored in the
public space until the 1990s. The roots of these issues were born in the 1960s and 1970s with
conscientious objectors, supporters of economic and social models other than capitalism,
women in the LGBT community, and women of color. Significantly for the comics industry,
the third wave of feminism marked the dying days of the Comics Code Authority, which was
abandoned by Marvel comics in 2001 and by DC in 2011. The code had been weakening for
some time, allowing the depiction of illicit drugs in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until the
1980s that adult content began to creep back into comics in the form of violence and sexual
themes. With Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman only a couple of years from publication by DC,
the time was ripe for a new Wonder Woman team (Greg Potter, George Perez, and Bruce
Patterson) to come onto the scene and give Wonder Woman the more serious treatment that
women were demanding: taken for granted no more, brought into the modern age in which
comics were establishing their place as serious works of fiction.
280
Figure 19.4 Wonder Woman Volume 2, #1 (1987)
Narratively, the issue pulls absolutely no punches. The very first spread depicts an early
man murdering a woman in a fit of rage, then a hard cut to a lovingly rendered expanse of
Mount Olympus, the blinding white home of the gods. The debate that rages between the
deities sets the stage for the birth of a new race of superhumans: the souls of women killed by
men in anger, reborn as a new race to serve as exemplars to all humanity. Hippolyta and her
second in command are ordered to wear “Gaea’s girdle,” only as a symbol of their commit-
ment, and not as the sole source of their power. Hercules, identified here as the son of Zeus
and tricked by Ares into attacking the Amazonian capital of Themyscira, is roundly trounced
in a fair fight and yields (Figure 19.4).
His subsequent betrayal comes not as a product of Hippolyta’s weak will and easy seduc-
tion, but by the simple treachery of a poisoned drink offered in seeming good faith. Finally
and most significantly for our examination, Hippolyta’s prayer to Athena is answered not
with a deus ex machina of strength but with wisdom, which she uses to liberate herself and
her sisters by her own power. Their subsequent exile to Paradise Island is a punishment for
withdrawing from the world of men, and on this New Themyscira they stand as guardians of
a buried evil, a tidy explanation for the old rule against mortals setting foot on their home-
land. Truly, the Amazons operate under their own agency here in a way never before seen in
the pages of Wonder Woman.
Wonder Woman’s own origin, as Diana Prince, also deviates from Marston’s creation. It
is revealed to Hippolyta that of all the souls reincarnated only hers was the soul of a pregnant
woman, and that a powerful pull she feels for many months is a yearning for her unborn
daughter. At the advice of an oracle, Hippolyta shapes a child from sand to accept the final
soul in Gaea’s womb, blessed with the powers of all the gods aligned against Ares. The little
girl quickly proves herself to be the best among all her sisters, stronger and faster than any
other despite her youth. In Diana’s adulthood, the oracle commands the Amazons to choose a
champion as their envoy to the outside world, and the queen orders a competition held in full
body armor in order to prevent any hesitation on the part of friends fighting each other for
the first time. Diana comes out on top, and in doing so takes her place as the champion of the
gods. The story resolves a number of issues from earlier versions, most notably the lack of di-
versity in the ranks of the competitors. With full-body armor, the specific build or skin color
of a woman has room for variation while still keeping her identity a secret, unlike the masks
from Wonder Woman #98. The method of her birth, however, calls attention to the issues of
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George Thomas
sexual liberation exemplified in Roe v. Wade which emerged in the years between the previ-
ous origin story and this one. It’s unclear in the depiction of Hippolyta (by all male writers
and illustrators, notably) whether her strong desire for a child as a product of pregnancy in
her former life is in line with the ideals of sexual liberation that the third wave of feminism
is associated with. In a historical moment defined by women making their own choices, an
argument could be made that the biological need to have children plays into the patriarchal
system that the Cold War brought to the forefront of public life in the USA. The mechanics
of the birth, however, put this idea to rest. The deliberate exclusion of men from the equa-
tion is a powerfully feminist statement; Artemis the Huntress is the midwife in this act of
creation, Gaea the womb, and Hippolyta the will. The act of imbuing clay with the breath
of divine life, a twist on the biblical scene of man’s genesis, is a boldly feminist reimagining.
The visual elements of the piece are a notable step forward from Wonder Woman #98,
but there is still room for improvement. To the credit of the authors, women of color ap-
pear on New Themyscira, though only one is named and the rest are a tiny minority of the
background women. Diana herself, in the process of earning the title of Wonder Woman,
is shown with sweat on her face after her grueling trials, a sure sign of progress in the visual
depiction of women as experiencing the full range of human emotion. Even so, there is much
progress still to be made. Women continue to appear too flat when compared to their male
counterparts, even when the lighting and age are supposedly the same. This is most evident
in the showdown between Heracles and Hippolyta early in the story. Both of them are the
offspring of the divine, both clad for battle, and both exerting themselves in the fight, but
even with the sun directly in his face Heracles manages to display creases at the corners of his
smile and shadows over his heavy brow. The side-by-side shot of the pair is almost comical,
the blank slate that is Hippolyta’s face looking airbrushed in comparison to Heracles’ grizzled
warrior visage. The crowd shots, too, reveal a certain sameness of facial structure, with the
same shape of chin and the same thickness of eyelashes visible on nearly every face. Without
a crowd of men to compare them to it’s difficult to say for sure whether this sameness carries
over, but the group of friendly gods are all visually distinct enough to tell apart at a glance,
so the issue is clearly not a lack of talent or creativity on the part of the artists. Instead, we
find ourselves once again faced by an army of clones, department store mannequins with
picture-perfect makeup no matter what the situation would suggest.
Wonder Woman: The True Amazon, October 2016

Jill Thompson’s modern standalone story doesn’t fit into quite the same category as the pieces
we’ve examined so far, but it’s worth briefly discussing as a uniquely progressive take on Wonder
Woman’s origin story. Written and illustrated by a single woman, Thompson’s standalone work
stays true to Wonder Woman’s classic origin while organically including new post-feminist el-
ements. Hippolyta’s golden girdle makes a cameo as it’s taken by Hercules in the opening scene
of the book, but the woman herself escapes with the help of Hera, who aids the women to foil
her husband Zeus. Already the classic elements of Greek mythology are at play in a way that is
both true to the source material and progressive, granting agency to the women in the narra-
tive. Even the circumstances of Princess Diana’s birth are freshly reimagined to lend strength
of character to the Amazons, whose beautiful song moves the gods to life-giving tears. Diana
herself is especially richly imagined, rendered as the most human superhuman to date. She is
prideful and flawed, a believable product of her upbringing, and she reacts and grows as the
reader expects a human would. The most significant factor here is not just the overall quality of
the writing, but that the high-quality writing is being applied to female characters.
282
Figure 19.5 Wonder Woman: The True Amazon (2016)
It’s the art that really shines in this book, however. Each man and woman is crafted with
equal care, proper shadows, and wrinkles visible on every face. There are no porcelain dolls
among the Amazons, every woman uniquely shaped and styled. In addition to the diversity
of hairstyles and skin tones present, faces have distinctive shapes that enable the reader to
tell them apart. Even the clothing choices are clearly the product of a studied hand, armor
rendered practically and beautifully (Figure 19.5).
Obviously the art of The True Amazon can’t be judged by exactly the same standards as a
monthly publication, but it establishes an important precedent: that women are rendered just
as diversely as men in the same context. It’s the relative representation that must be equal,
not the general quality of the art, and we can apply this to any visual storytelling medium. A
story doesn’t need to feature an island full of women to grant them equal status, it only needs
to frame women equally in terms of their place in the narrative and their geometrization.6
Ultimately, what we learn from Thompson’s work is that one of the most important steps
to achieving a degree of equality in mass media is to find the same equality in the people be-
hind the pen. With the inclusion of more women in the workplace and the continued efforts
to bring gender equality into law and practice, we can expect to see more women helping to
shape the present and future of literature and art, creating new role models for tomorrow’s
artists and writers to look up to. Wonder Woman’s continued presence on the page and on
the big screen is a sign of continued progress toward gender equality, an appeal to the newest
generation of feminists and the original takes on old ideas that they represent.
Notes
1 In case you missed its debut in 1962, the quote concludes “…Comes great responsibility.”
2 The wave model organizes feminism into four rough eras: first wave focused on women’s suffrage
in the 1800s and early 1900s; second wave focused on reproductive rights, a woman’s place in the
family, and de facto inequalities in American society from the 1960s through the 1980s; third
wave focused on intersectionality and sexual violence and liberation; and fourth wave focused on
technology, communication, and the media, exemplified by the #metoo movement. Some have
voiced issues with the model, not the least of which being that it marginalizes the ongoing efforts
of women between these time periods and that it is centered on the USA alone. It is used here with
the understanding that feminism is an ongoing effort which cannot be properly summed up by any
model, but that it is as good an attempt as any for this discussion given that all of the writers related
to this story were based in the USA.
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20
“Part of something bigger”
Ms./Captain Marvel1
Carolyn Cocca
Carol Danvers may not look different from other superheroes: white, blond, heterosexual,
tall, attractive, strong. But in the 2010s, fan responses to her were unprecedented. Formerly
Ms. Marvel, as the new Captain Marvel she upended conventional wisdom that most super-
hero comic fans are older white males who buy male-character-centric titles with sexualized
female side characters in brick-and-mortar stores, and made clear that there was nothing
“natural” about such portrayals—rather, their creation and repetition had suppressed alterna-
tives and circulated gendered and raced inequalities.2
Employing approaches from feminist theories, queer theory, critical race theory, disabil-
ity theory, and political economy alongside insights from cultural studies and comics stud-
ies, this chapter analyzes the changing productions, representations, and receptions of Carol
Danvers since her first appearance in 1968.3 More than with most other superheroes, fans
and creators have struggled and negotiated gender roles and feminism through this character.
“This female fights back”: Ms. Marvel, the “female fury”

of Second-wave feminism
Ms. Marvel debuted in 1977, alongside Wonder Woman on tv, Princess Leia in film trail-
ers, and Jean Grey/Phoenix in comics. These attractive, superpowered, heterosexual, non-
disabled white women in media were increasingly prominent and profitable, their privilege
making their challenges to the status quo more palatable.4
The way in which the all-white-male creative team went about creating and fleshing
out this superhero was enmeshed in both the triumphs of and the backlash to Second-wave
feminism. Editor and initial writer Gerry Conway pitched the comic as feminist in issue #1,
“Ms. Marvel…is influenced, to a great extent, by the move toward women’s liberation. She
is not a Marvel Girl; she’s a woman, not a Miss or a Mrs.—a Ms. Her own person.”
Carol Danvers first appeared in 1968, in Captain Marvel. That Captain Marvel was a male
Kree alien named Mar-Vell and Carol was his romantic interest. The base commander notes
the apparent disconnect between Carol’s job and gender and praises her, “This is Miss Danvers!
Man or woman, she’s the finest head of security a missile base could want!” (Gary Friedrich
and Frank Singer 1969, Captain Marvel Vol. 1 #13). Carol gets caught between Mar-Vell and
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Carolyn Cocca
Figure 20.1 John Romita, Sr. Ms. Marvel #1 (1977)
his nemesis, Yon-Rogg. As Mar-Vell rescues her, a machine called the “psyche-magnitron”
blows up and its radiation floods her body (#18).
Ms. Marvel #1 (1977)’s cover showed an unknown white, blonde woman (Carol) wearing
a much-reduced version of Captain Marvel’s uniform. (Figure 20.1). His has black under-
wear, gloves, and boots over a red full-body suit, with a black domino mask. Ms. Marvel
wears the same black underwear, gloves, boots, and black domino mask. But much of her re-
mained uncovered. An early letter writer asked, “Where is a woman who wears long sleeves,
gloves, high boots and a scarf (winter wear), and at the same time has a bare back, belly, and
legs? The Arctic equator?” (Debbie Lipp, #8).
Even in this costume, Ms. Marvel is set up as having the same powers as Captain Marvel:
superstrength, flight, and a “seventh sense”—foreknowledge of threats akin to his “cosmic
awareness,” but perhaps a nod to “women’s intuition.”
Her “woman-ness” and her strength as Ms. Marvel are highlighted in most issues. Early
covers proclaimed, “This female fights back!” One letter writer called this “stupid” and a
second, “sexist,” adding, “You wouldn’t consider putting ‘this male fights back!’ on the cover
of Spider-Man; it would be degrading” ( Jana Hollingsworth, #5; Debbie Lipp, #8). That tag
was replaced by covers labeling Ms. Marvel a “female fury.” Invariably, villains address her
as “woman” or “female” or “broad.”
Her woman-ness and her strength as Carol Danvers are highlighted in most issues as well.
J. Jonah Jameson hires her to run Woman magazine, lamenting that he hasn’t had time for it
and “Miss Danvers, it shows. Articles on women’s lib…yecch…a woman’s magazine should
have articles that are useful, like new diets and fashions and recipes.” Jameson offers a salary
of $20,000, but she holds firm at $30,000 and he meets it. She ends their conversation, “My
name is Ms. Carol Danvers. And as far as diets and recipes go, forget it!” (Gerry Conway and
John Buscema 1977, #1).
Many letters praised the attention to gendered inequalities; others did not. “I’m employed
at NASA…I’m also a married and liberated woman—and the half owner of a comic book
store. [Ms. Marvel] should be an action-oriented comic and not a soapbox for women’s lib”
(Cynthia Walker, #3). Editor Conway responded:
It’s never been our purpose to preach, convert, or pontificate—only to entertain….

[“Ms.” is] more than just a symbol of quasi-political leanings.…it means the same thing
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Ms./Captain Marvel
as both Miss and Mrs.—only without any marital references…[S]hould we ever decide
to have our woman wonder marry, we won’t have to worry about changing the title…
And to our ever-lovin’ production staff, that means a lot.
He stands by the word “Ms.,” defusing negative reactions by pitching it as a dovetailing of

political and production concerns.
The first few stories explore a “split personality.” The explosion of the psyche-magnitron
imbued Carol not only with radiation but also with the mind of a Kree warrior, Ms. Marvel.
“Carol” would pass out, “Ms. Marvel” would take over to complete a mission, then “Carol”
would re-emerge with no knowledge of what “Ms. Marvel” had done. Conway explained,
“You might see a parallel between her quest for identity, and the modern woman’s quest for
raised consciousness, for self-liberation, for identity” (#1).
However, this can be read as implying that because she is female, Carol could not handle
being a superhero. Just like early Jean Grey of the X-Men and Susan Storm of the Fantastic
Four, she passes out when using her powers. As Jameson essentializes her fainting, “Just
like a woman!” (Claremont, #6). Carol is described in stereotypically female adjectives and
Ms. Marvel in stereotypically male ones, further implying that heroism is a male trait that
Carol can’t grasp. Gibson labels Carol “the feminine” and Ms. Marvel “the feminist” and
reads the split as a “critique of feminism” (2015: 143, 144). The comic may also be seen as
representing the “feminine” Carol as “feminist” in her career path and “masculine” in her
superheroing, and needing to integrate all three.
Readers disagreed as to how much attention should be placed on the “feminine.” One was
pleased, “She is treated as a person…without…the stereotype pigeonholing of the person as
man or woman first” (Rob Allstetter, #7). But another countered with, “Please bring out the
woman in her more….A lady can be equal and feminine” (Adrienne Foster, #7).
Carol’s dissociative identity disorder, “feminist” speechifying, and shrunken costume to-
gether do reinscribe gendered stereotypes. “[I] believe Gerry Conway really tried to create
a feminist super-heroine, but his handling of Ms. Marvel demonstrates he has no idea what
feminism is” ( Jana Hollingsworth, #5). Conway anticipated such criticism in his column,
Why is a man writing this book about a woman?...[T]here are no thoroughly trained and
qualified women writers working in the super-hero comics field… A man is writing this
book because a man wants to write this book: me…[W]hy not a man? If the women’s
liberation movement means anything, it’s a battle for equality…A man…aware of the
pitfalls, can write a woman character as well as a woman.
This column is imbued with good intentions and blind privilege. Women weren’t employed
as writers because of discrimination, while a white man such as Conway could write the
book simply because he “wants to.” Men had been writing women’s stories—sometimes
quite poorly—for hundreds of years such that another man writing another woman’s story
was not happening in a vacuum. A later letter writer tells the still-completely-male creative
team to “find yourselves a feminist proofreader, and listen to her” (Suzanne Elliott, #9).
The next writer, X-Men scribe Chris Claremont, and editor Archie Goodwin would see
that the character would be more nuanced. Claremont has the “masculine” Ms. Marvel learn
from the “feminine” Carol. The former knew only “violence and hatred” while latter had
friends and memories of “love and beauty” (#7), and Ms. Marvel begins to feel “good” when
she helps others (#9). Even so, letters asked that the “split personality” be resolved (in #5,
10, 11, 12). Goodwin responded, “We’ve been trying to eliminate as much of the blatant,
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preachy feminism as we can; and instead, striving to let Ms. Marvel’s—and Carol Danvers’—
words and actions and feelings speak for themselves” (#8).
The costume was changed as well, to cover Ms. Marvel’s midriff and back. The editor
wrote that this was mostly a production decision because it was difficult to color, “Not as
sexy, perhaps (sorry, young fellas in the audience) but a lot easier to handle.” As with the ed-
itor’s explication for “Ms.,” this may have been a progressive decision described as a produc-
tion decision to defuse opposition, or a production decision pitched as political to generate
goodwill among progressive fans, or some combination.
Claremont wrote, “What Ms. Marvel is all about [is] taking a woman, giving her super-
powers—and then treating that super-person with the same intelligence and respect that I would
Spider-Man or the FF [Fantastic Four]” (#4). He had Carol embrace her Ms. Marvel-ness and
widened her circle of villains, friends, and opposite-sex dates. He also filled in her backstory,
to stress her agency, stubbornness, and temper. Her father pays for her brother to go to college,
but not Carol simply because she’s female. So she joins the Air Force and earns her college de-
gree, works in intelligence, and then becomes NASA security chief. Claremont also expands
on 1969’s Captain Marvel #18, where Carol is unconscious just before the psyche-magnitron
explosion. He adds in that she was “wishing she had the power to stand with Mar-Vell as an
equal,” and that is why the machine gave her the powers of a Kree warrior.
All of this establishes her as smart, determined, and equal to any man on a similar path. It
also reflects her privileges in terms of race and sexuality. Except for one character in a hand-
ful of panels, everyone is white. Whiteness and heterosexuality are assumed and unnamed
by creators and fans. And Carol’s success makes it seem as if sexism is due only to individu-
als’ actions rather being systemic. However, most of the letters and responses in Ms. Marvel
did engage directly with ideas about gender and feminism, a much higher percentage than
other contemporary comic titles. Just under half of the letters across the 23 issues were from
women, similar to the X-Men at this time.
As Claremont was writing both X-Men and Ms. Marvel, the titles had similarities. They
would increase as artist Dave Cockrum joined the book, at Claremont’s request. Cockrum’s
revamp of Ms. Marvel’s costume echoed his Storm, with its high-necked black bathing suit
and black thigh-high boots, and his Jean Grey, with its red scarf around the waist. Claremont
recalled, “We’re trying to appeal to a female audience, trying to make her a hip, happening,
70s woman striking out on her own” (Howe 2012: 221). Cockrum went through “fifty
designs,” and then came up with “the lightning bolt and sash, and I took it to Stan who
said…‘That’s what I like: Shiny leather and tits and ass’” (Cronin 2014). Unfortunately, we
can’t access contemporary reader reaction to the costume change via letter columns, because
the book was canceled shortly thereafter. One assumes this was due to sales, but no sales fig-
ures were published in these issues as in the contemporaneous X-Men issues.
The initial run of Ms. Marvel was embedded in late 1970s debates over feminism, and
concurrent with a wave of media featuring attractive, white, female protagonists. Ms. Marvel
was less sexualized, more nuanced, and more progressive than many of these. Her portrayals
would become more mixed in the 1980s–2000s as creative teams changed and as corpo-
rate decision-makers accounted for the direct market’s more homogenous fan base. These
changes occurred within a broader backlash to Second-wave feminism.
Avenger, Binary, Warbird, Survivor: Carol Danvers in the 1980s–1990s

After Ms. Marvel, Carol would appear in Avengers and Uncanny X-Men. Her inner strength,
high emotion, hot temper, and increasing amounts of her body were displayed there, in
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stories that showcased her character as well as putting her in service to other characters’
development.
The early 1980s Avengers issues, like Ms. Marvel, illustrate the power of editorship and
prominent authorship. Avengers #200 can best be summed up by a piece by Carol Strickland:
“The Rape of Ms. Marvel.” Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter mandated that Avengers
#200 be reworked with Carol having a baby, and co-plotted it with David Michelinie, Bob
Layton, and George Pérez. The Avengers don’t ask why she is suddenly pregnant, but rather
are thrilled for her. After the birth, Carol responds to Wasp’s perky “You’re so lucky!” with
“Lucky?...I’ve been used! That isn’t my baby! I don’t even know who the father is!” (#200).
But later, she apologizes to Wasp and meets her baby, who is somehow already an adult,
Marcus. “She steels herself, bracing for a resurgence of the loathing and humiliation she had
felt before….She feels instead an odd sense of calm, along with an unexplainable and undeni-
able attraction.” Marcus explains that he kidnapped her, wooed her unsuccessfully, and then
using “Immortus’ machines,” which “ben[t] your will to mine,” he had sex with her, im-
pregnated her with a version of himself, wiped her memory, and sent her home. Panels show
Carol’s seemingly pleasure-filled face next to his monologue. She tells him, “[I] feel closer to
you than I’ve felt to anyone in a long, long time. And I think that just might be a relationship
worth giving a chance.” Hawkeye, Iron Man, and Thor watch her leave with Marcus, saying
they hope she’s happy with him.
The misogynistic tropes here are quite startling: that women’s minds can be altered,
that they enjoy rape, that all pregnancies are cause for joy no matter the circumstances, that
women are emotional during pregnancy but of course will love their babies, that women can
come to love their rapists. Strickland writes, “An all-male Marvel staff…slaughtered Marvel’s
symbol of modern women.” Today, this is talked about as the obvious reading of this story.
At the time, though, Strickland’s essay engendered strikingly negative letters.
Chris Claremont was horrified too,
I wanted…to say what was done in the story was wrong [and] make a story out of it
(Columbia University Libraries 2012). In Avengers Annual #10, Claremont rehabilitates
Carol’s character. Following the then-villainous Rogue’s absorption of her powers and
memories, Carol is recovering with the X-Men. She confronts the Avengers, “Don’t any
of you realize…what Marcus did to me?!?...When I needed you most, you betrayed me…
You screwed up Avengers.
They leave, and Carol stays with the X-Men.

In Uncanny X-Men, Carol was not superpowerless for long. The alien Brood subjects her
to painful “evolutionary modification” through which “she remains sane and defiant” (Cla-
remont and Cockrum 1982, #163)
Drawn by Cockrum, Carol now wears a white Storm-shaped bathing-suit costume and
boots and gloves over her red-hot face and body (Figure 20.2). “A blinding light flares within
her soul…The light is power, and Carol uses it without hesitation.” Calling herself Binary,
she is unafraid and unconflicted, unlike her beginnings in Ms. Marvel. She wipes out much
of the Brood, releases their victims, and is invited to join the X-Men.
But Carol’s character would be sacrificed for that of Rogue. Rogue begs for help in deal-
ing with her absorption of Carol’s memories and powers. While Carol’s response is to punch
her into space, Professor Xavier says he will help her. Carol calls him cruel and the X-Men
agree, threatening to leave the team. But they give in when he argues that everyone has po-
tential for good. As with the Avengers, her fellow heroes and friends abandon Carol. So she
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Figure 20.2 Dave Cockrum and Bob Wiacek. Uncanny X-Men #164 (1982)
leaves and joins the space pirate Starjammers. Letters took Carol’s side, “Are you WACKO?
There is no way that you can possibly make Rogue into an X-Man. The X-Men hate her.
Binary hates her, half of the free world hates her. I hate her! Don’t do it” (Chuck Sottosanti,
Uncanny X-Men #179). Rogue’s split personality between the “Carol” she absorbed and her-
self, and her hero’s journey, would continue until 1990, all written by Claremont. The “real”
Carol would appear as Binary a few times in Uncanny and Avengers.
Just as Carol’s struggle with her power and memory losses furthered Rogue’s heroic arc,
her abuse of alcohol furthered that of Iron Man Tony Stark. Writer of both Avengers and
Iron Man Kurt Busiek says, “We wanted to have Tony become an AA sponsor to another
alcoholic…We were able to explore both Tony’s struggle and Carol’s” (Dalton 2011: 111).
She is hiding the trope-laden problem (for female characters) that her “Binary” powers are
decreasing from having overtaxed herself. Renaming herself Warbird, she is shown drunk,
lying and endangering the others, and actively defensive and mean when they question
her. She tries to prove her worth in battle, but falls. Shaky letters read, “Guess I just didn’t
have what it takes…I need a drink!” Facing court-martial, she quits. Of the only three
letters about this issue (Busiek and Pérez 1998, #7), one praised the story and two others
bemoaned it (#11). This is yet another example of a female character’s storyline servicing
a male character’s growth, while also reinscribing stereotypes of women as emotional and
out-of-control. And because there are fewer female than male characters, each female
carries more representational weight than each male such that she virtually stands in for
all women.
To be sure, Busiek also wrote a nuanced and heroic Carol, and George Pérez drew her as
such. She commits to recovery and takes responsibility for her actions, confessing in court
to endangering a plane while drunk, and announcing “With Iron Man’s help and support,
I’ve joined Alcoholics Anonymous” (Busiek and Stuart Immonen 2000, #26). She returns
triumphantly to the Avengers and flies across the first splash page, “All right Avengers, let’s
do this!” (Busiek and Pérez 2000, #28).
Busiek bookends the arc by having Carol request her own court-martial because she had
killed a villain. The Avengers do not punish her because there was no alternative to her ac-
tions. She says to Scarlet Witch, “I thought I’d be kicked out again…but I had to face it…I
feel like I’ve turned a corner—like after all this time I might actually have what it takes.”
Scarlet Witch replies, “You always did, Carol” (Busiek and Kieron Dwyer 2002, #55).
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The 2000s and 2010s: the best of the best

Carol launched into the mid-2000s as she had always been: the resilient soldier, the self-
reflective striver, the all-too-human hero. She would have two solo series and also appear in
Avengers and crossover events.
When Scarlet Witch warps reality such that all characters live their heart’s desire, Carol is
Captain—not Ms.—Marvel, the world’s most beloved superhero. She loves it, but still fights
alongside the others to change the world back to reality. Her experience gives her an AA-
esque “moment of clarity.” In the first of 50 issues (Ms. Marvel Volume 2, 2006–10) written
by Brian Reed, she vows, “I can do more…I can be the best.” She leads the Mighty Avengers
and a strike team, defeats the Skrulls, rescues superheroes, and protects Rogue even though
she still has conflicted feelings about her.
She still wears her black bathing-suit costume, generally higher cut on the sides and smaller
across her behind, depending on the artist. One letter writer said, “I wouldn’t mind if you
made the back show off her butt a little more, the way [Frank] Cho drew it…And if you made
it a thong, I wouldn’t complain about it either” (Greg Martino, #7). Cho would indeed draw
Ms. Marvel in his style in this run, and in 2007’s Mighty Avengers as well. Only half of this
Ms. Marvel series had letters, with only 7% from women. This may have been the breakdown
of who was reading the comic or the breakdown of letters received, or perhaps the editors
chose to portray the readership that way during this time of dependence on comic shop sales.
Ms. Marvel’s most powerful adversary in this series—again, by an all-male and usually
all-white creative team—is often herself. She generally does not have female allies around
her, standing mostly alone with an occasional love interest as in the 1970s. She sided with
Iron Man to have superheroes register with the government, in the Civil War event. This is
unsurprising given her relationship with Iron Man and her government career, but most let-
ters were against her decision. She does doubt herself on this, and also when Rogue appears,
which Reed noted was requested by many fans. They work together, Rogue apologizes,
Carol says that she’s forgiven her, but internally she is not so sure (Reed and Mike Wieringo
2007, #10). At the end of the series, she wants to kill Mystique, but backs away to consciously
make the more heroic choice (Reed, Sana Takeda, and Ben Oliver 2010, #50)
The other times she fights “herself ” here recall her 1970s “split personality” and
1980s–1990s power losses. She fights an alternate-universe version of her alcoholic Warbird
self as well as a “Ms. Marvel” wearing Carol’s old red-and-black costume (Figure 20.3). She
Figure 20.3 Mike Wieringo and Chris Sotomayor. Ms. Marvel #10 (2007)
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Carolyn Cocca
uses too much power and splits into four beings which she then has to integrate back to-
gether. She succeeds, and the series ends as it began, “Being the best of the best is not really
a goal. But being the best you can be…that’s doable.” It is this promise that fans will cite in
the mid-2010s as at the heart of their love for the character.
Captain Marvel, 2012–present: flying with her own wings

The 2012 relaunch of Carol as Captain Marvel capitalized on the assets of the past, while
steering away from its more stereotypical moments. The new title was first directed by ed-
itor Steve Wacker, who wanted to give Carol the title of “Captain.” For the first time the
character would have a female writer, Kelly Sue DeConnick, a self-labeled intersectional
feminist and hot-tempered Air Force brat, not unlike Carol Danvers. She assumed that given
the structure of the direct market and the conventional wisdom about its fanbase, the series
would run only a few issues (Phillips 2012). She wanted a hero for whom readers could cheer,
while also seeing that she is an impatient “adrenaline junkie” prone to “righteous indigna-
tion.” None of these characteristics, DeConnick felt, need be tied to masculinity but rather
could be embodied by anyone (Women of Marvel 2015).
In Captain Marvel #1, editor Wacker, like editor Conway in Ms. Marvel #1, addressed fans:
With all due respect to the Ms. Marvel name, [it] is of a different era…[Changing the
title] made sense given her military background and the importance for Carol to feel a
part of something bigger…The costume was definitely titillating, but again, of its time
and none too practical…..And to be even more blunt, it’s not a costume most fathers
would want their daughters dressing up in for Halloween.
The combination of these two changes, a diversifying fan base, and the outspoken-ness of
the editors and writer about portrayals of women in comics made the new Captain Marvel a
flashpoint for struggles over gender.
Issue #1 from 2012 recalls issue #1 from 1977, with a villain drawing attention to her
woman-ness, “If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel!” Instead of a no-nonsense
rebuttal, however, this Carol makes fun of his name (Absorbing Man), which “sounds like a
brand of toilet paper.” Instead of most of her body being exposed, this Carol’s only exposed
skin is her face. As Captain America encourages her to take the “Captain Marvel” moniker,
she reflects on her idol, record-breaking pilot Helen Cobb’s words to her that would come
to represent Carol as well as the Carol Corps, “Higher, further, faster, more. Always more…
The Lord put us here to punch holes in the sky. …We’ll get there…and we will be the stars
we were always meant to be” (Kelly Sue DeConnick and Dexter Soy 2012, Captain Marvel
Volume 7 #1).
“A lot of the first volume,” said DeConnick, “is revisiting Carol’s history and reworking it
with an eye toward more agency” (White 2014b). In 1969’s Captain Marvel, Carol lay uncon-
scious and Mar-Vell helps her. In 1978’s Ms. Marvel, Carol was conscious, “wishing she had
the power to stand with Mar-Vell as an equal.” In DeConnick’s 2012 Captain Marvel, after
time traveling, present-Carol rushes in to help past-Mar-Vell, “I go because he’s hurt and I
can help. I go because I’m an Avenger and that’s what we do” (DeConnick and Emma Rios
2012, #6). She chooses not to stop the blast, and so, this Carol is a hero who actively chooses
to get her “Marvel” powers.
Carol’s agency and heroism was supported by a diverse female cast: best friend
Spider-Woman Jessica Drew, younger assistant Wendy Kawasaki, older co-worker Tracy
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Burke, adoring kid Kit and her mother Marina, and the all-female Banshee Squadron. This
breadth of female characters meant that no longer would Carol have to carry the representa-
tional weight for all women.
The most significant appearance would be by Monica Rambeau, the first African-
American female Avenger and the first female “Captain Marvel” (unrelated to Mar-Vell and
named by the media) in the 1980s; she later goes by Photon, then Spectrum. Monica keeps
calling Carol “Captain Marvel.” Carol replies, “Give me a break! You don’t go by Captain
Marvel! You haven’t used it in years—it wasn’t yours to begin with.” Monica responds,
“All I’m saying is, you should have called. It’s like…you want to date my ex?...you call”
(DeConnick, Sebela, and Soy 2012, #7). Carol apologizes. Well received, these issues did
face criticism from Monica fans who felt that the white Carol had usurped the “Captain”
title while there was still a dearth of black female superheroes. DeConnick wrote (2015) that
this book was slated to be a Carol Danvers book, then became a Captain Marvel book, while
Monica was set to star in Mighty Avengers. DeConnick’s story sees Monica turn herself into
light and Carol, who can absorb energy, absorbing her. Their merged body defeats the threat.
Together, they are more powerful, making the point that women can be both competitive
and friendly, an underrepresented relationship in popular culture.
Carol is motivated by care for her friends, and all of Earth. Although she is told she should
no longer fly due to a growing lesion in her brain, she continues to. She realizes that the
lesion is caused by a shard from the psyche-magnitron, and old nemesis Yon-Rogg wants
it. She ends their battle by taking off into space to remove his access to her. “I’m making a
choice.…I can think of worse ways to—.” Her body falls lifelessly. Kit’s mother thinks about
how to tell her about Carol’s sacrifice, “We tell her that heroes aren’t defined by their powers
or their costumes…but by the content of their hearts” (DeConnick, Hepburn, and Sandoval
2013, #14).
Carol survives, without memories. Similarly to the 1980s when Rogue stole her memo-
ries, Carol again feels nothing for those around her. But here, as intended by DeConnick, she
was not a victim who had her memories taken, but a hero who chose to do it in order to save
millions (Ching 2014). Here, she does not have her memories restored by a superpowered
man, but she rebuilds them with the help of her friends. Little Kit makes her a comic book to
teach her, “This is the story of Captain Marvel. Her many foes and challenges and how our
intrepid hero became the hero we call earth’s mightiest avenger” (DeConnick and Andrade
2013, #17).
This heroism, strength, perseverance, caring, hotheadedness, risk-taking, agency,
non-sexualization, humor, and pathos struck a chord with those who had felt alienated from
mainstream superhero comics. But the first letters published in issue #2 reflected the online
backlash to the new title. As Pustz notes, “Letters can reveal editors’ ideas about a com-
ic’s intended audience and about how it will be read…[as well as] to mobilize fans” (1999:
167), so perhaps this was a strategic choice. Letter writer Alan Brown wrote, “I have always
loved Carol Danvers [but] every time I see that new costume I want to vomit.” Eric Apfel
elaborated, “I hate it….You’ve given her a hideous new costume…[You’re] only attracting
attention of one small group of readers—those who know nothing about Ms. Marvel…sales
are going to be bad for this title.” A similar reaction was posted to MarvelMasterworksFansite,
“Might as well give her some more muscles, shorter legs, broad shoulders, some arm pit hair
and some ugly tattoos….Long sexy blonde hair with domino mask to butch hair cut with no
mask. The naked thighs were just the wonderful icing on the sexcake” (FiveYearsLater 2012).
Such comments reflect the conventional wisdom of the 1980s–2000s: female characters must
fall within a narrow definition of “sexy” or the title will not appeal to the core direct market
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audience of older, heterosexual, white males. Fans outside of this group were neither “real”
fans nor numerous enough to sustain such a title.
But subsequent letter writers, about a third women, proclaimed their love for the title and
its place in superhero comics. “I love seeing Carol as a leader….Shouldn’t people be more
concerned with the content of the story and not whether or not the costume shows enough
skin?” (Claire, #5). “Here we have a United States Air Force colonel, a fighter pilot, a super-
hero who represents many feminist qualities, yet she fights crime with her ass hanging out.
So you have no idea how thrilled I was when I saw the ad with Carol in a full body costume”
(Lucas Click, #5). “Finally a female comic book hero who has not been fetishized for a male
readership that is largely imagined…[This] opens up the possibilities of catering to audiences
like myself and my daughter and my teenaged students” (Imogen Cassidy, #6).
Many noted that they bought the comic digitally, and had picked up or come back to
comics because of it. Still, to minimize their risk, the big companies have thus far tended to
diversify their lines only a little bit at the margins with new creative teams, new characters,
or de-sexualized female characters. And yet, blogs, comment spaces and forums, and social
media are full of accusations of “pandering” to “social justice warriors” who dare to want
non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual heroes. The irony, not lost on those advocating for
more diversity, is that the direct market audience has been pandered to for decades as comics
companies catered to their presumed preferences for big action and big breasts, and only to-
ken numbers of characters of color or who were female or queer.
From the 1980s, print sales numbers from Diamond Comic Distributors to local comic
shops were crucial to determining the health of a particular title. Captain Marvel’s single-issue
print sales were not blockbusting. But it sold well digitally and in trade paperbacks, and as
comics writer Brian Michael Bendis notes, “Diamond is such an inconsequential part” of
total sales today (Siuntres 2014). Trade paperbacks, digital comics, video games, merchan-
dise, movies, and tv shows are being accessed by more diverse and larger audiences than
those frequenting local comic shops, a point made not only on comics news websites, but in
mainstream media as well.
By February 2013, new editor Sana Amanat was addressing readers as the “Carol Corps.”
In issue #11, she wrote, “The Carol Corps is being heard loud and clear.” Captain Marvel #17
represents the Carol Corps on the cover as Captain Marvel cosplayers, watching their hero
fly overhead with Kit (Figure 20.4). Villain Grace Valentine (not unlike those who dislike
Figure 20.4 Joe Quinones. Captain Marvel #17 (2013)
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the new title) is furious that Carol is beloved, “She’s an alien. An alcoholic. An undisciplined
brain-damaged disaster.”
But one dark-skinned boy pushes back, saying, “I am Captain Marvel!” A chorus of “I am
Captain Marvel” by countless people both confuses the targeting of Valentine’s machinery
and represents the Carol Corps’ identification with Carol. Injured but defiant, Carol rises,
“I’m Captain Marvel [and] I’m going to kick some ass!” The crowd, and the reader, cheers
for their hero.
The changing face of comics…at the margins

Both Captain Marvel and its mega-hit spinoff Ms. Marvel have been nominated for Eisner
Awards. Several more female Marvel characters appeared with redesigned costumes and/or
with less sexualization, and new solo and team titles starring female characters were launched
as well. Editor Jeanine Schafer told fans, “We’ve been able to have this kind of diversity be-
cause you guys are asking for it and you’re following up on it” (Tomaszewski 2014). These
characters are not mere window dressing to the plot, but rather they are “strong female char-
acters” with internal lives, friends and family, conflicts, doubt, quirks, and heroism.
Captain Marvel’s main title has been relaunched four times with new #1s. She starred
with Monica Rambeau and Black Panther in Ultimates, crossed over with the Guardians of the
Galaxy, and was centered in the Civil War II event and two miniseries. She was also featured
in young adult Captain Marvel novels and the animated Frost Fight and Marvel Rising.
And Captain Marvel became the first and only female-led superhero film in Marvel’s
22-movie arc ending with Avengers: Endgame. Based closely on Kelly Sue DeConnick’s 2012
characterization, the movie sailed past the billion-dollar mark. “It’s not an exaggeration to
suggest that the Carol Corps is at least partly responsible for the Captain Marvel movie an-
nouncement” (McMillan 2014). Note, though, that the structure of Marvel’s licensing deals
means that unlike X-Men and Spider-Man, profits from a Captain Marvel movie all come
back to Marvel studios. The company can showcase a female superhero, capitalize on its per-
ceived progressivism, and marketize the feminism inherent in Carol Danvers’ story.
Despite the fears of some very vocal fans from the more homogenously male and white
base of the 1980s–2010s, all of the much-touted and fought-over changes in the Big Two
comics world are still at the margins. About 90% of superhero comics, tv shows, and films
still either star male characters or are written/drawn/produced/directed by men. The changes
are real, and important, and a long time coming. But, as Kelly Sue DeConnick often says,
“Nobody sit down. We’re not done yet.”
Notes
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Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press:
357–364.
Jowett, Lorna. 2005. Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
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Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell: 1–26.
McMillan, Graeme. 2014 (October 28). “Who Is Captain Marvel? A Brief History of Marvel Stu-
dios’ First Leading Lady.” Hollywood Reporter: www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/
who-is-captain-marvel-a-744562.
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by-brian-m-bendis.
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[first published in comic magazine LOC #1].
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deconnick.
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21
Higher, further, faster baby!
The feminist evolution of Carol
Danvers from comics to film
Sam Langsdale
The 2019 release of Marvel Studios’ superhero film Captain Marvel brought with it a wave of
firsts: it was the studios’ first female-led solo film, the first female-led superhero film to pass
the billion-dollar mark, and for many fans, one of the first female superhero films with an
explicitly feminist ethos. However, while the Carol Danvers who appears on screen embodies
persistence, passion, humor, strength, and femininity, the Carol who evolved in the pages of
comics was not always so complex. Traditionally, female superheroes in mainstream comics
have been both sources of inspiration and vexation for feminist fans and scholars. Even when
characters have been created with the intent of directly referencing feminist movements, the
actual development and use of such characters has often been one dimensional, stereotypical,
and devoid of reference to women’s lived experiences. For much of her existence, Carol Danvers
was no exception. Thus, in order to better analyze the progress represented by the film version
of Carol Danvers, this chapter will begin by reviewing the works of scholars Carolyn Cocca
and Rick Stevens, which trace the character’s evolution in comics and animated television
shows.1 Using an intersectional feminist lens,2 I will also examine other aspects of the Captain
Marvel film—female relationships, intergenerational mentoring, and sources of conflict—in or-
der to highlight the positive changes made to the narrative of Carol in particular and to explore
the possibilities for better representations of female superheroes more generally. Finally, I will
demonstrate that while Captain Marvel does have certain limitations, the film is nevertheless an
important step in representing women in the superhero genre.
Carol Danvers in comics and animated series

According to Cocca, the creation of Carol Danvers was (at least in part) a response to the
increasing prevalence of strong female characters across American media (184). Carol first
appeared in 1968 in the original Captain Marvel comic as a security officer/love interest to
the titular character Mar-Vell, an alien Kree warrior. In issue 18 of the comic, a machine
called the “psyche-magnitron” explodes and radiation pours over Carol, eventually giving
her powers that match Mar-Vell’s (Thomas, Kane, Buscema, and Romita). It is not until 1977
that her own comic, Ms. Marvel, debuts (Conway, Conway, Buscema, and Sinnott). Despite
having the same powers as Captain Marvel, and despite the comic “having a politically
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Sam Langsdale
Figure 21.1 John

Buscema. Ms. Marvel, Issue #1 (1977)
progressive and feminist mission” (Cocca 184), Carol as Ms. Marvel suffers from many of the
pitfalls characteristic of mainstream female superheroes: being objectified, hypersexualized,
treated as weak, and framed as derivative. Her original costume, for instance, amounts to
little more than a tankini with accessories—“black undies, black gloves, black boots, yellow
Hala star, and a black domino mask,” completed by “a long red scarf around her neck,” all of
which left her midriff, back, and legs exposed (Cocca 185) (Figure 21.1).
Visually the costume alludes to the one worn by Mar-Vell; however on Carol, it is unde-
niably sexualized. Carol is also not really in control of her powers; instead, she forms what
Cocca characterizes as dissociative identity disorder such that Carol Danvers, the woman,
blacks out whenever superhero action is required, leaving the (masculinized) Kree warrior,
Ms. Marvel, inside her consciousness to take care of business. Scholars have interpreted this
kind of dichotomy as perpetuating problematic associations of femininity with passivity and
weakness, and masculinity (or what is traditionally considered masculine) with activity and
strength (Cocca 187; Gibson 143–144). The name Ms. Marvel is, of course, also derivative
of Captain Marvel. Writer/Editor Gerry Conway attempted to explain that the title “Ms.”
was used in order to identify the character in a way that did not rely on marital status; how-
ever, combined with the sexualized costume, the fainting spells, and the “split personality,”
this nod toward feminist politics fell flat (Cocca 186). Indeed, scholars like Stevens have
concluded that this combination made Carol’s “original incarnation a considerably weak
feminist icon,” while Mike Madrid described Carol’s creation as Marvel snapping “off a rib
from one of their male characters to create their Eve” (175).
Changes in the creative team did much to improve Carol’s development. Under writer
Chris Claremont, editor Archie Goodwin, and artist Dave Cockrum, many of the problems
surrounding Carol’s origins in Ms. Marvel were corrected. Claremont resolved the “split
personality” situation, combining both the “masculine” and “feminine” sides of the char-
acter into a single female hero who exhibited strength and boldness while also being caring.
Carol’s circle of friends and villains expanded and Claremont depicted a character who was
truly committed to being a hero but who also had a strong sense of her self. The derivative
nature of Carol’s superhero persona was addressed in a conversation with Captain Marvel
in which Carol clarifies that she is her own person and so much more than just a copy or a
romantic interest (Cocca 188–190). Claremont also revisited the origin of Carol’s powers,
adding “Carol at that moment was ‘wishing she had the power to stand with Mar-Vell as an
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Feminist evolution of Carol Danvers
Figure 21.2 Frank

Cho. Captain Marvel: Carol Danvers—The Ms. Marvel Years, Vol. 1 (2006)
equal,’ and that is why the machine gave her the power and mind of Kree warrior” (Cocca
190). Cocca writes that all of these changes established that Carol was as “smart, determined,
and equal to any man who might take a similar path” (190). That is not to say that Carol’s
character development was free from sexism from this point onward. The change in her uni-
form during this time period, for example, demonstrated the same kinds of persistent para-
doxes that have plagued so many female superheroes. While the two-piece tankini was gone,
it was replaced with “a black bathing suit with a high neck, and black thigh-high boots,” a
red scarf around her waist, and a lightning bolt across her chest that Stan Lee endorsed as
“shiny leather and tits and ass” (in Cocca 190) (Figure 21.2).
Cockrum’s redesign was directed to remain “sexy,” and while, as Cocca points out, the
new costume did cover more of Carol’s body, it was still meant to “appeal to an Anglo-
European upper-middle-class standard of attractiveness” (191). So, despite Claremont’s in-
tention to redesign Carol’s look “to appeal to a female audience, trying to make her a hip,
happening, 70s woman striking out on her own” (in Cocca 190), the uniform was still ren-
dered via the male gaze (Mulvey).
A more egregious backsliding in Carol’s progression as a feminist character came as a result
of Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s involvement in issue #200 of Avengers (Michelinie,
Layton, Pérez, Green) in which Carol is abducted, forcibly “seduced,” raped, impregnated,
and then brainwashed by an alien entity (Cocca 191–192). While this issue resulted in outcry
from many fans, and notably from Ms. Marvel writer Chris Claremont himself, treatment of
Carol throughout the 1980s and 1990s remained tumultuous at best. First, Carol’s memo-
ries and powers are stolen from her during her time with the X-Men; she then gains cos-
mic powers and becomes the character “Binary” for a short time; while working with the
Avengers, she adopts a new moniker, “Warbird,” develops a problem with alcoholism, harms
an Inhuman, and is eventually court-martialed (Stevens; Cocca 193–196). As Stevens sug-
gests, “these events produced another stain on the already-strained reception of Ms. Marvel
as a second-wave feminist icon.” Efforts to revitalize the character and distance her from
past were made in the early 2000s; however, this time period too produced mixed results.
Whether in her own solo titles, or as a part of ensemble texts, Carol displays the personality
so beloved by fans: she is “the resilient soldier, the self-reflective striver, the all-too-human
hero” (Cocca 196). Yet simultaneously, Carol is also visualized in highly sexualized ways;
she appears in books overwhelmingly created by all-male, all-white teams; and according
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to Cocca, “she does not have female allies around her except in isolated issues, and stands
mostly alone with an occasional love interest” (197). Hardly the right ingredients for a truly
feminist superhero narrative. In the animated television series Super Hero Squad and The
Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the nuance of Carol’s personality is once again stripped
away. As often the only female character on Super Hero Squad, Carol as Ms. Marvel is basically
“an annoyance whose most prominent episodes cast her as ‘the girlfriend’ and as a distaff
version of a male hero” (Cocca 199). The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes offers something
of an improvement by including two female characters, Carol as Ms. Marvel and Wasp, and
Carol’s character construction is generally stronger; however, Cocca concludes that it is still
stereotypical and one dimensional, focusing on Carol’s “uptight military seriousness” (200).
All together, the comics and series that comprise Carol’s history are, according to Stevens,
“fraught with uncomfortably gendered texts.” While the inclusion of certain forms of femi-
nism is evident, any close reading of this 35-year history would, as Stevens suggests, under-
mine “Danver’s credibility as a feminist symbol.”
In 2012, however, that strained credibility changed significantly, when Marvel re-launched
a solo title dedicated to Carol Danvers, in which she truly takes up the mantle indicative of
the book’s title, Captain Marvel. For the first time, the book was produced by a woman writer
and, shortly after launching, a woman editor with Kelly Sue DeConnick and Sana Amanat
signing on to the project. Resurrecting the aspects of the character that made her most com-
pelling, DeConnick writes Carol with humor, swagger, and even a hot temper, in ways that
are not framed as masculine, but as characteristic of a loveably imperfect female superhero
dedicated to “kicking ass” (Cocca 200). Using time travel as a plot device, DeConnick re-
imagines Carol’s origins so that she actively chooses to receive her powers, even in the face
of danger. Her troublesome past is also wiped away when a brain hemorrhage erases all of
Carol’s memories (Cocca 201–203; Stevens). Instead of relying on a male character to regain a
sense of herself, as she had in the past (i.e. from Professor Xavier of the X-Men), DeConnick’s
Carol learns what it means to be Captain Marvel from an eight-year-old girl who creates a
comic book to remind Carol of her role as a hero. Also different from previous iterations,
DeConnick’s Carol is surrounded by friends and allies, most of whom are women, who are
diverse in character and appearance. Perhaps as impactful a change as swapping the “Ms.” for
“Captain,” artist Jamie McKelvie also redesigned Carol’s uniform to look “more reminiscent
of a military flight suit than spandex” (Stevens) (Figure 21.3).
Figure 21.3 Dexter

Soy. Captain Marvel, Issue #1 (2012)
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Carol also began to be illustrated in ways that allowed her to be active and strong, while
also feminine, and that rejected entirely the long legs and overly large breasts “bad girl”
aesthetic of the past. While not all fans welcomed these changes—in fact many responded
with emphatic misogyny and rejection (Cocca 204)—a new population of readers formed
an enthusiastically receptive community that came to be known as the Carol Corps. As
Cocca notes, “the combination of such relationships with the hero’s non-sexualization, her-
oism, strength, perseverance, caring, hotheadedness, risk-taking, agency, humor, and pathos
struck a chord with those who had felt alienated from mainstream superhero comics” (203).
More specifically, Cocca writes, the Carol Corps was made up of “female readers as well as
others who had tired of or been offended by ‘broke back,’ secondary, and one-note female
superheroes” (203). The availability of Captain Marvel from online retailers also opened up
fandom for readers who could not, or were not comfortable accessing comics in traditional
retail spaces previously. The re-launched Captain Marvel was undoubtedly the most inclusive,
feminist rendition of Carol Danvers yet, and importantly, it was also foundational for the
2019 film (Mason).
Carol Danvers on film

Similar to DeConnick’s book, Captain Marvel the film contributes to Carol’s evolution as
feminist character in a number of meaningful ways. On the creative side, the film marks
the first time a woman has directed for Marvel with Anna Boden (in collaboration with
Ryan Fleck) at the helm (Machado). Boden and Fleck also claim writing credits, alongside
an otherwise all-female roster including Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, and
Meg LeFauve (IMDb). In addition to a sneaky cameo, DeConnick served as a consultant on
the film (Mason). The storyline does not follow any of the previous comics but nevertheless
stays true to the spirit of DeConnick’s Carol. As the film unfolds, the audience follows Vers
on her journey to complete her first mission as a Kree warrior, and also to truly gain a sense
of who she is. Her memories of her early life are patchy, and even though she is confronted
by the Supreme Intelligence in a form she is meant to recognize, Vers has very little sense of
her past. It is not until Vers is captured by the Skrulls—the alien race we are led to believe
are the “bad guys”—and then crash-lands on Earth that she starts to understand the complex-
ity of her own identity. Vers, it turns out, is not her true name, and while she does indeed
have Kree blood running through her veins, Carol Danvers is from Earth. With the help of
SHIELD agents Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, one deceptively cute flerken, and Maria and
Monica Rambeau, Carol née Vers discovers more about who she was, how she became who
she is, and that her mission to hunt Skrulls is based on a lie. Skrulls, it turns out, are not the
prime enemy; rather, they have been colonized by the Kree and are under threat of extinc-
tion. Once fully realized, Carol uses her power to right past wrongs and to help secure a new
future for the Skrulls.
Throughout this narrative, women play a key role in Carol’s heroics. Resonant with
DeConnick’s books in which Carol chooses to receive powers, a flashback scene in the film
shows Carol in a stand-off with Kree warrior Yon-Rogg; rather than surrender the engine
built by her female mentor to this as yet unknown aggressor, Carol shoots the machine and
absorbs the power within. The mentor, Dr. Wendy Lawson, is in fact an under-cover Kree
scientist named Mar-Vell, and as mentioned earlier, she was one of the most important people
in Carol’s life. Maintaining Carol’s agency and gender-swapping Mar-Vell emphasizes the
centrality of women and their relationships to one another in the film. The other founda-
tional relationships in Carol’s life are also with women. Maria and Monica Rambeau, we are
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Sam Langsdale
Figure 21.4 Captain Marvel (2019) Marvel Studios
told, become Carol’s family when her relationships with biological kin prove toxic. Further,
reminiscent of DeConnick’s character Kit, young Monica is responsible for keeping all of
Carol’s belongings and talking Carol through them in order to help her remember who she
really is. Monica is also instrumental in helping Carol to re-engineer her uniform, turning
it into the now iconic red, blue, and gold flight suit evocative of McKelvie’s 2012 redesign
(Figure 21.4).
Distinct from the original comics where a male Mar-Vell leads Carol to the source of her
power, or the mid-2000s comics in which Carol has no female relationships to speak of, the
film constructs a much more feminist framework. This Carol it not derivative of a male hero,
and it is not because of solely male characters (or creators, for that matter) that she evolves
into the hero she is meant to be. Instead, Carol as Captain Marvel manifests overwhelmingly
as a result of the mentoring, love, support, and persistence of women. It is not just the people
who fight alongside and support Carol that make this version of the character more feminist;
however, it is also about who, or rather what, Carol fights against. While the category of
“bad guys” shifts in the film from Skrulls to Kree and the Supreme Intelligence, I argue there
is something conceptually broader in Carol’s way. In fact, Captain Marvel conveys that it isn’t
the Skrulls Carol needs to worry about, it’s the misogyny. She has certainly been confronted
with misogyny before; Cocca outlines the various times when Carol was demeaned on the
basis of gender. However, as Cocca observes, it often seems “as if such sexism is the product
of individuals rather than being systemic” (190). But the film is unique in depicting the mi-
sogyny Carol confronts as systemic.
Traditionally, misogyny is assumed to mean the hatred of women because they are women.
If that is the definition, then my claim may seem a bit extreme. There isn’t anyone in the
film who hates Carol (even Minn-Erva stops at saying she “never liked” Carol), and even
if there was, we really don’t have any evidence that that kind of hatred is rooted in Carol’s
gender identity. So what makes such a claim possible? In her recent book, Down Girl: The
Logic of Misogyny, philosopher Kate Manne argues that the “naïve conception” of misogyny—
hatred of women as women—fails us on a number of levels. First, it suggests that misogyny
is a virtually nonexistent phenomenon; though this may seem to make sense to those who
believe that gender justice has been fully realized, for those of us aware of the persistence of
vast inequalities, and who experience hostility or exclusion on a regular basis, this suggestion
belies reality. Second, if misogyny is believed to be about hatred of women as women, and
it is understood as being relatively rare, then it is immensely unhelpful for victims because
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it becomes “inscrutable” and thus any claim that something is misogynist becomes difficult
to justify. Finally, if we continue to insist on this “naïve conception,” those who are accused
of misogynist behavior have only to say that they don’t hate women and then point to the
women in their lives whom they love or care for. Again, for those of us who have experi-
enced harassment or abuse in ways that we are certain relate to our gender, it hardly helps
to know that there are others like us in the lives of our abusers. Manne argues that another
definition of misogyny is necessary—one that does not lapse into psychological explanations,
or that makes the coexistence of care for, and hostility toward, women impossible.
Manne proposes instead that misogyny be understood as “a property of social environ-
ments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to the enforcement and policing
of patriarchal norms and expectations.” In other words, misogyny is “a name for whatever
hostile force field forms part of the backdrop of [a woman’s] actions, in ways that differentiate
her from a male counterpart (with all else being held equal)” (19). This alternative defini-
tion ameliorates the difficulties outlined above because “misogyny’s essence lies in its social
function, not its psychological nature” (20). A person may be enacting misogyny not because
they “feel” hatred, but rather because they are upholding what they believe is right, i.e. the
patriarchal norms, ideals, and practices that have been privileged by dominant social struc-
tures. The conversation then is less about what misogyny is and instead more about what it
does. More specifically, Manne outlines the operations of misogyny in the following steps:
Misogyny takes a girl or a woman belonging to a specific social class (of a more or less
fully specified kind, based on race, class, age, body type, disability, sexuality, being cis/
trans, etc.). It then threatens hostile consequences if she violates or challenges the rele-
vant norms or expectations as a member of this gendered class of persons. These norms
include (supposed) entitlements on his part and obligations on hers. She may also be
positioned as the type of woman who is representative of those who are not playing their
assigned parts properly or are trespassing on his territory. (20)
There are a number of things to take note of here: first, we are no longer beholden to a
definition that presumes that all misogynist behavior looks the same and instead, this alter-
native definition allows us to understand misogyny in more intersectional ways. Second, this
type of behavior can be performed by anyone who believes that there is a proper “place” for
women in patriarchal society and that men are justified in laying claim to disproportionate
amounts of power and control. Third, misogyny may be directed at particular women even
if they have not specifically behaved in ways that defy “patriarchal law and order” simply
because they are perceived to be the type of woman who does not perform her role prop-
erly. In short, Manne writes, “sexism [is] the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and
rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny [is] the system that polices and enforces its
governing norms and expectations” (20). So, what does this have to do with Captain Marvel?
The many faces of misogyny in Captain Marvel

Through the frequent flashbacks Carol experiences in the film, we learn that there were many
points in her life where she was told to stay “down girl,” and we see that these directives
came from different types of people. The first person is Carol’s Kree superior, Yon-Rogg.
Although their relationship seems to be one of mutual respect, and good-natured snark, the
interactions between Yon-Rogg and Carol are unquestionably misogynist. In their opening
fight scene, Yon-Rogg insists repeatedly that Carol must not let anger and emotion be a part
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of her combat, that she must remain calm and rational at all costs. This kind of psychological
policing has a long history in our patriarchal society where it is assumed that to participate
in a “man’s world” all emotion must be erased, and further, that if women in particular want
to be taken seriously, they must control their (always irrational) anger ( Jaggar). When Carol
asks why she was given her power if they expect her not to use it, Yon-Rogg again insists that
she must learn to use it right, or, in other words, she must learn to use the power according
to what he says is right. Manne reminds us that “misogyny is primarily a property of social
systems or environments as a whole, in which women will tend to face hostility of various
kinds because they are women in a man’s world (i.e., a patriarchy), who are held to be failing to
live up to patriarchal standards” (33). Though Yon-Rogg and Carol’s verbal banter in the
opening scenes gives it a more playful feel, Yon-Rogg is actually emphasizing Carol’s failure
to live up to (his) Kree standards.
Yon-Rogg also threatens Carol a number of times, a key component of the mechanisms
of misogyny according to Manne. At the point that Carol begins to fight in her own unique
ways, Yon-Rogg warns her that what has been given can always be taken away, alluding to
the Kree technology embedded in Carol’s neck which is supposedly the source of her power.
We hear this threat articulated first by the Supreme Intelligence who, in Carol’s initial visit,
takes the form of a woman, Dr. Wendy Lawson (aka Mar-Vell), and who makes the threat
when Carol shows signs of noncompliance. This too is a powerful lesson in recognizing mi-
sogyny; it can come in many forms, including in the behavior of some women. As Manne
writes, patriarchal ideology “enlists a long list of mechanisms” in service of policing women’s
behavior, “including women’s internalization of the relevant social norms, narratives about
women’s distinctive proclivities and preferences, and valorizing depictions of the relevant
forms of care work as personally rewarding, socially necessary, morally valuable, [etc.]” (47).
The particularly insidious aspect of these social roles is that they are “supposed to look as nat-
ural or freely chosen as possible” such that it can be difficult to distinguish how they prop up
patriarchy. Of course the Supreme Intelligence’s adoption of Lawson’s image does not mean
that the character Lawson herself was guilty of adhering to patriarchal social norms (in fact
we know she absolutely was not) but instead is a reminder that misogyny—as a system that
polices women’s behavior via hostilities and threats—does not always wear a man’s face. That
said, Yon-Rogg also gives himself away (as perpetuating misogyny) at the conclusion of the
film. When he finally reaches Maria’s house on Earth, and encounters a person who appears
to be Carol, Yon-Rogg follows custom by asking questions only Carol would know the an-
swers to. The Skrull who has shape-shifted to resemble Carol does relatively well until Yon-
Rogg asks whose blood was used to give Carol a transfusion in order to keep her alive after an
explosion. The Skrull cannot answer and so after shooting him, Yon-Rogg says bitterly, “It’s
my blood that’s coursing through her veins.” Later, when he is fighting Carol, he reminds her
of this fact and again threatens to take away her powers, claiming that she would be nothing
without him, or without the Kree. As Manne notes, misogyny involves “(supposed) entitle-
ments on his part and obligations on hers”; here manifesting in Yon-Rogg’s implication that
Carol owes her allegiance to the Kree and to him because she was given some of his blood.
In other words, Yon-Rogg believes he is entitled to Carol’s obedience.
There are more familiar misogynist faces in the film as well. Flashbacks reveal a fellow
Air Force cadet who attempts to put Carol in her place by arguing that being a fighter pilot
is a “man’s territory” and asking, “you know why they call it a cockpit, don’t you?” In mili-
tary training scenes, we see Carol clinging to a rope, trying to fling herself forward and all
around her, male cadets are laughing and shouting, “you’ll never make it.” Standing outside
a store, Carol is told to smile by a man who arrives on his motorcycle just moments before.
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We are also shown a scene from Carol’s childhood where, after she crashes a go-cart, her
angry father rushes over, not to ensure her safety but to chastise her for daring to participate
in a boy’s activity that he forbade her to try. In all of these examples, women in the audience
will have undoubtedly recognized themselves in Carol’s experiences and for so many of us,
these parallels made the “stand up” scene all the more powerful. Carol isn’t just getting up
after falling down, being knocked down, being thrown out, she’s getting up time and again
after misogyny tells her to stay “down girl.” In an interview with entertainment site Polygon,
DeConnick states, “Carol falls down all the time, but she always gets back up—we say that
about Captain America as well, but Captain America gets back up because it’s the right thing
to do. Carol gets back up because ‘F— you’” (Polo). This type of attitude is best exhibited in
the film when Carol blasts Yon-Rogg into the dirt and assures him, “I have nothing to prove
to you,” shaking off the last remnants of his entitlement.3
Higher, further, faster, more

The version of Carol that appears on film certainly seems to be one of the most feminist ren-
ditions of the character to date. Her continued evolution across media has paved the way for
numerous feminist fans to meaningfully engage with the superhero genre. That said, some
questions remain as to whether the film is a feminist text more generally. The treatment of
Maria Rambeau in particular may be a cause for concern. While we get brief glimpses of
Maria’s career in the Air Force, and while she plays an important role in saving the Skrulls,
fans have posed critical questions about the racial politics of her supporting role. Writer and
editor Helen Gould, for example, in her analysis of subtle forms of racism in science fiction
and fantasy, suggests that Maria could be read as a “magical Negro.” Gould notes, building
on the work of Cerise Glenn and Landra Cunningham, that this character type’s actions
consist of “[assisting] the main, white character; [helping] him or her discover and utilize
his or her spirituality, self-worth, or abilities; [offering] wisdom that helps to resolve the
white character’s dilemma.” She argues that Maria fits these criteria because she has very few
people in her life other than Monica and Carol, we know very little about what she’s been
doing in Carol’s absence, and her pep talk to Carol (i.e. the one that includes “you were the
most powerful person I knew”) is unreciprocated and serves only to solidify Carol’s success.
Glenn and Cunningham suggest that while these types of interactions seem to be about how
“Black and White characters relate to each other in a constructive manner,” they are often
vehicles for racial stereotypes (136). Part of the problem, they observe, is “the lack of charac-
ter development for these roles. They do not have depth or interior lives. […] these characters
only exist to rescue the White characters that do have more character depth” (138). Further,
Gould critiques the pep talk by saying:
What makes lines and speeches like this so frustrating is that they are so rarely said to
people of colour, particularly black people, despite the fact that we are constantly told
by the entirety of western society and western media that we are not kind, or smart, or
important. We are never worthy of being reassured like that – we are never allowed to be
fragile in the way that so many of us actually are. We are forced, in reality and in fiction,
to constantly provide support to others that we should be giving to ourselves.
While Gould herself admits that Maria is not the most explicit example of a “magical Ne-
gro,” the critique is nonetheless salient. The film omits much of Maria’s life, and only rarely
gives us insight into her ambitions, thoughts, and feelings distinct from her relationship to
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Sam Langsdale
Carol. In fact, related to the analysis provided above, one of the underdeveloped aspects of
Maria’s life is her own struggle with misogyny. She hints at the uniqueness of her experi-
ences when she tells Carol, “you were the only person who supported me as a pilot and as
a mother,” but further discussion of what this statement means for Maria as a Black woman
is not had. That Maria delivers that line implies some recognition of the distinctness of her
lived reality, but the film hardly demonstrates an explicit awareness of this. Manne recog-
nizes that “there are forms of erasure and subsequent invisibility that are arguably distinctive
to, and certainly endemic of, ‘misogynoir,’ Moira Bailey’s term (2014) for the kind of misog-
yny faced by black women in America given their particular social location, and the opera-
tion of anti-black racism in conjunction with heteronormative and patriarchal forces” (64). It
is perhaps unreasonable to expect Maria to receive the same level of character development as
Carol, but for a film that focuses on the importance of female relationships, and that frames
misogyny as a primary obstacle, the politics of Maria’s role, from an intersectional feminist
perspective, are questionable.
Similar concerns were raised about the treatment of Monica Rambeau in comics. As the
second character to actually bear the moniker “Captain Marvel” after Mar-Vell, and the first
Black female Avenger, fans of Monica have long been dissatisfied with the fact that Carol
Danvers, a white female character, was more readily associated with the title (Cocca 206).
As Cocca explains, there was a real need to address “some previously simmering criticism
from Monica Rambeau fans who felt that the character of Carol had usurped the title from
Monica—the first female Captain Marvel—in a way that smacked of racism and lacked un-
derstanding from creators and from the fans in the Carol Corps” (208). In DeConnick’s
run, Monica is brought in for two issues during which she and Carol are framed as peers,
working collaboratively to surmount obstacles (Cocca 208). The use of the moniker is also
addressed; Carol initially defends her own use of the title, and implies that Monica has no
real ownership of it, but she eventually concedes, recognizes Monica’s place in the history
of “Captain Marvel,” and apologizes. Unfortunately, the film creators have approached this
point of continuity in a way that ignores Monica’s precedence. By recreating her as a child
in the film, Monica’s history in the comics becomes untenable. Her central role in helping
Carol remember who she is, and in helping her to become Captain Marvel, is arguably an
attempt to affirm Monica as integral to the Captain Marvel timeline. However, for many,
this reframing perpetuates the tendency to see Black female characters as nothing more than
support for their white counterparts. Of the changes made to Monica’s character in the film,
writer Court Danee states, “the racial optics of this portrayal of Monica Rambeau are poor
to say the least. Firstly, it continues the tradition of white superheroes overshadowing Black
ones. Secondly, it mimics mainstream feminism’s tendency to exclude or diminish Black
women in favor of centering white women.” For scholars Glenn and Cunningham, this
kind of treatment results in part because of all-white creative teams, which is indeed the case
for most of Monica’s history in comics (Cocca 208), and is true of the film’s writing team
(IMDb). As Glenn and Cunningham observe, “most Hollywood screenwriters do not know
much about Black people other than what they see or hear in other media forms,” and they
therefore perpetuate problematic tropes and racial stereotypes (137).
The effects of these kinds of characterizations are deeply troubling. Danee writes, “Cap-
tain Marvel ultimately reminds me that this movie was made for a particular type of female
audience, and I am not in it. I can like it as much as I want, but it really doesn’t matter.
Because Marvel didn’t make this movie for me.” Attempts to counter this kind of statement
often involve emphasizing the impossibility of producing a single narrative that reflects and is
intended for everyone. And indeed, such an attempt would not even be particularly desirable.
306
Cocca demonstrates that one of the primary problems with having only one or two female
superheroes in comics or on screen results in those singular characters “standing in for all
women” (199). DeConnick attempted to move away from the assumption that the represen-
tation of one type of woman was sufficient to represent the experiences of all women, stat-
ing that her book “was always a Carol Danvers book” that “then became a Captain Marvel
book” (Cocca 208) and implying that she did not set out to write about all of the characters
called Captain Marvel (with specific reference to Monica Rambeau), but instead to write
about one in particular, Carol Danvers. Director Anna Boden too was cautious about the
film’s framing, saying, “the story lends itself to a [feminist narrative]. We just found what we
thought was strong and powerful about this character and stayed to that story. No, we’re not
trying to make this movie about all women—we can’t make it about all women’s journeys—
but we want to just be really true to this woman’s journey” (Machado). Recognizing the
need for discrete stories is important, but these statements of delimitation miss Danee’s above
point in at least two important ways. First, there is a need to make clear how frequently sto-
ries about white women’s journeys involve the marginalization and stereotyping of women
of color. Casting more than just white women in female superhero films is crucial, but that
alone does not result in inclusion. Even in texts centered on white women, the perpetuation
of racialized power dynamics that elicit the erasure and disempowerment of female characters
of color is not inevitable. From an intersectional feminist perspective, it absolutely should not
be. Examining this tendency in Captain Marvel is important in helping us to understand how
future female-led superhero films should change. Second, although DeConnick’s book and
the Captain Marvel film take Carol forward in important feminist ways, they also contribute
to the overrepresentation of white women in media. As Cocca reminds us, the progressive
nature of these texts has to be questioned insofar as, from at least the 1970s onward, “attrac-
tive, superpowered, heterosexual, nondisabled white women were increasingly prominent
and profitable, their privilege making their challenges to the status quo more palatable”
(184). Captain Marvel then is not only necessarily limited in its scope in that it centers on one
woman’s journey, but also limited in the ways it disrupts and diversifies the superhero genre.
Exploring the shortcomings of the film is not to dismiss its successes. The prevalence of
women on the creative team, the film’s box office performance, and the feminist character-
ization of the hero all matter immensely. However, if what we want to see is not only fem-
inist characters but wholly feminist superhero films, it is necessary to continue to push for
“more… Always more” (DeConnick, Soy). More diversity is needed behind and in front of
the camera. More stories, from myriad perspectives, about women’s lived experiences should
inform our films. Not just more, but all of our characters should embody and be celebratory
of our differences. And more awareness is needed of the ways intersecting social hierarchies
effect people’s lives such that our superheroes are better able to fight various kinds of in-
justice. Carol has gotten Marvel female-led superheroes off the ground; now let’s push for
intersectional feminist films that take us “higher, further, faster baby!”
Notes
1 Owing to space constraints, and because thorough analysis of Carol Danvers in comics has already
been done by the scholars referenced here, this survey of the character’s history is intended as a
general overview.
2 From the early part of the twenty-first century, “intersectionality” has been a mainstay of much
social justice-oriented scholarship (Collins and Bilge 1). That said, its meaning and usage has ex-
panded such that there is no singular definition. Patrick Grzanka’s summation is helpful: inter-
sectionality reflects on “the ways in which race, class, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions
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Sam Langsdale
of identity and inequality shape the contours of social life and structures in the United States
and around the world. ‘Intersectionality, [is] the study of how these dimensions of inequality co-
construct one another” (xiii). Estelle Freedman defines feminism as “a belief that women and men
are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements
are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender
always intersects with other social hierarchies” (22). In the context of this chapter, to conduct an in-
tersectional feminist analysis is to critically examine how white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy,
and heteronormativity (among other social hierarchies) co-construct each other such that represen-
tations of white, affluent, heterosexual men are disproportionately privileged and presumed to be
the norm. Further, intersectional feminist analyses seek to propose alternative modes of represen-
tation that do not perpetuate overlapping systems of oppression and which illuminate the diversity
of women’s lived experiences as they are shaped by race, class, sexuality, and embodiment.
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“Captain Marvel (2019).” IMDb, March 2019, www.imdb.com/title/tt4154664/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt.
Cavanaugh, Patrick. “‘Captain Marvel’: Brie Larson Addresses the Smiling ‘Controversy’.” Comic-
book.com, February 2019, https://comicbook.com/marvel/2019/02/27/captain-marvel-brie-larson-
smile-smiling-trolls/.
Clark, Nicole. “Brie Larson Was Told to Smile, So She Put Smiles Onto Marvel Dudes.” Vice, September
2018, www.vice.com/en_us/article/gynvnw/brie-larson-was-told-to-smile-so-she-put-smiles-
onto-marvel-dudes.
Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Collins, Patricia and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality (Key Concepts). Polity Press, 2016.
Conway, Gerry, Carla Conway, John Buscema, and Joe Sinnott. “This Woman, This Warrior!” Ms.
Marvel 1(1), January 1977.
Danee, Court. “How ‘Captain Marvel’ Erases Monica Rambeau.” Shadow and Act, March 2019,
https://shadowandact.com/how-captain-marvel-erases-monica-rambeau.
DeConnick, Kelly Sue, and Dexter Soy. Captain Marvel 7(1), September 2012.
Francisco, Eric. “‘Captain Marvel’ Gets Review Bombed Again, This Time on IMDb.” Inverse, March
2019, www.inverse.com/article/53892-captain-marvel-brie-larson-is-being-review-bombed-
again-on-imdb.
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Glenn, Cerise L. and Landra J. Cunningham. “The Power of Black Magic: The Magical Negro and
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white-men-lose-their-damn-minds.
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22
Female fans, female creators,
and female superheroes
The semiotics of changing gender dynamics
Angela Ndalianis
The superhero genre has thrived since the turn of the century. The record-breaking block-
busters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC’s Extended Universe, Marvel and DC’s
adult and children’s television series, multiple video games across numerous platforms, and
plethora of comic books have all successfully extended their reach beyond the traditional
comic book reader to attract new audiences across a variety of media. In this chapter, I focus
on what I believe to be some dramatic changes that are happening in female representation
and the female demographic within the context of the genre, particularly over the last de-
cade. The emphasis will be on the female superhero across comics, film, and television and
the systemic changes that have been (slowly) occurring in the stories, in the creative indus-
tries that create the stories, and in the world of fans who consume the stories.
There is a dynamic dialogue across these areas – the superhero narratives, the industries
that create them, and the fans of the genre – that has generated these shifts and the emergence
of new female superheroes signals a cultural shift generated by this three-way dialogue. At
this stage this shift is but a small, seismic rumble but this rumble is expanding outward and is
on its way to effecting a major transformation. It’s not that we’ve never had female heroes –
Ripley (the Alien franchise), Buffy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Sarah Connor (the Terminator
franchise), Calamity Jane (Calamity Jane), Trinity (Matrix), Lara Croft (the Tomb Raider series),
Charlie’s Angels (Charlie’s Angels), Yuki Kashima (Lady Snowblood), Alice (Alice in Wonder-
land and the Resident Evil franchise), and many, many others. By the same token, we’ve also
had female superheroes from the beginning of the genre in comics and later in film and
television – Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Batgirl, Invisible Girl, Ms. Marvel, etc. – but, as
I’ll go on to address later, especially since the late 1970s, these superwomen were primarily
created by and directed to a male audience. The dynamic currently in place in relation to
women (and issues of diversity more generally) in the superhero genre is resulting in systemic
changes that are putting pressure on entertainment industries to reconsider their previous
myopic focus on the white, heterosexual, male superhero.
This chapter examines the rationale behind this shift, which has seen a change toward
representations of richer, more diverse characterizations of female superheroes that abandon
previous (and, alas, continuing) norms that have hyper-feminized and simplified these char-
acters for the gaze of an assumed male viewer or reader. An overview will be provided of:
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Female fans, creators, and superheroes
Figure 22.1 Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–19). © HBO
changes in audience demographics, which now comprise of a readership/viewership that is

almost half female; changes in the entertainment industry, which have had to address both
fan demand for more women creatives and the changing demographic; the introduction
of more female writers and artists; changes since the early 2000s, which include the rise of
digital comics and online arenas of debate that include social media. In the latter part of the
chapter, I will turn to the writings of Yuri Lotman, the Russian semiotician, and his semiotic
model of the semiosphere, which offers a method for mapping out cultural shifts, and offers a
way for a critical rethinking of how genres intersect with culture (Figure 22.1).
I’d like to begin with an example of a character who may not strictly be a superhero, but
who certainly embodies many superhero characteristics. It’s Arya Stark, the young girl hero
from the incredibly popular television series Game of Thrones (HBO, 2009–19), and the ep-
isode is “The Long Night,” episode 3 of the season 8, in which Arya triumphantly kills the
Night King. Throughout the episode – and the series – the viewer is set up to believe it will
be Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen, both born into the role of monarch-to-be who finally
rid the world of the Night King. Instead, it is Arya who flies like a superhero out of the dark-
ness, Valyrian steel dagger in hand, and plunges the dagger into the heart of the leader of the
White Walkers. On Twitter, @the darkknight77/Anthony B. Cagle proclaimed, “I use to
like Arya Stark before last night’s episode of Game of Thrones turned her into the ultimate
Mary Sue,” then added:
Her killing the Night King

Not earned
Very little foreshadowing for most of the series
Jon got fucked over.
In the thread that followed, there was uproar. On the question of foreshadowing, @SFBrianT/
The Borg Were Wrong asked “Did you even watch the show?” while in response to the
Mary Sue comment, @Massawyrm/C. Robert Cargill remarked: “Anyone who thinks
Arya Stark is a Mary Sue needs to A) look up what Mary Sue actually means and B) Study
her as having one of the greatest character arcs of the 21st century” (@thedarkknight77).
@thedarkknight77’s negative response seems to be atypical of online responses to Arya’s
action. Reactions on social media can be described as explosive, in a positive way. Viewers of
the episode filmed themselves in large groups in pubs and other public spaces as well smaller
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Angela Ndalianis
groups at home and, as Arya plunged the dagger in, most erupted in joy, waving arms in the
air, yelling victory cries out loud, with one man somewhere in his 20s crying out “that’s my
girl!” Millions of people watched these audience reactions on YouTube. I myself remember
feeling elated, waving my arms around in excitement, and yelling out “Yes! Woohoo!”
This scene isn’t just about Arya sticking a knife into the heart of the Night King. For me,
it represents something bigger: sticking a knife into the heart of the traditional hero. While
everyone expected the victor to be the born-to-be heroes, instead, it turned out to be the
young girl who, very much like a superhero, had her own origin story that set her on a path
of revenge to rid the world of the evil that had torn her family and world apart. Interestingly,
also like a superhero, Arya played on issues of secret identity and disguise throughout the
series. She’s the self-made hero in the tradition of Batgirl, who strives to advance her physical
skills in order to fight evil; but unlike Batgirl, her narrative unravels in a fantasy rather than
superhero genre. It’s because Arya is a hero different to the norm that everyone watching
the episode in the YouTube videos (which have been viewed by millions) had such jubilant
reactions to her act of heroism. She’s an underdog who, from the beginning, fought against
performing the role of a conventional “girl.” Yet, it’s this different kind of “girl” who man-
ages to save humanity-at-large from extinction. And the fact that she’s a girl-become-woman
didn’t dissuade men in most of the videos online from being thrilled at her heroic act.
For decades (probably more like millennia) male producers and creators have assumed that
women can’t be viable heroes (or creators) who can sustain being heroes in a successful heroic
story or maintain the attention of an assumed male audience that’s seen to dominate in the
consumption of such stories. This scene and public reactions to it are, I believe, indicative of a
major cultural shift that is beginning to happen. It’s in the superhero genre that these changes
are being experienced most dramatically.
The rise of the C21st female superhero

This section provides an overview of some of the female superheroes who have appeared
in the last decade or so who have left a decisive stamp in terms of issues of representation,
feminist agendas, female creators, and female readers and viewers. As Liam Burke explains:
Moving into the second decade of the millennium there was a sustained attempt on the
part of the comic book industry to redress this disparity by reworking the secret iden-
tities of some of their most high-profile characters, with female heroes taking over the
mantles of Wolverine and Thor, Korean American Amadeus Cho serving as the Hulk’s
alter ego, and Pakistani American Kamala Khan becoming the new Ms. Marvel when
the previous title holder, Carol Danvers, received her overdue promotion to the rank
of Captain Marvel… yet after years in which every superhero seemed to be played by a
white guy named Chris (Evans, Hemsworth, Pratt) some of this diversity began to seep
into superheroes on screen. Superhero shows like Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Supergirl, and
Black Lightning provided a greater array of heroic types, while the box office grosses of
Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Aquaman, and Captain Marvel have hopefully dispelled
the misconception that women or people of color cannot lead superhero movies. (10)
One of the most successful additions is a superhero who has been around for a while –
Wonder Woman – who first appeared in All Star Comics #8 in October 1941, but who had,
until recently, never appeared in a movie. The Amazonian princess was the creation of psy-
chologist William Moulton Marston (writing under the pen name Charles Moulton), and
312
she was very much inspired by feminists of the era who fought for the rights of the powerful,
modern woman. Marston’s wife, Elizabeth, and his other life partner, Olive Byrne, also had
a role to play in the creation of the character, but it was Joye Hummel who was the first
woman to write Wonder Woman. Hummel (later, Joye Murchison Kelly), who was a student
and assistant of Marston’s between 1944 and 1947 (the year of Marston’s death), ghost-wrote
a number of the Wonder Woman comics during the years of Marston’s illness.1
She would remain the only woman creator of Wonder Woman until 1986 when another
woman – Trina Robbins – would become the first female artist to draw Wonder Woman
in the four-issue series Legend of Wonder Woman (written by Kurt Busiek). In the mid-1980s
Mindy Newell would become the first woman to actually be credited with writing Wonder
Woman (issues 326–8, 1985). However, it wasn’t until 2007 that Gail Simone would be hired
as the lead writer and the first woman to write Wonder Woman on a series run. Simone’s run
would last until 2010. Since then, more of an effort has been made by DC to include female
writers and artists, including Nicola Scott, Jill Thompson, Jodi Picoult, Meredith Finch, Shea
Fontana, and Mirka Andolfo.
The comic book industry took the lead in this respect, one that the film industry attempted
to address with the blockbuster film Wonder Woman ( Jenkins 2017). A film about Wonder
Woman had been in development hell since the late 1990s, with a number of male direc-
tors, including Joss Whedon, slated to direct. Around 2013 Warner Bros. revived plans for a
Wonder Woman film and Michelle MacLaren was hired as director, leaving soon after because
of “creative differences.” In 2015, Patty Jenkins accepted the role. There was a great deal of
media attention directed to the fact that a major blockbuster film – one that would be part of
DC’s Extended Universe in direct competition with Marvel’s Cinematic Universe – had been
given to a female director. The lack of faith in a female director was, no doubt, one of the
reasons Jenkins wasn’t locked into directing a sequel (Kit). Barring Kathryn Bigelow, every-
one knew women couldn’t direct action blockbuster films, right? Wrong. On release, the film
earned $821 million worldwide (Wonder Woman). The press and social media went wild, and
attention was drawn to Hollywood’s failure to acknowledge and support woman creatives in
the industry (see Lauzen 2017; Jacobs 2017). Jenkins became emblematic of the failure of the
film industry to support women. Patty Jenkins has since been locked into directing Wonder
Woman 1984 (due for release in 2020), and she will receive a reported $7–9 million, a record
salary for a female director (Kit).2 The film’s success revealed not only that women directors
could successfully direct action blockbusters that could also be major box office successes, but
that men would also go see films directed by women that also had a female lead character.
I remember going to see the film and, during the battle sequence when Wonder Woman takes
off her cape, walks onto the battlefield, and reveals her costume, an adult male in the audience
started hooting and whooping with joy. It added to the elation I felt while watching the film.
While not the most ground-breaking cinematic experience of all time, the film was
ground-breaking in terms of what it represented: empowered women and empowering to
women, a strong female hero who was empathic and followed a different journey compared
to male heroes, success in hitting the mark with both male and female audiences, proof that a
woman could more than handle directing what had previously been considered male-domain
film genres and budgets. Thousands of people posted their comments on twitter. Here is a sample:
• @emerylord – dear Lord, please bless the 10yo boy sitting next to me in Wonder Woman
who whispered, “Diana, no!” as she put herself in danger.
• @emerylord – also, please, his friend sitting on the other side of him who whispered
back, “she can do it.” amen.
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Angela Ndalianis
• @megsauce – NO WONDER WHITE MEN ARE SO OBSCENELY CONFIDENT

ALL THE TIME I SAW ONE WOMAN HERO MOVIE AND I’M READY TO
FIGHT A THOUSAND DUDES BAREHANDED
• @EvanMatyas – I’ve lived to see my childhood princesses become generals.
• @DeeGoots – Just passed my neighborhood comic store. Saw a little boy walking out in
a #WonderWoman headband, holding her comic book. Hells yeah.
• @bessbell – Hospitals should play Wonder Woman in birthing rooms.
• @elisaskinner – I’m sure Gal Gadot has a great ass, but I’m so excited I didn’t see it once
in the movie.
• @AnnaAkana – Still blown away that women are feeling something we’ve never felt
before. Representation matters.
• @Terri_Schwartz – Now #Wonder Woman’s a certified hit, I look forward to all other
studios scrambling for their own female-directed female-led superhero films!
• @joss [whedon, in response to male outcry about woman-only screenings] – I got to
see Wonder Woman by myself weeks ago so shut up there’s already been a man-only
screening. Oh and it’s a godddam delight.
• @chrishemsworth – I think she’d kick Thor’s a**
While most of the tweets were by women, men also responded. Most tweets were positive
reactions to the film addressing gender equality in the story, in the film industry, and for the
audience.
Wonder Woman was followed by another female superhero film – Captain Marvel – in February
2019. The film is based on the ongoing comic book series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick
with art by Dexter Soy, which was released in July 2012. As was the case in Wonder Woman,
the film focused heavily on relationships between women – in this case not the Amazonians
but the two friends Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel and Maria Rambeau, who had trained as
pilots together. At one point in the film, the women discuss the difficulty of being a woman
in the air force and not being able to get flight missions. It’s for this reason, in fact, that Carol
Danvers agrees to take on a secret mission with Dr. Wendy Lawson – testing an experimental
light-speed engine – which eventually results in her becoming Captain Marvel (when the
engine explodes, Danvers absorbs the energy from the explosion, which gives her her powers).
As was the case with Wonder Woman, the creators avoided over-sexualizing the female charac-
ters, and made an effort to hire women who could offer more convincing portrayals of female
experiences and relationships. The film was co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who,
along with Geneva Robertson-Dworet, also wrote the screenplay. All three were also respon-
sible for the story, along with Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve. Brigadier General Jeannie
Leavitt, the first female fighter pilot of the US Air Force, was also hired as consultant on Captain
Marvel, lending authenticity to the film’s depiction of female fighter pilots. The film premiered
in London on February 27, 2019 and grossed over $1.1 billion worldwide, making it the first
female-led superhero film to pass the billion-dollar mark, and the second-highest-grossing film
of 2019 (Avengers: Endgame came in first) (Hughes).
In television, the arrival of Jessica Jones (Netflix 2015–19) (Figure 22.2) and Supergirl (CBS
2015/The CW 2016–) in 2015 was the first time two female-led superhero shows aired si-
multaneously. Both shows push strong feminist agendas (the serial killer in season 3, Gregory
P. Salinger, calls Jennifer Jones a “feminist vindicator”), dealing with issues of sexism, abuse,
and equal rights (gender, sexuality, and race) and, like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel,
both pass the Bechdel Test (two female characters talk to each other about something other
than men). In fact, not only does Jessica Jones pass the Bechdel Test, but she inverts it. As noted
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Figure 22.2 Jessica Jones (Netflix 2015–19). © Netflix
in an article in the magazine Vox, “As season one continues, the show’s male characters
more frequently interact with one another. And those interactions are almost always about a
woman” (Abad-Santos).
Jessica Jones was created by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos and first appeared in
the comic book series Alias (MAX/Marvel 2001–4). The character was adapted for television
by Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote the Twilight scripts and was head writer on Dexter (Show-
time 2006–13). Jessica Jones deals with hard core issues surrounding sexuality, assault, rape,
addiction, trauma, and violence against women (and violence more generally). The character
introduces a new kind of female superhero to the genre – one who’s darker, is an alcoholic,
suffers from trauma as a result of having been raped and her mind being controlled, and is not
sure she really wants to be a hero. However, her job as private detective inevitably leads her
to step into her superhero role, even if grudgingly. Jessica Jones is one example of the new
superheroes entering the genre who lend more diversity and complexity to the superhero
identity, and who place the drama against the backdrop of more authentic social and cultural
issues, often issues that relate to gender. Given the fact that many of the show’s themes focus
on a number of female characters and women’s issues, it’s surprising (or perhaps not) that only
four out of thirteen of the directors in season one were women (there were even less female
writers). However, Melissa Rosenberg, Jessica Jones’ showrunner, decided that for the second
season of the series, all of the directors would be female, which they were, as were many of
the writers (Ryan). (For season three, the numbers were about half and half.)
Superhero scholars have equated this shift toward stronger female representation with the
third wave of feminism. For example, Neal Curtis and Valentina Cardo state that “Recent
developments in superhero comics have seen positive changes to the representation of char-
acters and storylines… these changes mark an intervention on behalf of female creators in
keeping with the theory and practice of third-wave feminism” (1). A similar feminist agenda
is found in Supergirl, which also tackles women’s issues, but the superhero in this case is the
flip side of Jessica Jones. Kara Zor-El/Kara Danvers/Supergirl is as shiny in spirit and full of
hope as her cousin Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman. Where Jessica Jones questions her role as
superhero, Supergirl embraces it. Her initial workplace, the media company CatCo, opened
up a space that allowed her to discuss issues relating to women in the workplace and female
empowerment with her boss, Cat Grant. By season four, and true to the beliefs of third wave
feminism, the series extends itself to explore wider political contexts and rights for all, in par-
ticular, alien refugees that have “invaded” the United States (including Supergirl); the show
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thus metaphorically aligns itself with the real-world politics of Trump’s presidency.3 Accord-
ing to a Nielsen poll, the audience who watches both Jessica Jones and Supergirl “every week
is almost completely equal in terms of gender parity. And even the show with the highest
number of male viewers—The Flash—still has a relatively large number of female viewers”
(McNally). In other words, despite the focus on female heroes and women’s issues, both male
and female demographics consume superhero narratives.
Many other female superheroes have emerged across media, all offering diverse represen-
tations of women. Faith Herbert, also known as Zephyr, first appeared in Valient’s comic
Harbinger #1 ( January 1992) and underwent a revamp in 2016 (Figure 22.3). This plus-size
superhero was created by writer Jim Shooter and David Lapham, and the new series has fe-
male creators – written by Jody Houser with artists Pere Perez and Marguerite Sauvage. Faith
is now also making her way to Hollywood to become the first big-curved superhero on the
big screen; Sony (the production company) have hired writer Maria Melnik, who worked on
America Gods, to work on the film (Pulver).
In 2011, Batwoman #1 was launched as part of the New 52 rebooted DC Universe – and
was extremely successful with a diverse range of readers. Kathy Kane/Batwoman was no lon-
ger a sidekick for Batman but was a powerful superhero in her own right. She was also a les-
bian and in issue 17, she proposed to her girlfriend, Maggie Sawyer. Soon after, Batwoman’s
creators of this series, W. Haden Blackman and J.H. Williams III, announced they would
end their run on Batwoman once they finished issue 26 because DC refused to allow Bat-
woman to marry her partner Maggie (Goldberg).4 There was much fan uproar. Following the
cancellation of Batwoman, the character was returned to DC in her own comic for the DC
Rebirth event – this time written by Margueritte Bennett – and her popularity with fans has
resulted in a television series (due to air in late 2019) developed by Caroline Dries and Greg
Berlanti, with Ruby Rose playing the role of Batwoman. The series is set in the Arrowverse,
sharing the same universe as Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl. Despite the refusal to allow Kate
to marry Maggie (DC have argued it was not about the fact it was a lesbian couple, but be-
cause to be an effective superhero she needed to be alone), the emphasis is on more diverse
depictions of women, and greater female creative input.
Figure 22.3 Jim Shooter and David Lapham. Faith. (1992) Valient Comics
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The Batgirl of DC’s The New 52 (and beyond) has involved a number of female creators,
including Gail Simone, Hope Larson, and Mairghread Scott as writers and Babs Tarr as artist.
One of the big news stories of 2014 was when Batgirl’s new costume – designed by Cam-
eron Stewart and Babs Tarr – was revealed; it was applauded for ditching the boobs-reveal
outfits typical of female superhero costumes and opting instead for a costume that was about
functionality. Batgirl will also soon be coming to the big screen. While Joss Whedon has
abandoned the film, the new writer hired is Christina Hodson, who wrote the Transformers
spinoff Bumblebee (Travis Knight 2018).
Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel is, perhaps, the most successful of the new female superheroes
erupting on the market. She’s Marvel’s first Muslim character to have her own comic book
and made her first appearance in Captain Marvel (#14) in August 2013, before headlining
in her own Ms Marvel comic books series in February 2014. Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-
American and a practicing Muslim who, after being exposed to Terrigen Mist, is able to flex
and transform her body. The idea for Kamala Khan came from Marvel editor Sana Amanat
who told other Marvel editor Steve Wacker stories about growing up in a Muslim family.
They approached G. Willow Wilson, who is herself a practicing Muslim, to write the comic.
In addition to her superhero adventures, Kamala deals with life as a teenager and as a second-
generation American Muslim (Saner). As Sarah Gibbons explains,
Ms. Marvel has been ground-breaking as a comic about intersectional experience, as it

breaks with a long tradition of framing women through hegemonic cultural ideals. The
representation of Kamala is particularly important when one considers how stereotypes
about Muslim women in the media influence the ways that they are harassed and dis-
criminated against in everyday life. (451)
Many others have joined the legion of new female superheroes – some replacing their white,
male counterparts, and others not: Thor was no longer deemed worthy of Mjolnir and a woman
took on the role of Thor (she will also be appearing in the fourth Thor film, Thor: Love and
Thunder, played by Natalie Portman); America Chavez, who is both lesbian and Hispanic, took
on the role of “America”; Iron Man was replaced by Iron Heart, an African American teenager;
X-23, a clone of Wolverine, had her own comic; She-Hulk has made a comeback as a high-
flying attorney – and these changes and many other changes are only in the medium of comics.
This is just a small sample of some of the new female superheroes and their female creators.
I should also qualify by quoting comics artist Colleen Coover, who says that:
comics do not consist only of those two companies [Marvel/DC and, by extension their
parent film and TV companies], so focusing only on their advancements or shortcomings
does a severe disservice to the women who create comics outside of that very narrow sliver
of publishing. There has [been] a remarkable boom of women, LGBTQ people and people
of color in American comics in the past decade or so, whether published by alternate pub-
lishing houses, small press, self-published or published on the web. (in Rhode)
It’s at the grassroots and independent level that many of these changes first manifested, meet-
ing the demand for new forms of representation and diverse creative talent. Marvel and DC
followed suit, attempting to include more women writers and artists as well as other diverse
groups in their companies. As of June 2019, there are 38 female and non-binary creators
scheduled to work on 30 different comic books at Marvel in July, which makes it 32% of the
overall comics for July. Releasing less comics than Marvel, at DC, 18 female creators worked
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on 20 comic books in July, which also brings the total to 32% women (Hanley). At DC,
early 2019 had 16% creators overall, with Marvel at 14.8%, so there was a marked increase
in a matter of five months (Beat Staff ). We’re dealing with genre, which is by its nature for-
mulaic; nevertheless, a lot of groundwork has been laid to complicate and make the female
superhero more multi-faceted as opposed to cardboard cut-out characters that simply exist
to be drooled over.
Superheroes and the rise of the female demographic

A number of changes have contributed to the shifts currently taking place, particularly in super-
hero comics, which this next section will primarily focus on. Central is the new dynamic that
has evolved between texts, producers, and consumers, which includes the powerful voice of fans
on social media that producers can’t ignore, particularly with regard to female representation
and female creators. Likewise, new modes of dissemination of superhero media, including digi-
tal delivery (e.g. ComiXology and other modes of digital comics distribution), have allowed ac-
cess to comics beyond the male-dominated comic book dungeons that kept many women at bay
between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Finally, there is a distinctive, transforming demographic
in the consumption of superhero media, which is moving away from tradition male consumers
to new male and female audiences and a more diverse audience in general.
In 2013, during a panel promoting PBS’s documentary series Superheroes: The Never-Ending
Battle, a few troglodyte comic book creators were asked why comics focus so little on women
and minorities. The panel included Gerry Conway, one of the creators behind DC’s character
the Punisher, who responded by saying that readers aren’t interested in female or minority
characters. Todd McFarlane, who created Spawn for Image Comics, said that he wouldn’t
steer his own two daughters toward comics because the industry is “testosterone-driven.”
But even in 2013, the facts were beginning to prove comments by both writers wrong.
The comics industry had lost touch with its changing demographic and the industry was in
decline. Around this time, in the mainstream, it was Marvel (initially) and DC – following
the lead of many independent comic book companies – that began to address diversity and
change in the market from what had been a dominant male audience, particularly in the case
of superhero comics. Despite glib, sexist remarks and disbelief expressed by men in the com-
ics industry, the reality was that to fail to address your demographic is to fail to attract your
new market that can bring in revenue. Jason Rhode states:
The reality that women are involved in comics is neither a new topic nor a new fact.
Women have always made comics, and women have always enjoyed comics. However,
the last several years have witnessed grassroots changes in both the business and fandom
of comics—alterations that are not widely understood.5
One of the reasons the changes aren’t understood is because of the difficulty in tracking who’s
buying comics – DC and Marvel are not forthcoming with statistics – especially in what had
been the traditional method of purchase since the early 1980s: comic book shops and online
orders.
Nevertheless, there have been other ways to track the changes. Brett Schenker, who runs
the comic website Graphic Policy, explained that in March 2017, the number of comic fans
on Facebook in America were 31 million and 283.8 million worldwide. Jason Rhode pro-
vides an overview of many of these changes stating that: in America, men accounted for
52.78% of readership and women 47.22%; women are the majority of fans under 18 and will
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“eventually become the majority of fans as age increases”; European Facebook likes were
divided between women at 45.45% and men at 54.55% (Rhode). While not all comics are
superhero comics, a great percentage are and, as Rhode states, this offers a reasonable picture
of the changes in readership. In addition, “Data in the Evidence Based Library and Informa-
tion Practice Journal states that 98 percent of public libraries reported having graphic novels
and comics in their collections…. [Results showed that] public library usage was 68 percent
female and 32 percent male” (McDonald).
The writer of Thor (including the female Thor) – Jason Aaron – has responded to this
issue of changing demographics. Walt Hickey argues that the focus on male characters and
male writers “may be due to whom publishers have perceived their audience to be.” He
quotes Jason Aaron, who explains:
“Over time, we started to appeal to the same, dwindling fans,” he said, adding, “I don’t
say that derisively, because I’m at the heart of that dwindling group of fans, and always
have been.” (Aaron is male, white and 40 years old.) During the 1960s and ’70s, comic
books moved from grocery store newsstands to specialized shops, which mostly catered
to a young, white, male audience. Once that happened, Aaron said, the industry lost a
way to attract new fans. (Hickey)
We do know that female comic book readers have been on the rise over the past few years,
partly because of the rise of digital comics distributors like ComiXology. According to new
registrations, “young female readers are currently ComiXology’s fastest-growing demo-
graphic.” ComiXology’s Chip Mosher has stated that “Recently, surveys have shown that
30% of our new customers are female…. This is up 50% from the last time we revealed the
percentage of female new customers at NYCC in 2013” (McNally). Given the upward tra-
jectory, the female demographic is no doubt even higher in 2019. Comics conventions reveal
similar trends. A July 2018 survey of the SanDiego Comic Con showed that 54% identified
as males, 44% as females, and 2% as other (Holloway). A 2015 study by Eventbrite that polled
2,600 different fans found that the number of male and female respondents who attended the
convention was exactly even (Eventbrite).
Of course, part of the reason for the growth in female superhero comics readers can also
be the fact that there are far more women working in comics these days – Gail Simone, Kelly
Sue DeConnick, G Willow Wilson, Tula Lotay, Adriana Melo, Marjorie Liu, Ming Doyle,
Hope Larson, Babs Tarr, Jill Thompson, to name just a few. And comic books from Marvel
and DC are also featuring more female characters, including superheroes, where more atten-
tion is paid to the depth of character.
Victoria McNally reviewed the statistics of female readers and viewers across superhero
media. In relation to superheroes on television she states that, according to data provided by
Nielsen in early November 2015, the average audience in the United States watching Super-
girl and Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. were, at 48%, equal in terms of gender parity and
“even the show with the highest number of male viewers – “The Flash” – still has a relatively
large number of female viewers [40%].” She concludes that “male viewers DO respond to
interesting female lead characters” as, I would add, female viewers to male leads. Based on
Nielsen research, film attendance of superhero films showed a higher attendance of men
but not by that high a margin. Ant-Man (2015), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), The Wolverine
(2013), Dark Knight Rises (2012), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) all averaged 42%–44%
female attendance, while Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014),
and Man of Steel (2013) sat at approximately 45% – not that wide a margin.
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The consumer/producer dynamic

In her book Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation, Carolyn Cocca discusses the
comic book store/direct market period of comics that dominated between the 1980s and the
early 2000s. She states:
The last decades of the twentieth century were marked by the explosive growth and de-
cline of local comic shops, which fostered a narrower fan base and coincided with more
sexualized and more violent depictions of female superheroes. Rather than sell comics
to newsstands and drugstores and grocery stores, who could return unsold merchandise,
publishers increasingly turned to distribute comics to specialty stores that could order
a specific number of heavily discounted comics of their choosing but could not return
unsold merchandise. (10)
As Cocca explains, the comic book stores “fostered exclusionary cultures that deterred new and/
or demographically different readers. Comic fandom had been widespread and diverse in the
1940s…[however, the new market] seemed to be mostly male, white, and older” (11). Assump-
tions about the demographic resulted in an “increasingly, homogenous fan market” that was con-
servative and, in turn, mainstream superhero comics began “to display very particular and very
binary representations of gender: hypermuscular men and hypersexualized women” (11) – or,
what I like to call, the hyperbazookaization of the female superhero. As Cocca and Suzanne Scott
outline, the design of the female superhero’s body drew on the erotic “good girl” pinups of the
1940s and 1950s, which were revised in the 1980s into “bad girl” erotic art typified by the work
of Milo Manara, who also drew cover art for superhero comics during this era.
In the changing environment of current superhero fandom, a great deal of pressure has been
put on the media industries – especially the comic book industry – to stop these sexist portrayals
of women and to address to the question of what new audiences want. Social media – Tumblr,
Facebook, twitter, YouTube – have become ideal delivery systems for fans in the thousands to
voice their dissatisfaction with the result that fan voices are putting pressure on producers and
creators. One of the most successful online protests happened on Tumblr and came under the title
of “The Hawkeye Initiative.” In an article about The Hawkeye Initiative, Scott explains:
The Hawkeye Initiative is a crowdsourced fan-art site, founded in December 2012 on a

simple premise: “How to fix every Strong Female Character pose in superhero comics:
replace the character with Hawk-eye doing the same thing.” The “initiative” referenced
in the site’s title is to “illustrate how deformed, hyper-sexualized, and impossibly con-
torted women are commonly illustrated in comics” by redrawing comic-book panels
featuring superheroines with the Marvel character. (150)
Since then many other male superhero characters, particularly from Marvel and DC, have
succumbed to the sexist exposure of The Hawkeye Initiative. In the “Notmyanus” revision
of the “War Goddess” cover art (Figure 22.4), for example, the War Goddess is replaced by
Hawkeye, whose spine is twisted to a ridiculous degree. The comic effect exposes the way
the stance in the War Goddess version is situated in a potentially back-breaking pose in order
to simultaneously make visible the breasts and curvaceous butt. To add to the hypersexualiza-
tion, the tendril of some land-loving monstrous octopus creature comes threateningly close
to invading the War Goddess’ posterior! Posing a man in this way exposes the outrageous
sexism that has been embraced as a norm in superhero comics for decades. The seemingly
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Figure 22.4 “Notmyanus,” the Hawkeye Initiative revamp of the “War Goddess,” January 16,
2014. ©chaosundivided. Image available at: https://imgur.com/gallery/8WInN
“normal” is transformed and becomes defamiliarized so that the codes are exposed. Espe-
cially forceful is the way Hawkeye’s buttocks seem to deliberately direct themselves to the
monstrous tendril as it appears to prepare for entry.
Scott argues that The Hawkeye Initiative is one example of a trend in comics fan art
toward the gender-swapping renderings of characters as “a mode of transformative interven-
tion” that turns “the male gaze of comic book culture back on itself and holding the industry
accountable for the paltry number of women being hired to work on mainstream superhero
titles” (151). Female superheroes follow the style of the bad girl pinup and are posed in po-
sitions that, for the sake of eroticizing, are simply physically impossible. Bodies are twisted
and backs are arched to the extreme, so that often the female superhero displays “all of her
curves in front and back simultaneously” (Cocca 12), as is visible in the War Goddess image.
One controversial and vociferously critiqued example from August 2014 was Milo
Manara’s variant cover for the relaunch of Spider-Woman #1 (top left, Figure 22.5). News
Figure 22.5 Spider-Woman #1, 2014. © Marvel. https://imgur.com/gallery/FmE7mJz
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online and fans on social media went wild, criticizing Marvel for allowing this and other
variant covers designed by renown erotic art artist Manara, for the issue to go ahead. Most
rightly expressed the view that this belonged to the porn/erotica pinup tradition that Manara
was known for, not the superhero genre. Initially, Marvel were going to go ahead with the
cover issues, but public pressure made them finally pull the plug. Not only did the Hawkeye
initiative respond with their own variation (http://blog.kimherbst.com/2014/08/hawkeye-
initiative.html), but one genius fan created a 3D model that showed what Spiderwoman’s
spine and body would look like in 3D (Figure 22.5). In real life, Spider-Woman and many of
her female counterparts would be requiring some emergency neurosurgery!
Meanwhile, Marvel have actually come good with this run of the new Spider-Woman. Spider-
Woman/Jessica Drew becomes pregnant – the first ever pregnant title character in a superhero
comic – and her costume was adjusted to suit the realistic needs of her pregnant state. More im-
portantly, while the reader was strung along for the daddy-reveal, in the end it was disclosed that
it was Jessica Drew herself who decided to have a baby and had herself artificially inseminated.
Some of the new superheroes have also been appropriated for more overt political purposes
in order to effect social change (Figure 22.6). Writing about Ms. Marvel as “a real-world pro-
test icon,” Romano explains:
When, in 2014, Marvel introduced its new iteration of Ms. Marvel: Kamala Khan, it
was an instant hit. Kamala Khan broke records and stereotypes: Her debut issue received
a rare sixth printing, and the character quickly became a beloved cosplay staple at con-
ventions. But since her debut, Kamala has also become something more: a real-world
emblem of protest against Islamophobia. In 2015, the San Francisco street art activist
group Street Cred used her image in response to a series of racist bus ads that had
been bought by an anti-Muslim group. The artists strategically vandalized the ads using
Kamala’s image, the idea being to encourage passersbys to spread love, not hate, for the
Muslim community. Then, amid the tumultuous political and cultural climate follow-
ing the election of President Donald Trump and his “Muslim ban,” Kamala emerged
as the leader of a band of social-justice-driven superheroes. Claimed by protesters and
wielded across social media, Ms. Marvel has become a symbol of resistance to the sweep-
ing changes Trump issued during his first week in office. (Romano)
Figure 22.6 Ms Marvel (2014). © Marvel
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Artist Phil Noto also “remixed one of his own comics covers in order to symbolize Kamala’s
reaction to a Trump presidency” (Romano). Reworking his cover variant for Civil War II,
Issue #0, where Ms. Marvel reacts to a falling out with her mentor, Captain Marvel, Noto
replaces the image of Captain Marvel with Trump.
Since the rise of the digital era and the social media tools it offers, the voices of superhero
fans have not only become more vocal, but become more powerful because the collective
voice online is heard by the thousands. Add to this the fact that online news and specialist
magazines tap into fan dissatisfaction and they report on controversial issues such as gender
and representation, sexism, ideologically problematic views, and the refusal of industries
to accept changes in their demographic, entertainment companies are finally listening and
changing the content of their creative output in order to address consumer concerns.
Superwomen in the superhero semiosphere

Over the last few years I’ve been thinking a great deal about the changes happening in the
superhero genre, especially in relation to gender issues. I’ve been reading many of the new
comics and watching the films and televisions series that are increasingly (especially in the
comics and television) presenting new kinds of female heroes on the page and onscreen. I’ve
also been following many of the online debates about the status of the female superhero, the
industries that create her, the consumers that consume her, and the culture she circulates
within. In one respect, I agree with Cocca that “the proportion of female superheroes as
compared to male ones hasn’t really changed” (1); however, I also believe that we’re at a tran-
sition point that has already signaled a dramatic change that is in the process of happening.
Thinking through these changes, I turned to the writings of Yuri Lotman, one of the found-
ers of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. In my research, I’ve been particularly drawn
to his writings because he offers a critical rethinking of how genres intersect with culture to
effect change within a genre (Ndalianis 2004, 2015) and, in particular, it’s Lotman’s artic-
ulation of the semiosphere that is applicable to the superhero genre. Lotman’s theory of the
semiosphere provides us with a useful model with which to analyze the process of generic
development and understand how genres interact with culture to effect new patterns and
meanings in a genre.
In his article “On the semiosphere” (2005 [1984]) and later in his book Universe of the
Mind: The Semiotics of Culture (2001 [1990]), Lotman outlined his theory of “the semio-
sphere,” which he understood as encapsulating “the semiotics of culture”; semiotic objects
that exist within the semiosphere are understood as operating like “thinking structures” that
reflect “functions of intelligence” (2001, 2). In other words, the signifiers and the meanings
they signify that exist within a semiosphere intelligently engage with other signification
systems within and across semiospheres to the point where they can alter meanings of signi-
fiers, or even transform the signifier itself. For Lotman, the semiosphere includes “the whole
semiotic space of culture” and he defined culture as the “totality of information acquired,
preserved, and transmitted by various groups of human society” (Lotman 2001, 125). The
larger semiosphere encompasses all culture (which is human produced) and within it are mil-
lions of clusters of sub-semiospheres. And all exist within the biosphere which is the natural
world – the universe.
The semiosphere is understood as a space that has a universal quality, in the sense that
it includes all cultural meaning and is the space where meaning is generated. Within this,
genres are one of a multitude of semiospheric clusters, and they intersect with other semio-
spheres (ideologies, political systems, entertainment industries and their modes of operation,
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social media, etc.) within the larger semiosphere, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not.
The semiosphere is semiotic in that it comprises languages, texts, and signs; is dynamic and
is susceptible to change; and is enclosed or bounded (Lotman 2005, 208) – for example, the
abstract boundary that contains and creates the thing that is the superhero genre. But Lotman
uses the term “boundary” loosely in that it’s not a permanently enclosed system, but rather
the boundary is permeable and “acts as an organising mechanism” that filters and adapts
“the external to the internal” (Clark 2010, 65). The signs within a semiosphere are complex
systems that are constantly colliding with one another in time and space; they “comprise an
inter-connected group of semiospheres, each of them being simultaneously both participant
in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of the dialogue (the semiosphere as
a whole)” (Lotman 2005, 225). For Lotman, there is constant semiospheric dialogue between
the internal and the external to the semiosphere – it is a dynamic system.
Therefore, while containing its own, unique units of semiosis, according to Lotman,
the boundary or periphery of a semiosphere is also malleable and open to dialogue with
other semiospheres that circulate around it. It’s at the periphery that new signs can enter a
semiosphere from another semiosphere so that “what is ‘external’ is transformed into what is
‘internal,’ it is a filtering membrane which so transforms foreign texts that they become part
of the semiosphere’s internal semiotics” (Lotman 2001, 137).
In one passage, Lotman turns to the example of genre, explaining:
something similar can be seen when the texts of one genre invade the space of another
genre. Innovation comes about when the principles of genre are restructured according
to the laws of another, and this ‘other’ genre organically enters the new structure and at
the same time preserves a memory of its other system of encoding. (2001, 137)
But the invasion need not be by another genre. It can also be other cultural systems like
changing ideologies. Let’s consider the superhero genre according to Lotman’s semio-
sphere logic. The superhero genre is occupied by a myriad of semiotic signs and one of
the conventions of “the norm” – which sits at the center of the semiosphere – has been (to
put it simplistically) the straight, white, male superhero and the sexist female counterpart.
But, considering the issues outlined in this chapter so far from the perspective of a semi-
ospheric dialogue, where clusters of semiosis from outside the superhero genre permeate
the border of the genre, it becomes clear that pressure has been placed of the “norm” of
the superhero genre. A dynamic dialogue is currently taking place in semiospheres that
surround and intersect with the superhero semiosphere, to the point where they are ef-
fecting change through the entry of new semiotic signs from outside and into the space
of the genre.
In the diagram, I have attempted to visualize some of the many semiosphere intersections
that instigate a dialogue with the main semiosphere that is the superhero genre (Figure 22.7).
For example, pressure on the industry has forced it to respond to the expanding female
demographic (and other groups) that are now reading superhero comics and watching su-
perhero films and television series. Fans and social media commentary have pressured the
industry to acknowledge the changes, and to break up the dominant straight, white male
identity of the creators to include more diverse creatives, which include women. This, in
turn, results in the creation of new conventions, new character types, new stories that also
enter the genre and introduce it to new signs that affect the dominance of pre-existing con-
ventions. The new kinds of texts that are produced then dynamically enter into a dialogue
with the readers and viewers who consume them, discuss them on social media, and further
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Figure 22.7 Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere. © Angela Ndalianis
convince the industry of the changes in the demographics that are occurring. Like a feedback
loop, this then results in more new stories by more women, which then leads to an increased
fan base that is radically different to the white, heterosexual male who dominated for the last
three decades. Within the shared space of the semiosphere, the signs of one semiotic object
(female readership/viewership) have begun to influence another semiotic object (the super-
hero genre – which is altering its conventions and character types to meet the new consumer
needs). The upshot is that pressure is increasingly being placed on the norm that sits at the
center. The superhero genre has been exposed to new signs, belief systems, conventions,
writers, artists, changes in the industry, etc. that succumb to both the thinking structure and
conventions of the genre, but which also affect the genre and introduce change. The changes
are happening incrementally but it’s only a matter of time before the norm (which sits at the
center of the semiosphere) is transformed and undergoes what Lotman calls an explosion into
something else – a new norm.
We still have a long way to go, but I’m heartened by the fact that the dynamic exchange of
ideas, debates, arguments, and agreements that are currently taking place is loud and noisy. It
is also resulting in changes on a number of levels: a recognition on the part of the industries
that approximately half the number of superhero consumers are women; the introduction of
new approaches to developing female superheroes and their stories so they take into account a
new market that isn’t interested in the “bazookafied” women any longer; and the inclusion of
more female creators and creators from diverse backgrounds beyond the straight, white male,
which impact on the production of new texts. The changes may be slow but to paraphrase
Sherlock Holmes – a change is afoot!
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Angela Ndalianis
Notes
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the Psychology of William Moulton Marston.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016,
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Burke, Liam. “Introduction: ‘Everlasting’ Symbols: Unmasking Superheroes and Their Shifting
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July 2018, https://variety.com/2018/film/features/comic-con-hall-h-women-sexism-gender-
gap-1202874821/
Hughes, Mark. “‘Captain Marvel’ Tops $1 Billion As 7th-Biggest MCU Release of All Time.” Forbes,
3 Apr. 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2019/04/03/captain-marvel-tops-1-billion-as-
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Jacobs, Matthew. “‘Wonder Woman’ Trolls Its Male Killjoys with Poise and Wit”, Huffington Post, 1
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4b0c0608e8cd64c
Jay, Alex. “Comics: Joye Hummel, Wonder Woman Ghostwriter.” Tenth Letter of the Alphabet, 11 Sep.
2017, https://alphabettenthletter.blogspot.com/2017/09/comics-joye-hummel-wonder-woman.
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Kit, Borys. “‘Wonder Woman’ Sequel: Patty Jenkins Officially Set to Return as Director.” 11 Sep.
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set-return-as-director-1031052
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23
Public-facing feminisms
Subverting the lettercol in Bitch Planet
Brenna Clarke Gray
Bitch Planet, the 2015 feminist satire of the prison exploitation genre created by Kelly Sue De-
Connick and Valentine De Landro, posits a near-future world, where a patriarchy run amok
has determined how best to handle difficult women; defined as women who resist conform-
ing to gender expectations, women who resist or protest the government, and even women
whose husbands would prefer a younger model of spouse: imprison them in an off-planet
institution – or, in the parlance of the comic, an “auxiliary compliance outpost” (#1, 15) –
where they can no longer make trouble for the patriarchy. Women who are shipped to the
planet are marked as “non-compliant,” the branding for which has become a popular tattoo
among the comic’s fanbase, which draws heavily from the so-called “non-traditional” de-
mographic of comics readers, especially both cis- and transwomen and members of the queer
community. For those readers, the comic has, since its emergence in 2014, served as a rallying
site against a world seemingly more reactionary against feminism and more entrenched in pa-
triarchal thinking than in previous decades. Non-compliant logos pop up at the anti-Trump
Women’s Marches, at pro-choice protests and on clinic escorts and other women’s rights
activists, and in mainstream and pop culture feminisms.
Indeed, as David N. Wright and I argued in a 2017 article published in The Journal of
Graphic Novels and Comics, it is precisely this commitment to so-called non-traditional comics
readers that makes Bitch Planet so special. In that article, we focus on Issue #61 of the comic,
which opens with a much-discussed trigger warning for readers that states:
Content advisory: The following is a flashback issue, covering the events that led to
Meiko Maki’s Incarceration. It contains plot elements and images relating to sexual
assault. We encourage you to evaluate your comfort level before deciding to continue.
Bitch Planet’s main narrative will resume next month with Issue 7. The series recap
therein will not recount the assault.
In our analysis, Wright and I argue that this content or trigger warning is a ground-breaking
choice by the creative team that signals something critical to readers: the sexual aggressor is
not the reader who is being centred here. So much of the history of comics is a story of the
power of the predatory heterosexual male gaze, and here that is subverted to make space for
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people who have been the victims of sexual violence; indeed, those readers are assumed to be
present. The warning is also notable because it resists a traditional comics ethos of comple-
tionism: the reader here is being invited to skip the issue if that is the best course of action,
and to prioritize self-care over some framing of comics expertise that demands minutely
detailed knowledge of every issue. In that article, we dig in to the history of trigger warnings
being used primarily for titillation – don’t you dare pick up our bloodiest issue yet! – and
discuss the larger impact of this framing of audience.
This chapter picks up on the work Wright and I did in that article to think about other
ways the Bitch Planet series is radically reimagining comics, readership, and the relationship
with and responsibility to fans that creators hold. The feminisms espoused in the pages of
Bitch Planet are insistently plural, intersectional, 2 and inclusionary, both in the depiction of
women – Black bodies, trans bodies, fat bodies, and disabled bodies are all glorious ren-
dered visually and imbued with the same humanity as their white, cis, straight-sized, and
able fellow inmates – and in terms of the theoretical discussions that happen in the pages of
the comic. To have any explicitly radical feminist 3 comic in comics shops is a victory unto
itself. But even more innovative and significant is the way Bitch Planet reimagines tradi-
tional comics back matter, and especially the lettercols, as a place to educate readers about
feminisms from a range of perspectives. In this chapter, I will explore the back matter
of Bitch Planet to argue that the very structure of the comic is in fact a radical reimaging
of the role of comics and their interactions with fans. I will offer first a careful reading of
the Bitch Planet fandom, then discuss the historical role of back matter and lettercols in the
history of mainstream American comics, and finally offer an analysis of how and why Bitch
Planet challenges formal conventions to make exceedingly productive use of this seemingly
throwaway space.
In both the article that generated my initial thinking on this topic and in this chapter, I
find myself having to use the term “non-traditional” comics reader or audience. It’s a term I
urge us all, as comics scholars, to resist using without context and discussion. We know from
the earliest studies of fandom that the people who are thought as being on the margins of
mainstream comics now – women, people of colour, queer folks – were in fact always present
in fan communities and always reading. That comics were not always welcoming to those
readers does not erase their presence. My concern with the ubiquity of the “non-traditional”
comics readers, even in scholarship that seeks to elevate or celebrate these audiences, is that
it cedes the ground of a critical debate that allows cancers like ComicsGate to metastasize.
Of course, data about comics readers are notoriously patchy and poor, but we know that in
the 1940s boys and girls read comics in about even numbers until adulthood (Berlatsky), and
in 2013, Graphic Policy’s numbers started to show a consistent 40% of comics readers were
women (Schenker). In between, the data are too patchy to make sweeping assertions: in re-
ality, the scholarship has to come down on the side of, “Who knows?” But anecdotally, we
know, those of us who have always been here, even when the Big-2 and others couldn’t see
us. And we also know that the data, even in 2019, continue to be poor or incomplete when it
comes to readership who primarily purchase digital comics or trades – except that we know
those markets are dominated by people who have not typically felt well served by comics
shop culture (Brothers) – and we often have no idea how to parse that data. For example,
data in 2015 showed that while Ms. Marvel was only the 59th best-selling hard copy comic
of March 2015, in the same month the title held four of the top ten spots on the Comixology
best seller list (Polo). The truth is we don’t really know and there’s certainly some questions to
be asked about why the industry clings to a narrative of itself as narrowly limited in audi-
ence and scope. But we don’t have to reify its narrative without critical attention in our own
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scholarship. If we allow that there was once a monolithic body of comics readers who reflect
the values of a single demographic, we give away too much and we support a false history of
the readership of comics.
The fandom
The Bitch Planet fandom is a hyper-engaged, social media savvy community that reflects this
diversity of comics readership. Part of this is due to the fact that at least part of the Bitch Planet
is part of the Kelly Sue DeConnick readership and the fandom she built up while writing
Captain Marvel, the Carol Corps. In Matthew Freeman and Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield’s study
of the Carol Corps, they reflect on the “feministic” approach these readers take to comics and
their interest in diverse titles that don’t demand adherence to the existing gatekeeping ethos
in much of comics; many of the fans in this study articulate that it is important to them that
the test of fandom within this community is simply professing membership (331). This ethos
comes directly from Kelly Sue DeConnick, who reblogged this fan-penned summary on her
own Tumblr: “You want in? Hi! Here’s your badge. Welcome to the club. Yes, it’s really that
simple. Anyone who tells you different is lying” (Digital Baubles). DeConnick resists the
“name five Robins”4 ethos of comics fandom that demands people prove their connection to
the title, and she celebrates readers who tell her Captain Marvel is the first comic they have
ever read or the comic that brought them back into comics reading. And there is a deep con-
nection to Kelly Sue DeConnick not only as the writer of Capatin Marvel but as Freeman and
Taylor-Ashfield term it, the “auteur of this fandom,” so it should not surprise us to see a large
migration of readers from the Carol Corps to the Bitch Planet fandom (331). DeConnick had
already built a fandom that anticipated deep engagement with the creative team and support
their own participation in it (through crafting, fan art, and social media campaigning), and
that ethos relocates itself to the fandom of Bitch Planet but also, as I argue in this chapter, to
the structure of the comic itself, especially the lettercols and other general back matter.
Fans of Bitch Planet use the term “non-compliant” as a moniker – “we are non-compliant,
and we are legion” is a line from the comic that is repurposed as a slogan of community – and
the NC logo pictured in the comic is a popular tattoo. The popular book site Book Riot ran
a survey asking people to explain why they had committed the NC logo to ink. The survey
results indicated not only that every person who responded to the survey self-identified as a
feminist, but that most were women or genderqueer. The survey responses repeatedly show
a readership seeing themselves in a comic in a life-changing way, and the importance of
the symbol to them seems to crystalize around remind themselves of inner strength, of not
wanting to be silenced, and of celebrating their bodies (Northington). This echoes much of
what Freeman and Taylor-Ashfield found in their examination of the Carol Corps. It’s also,
of course, an act of devotion to permanently tattoo a symbol from a comic book on one’s
body; one survey respondent reported getting her tattoo before the release of the third issue,
which suggests how quickly these readers committed to the comic and their membership in
the fandom and a deep faith that the creative team will not betray this trust. The tattoos are a
mark not only of fandom but of membership to the most committed level of the Bitch Planet
fandom, and these vocal fans extend their engagement with the comic onto social media
platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram and into the development of homemade Bitch
Planet merchandise sold in Etsy stores and through other online retailers (which the creative
team has taken no steps to restrict or limit). These contributions often find their way into the
back matter of Bitch Planet issues, in photo roundups or even with DIY patterns, suggesting
a more profound reciprocity than is typically seen in comics.
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As we will see through the analysis of the back matter, the Bitch Planet fans who engage
seem to share an expectation that the act of reading Bitch Planet fits into a personal politics
defined not simply by feminism, but by an intersectional and plural feminism. These readers
seek to educate and be educated, and they expect the creative team of Bitch Planet to make
ethical choices, defend questionable choices, take and respond thoughtfully to criticisms,
and help to move discourse around progressive topics further. These fans embrace terms like
“social justice warrior” that, in other corners of comics fandom, are used pejoratively. And
they see the connections between the dystopian, anti-feminist setting of Bitch Planet and the
increasingly anti-woman policies emerging, especially in the USA.5 The Bitch Planet creative
and editorial teams have embraced this ethos, using the needs and interests of the fandom to
radically reimagine the comic’s back matter as a space for radical feminist community build-
ing, critique, and education.
Back matter and the historical lettercol

The back matter of comics refers to everything that comes after the conclusion of the story. It
might include previews of upcoming issues the publisher or editorial team wish to highlight,
alternative covers, or other special additional content – occasionally an interview or conver-
sation with one or more members of the editorial team or a letter from the editor, often the
bulk of the admatter for the issue, and of course the lettercols. Back matter usually differs
dramatically between the print and digital editions of a comic, and much back matter is either
excised or relocated when the title is collected in to a trade paperback. There is a small but
interesting body of research on the role of back matter in comics publishing, especially the
lettercol, but this is certainly an area of comics scholarship where more sustained work would
be productive. Given its ubiquity, and the fact that the majority of scholarship addresses it, I
am going to focus my attention here on the history of the lettercol, but Bitch Planet is radically
revising all of the various components of back matter in its issues, including the ads, which
DeConnick and De Landro satirize throughout the run by representing products available in
the world of Bitch Planet, like pills to make wives more compliant and a handy guide to tell
if you have just spotted a feminist (hint: she wears glasses, maybe).
When most comics readers think of lettercols, we think of those musty pages at the end of
old Marvel and DC comics, a place where fans (happy to publish their full addresses!) used to
communicate directly with creative teams about the direction of the title. The lettercol is an
important space in this history of comic books. In the time before social media and internet
community, it was a place to build fandom. The first lettercol in a comic that we know of
appeared in 1940, but the practice clearly draws its lineage from science fiction and fantasy
magazines, where fan interaction was a key component of the readerly experience. Lettercols
appeared as a regular component of mainstream comics starting in 1956, and by the 1970s
they were an expected feature of all comics. Matthew J. Pustz has done some persuasive work
breaking down the conventions of lettercol content, noting that Marvel and DC had different
voices and approaches to lettercols and the kind of content varied. Overall, though, we see a
recurring theme throughout the decades: letters of appreciation, fan art, and complaints, ques-
tions, and nit-picking at issues of continuity or clarity. This is a space for true fans, and often
a space for gatekeeping, where the creator themselves often gets scolded or corrected about
their in-group knowledge of comics. This was a conversation between creator and reader, and
though the power dynamic clearly skews in one direction – the editor controls not only how
letters get responded to but which get published at all – the interactivity here is real. Indeed,
many top LetterHacks (people who achieved large number of published letters) routinely
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find their way into work in comics creation, criticism, or scholarship. For much of the early
2000s, with the advent of comics discussion online that allowed for a more immediate and
perhaps more democratic conversation, lettercols seemed to disappear, though there has been
a resurgence in recent years. An unfortunate aspect of the process of digitizing comics is that
most comics available digitally through legal means like Marvel Unlimited or Comixology,
especially older comics, have had their letters excised. This is a loss for comics scholarship
because, with important caveats, the lettercol is a fascinating space of comic book discussion
over time. The lettercol is, of course, hypermediated: the editorial team selects not only how
to respond to the comments raised, but which comments will be published in the first place.
Editors can skew towards publishing positive letters for a book under fire, or negative letters to
stir up controversy. And they can choose which concepts get discussed in the lettercols at all.
And sometimes, of course, they can construct a letter from whole cloth, and how would read-
ers ever know? For this reason, studies of lettercols are complex and difficult to pin exclusively
as reflections of reader response; instead, we must acknowledge that the letters selected have
much to tell us about the creative or editorial team, as well as about the fandom.
But even acknowledging this, there is productive work to be done in thinking critically
about lettercols. For one thing, they can show us the history of engagement – not readership,
which is demographically invisible, but the choice to jump into the discourse, with the cave-
ats discussed above – in comics from women, as Tim Hanley has persuasively demonstrated,
particularly for female-led titles as far back as 1960 (223). Hanley’s research shows what many
of us as women-identifying readers know intuitively true: women readers engage more with
texts that tell stories about women. This suggests the importance, if the industry wishes to
grown comics audiences, and especially engaged, committed ones, of the drive towards
greater inclusivity and diversity in comics representations and creatorship.
Morris E. Franklin III makes the case that for marginalized comics readers, the lettercol space
was a place to be heard, to ask for better representation, and to make suggestions to creators that
directly connected to their subject identity or positioning. Franklin is specifically making the
case for how lettercols function to build community within queer comics fandom and to make
demands for better representation; he looks at this around the “coming out” discourse for gay
superheroes, in particular, and the way the mediated fan response is represented in the lettercol. I
had never previously considered the ways the lettercol could be a radical space; the control here is
wielded, obviously, by an editorial team and usually a large, corporate one at that, so I don’t want
to overstate things. And it’s certainly true that a lot of letters to comics are about performing a
kind of expertise. But it did make me wonder how a lettercol and other back matter might need
to function differently if the comic truly wanted to signal itself as presented for a different kind
of audience. Bitch Planet shows how a comic can upend formal convention in order to highlight
or reinforce the thematic intentions of the text; in other words, what does it mean to reflect a
feminist ethos by the very way the back matter has been constructed? For Bitch Planet, it means
handing this section of the text over to relevant experts and, most importantly, a non-compliant
fandom eager to engage directly with the creative and editorial team not only about the comics
themselves, but about how the social justice issues raised therein – from prison abolition to trans
rights to sexual abuse – reflect the real world in which the readers live.
Lettercols and back matter in Bitch Planet

If we think through the various components of back matter listed above, it’s clear that the
full range of possible content is being challenged here all with an eye to reframing who the
default reader is and how they should expect to interact with comics. For example, if we
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think about the classic comic book ads – x-ray specs so you can see through women’s cloth-
ing, bodybuilding programmes so you can get the girl – they assume a heterosexual male
default reader, one is who seeking tools to help him be more predatory. In Bitch Planet, the
x-ray specs ad, for example, allows women “to see through his intentions” to spot a “future
of torment and pain” before it’s too late. While ads also target men within the world of Bitch
Planet as part of the larger satire, the default reader is not by definition male. This extends
to the rest of the back matter and how DeConnick and De Landro and the editorial team
position these pages as tools of education, extending the larger themes of the novel into the
essays and other material presented.
Each issue of Bitch Planet offers generally the same back matter, and these sections are
much lengthier than traditionally seen in comics; indeed, this section regularly runs between
ten and fourteen pages, which signals not only the volume of the content offered but the
commitment to it for the editorial and creative team. Ten to fourteen pages represents typi-
cally more than a quarter of the pages in a given issue, which is a substantial commitment in
terms of not only the cost to create the content, including commissioned essays, but the cost
to produce and print what some editorial teams might see as unnecessary content. Obviously,
with this much space to play with, the creative and editorial teams can offer more than a few
truncated letters and a character sketch or two. Generally, the back matter follows the same
structure: an introductory essay by Kelly Sue DeConnick that often connects the themes of
the issue to current events; one or more essays by invited experts about the thematic issues
of the text and/or other content like Bitch Planet relative crafting patterns; a section titled
“Bitches, Read” that offers book recommendations, often curated by a guest expert; a let-
tercol that runs to three or more pages and includes substantive responses by DeConnick,
De Landro, and other members of the creative or editorial team as relevant; a section of fan
photos that might range from a roundup of non-compliant tattoos to a collection of photos
taken by Bitch Planet fans at the Women’s March or other protests; a roundup of discussion
about Bitch Planet on Twitter; and, in later issues, a “Lip Glossary” that defines key terms
from the text. If the back matter of Bitch Planet is about appealing to a different kind of
readership and engaging with them in a different kind of way, these components all clearly
work towards that goal: the essays, “Lip Glossary,” and “Bitches, Read” components all un-
derscore a commitment to education and social justice, and suggest that the readership of this
comic is expected to want something more than straightforward entertainment; the letter
from DeConnick, lettercols, photos, and Twitter roundup all demonstrate the commitment
to a reciprocal engagement with a participatory fan culture that expects the creative team to
be involved in their discussions. While the back matter itself is, like all lettercols before it,
controlled by editorial team and publisher and therefore not a democratic fan space, there is
a signalling here of a feminist revisioning of hierarchy, where De Connick and De Landro
reserve space in the comic for other voices to be centred. Maite Urcaregui has done some
thoughtful work on the essays in Bitch Planet and how they complement the story and call
readers to action; I think it’s worth thinking about how all of the back matter, especially the
conversation between creator and reader, works together in this larger goal.
Focusing first on the lettercol is a way to perhaps demonstrate this most effectively. With-
out losing track of the editorial control over the content of the letters selected for publication,
there’s no doubt that the presentation and selection is somewhat different than is typical for
traditional lettercols. For one thing, the selected letters are often very long, stretching to
full column lengths and beyond. Further, there seems to be a focus on letters that engage
in a calling-in; call-in culture, sometimes seen as the opposite of call-out culture, is the ex-
pectation and practice among progressive groups to ask art they love to work harder to be
334
inclusive. What delineates a call-in from a call-out is that a call-out is usually from someone
with no tie to the community who points out a problem from the outside, while a call-in is
defined by the speaker’s investment in the community being critiqued. The critical letters
in Bitch Planet are written by people who profess a passion for the comic and usually come
from a place of profound disappointment for a perceived misstep or slight, and the responses
show a creative team that is committed to trying to do better. Issue #7 offers two excellent
examples, both in critique of previous issues. In the first letter, reader Mey R., who iden-
tifies herself as a transwoman, writes in to offer a criticism of a response to a letter from a
male reader written by Danielle Henderson and published in Issue #6 that used the phrase
“women and womenidentified women” to refer to the audience for feminism; Mey R. chal-
lenges this language from a supposedly inclusive publication, arguing that by highlighting
the distinction she felt “separated out from all the ‘real’ women” (34). She notes that she
had expected more from the feminist spirit of Bitch Planet and felt let down and like she had
been rejected by a space that was important to her. In the response to the letter, we learn
that DeConnick had seen an exchange between Mey R. and Henderson on Twitter, and had
invited Mey R. to write her response for publication as well, showing DeConnick’s aware-
ness of and attention to discourse within the community. She praises Mey R. because “it’s
hard to speak up for yourself when you’re being marginalized, and you did so beautifully”
and notes that DeConnick wanted the issue addressed publicly because “I knew that if we’d
made you feel that way, then there was a good chance you weren’t alone,” concluding by
offering a whole-hearted apology: “we are so sorry we made you feel unsafe. It’s not your job
to teach us, but we’re grateful that you did” (35). In this response, DeConnick, in addition
to offering something of a masterclass in how to take critical feedback and how to apologize
for a misstep, shows the value she places on individual readers and their lived experiences as
well as the larger spirit of inclusiveness and education in the comic.
DeConnick and the Bitch Planet team also include critical feedback when they do not
agree or are not offering apology for it, but still allow the criticism space in the lettercols and
still offer graceful responses. For example, also in Issue #7, reader M writes in to critique the
death of Meiko Maki in Issue #5. M notes that, as a woman of colour, she has had to see other
women of colour killed off in media all her life, and she had hoped that Bitch Planet would be
a place where the “strong female character who looks like me” might get to survive; instead,
she notes that Meiko’s “death was a mega disappointment” and also that she felt comfort-
able sharing this feedback with the creators of Bitch Planet because she believed they would
“receive them openly and without offence” (38). In thanking M for her letter, DeConnick
writes, “Meiko’s fate is a choice I keep second-guessing. I come to the same conclusion
every time, but I hear you” (38). Here, we see DeConnick affirming that M’s feelings are
valid – indeed, not denying the history of cultural erasure M taps into in her letter – without
apologizing for the choice she made as a writer. That the editorial team includes this feedback
allows M’s response to be shared, much like Mey R.’s, for the benefit of other readers who
may have been feeling the same way.
This validation is a process that continues across the back matter with the curation of the
essay collection, as is the commitment to educating the readership on issues of social justice
and amplifying marginalized voiced. In general, the essays in each issue address themes and
topics relevant to the content of issue. For example, Issue #8 introduces the transwomen of
Bitch Planet who, as people guilty of what this dystopian regime terms “gender falsification,”
are at greatest risk for accusations of non-compliance simply for existing; they need not act
up, speak up, or anger someone, because they are non-compliant simply by being. As the nar-
rator of this issue tells readers, “We were the first to be sent away. We are always the first” (5).
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Brenna Clarke Gray
This brief line gestures to the history of trans rights, which has often involved being at the
forefront of movements for LGBTQ+ rights, but either forgotten, further marginalized, or
rejected in the process. The transwomen who have been transported to the prison colony
are forced to undergo invasive and frequently humiliating testing that assesses how their
bodies comply to gendered ideals (6–7). Indeed, one explicit choice in the comic is to not
solely depict transwomen who “pass” by the standards of a society deeply gender stratified.
In Kelly Sue DeConnick’s letter to readers at the start of the back matter for this issue, she
discusses the choice to employ consultants in the development of this issue, which she hasn’t
done when writing about other marginalized groups, and spends some time articulating the
responsibility she feels in telling an often untold story: “Val and I felt strongly that we needed
to hear the voices of real human beings who were living this experience” (25). The back
matter goes on to underline this statement by including an essay by Mey Valdivia Rude (the
same Mey R. from the lettercol in Issue #7) about trans visibility in media and the misrep-
resentations of the community that exist, echoing DeConnick’s sentiment when she writes,
“trans women should be involved when trans characters are” and that “cis people can elevate
our voices” (30–31). Here, two pages of the issue are given over to a transwoman to speak
about her experiences and how she sees Bitch Planet as part of a larger project working towards
greater trans visibility, but also offering a call to cis readers responsible for trans inclusion
and the amplification of trans voices in their own communities. This is often the function
of the essays in Bitch Planet: to first explain, in a #ownvoices6 way, a perspective included in
the comic itself, and then to empower readers with strategies to pursue greater social justice
themselves.
Issue #7 includes a reframing of the stereotypical women’s prison shower scene to focus
not on the titillation of the male gaze, but the interconnection between two women; in this
case, Penny Roll is grieving the loss of Meiko Maki and blaming herself for Meiko’s death,
and Kamau Kogo is trying to comfort her. The women hold each other, but in solidarity, not
as an expression of exploitative sexuality that we might expect in, for example, a prison genre
film. Penny’s fat, Black body is depicted in dejected repose, slumped over the shower drain
in defeat (19). Kamau and Penny discuss strength and vulnerability, and this theme extends
to the essay in the back matter, “Vulnerability and the Strong Black Female Archetype,”
in which Angelica Jade Bastién discusses the stereotype of Black femininity as explicitly
strong that actually silences Black women and “operates as another way for our pain to go
unheard” (27). Bastién discusses how most people who repeat this myth feel like they are be-
ing complementary, but outlines the problems with systemic assumptions that other experi-
ence, like pain, that should be universal. The essay is accompanied by two close-ups of frames
from the comic, showing Penny and Kamau holding hands, demonstrating the vulnerability
they feel in an environs where they are each expected to maintain a kind of stoical strength.
Again, DeConnick creates a character but then passes the mic to a #ownvoices writer who
can explore the underlying experience from both a personal and a theoretical perspective.
This willingness to share space is one of the most powerful aspects of the comic; white cre-
ators have historically positioned themselves as experts in a range of experiences by virtue
of the fact that they are the only people speaking. Throughout Bitch Planet, DeConnick as
author is willing to recognize where her expertise reaches its limit, and where readers are
better served by hearing from a multiplicity of voiced.
In each of these cases, we see two priorities highlighted: allowing communities who
are typically underrepresented in comics to voice their own perspectives, and educating
readers not from that marginalized community about experiences with which they might
not be familiar, typically with a call to action for those with privilege to act on behalf of
336
those without. There’s a kind of feminist worldbuilding here, where by giving up space to
other voices, hierarchies are dismantled – or perhaps, given the editorial structure and the
power dynamics at play, we get the opportunity to imagine hierarchies being relaxed – and
new opportunities for understanding and for social justice. What makes this radical in the
context of comics is that DeConnick and De Landro are doing this feminist worldbuilding
in a space that many of us haven’t previously experienced as feminist, or even as particularly
woman-friendly. That this back matter appears in (and, perhaps troublingly, only appears in)
the single-issue version of the comic means that readers can only access this content in comics
shops or via online comics retailers like Comixology, which both creates a feminist space in
traditionally unfriendly territory and asks feminist readers seeking this content to integrate
into comics culture in a very concrete way.
It is clear, though, that one problem that emerges in reading the back matter as being inte-
gral to the feminist project of Bitch Planet is that most of the back matter does not survive into
the trade paper volumes of the comic. This is most significant when we consider that some
audience report data suggest marginalized readers of comics are more likely to seek out their
comics in trade paper collections, particularly as an alternative to maintaining a traditional
comics shop pull list. There has been a lot of fan desire for at least a trade paper collection of
the essays and letters themselves, but so far none has been forthcoming. One can assume the
reasons are primarily mercenary – again, the back matter in this comic is extremely lengthy,
and to include all of it for a typical trade paper collection would run to at least 50 pages of
extra content. DeConnick writes, in response to a question in the lettercols of Issue #7 about
the lack of back matter in the trade paperback editions,
The first reason is the $9.99 price point [for the American distribution of the trade
paper] – it’s tricky to hit that and stay profitable and so we have to try to keep the page
count down. The second reason is that putting some exclusive content in the individual
issues helps us promote them, and it’s primarily the sales of “floppies” that allow us to
fund production of the book. (34)
It’s worth noting here that the explicitly feminist project of Bitch Planet is at least in part
undermined by the very distribution structure of comics that has long made getting comics
into the hands of underrepresented readers more difficult. DeConnick is referring here to the
direct market, whereby the most important (and often only) sales that matter from the per-
spective of publishers are the comics sold in single-issue format in comics shops, with privi-
lege to pre-orders. This way of calculating sales doesn’t consider digital sales and distribution
or trade paper sales in places like bookstores. Indeed, part of why underrepresented readers
are seen as non-tradition by the comics industry is that they do not tend to buy their books
in single issues at comics shops, and so their market share goes largely unrecognized. It’s
hard to parse the scope of this problem because distributors like Comixology are notoriously
proprietary about their sales figures. But this example shows us how trying to cater to under-
represented fans still requires playing within a system that largely hasn’t served that audience
particularly well. DeConnick and her team need to drive sales to single issues because they
need those sales to prove the value of their feminist comics project, even if that means some
fans never get access to the most feminist component of the book.
This absence is a shame because there is very real community building happening in these
pages. If anything, the radically revisioned back matter of Bitch Planet is a close analogue to
the very early days of comics lettercols, where comics fandom was first built. Readers are
encouraged to communicate with the editorial and creative teams, but also – because social
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Brenna Clarke Gray
media handles are posted – with each other, in the same spirit as full addresses were posted
in the lettercols of those early comics. But beyond the community of comics fandom, the
community-building in Bitch Planet is explicitly feminist. For example, in Issue #6, a reader
named Stephen writes in to comment on his distaste with the way men are portrayed in Bitch
Planet, noting, “I’m not comfortable with the feminist jabs at the male collective” and “it’s
not just women who have it rough, we all do” (37). This is a common criticism of public
feminisms, and echoes the #notallmen sentiment that has been popularized on social media
in recent years: in other words, individual men should not be critiqued for the actions of the
patriarchy. Rather than softening the voice of the larger comic with an appeasing response
here, Danielle Henderson notes that “feminism isn’t organizing against you personally” and
goes on to explain the difference between individual struggles and systemic oppression (38).
She allows for Stephen to consider himself someone who believes in equal rights, but asks
him what he’s ever done to challenge inequality. And she does so patiently, with the tone of
an educator and without judgement. This example is instructive because it shows that Bitch
Planet’s lettercol, while controlled by the editorial team, is not an echo chamber. The com-
mitment here is to education and to building up an understanding of feminism among com-
ics readers, even where it might not exist. Stephen is not the target audience of the comic,
and the tone will not shift to accommodate him, but giving him an opportunity to learn is
within this larger project of feminist community building.
The question I often leave an essay like this with is, “So what?” Yes, what Bitch Planet is
doing is interesting, ground-breaking even, but what does it offer us to stop and look at it?
Comics back matter is not a typical site for discussion or inquiry, and in many comics it’s
likely little more than an afterthought. We’ve all read comics where the lettercol seems less
a conversation or a critical reflection and more a formality before the back cover. Lots of
readers skip this content, and with good reason: used to seeing inconsequential lettercols and
ads, many of us have been trained to disregard those pages. What Bitch Planet does, however,
is rethink the very idea of comics back matter. Not only is it not an afterthought: the content
in the back matter deliberately makes immediately relevant in the reader’s world the thematic
content of the issue itself, providing additional education and perspectives from marginal-
ized voices, while simultaneously building feminist community. This work offers a radical
reimagining not just of back matter, but of what a comic book can do to move the needle on
pressing issues of social justice.
One letter highlights the value of this work. Published in Issue #8, a letter from reader
Jake B. notes,
Thanks for pushing the comics industry to new heights. What I love most about Bitch
Planet isn’t the art, or even the story. It’s that it’s transforming comics into an interactive
medium. Not only is there a letters column, there’sa guest lecture as well as a social me-
dia page. […] Thanks for reinvigorating my favourite industry. That’s for enlightening
my social understanding and helping me to acknowledge the issues you and your guest
writers address. […] Thanks for serving me a healthy dose of perspective. (36)
Jake B. doesn’t use the word feminist and doesn’t call the work radical, but his recognition
that something different and meaningful is happening in the back matter of these comics,
and his awareness of its impact on his own perspectives and politics, suggests that he sees both
aspects. And indeed, Jake B., who identifies as a long-time comics fan, may not be the cen-
tral market for Bitch Planet, given that the vast majority of published letters are from women.
But if the comics industry is to be inclusive and grow with new audience, readers like Jake
338
B. need to be part of that conversation, too. His letter suggests that the scope of DeConnick
and De Landro’s project both centres underrepresented readers and helps non-marginalized
readers with perspectives on equity and social justice.
And in the end, this is why the back matter in Bitch Planet matters. It offers us another way
to the think about comics, community building, and feminist spaces, and radically reimag-
ines not only the possibilities offered by comics as a narrative medium, but the form itself.
The team behind Bitch Planet reappropriates a largely underused component of comics to do
the radical work of reframing the form itself as a possible space for serious feminist labour that
recognizes the opportunities of the medium.
Notes
1 This issue is the only one that doesn’t list De Landro as the artist; because the content of the
issue tells traumas imparted upon an Asian-American woman, the Bitch Planet team sought an
Asian-American artist to tell her story.
2 I use this term with caution. The word “intersectional” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989
to describe a particular type of oppression experienced by Black women. It does not just refer to
the intersection of multiple forms of oppression, as the term has been taken to mean in popular dis-
course, and it is important to push back against the erasure of Blackness from the discourse around
intersectionality. Crenshaw is articulating the kind of experience that occurs when anti-Black
racism and misogyny are both visited upon the same body. I highlight this because “intersectional”
should not be used divorced from its roots in Black feminist thought. I believe it is appropriate
to use in discussion of Bitch Planet because the story, though not penned by a Black woman, does
centre the lived experiences of Black women. As will be discussed in this chapter, the back matter
often draws on the expertise of Black feminist thinkers and practitioners in addressing these issues,
and I think the care DeConnick and De Landro show – and their willingness to be corrected when
necessary – underscores the comic’s commitment to intersectional feminism.
3 Radical feminism emerges these days as a contested term given the rise of TERFs, women who
frame themselves as radical feminists but who also espouse a trans-exclusionary politics. I do not
use radical feminist in this chapter in this newer context, but instead draw from the traditional
definition of a radical feminist as one who actively seeks to overthrow the patriarchy (in contrast
with liberal feminists, who prefer to revise our existing social system rather than imagining a
future beyond it). Bitch Planet is very much interested in overthrowing the patriarchy. As Kelly
Sue DeConnick noted in a favourite tweet of mine, “Y’all, the patriarchy ain’t gonna fuck itself ”
(@kellysue).
4 “Name five Robins” is a short-hand for referring to the kind of quizzing that acts in a gatekeeping
function for comics fandoms. The idea is that any “real” fan of the Batman universe would be able
to name all five major incarnation of the Robin character (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake,
Stephanie Brown, Damian Wayne). Of course, there are many more: Bruce Wayne himself, Talon,
Carrie Kelley, etc. I can name all of these characters and more, however, and I hate Batman. This
demonstrates, once again, that gatekeeping around comics is profoundly, ceaselessly pointless.
5 On 26 June 2019, as I was finishing a draft of this article, a young woman in Alabama was charged
with manslaughter after she lost her five-month foetus after being shot in a robbery that took place
in 2018; the indictment stated that she should not have put herself in an altercation where harm
could come to her unborn child. As I watched the Twitter discourse around this crime, I noticed
users making reference to Bitch Planet. For members of the Bitch Planet fandom, the comic reso-
nates as a touchstone for popular feminism in much the same way as The Handmaid’s Tale does in
literary circles.
6 #ownvoices is a term first popularized in the children’s and young adult writing and publishing
community on Twitter, but has now expanded to at least some corner of most media discussions
on the social media platform. The hashtag term was first coined by Corinne Duyvis in 2015 and
it refers to books published where the protagonist and the author share a marginalized identity. It
is meant to help highlight books written from within underrepresented communities. I see Bitch
Planet’s use of essays written from within the represented communities as a gesture in support of
#ownvoices storytelling.
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Brenna Clarke Gray
Works Cited
@kellysue. “Y’all, the Patriarchy Ain’t Gonna fuck itself.” Twitter 10 Jun 2015, 12:44 pm. twitter.com/
kellysue/status/608721444277620736
Berlatsky, Noah. “The Female Thor and the Female Comics Reader.” The Atlantic 21 Jul 2014. www.the-
atlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/just-how-many-women-read-comic-books/374736/
Brothers, David. “The Dramatic Data about Who Is Buying Digital Comics – And What They’re Buy-
ing.” Comics Alliance 12 Jan 2011. comicsalliance.com/the-dramatic-data-about-who-is-buying-
digital-comics-and-what/
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Cri-
tique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–167. https://
chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
DeConnick, Kelly Sue. “A Beginners Guide to the Carol Corps: Reblogged from puppysteeb.” Digital
Baubles 14 Jun 2014. kellysue.tumblr.com/post/88991868148/a-beginners-guide-to-the-carol-corps
DeConnick, Kelly Sue and Valentine De Landro. Bitch Planet: Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine. Berke-
ley, CA: Image, 2015. Comixology.
———. Bitch Planet #7. Berkeley, CA: Image, 2016. Comixology.
———. Bitch Planet #8. Berkeley, CA: Image, 2016. Comixology.
DeConnick, Kelly Sue and Taki Soma. Bitch Planet #6. Berkeley, CA: Image, 2016. Comixology.
Duyvis, Corinne. “#ownvoices.” Corinneduyvis.net. www.corinneduyvis.net/ownvoices/
Franklin, Morris E. III. “Coming Out in Comic Books: Letter Columns, Readers, and Gay and Les-
bian Characters.” Comics & Ideology. Matthew McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, Jr., and Ian Gordon,
eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 221–250.
Freeman, Matthew and Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield. “‘I Read Comics from a Feministic Point of View’:
Conceptualizing the Transmedia Ethos of the Captain Marvel Fan Community.” The Journal of
Fandom Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2017): 317–335. doi:10.1386/jfs.5.3.317_1
Gray, Brenna Clarke and David N. Wright. “Decentering the Sexual Aggressor: Sexual Violence,
Trigger Warnings, and Bitch Planet.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 8, no. 3 (2017):
264–467. doi:10.1080/21504857.2017.1307240
Hanley, Tim. “The Evolution of Female Readership: Letter Columns in Superhero Comics.” Gender
and the Superhero Narrative. Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott, and Philip Smith, eds. Jackson: UP
Mississippi, 2018. 221–250.
Northington, Jenn. “We Are Non-Compliant and We Are Legion.” Book Riot 13 May 2015. bookriot.
com/2015/05/13/non-compliant-legion/
Polo, Susana. “Comixology’s Numbers Indicate Female Characters Dominate Digital Comics Sales.”
Polygon 14 Apr 2015. www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8410771/digital-comics-female-characters
Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1999.
Schenker, Brett. “Facebook Fandom Spotlight: Who Are Comics Fans?” Graphic Policy 1 Sep 2013.
graphicpolicy.com/2013/09/01/facebook-fandom-spotlight-who-are-the-comic-fans-912013/
Urcaregui, Maite. “Intersectional Feminism in Bitch Planet: Moving Comics, Fandom, and Activism
beyond the Page.” Gender and the Superhero Narrative. Michael Goodrum, Tara Prescott, and Philip
Smith, eds. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2018. 45–73.
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24
“I’d like everything that’s
bad for me!”1
Tank Girl’s cracks in patriarchal
pop culture
Susan Kerns
Emerging in the late 1980s, the character Tank Girl became something of a feminist icon
as her visibility quickly grew in alternative comics and punk culture. Tank Girl, the central
character of the British Tank Girl comics written by Jamie Hewlett and Alan C. Martin, is a
fearless, potty-mouthed woman with a kangaroo boyfriend named Booga, a high tolerance
for booze, a strong sex drive, and a penchant for violence. Despite her haphazardly shaved
head, torn clothes, and combat boots, she wears lacey bras, often appears naked, and main-
tains a quick wit and a twinkle in her eye. The Tank Girl of the original Hewlett and Martin
Deadline and Tank Girl comics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, those under consideration
here, embodies the postfeminist individualism of the 1990s. She never seeks acceptance from
or belonging to a female-identified group (or any group), and she never acts on behalf of a
collective, certainly not a political one. She is hedonistic, if not nihilistic, and she tends to act
out of boredom and sexual desire. She is also often drawn with an eye toward the male gaze.
Even her girlfriends Sub Girl, Jet Girl, and Barney are barely mentioned the first several years
of the comics, and early on Sub Girl and Jet Girl are most prominently featured in titillating
full-page illustrations, expanding the visual world of Tank Girl as a playground primarily for
men. As such, Tank Girl remains a peculiar case when studied through a feminist lens.
Tank Girl’s timing, however, was impeccable. Her quick rise to fame coincided with Riot
Grrrl culture and music in the United States, roughly 1989 through 1996,2 and an increase in
British youth violence in the 1990s resulting in the term “ladettes,” described as hostile fe-
male youth who “adopted the attitudes of working-class antisocial males” and their drinking,
swearing, and confrontational style (Muncer et al. 35). To blame were “new and aggressive
cultural images of women in films and on television” (35). Tank Girl is mentioned by name.
The original comics soaked into the pop culture zeitgeist, resulting in the 1995 movie ad-
aptation directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty with a soundtrack assembled by
Courtney Love. Female action heroes of the 1990s were rapidly expanding visual represen-
tations of women in popular culture and were considered to have transgressive and transfor-
mative potential. They “access a range of emotions, skills, and abilities” and derive “power
from their ability to think and live creatively, their physical courage, and their strategic
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Susan Kerns
uses of technology” (Hills 39). As Yvonne Tasker notes, they were often “motivated by …
maternal instincts” (102), as Tank Girl is in the film, but Elyce Rae Helford explains that the
film’s “insistence upon a sexualization of power” is striking as “an instructive representation
of the compromises and contradictions of the 1990s brand of postfeminism” (299–300). The
character “displays the aggressive individualism and ‘projected’ sexuality” of a postfeminism
wherein younger women want “a lot of attention through sexual magnetism now” (297).
Simultaneously, Tank Girl challenges the “power and supremacy of the phallus” just as she
appropriates the phallus via the use of and relationship with her tank: “This mockery …
functions as a critique of masculine power, which is even stronger than her (sexualized) use
of physical violence. She ridicules patriarchal sexual politics in every scene in which she
is endangered” (303–304). The joke, often, is that men are stupid and controlled by their
bodies; women just have to use that against them. Ultimately Helford says Tank Girl “is no
feminist film” (306), in part because Tank Girl’s bratty behavior puts others in harm’s way
for kicks. Yet this absurdity is part of the character’s lasting appeal. The film was a notorious
failure, but the combination of Tank Girl’s style, the film, and the comics that preceded it
solidified a place for the character in pop culture with new comics continuing to be released
over 30 years later.3
In all her contradictions, Tank Girl remains beguiling to readers interested in seeing her
as a fetish object or relevant as a powerful, lawless woman confronting the patriarchy. Space
for these dual, if not incongruous, impulses is created in the early Hewlett and Martin comics
through various visual and linguistic choices and by breaking the fourth wall, thus forcing ac-
knowledgment of the relationship between the reader and Tank Girl character and causing fis-
sures in the reading experience. Charles Hatfield explains, comics “are always characterized by
a plurality of messages. They are heterogeneous in form, involving the co-presence and interac-
tion of various codes” (36). He argues that comics’ strength is “several kinds of tension, in which
various ways of reading—various interpretative options and potentialities—must be played
against each other” including between codes of signification, the single image and image-
in-series, narrative sequence and page surface, and reading as experience and text as object (36).
How readers interpret tensions depends on who the reader is and what they hope to find. Eliz-
abeth Ellsworth notes in “Mode of Address: It’s a Film Thing,” neither audiences nor films are
ever exactly who or what they think they are, and audiences may pleasure in texts in multiple
and unanticipated ways (26–27). As such, “modes of address don’t necessarily work together
compatibly” (27). Hewlett and Martin amplify this by deliberately complicating the reader’s
ability to understand Tank Girl cohesively as a series, or as a character. Discussing the intertex-
tuality of Tank Girl, Whelehan and Sonnet note that Hewlett and Martin take roles within the
comics and declare “their own knowingness about the sexualised consumption” of Tank Girl
(38). As such, “the character simultaneously addresses her male audience’s complicity and sub-
verts the ‘naturalness’ of the traditional structure of looking within the genre. A complex nego-
tiation of meanings is thus set up by the inescapably gendered conventions at work” (38). The
Tank Girl comics, then, invite “a ‘look’ from the reading constituency for whom the purpose
of appropriating the Tank Girl image is resolutely not heterosexual, but women-identified” (38).
Tank Girl is, to be sure, sexual and sexualized. Even the titles of books like The Cream
of Tank Girl (2008) and The Hole of Tank Girl (2012), not to mention numerous story titles,
foreground her body and sexuality. Yet other collection titles include Tank Girl: Skidmarks
(2010), Tank Girl: Bad Wind Rising (2012), and even We Hate Tank Girl (2011). This contrary
portrayal began as early as the first comics and accelerated over the initial few years. In a time
when images of women in comics were limited, women comics authors even more so, and
the experience of visiting comic books stores could be fraught for women and girls,4 Hewlett
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Tank Girl and patriarchal culture
and Martin created productive cracks in the dynamic between author, reader, and character,
providing an in-road for readers resistant to socio-patriarchal conceptions of what women (in
comics or otherwise) should be or how they should be read. Tank Girl’s set-up allows readers
to see her as empowered regardless of how she is sexualized, as the comics foreground an im-
perfect and not especially talented female “hero” who repeatedly overcomes obstacles to win
the day.5 She uses her body to outsmart men who can only succumb to theirs, often to pull off
a joke like when the President “drops his load” (Hewlett and Martin, Hole 18), or when Tank
Girl removes “censored” stickers from her breasts, killing her foe who loses too much blood
to his penis (43), a joke recycled in “Milky Outlaw Babes No. 23 Tank Girl” (285).6 She also
uses her cunning and mechanical know-how in an era when women were not encouraged to
be mechanically inclined. Tank Girl further encourages readers to make fun of other readers
who limit her to a fetish object. Not only is she funny, but much of her humor comes at the
expense of men, and the metanarrative’s humor does the same.
The Tank Girl character first appeared in Atomtan #1 (1987) as a standalone page
(Hewlett and Martin, Tank Girl One 2). The authors’ friend, Philip Bond, had created a
character named Rocket Girl, inspired by a girl who resembled Hopey from the Hernandez
brothers’ Love and Rockets comics (4). In Love and Rockets at the time, Hopey is a hard-
core, combat-boot wearing lesbian punk with a shaved head.7 Martin explains, “when a
stray photocopy of a tank picture found its way onto the Atomtan page, behind Jamie’s
chunky-thighed gun-toting femme, she had to be called Tank Girl. I mean, what the hell
else could we have called her?” (4). Based on this drawing, Brett Ewins of Deadline com-
missioned Hewlett and Martin to create Tank Girl (2). Hewlett and Martin claim they set
Tank Girl in Australia because “it was flat and empty of buildings, and therefore very easy
to draw” (4), but they also mention Mad Max as an influence. Moreover, Australia seemed
“like another planet to us” and thus the “perfect stage” for Tank Girl’s “demented life” (5).
This setting allows for the seamless inclusion of hardened and angry killer kangaroos,
called Rippers in the film, though in both, Tank Girl starts dating one of them, Booga,
who is something of a softy. Tank Girl begins as a drunk, party-girl bounty hunter, who
quickly gives way to a preference for mass, inconsequential killing. However, this de-
scription sounds like a pejorative criticizing Tank Girl, and the beauty of the comic is its
frenetic energy, lack of interest in serialized storytelling or traditionally heroic endeavors,
punk visual style, and nonjudgmental attitude toward Tank Girl. It is difficult not to be
amused by her escapades, mood swings, and approach. Perhaps this is because too few
female adventurers existed in comics at the time, or perhaps readers found her daring,
pleasurable, and freeing.
Tank Girl’s first comic image is a close-up of her head and shoulders next to the title,
“Tank Girl” (Hewlett and Martin, Hole 9). She has a shaved head, big smile, bright eyes, and
a bandage on her forehead. Since she looks to the side, she is non-confrontational and easy to
adore (Figure 24.1). The next image of her appears a page later (10). In this panel, she looks
hard. Her teeth are well defined when before they were not, and she clamps a cigarette. Her
face is mostly in shadow, her eyes obscured by glasses as she leans on a rock and aims her gun
(10) (Figure 24.2). Tank Girl’s image fits her action-packed and angry world. Punches fly,
and her tank crashes into a party of kangaroos, one of whom, Rocky, she has been paid to
kill. When they crash, Tank Girl giggles and kisses Rocky before having sex with him. They
start kissing in one panel and, stand up talking in the next, he says, “I spose this means I can
go free now eh?” (13). She shoots him. This becomes a pattern in Tank Girl. She is hard and
soft, angry and funny, scary and sexy, but she usually finishes the job and gets laid—when
the story is that linear.
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Susan Kerns
Figure 24.1 Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. “Tank Girl.” Deadline. Deadline Publications Ltd, 1988
Figure 24.2 Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. “Tank Girl.” Deadline. Deadline Publications
Ltd, 1988
Certainly all iterations of Tank Girl foreground her sexuality, but they also focus on her
desire, making her standout from other female action characters of the time. In her seminal
piece on the male gaze in cinema, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey
explains that women in patriarchal cultures stand “as signifier for the male other, bound by
a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic
command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of
meaning, not maker of meaning” (834). Film is especially complicit in this arrangement, as
it is built on scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking, as the bearer of the look, the presumed
male spectator, has access to the object of the look, the woman onscreen. This arrangement
is reinforced by cinema’s set-up: the spectator watches from a safe distance in a dark room,
and film feeds him images at 24 frames per second (pre-digital). Although comics share some
characteristics with cinema, specifically their reliance on visual information in the form
of successive panels or frames, reading comics necessitates an active reader to fill in gaps
344
between images. Scott McCloud calls this “closure,” meaning readers’ brains observe the
parts but perceive a whole (63–64), filling in action that occurs in the gutter between pan-
els. This process makes the reader “a willing and conscious collaborator” in meaning making
(65). Hillary Chute writes, “While foundational feminist criticism has detailed the problem
of the passive female film spectator following and merging helplessly with the objectifying
gaze of the camera, the reader of graphic narratives is not trapped in the dark space of the
cinema” (9). Quoting an article for Modern Fiction Studies Chute co-wrote with Marianne
DeKoven, she further notes, “she must slow down enough to make the connections between
image and text and from panel to panel, thus working, at least in part, outside of the mysti-
fication of representation that film … often produces” (qtd. in Chute 9). Therefore, graphic
narratives offer the opportunity for “a constant self-reflexive demystification of the project
of representation” (9). The reader continually negotiates their position as reader translating
words and images and what takes place in between.
If images’ meanings are not static, their sequential placement allows for even gaze-
oriented images to be read subversively. To return to the ending of the aforementioned Tank
Girl comic, from one panel to the next Tank Girl giggles, grabs Rocky’s face, and straddles
him, fully clothed. Since Tank Girl and Rocky have sex in the gutter (the space between
the panels), readers fill in what happens. Although Helford notes, an “insistence upon a
sexualization of power” is at times undermined (in the film) by the male gaze (300–301),8
Whelehan and Sonnet explain:
certain female spectators at least interpret the mode of address of the image as being
directed at men for sexual consumption, but who are nonetheless capable of appropri-
ating the space of “the look” in order to occupy the identificatory space of a fantasy of
sexualised female power expressed through aggression. (39)
Since Tank Girl is calling the shots both before and after, when she literally shoots Rocky,
and because the gutter places meaning in the reader’s heads, they can intuit she dominates
their sexual encounter.
Tank Girl’s sexuality is often discussed as queer, since her relationship with Booga begins
polyamorously as her boyfriend, Stevie, is still sporadically in the picture. Also, both Rocky
and Booga are not human. Tank Girl also has sporadic sexual encounters with female char-
acters, though Whelehan and Sonnet note that for lesbian readers in the 1990s, the character
was not “an object of homoerotic desire but as an image to be identified with” (39).9 How-
ever, Tank Girl and Booga quickly settle into a heteronormative relationship. Even images
of Tank Girl in, say, a bathtub with Sub Girl and Jet Girl (Hewlett and Martin, Hole 81) or
at the center of an all-girl orgy, as she is briefly in “Sunflower” (181), seem drawn with an
eye toward the male viewer, and the vast majority of sexual images of Tank Girl or other
female characters (as the comics continue, they are all frequently naked) suggest a male gaze.
As such, tensions between the story, gaze, and possibilities for, or thwarting of, subversive
readings continually govern the reader’s relationship to this world.
Tank Girl’s first full page of the comic, the “Prologue Bit!” returns her to being displayed
and even denigrated by the narrator (Hewlett and Martin, Hole 14). She is centered on the
page and in panels around it drawn in several positions—facing forward, to the side, and
reclining—all in a lacey bra, skin-tight black pants, boots, and a block-letter “TANK” belt
buckle. She looks like a punk Madonna circa “Like a Virgin,” especially since her “TANK”
buckle is a variation of Madonna’s “BOY TOY” belt (Figure 24.3).
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Susan Kerns
Figure 24.3 Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. “Tank Girl.” Deadline. Deadline Publications
Ltd, 1988
This page feels designed to present her sexually, if not undermine her strength as a charac-
ter. The narrator chides her, calling her bald, smelly, and hungover, among other things (14).
Tank Girl burps and undercuts herself: “It’s a good job I never get sent out on any important
missions like real soldiers do! I’m far too unfit and undisciplined, not to mention fat” (14). The
joke is on her, because she is immediately given “a real humdinger of an important mission”
(14). Taken as a whole, this page speaks to the tensions Hatfield mentions between codes of
signification, single images, narrative sequence, and page surface. Hatfield says comics en-
courage “a near-simultaneous apprehension of the single image as both moment-in-sequence
and design element” (48). This page can be seen as a total unit and sequence functioning
linearly and holistically, allowing readers a moment of choice between how they engage
with “the format or shape of the object being read” (52). If looking at this “Prologue bit!”
holistically, her reclined figure dominates the page like a centerfold in pain (Hewlett and
Martin, Hole 14). However, in different panels, she is smiling, her tank is stuck upside down
between two rocks, and she scratches her head. The background image bleeds to the edge of
the page, a post-apocalyptic, desert landscape surrounding her. This story foregrounds her
moods and world, but the reader has a choice of enjoying just the image of her or engaging
with the push and pull of the narrator and Tank Girl’s antagonistic repartee. In all, the first
Tank Girl comic reifies the ongoing tensions between reading Tank Girl as feminist and/or
fetishistic while exemplifying the animosity the narrator/authors initially have with Tank
Girl that eventually expands to their readers.
346
The penultimate page of the first issue also introduces banter between Tank Girl and the
narrator (who is sometimes the authors). One panel includes an illustration of Rocky’s head
with the word bubble, “If I climb she wont [sic] be able to follow me in that tank!” (Hewlett
and Martin, Hole 13). The successive panel shows Tank Girl riding her tank, saying, “He’s
right. I’ll have to follow on foot. Geeez how come I can hear everything he’s saying? Must be
something to do with comics and all that crap” (13). This metanarrative approach opens up the
text by revealing the artifice of the medium and breaking the fourth wall. Readers are pushed
out of the story momentarily, and thus unable to fully “lose themselves” in the fictional world.
This becomes important in Tank Girl, because although initially this approach adds comedy,
it eventually becomes antagonistic with a certain type of reader—the horny male who feels
entitled to Tank Girl’s story/body. Hewlett and Martin’s intertextual inserts, both within the
captions or word bubbles and the exterior margins, might undermine their character, but they
also force room for all kinds of readers, including female readers, to feel safe enjoying Tank
Girl, because they make fun of male readers who objectify her. This often includes nodding
to the sexualization of their character, which allows for something of a compartmentalization
of Tank Girl. In other words, she can be seen as an action antihero and fetish object, and one
does not necessarily negate the other. Whelehan and Sonnet note, “Such clashes of interpreta-
tion indicate the importance of recognising the role of the extratextual in accounting for the
readership dynamics centered around ‘Tank Girl’” (40). Tank Girl in fact demands the reader
engage with the narrator and/or authors. This insistence on recognizing the artifice of the
comics format, and at times actually interrogating readers for their reading habits, both forces
the “slowing down” and erases the possibility for passive spectatorship, theoretically allowing
all readers to break out of certain reading positions. For example, if readers see themselves be-
ing called out by comics’ authors in metanarrative moments, it seems unlikely they will keep
reading without at least a consciousness of their approach.
At times Hewlett and Martin literally separate out their meta-discussions from the main
comics, which furthers this distance between different readers and provides readers who respond
to Tank Girl primarily as an empowered feminist character the ability to make fun of what
might now be called fanboys. This is most prominent in “Blue Helmet,” which marks a moment
in Tank Girl when the authors were deliberately trying to upset reader expectations. Martin
notes, “as soon as anyone thinks they’ve got her sussed,” they change “the artwork, the sto-
rylines, or the universe that she occupies” (Hewlett and Martin, Hole 7). He mentions a spread in
The Daily Mirror, “How to Dress Like a Tank Girl,” that inspired them to create a look that “only
the most outlandish, demented freak would ever dare attempt. … Tank Girl is sporting the
unlikely combo of a pair of filthy old Y-Fronts over the top of some stripy cycling shorts, with
an ‘inverted’ version of her trademark hair-tuft. Oh, how we chuckled” (7). This antagonism
characterizes the friction between what the authors created, what the fans enjoyed, and how the
character almost immediately had a presence in popular culture outside of the pages of Deadline.
The story of “Blue Helmet” is total nonsense. Brian Smell (not a recurring character) is
reading the novel Blue Helmet by Jack Kerouac to impress Shit Face (also not a recurring char-
acter), a blue-haired girl who knows literature. The majority of the story takes place inside
Blue Helmet, which is a mishmash of On the Road and Tank Girl. Jack and his buddy Allen
pick up Tank Girl and Booga and find themselves accomplices to a variety of roadside rob-
beries and murders before “Blue Helmet Part 2” ups the ante. They sneak into a Yogi Bear/
Flintstones campground where they meet a Banana Splits-looking group called The Hairy
Banana Bunch. Tank Girl has a hallucinatory sexual encounter with Jack before her breasts
grow faces. Eventually the police catch up to them, resulting in a chase and concluding with
Booga performing oral sex on Tank Girl (197–212). The reliance on pre-existing pop culture
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Susan Kerns
to establish this preposterous world, coupled with sex, drugs, and violence, feels normalized
for readers familiar with the comics. Just as Tank Girl enters Easy Rider in an early comic,
here she and Booga join On the Road. In fact, a small drawing in the bottom margin of The
Hairy Banana Bunch page says, “If you have no ideas, steal someone elses!” [sic] (207).
More remarkable is how Tank Girl is visually presented in “Blue Helmet.” By part two,
Tank Girl’s look becomes differently confrontational outside of her new wardrobe and hair. Af-
ter celebrating the end of the first “Blue Helmet” by bumping bare butts with her friend Barney
(204), all parties lose their clothes (206). Tank Girl spends a couple pages in her black bra before
the color shifts completely from dark blues to bright oranges as she hallucinates and disrobes for
Jack (208–209). Initially Tank Girl is framed for the male gaze: her butt is centered in a panel
that takes up two-thirds of the page. The row of panels below it shows her removing her shirt,
though the gaze is played with, as she is only shown from the shoulders up, her breasts hidden
in the gutter (208). In the first three panels of the next page, she is seen from behind and from
the side, waist up, before she says, “You’re staring at my titties aren’t you!” (209). This sequence
sets up the expectation of seeing her naked breasts, and when Jack starts to deny staring, she
interrupts him, demanding: “Take another look at them Jack!” (209). The panel reveals a close
up of her breasts, which are now monstrous. They each have full sets of teeth, two eyes, tongues
sticking out, and say “Voop! Voop!” Jack responds with a scream (209) (Figure 24.4).
Not only has Tank Girl called out Jack, and the reader, for sexualizing her, but she has
also subverted their expectations, if not punished them for looking, by first imploring them
to look and then shape-shifting to make her body horrific, clearly in control of how her
sexuality is exploited. Her domination is reinforced in the penultimate panel of the comic,
which shows Booga on his knees performing oral sex on Tank Girl under her long trench
coat (212) (Figure 24.5).
If play with Tank Girl’s attire and sexuality was one response to her popularity, certainly
“Son of Zoro,” the “lucky extra” that runs across the bottom pages of “Blue Helmet” is
another. “Son of Zoro” features a boy with a makeshift “Zoro” mask over his face who
represents the typical (aggravating) Tank Girl reader—and Hewlett and Martin are mocking
him. This boy runs the gamut of emotions: happy to see Tank Girl, annoyed she is not front
and center in the comic, and therefore calling for better writers (198–199). He gets excited
when Tank Girl finally enters (“It’s her! It’s her!” “Yum yum yummy!”) before she farts
(“Disgusting. Farting. Don’t fancy her anymore!”) (200–201). He then criticizes Hewlett
and Martin again, this time calling them “Idiots!” for repeating lines in panels, which they
Figure 24.4 Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. Tank Girl 2 #4. Dark Horse Comics, 1993
348
also do in their “It’s bad panel time!” comment in the top margin of the same page (201).
“Son of Zoro” mimics what the authors mention in interviews as their most devoted, or
perhaps overly devoted, fans’ reactions to the comics and the Tank Girl character for better
and worse—mostly for worse. By the next page, “Son of Zoro” is ready to write a letter of
complaint before, “Woh!! Splash page!” knocks him out, to which he decides, “Time for a
quick fiddle with my dick! To the bog!” (202–203). “Son of Zoro” ends with the boy in an
outhouse ejaculating (204) (Figure 24.6). Although “Son of Zoro” concludes in the first half
of “Blue Helmet,” the final panel of “Blue Helmet 2,” which follows the panel of Booga
kneeling under Tank Girl’s coat, is of Brian Smell running into the distance, yelling, “I AM
ENLIGHTENED AND INSPIRED! Come to my pants you brainy ladys! [sic] Yum yum!”
(212). However, a line across the bottom of the panel reads, “You are enlightened and full
of shit!” (212), ridiculing both the character in the story and the reader who might think
reading Tank Girl will impress girls.
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Susan Kerns
The interplay between page design, character interaction, and reader reflection is key to
moments like these that do not directly break the fourth wall but do call out the reader’s
position in meaning making, their feelings of ownership over the character, and their (base)
reactions to her. Hatfield notes that “sophisticated” readers understand how comics exploit
their design and are aware of tensions or possible contradictions between, say, text and im-
age, layout, and reading experience and that there is no “stable” conception of the page (65).
Instead, awareness of tensions “may multiply the number of choices available to the reader
and can result in even more intensive questioning of the page” (66). Furthermore, com-
ics “always involves choosing among different options—different strategies of interpretation,
different ways of understanding” (66). Even though the design of “Blue Helmet” suggests
that “Son of Zoro” can be seen as a “lucky extra” or a throwaway add-on, it is meant to be
read alongside the primary story. Since Tank Girl plays with form frequently, regular readers
would intuit this. Moreover, “Son of Zoro” connects to Hewlett and Martin’s transparent
opposition to Tank Girl’s accessibility and popularity, as well as ideas about mode of address.
It delineates who the comic thinks the reader is before toying with him. It also builds soli-
darity between Hewlett and Martin and readers who do not see themselves in “Son of Zoro.”
Even though numerous popular culture references are included in Tank Girl, very little “girl
culture” makes its way into the comics. This criticism of fanboys via “Son of Zoro,” then,
could be especially significant for female readers invested in Tank Girl as a character, or even
perhaps contending with fanboys in the real world. At minimum, female readers would feel
seen and included.
Part of the pleasure of Tank Girl is that she consistently conquers men who underestimate
and undermine her. Moments in which the authors also make fun of their readers contribute
to this pleasure and reinforce the feeling that this story world is, without question, Tank
Girl’s dominion. Her desires and decisions drive the jokes and narrative, and the playfulness
between text and visuals allows readers to fetishize her while simultaneously making fun
of them for doing so. It does not matter that she does not have a true superpower; her su-
perpower is her irreverence toward men, what Sergeant in “Tank Girl Chapter Three: Big
Mouth Strikes Again” calls her “stagnant lack of respect” (31). Her smarts, her tank, and her
body are her tools for winning every time. Although the Tank Girl comics are full of the male
gaze, Hewlett and Martin’s multifaceted approach, visually, narratively, and otherwise, made
the character larger than the world she inhabits on the page, if not too big for it. For readers
in the 1990s who needed to see her as such, Tank Girl outshined those elements of the comic
that speak to male desires. Although many contemporary readers want to believe female
characters are now permitted to have power, menstruate, be funny, enjoy sex, and express
negative emotions, the truth is, Tank Girl still resonates. Perhaps it is the desire for a female
character who always has the quickest wit and full bodily autonomy that endures. Certainly
Tank Girl’s ability to enjoy everything that everyone says is bad for her continues providing
respite for girls needing a break from the patriarchy.
Notes
350
Works Cited
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. Teachers College
Press, 1997.
Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005.
Helford, Elyce Rae. “Postfeminism and the Female Action-Adventure Hero: Positioning Tank Girl.”
Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Ed.
Maureen S. Barr. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 291–308.
Hewlett, Jamie and Alan C. Martin. The Hole of Tank Girl. Titan, 2012.
———. Tank Girl One. Titan, 2009.
Hills, Elizabeth. “From ‘Figurative Males’ to Action Heroines: Further thoughts on Active Women in
the Cinema.” Screen, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1999, pp. 38–50.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper, 1993.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Read-
ings, Fifth Edition. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 833–844.
Muncer, Steven, Anne Campbell, Victoria Jervis, and Rachel Lewis. “‘Ladettes,’ Social Representa-
tions, and Aggression.” Sex Roles, Vol. 44, Nos. 1/2, 2001, pp. 33–44.
Tank Girl. Directed by Rachel Talalay, Performances by Lori Petty, Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, and
Naomi Watts, United Artists, 1995.
Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. Routledge, 1998.
Whelehan, Imelda and Esther Sonnet. “Regendered Reading: Tank Girl and Postmodernist Intertex-
tuality.” Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience. Eds. Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi
Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan. Pluto, 1997, pp. 31–47.
351
25
Falling in or stepping out
Little red formation as agentic gender
construction in Lumberjanes
Karly Marie Grice
In their keynote speech at the Children’s Literature Association’s comics-themed confer-

ence, Charles Hatfield and Joe Sutliff Sanders bandied about their thoughts on the past,
present, and future of comics for young readers. The central thread of their playful speech
was Sanders’s earlier posited heuristic for delineating between comics and picture books:
the chaperoning theory. As Sanders explains it, the difference between the two is less one
of formalistic boundaries—as many scholars have focused on—and more one of ideology,
specifically, the positionality of the implied child reader. “Comics anticipate a child who
reads without adult supervision; picture books anticipate an adult who will monitor and fix
meaning in ways ‘appropriate’ for child listeners” (Sanders 72). Sanders argues that “whom
the book anticipates as the chaperone” of meaning, the child as independent/solo reader or
the adult as authoritative/dual reader, is fundamental to the book’s rhetorical purpose and,
thus, scriptive design (78).
As Hatfield extolled Sanders’s theory to the audience, he projected a classic illustration of
Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, drawing parallels between the implications of Sand-
ers’s chaperoning theory and the protection and obedience within the didactic moral of the
fairytale by iterating its French name: Le Petit Chaperone Rouge (Hatfield and Sanders 464).
The two scholars track through their exploration of the future of comics “the social unease
and profound challenges raised by the empowered young reader” and ask adults fretting
over who will chaperone meaning for these babes in the woods “to see beyond our anxiet-
ies and recognize the struggles for power within the reading lives and literacy practices of
children” (479).
This adult anxiety over comics is not new. Comics themselves have historically been
the wolves of the story, not even bothering to dress up in grandma’s clothing. Concerns
ranged from educators arguing comics were a distraction from literacy development to psy-
chologists warning comics would turn young readers into criminals (Nyberg). These mid-
twentieth-century campaigns, fomented by the now infamous Fredric Wertham, led the
senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency to pass the 1954 Comics Code. In the name
of preventing the “seduction of the innocent,” the code restricted the kinds of messages
that were allowed to appear in comic books. Acceptable texts fell in line with dominant,
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Agentic gender construction
hegemonic, heteropatriarchal institutions and ideologies; or, in the committee’s language,

“violations of standards of good taste, which might tend toward corruption of the comic
book as an instructive and wholesome form of entertainment, will be eliminated” (CMAA).
Of particular concern for the committee was upholding institutions of authority and policing
“marriage and sex standards,” with restrictions including “sexual abnormalities” and “sex
perversion” (i.e., epithets for anything queer).
Jared Gardner, however, posits there was much more to Wertham’s fear of comics
than their manipulation of youths, and that was their empowerment of them, pointing to
Wertham’s later compositions as revealing “his recognition of the power of this new form
to activate readers’ imaginations and…of the power of images to do much more than sim-
ply ‘display’” (71). In the same vein, David Hajdu argues that “[c]omic books were radical
among the books of their day for being written, drawn, priced, and marketed primarily for
and directly to kids, as well as asserting a sensibility anathema to grown-ups” (5). With the
growth of comic books, young readers often circumvented adult gatekeepers and entered
into a community of writers and readers both very political in their content and present
in their seriality.
Taking this past of children and comics as well as the present of children’s comics theory
into consideration, the Lumberjanes comics series, originally created by Noelle Stevenson,
Grace Ellis, and Shannon Watters, serves as a rich text for analysis. The series follows a group
of close friends attending “Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp
for Hardcore Lady-Types” (Stevenson, Ellis, Watters 3).1 The main characters—Jo, Ripley,
Mal, Molly, and April—create a cadre of variations upon girlhood regarding race, gender,
sexuality, body type, interests, and skills. Espousing their motto “Friendship to the Max!”
the group of young Lumberjanes work together to solve the fantastic mysteries of the forest
surrounding their camp, including three-eyed foxes, a metamorphosing bear woman, hipster
yetis, and warring Greek gods. The series is notable for its all-ages queer content, having
been awarded not just comics-based accolades, like the 2015 Eisner Awards for Best New Se-
ries and Best Publication for Teens, but also gender- and sexuality-based awards like the 2016
GLAAD Outstanding Comic Book award and being added to the 2016 Amelia Bloomer List,
a collection of feminist youth literature.
Lumberjanes initiates in many ways the very transfer of power that Gardner finds at the
core of Wertham’s fear of the form. The series positions readers as agentic and empowered
in their individual, embodied presentations of gender, sexuality, and identity. Specifically,
Lumberjanes uses the rebelliousness of the comics medium to imply a poststructural construc-
tivist approach to gender. First, I explore how the creators accomplish this by calling readers’
attention to their own assumptions and ways of seeing using fairytale scripts, then by the
deconstruction of gender as a text via subversive repetition, and finally through the recon-
struction of gender as an individualized discursive practice using the peritext.
“WHAT WACKED-UP EYES YOU HAAAAAVE!”:

challenging gendered scripts
The comics series opens with a visual allusion that many readers will immediately recognize:
Little Red Riding Hood. Walking alone through a dark forest and terrified of the ominous
sounds, the opening page of the comic shows a girl in scarlet cloak, apparently vulnerable
and isolated, at the mercy of whatever dangers lie in the surrounding wood and beyond the
turn of the page (vol. 1, no. 1). Not only does her victimization seem imminent, but the
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culpability seems to be entirely hers for straying so deep into the forest alone. This reference
is meaningful in how it introduces the graphic narrative via both fairytale scripts broadly
and the individual tale specifically. Carrie Hintz and Eric L. Tribunella discuss the use of
fairytales as a socializing heuristic particularly in how they reward normative representations
of each sociohistorical era’s gender and sexuality norms (126). “Little Red Riding Hood,”
especially, has been interpreted by scholars “in allegorical terms as depicting an eternal battle
of the sexes” (Tatar 6). And while the story was “[o]nce a folktale of earthy humor and high
melodrama, it was transformed into a heavy-handed narrative with a pedagogical agenda
designed by adults” (Tatar 6). The lessons children can learn from Little Red’s mistakes
are those of obedience (to stay on the path), focus (not to get distracted), abstinence (not to
give in to temptation), and caution (to be wary of strangers). Unfortunately, these lessons
are learned “by making the heroine responsible for the violence to which she is subjected”
(Tatar 6). This rationalization makes “Little Red Riding Hood” complicit in a long history
of objectification and violence that continues to haunt women even today.
The presentation of these images on the initial page of the comic, isolated from the rest
of the narrative images, requires the reader to turn the page to see if she has read the fairy-
tale script correctly. The turn of the page in picturebooks, as Lawrence Sipe and Anne E.
Brightman write, has “‘complex semiotic significance’ which should not be neglected” (qtd.
in Low 369). Sipe and Brightman explain the value of the page turn: “Encouraging children
to speculate about page breaks develops inference-making and positions them as co-authors,
adding another element to their literary repertoires” (qtd. in Low 369). The Lumberjanes
creators’ decision to start the story with this meaningful page turn is even more important
when considering David Low’s commentary on the parallel functions of the page turn and
the comics gutter. Low connects these two narrative tools, postulating the gutter “demands
that readers produce inferences in order to construct meaning, and positions the reader in the
role of co-author of the text” (370). Based on prior knowledge of fairytale scripts, it is easy
to assume passivity and victimization await the hooded figure. Indeed, this opening mise en
page and the choice of where to break the storyline with the “gutter” of the page turn build
suspense for this kind of prediction.
However, the turn of the page reveals via the larger double mise-en-page spread that this
girl is not alone. Not only is she joined by other girls—providing the first view of the core
Lumberjanes—but the large panels at the bottom of both pages reveal the girls posed in Char-
lie’s Angels-esque battle stances (vol. 1, no. 1). This visual allusion positions the Lumberjanes as
powerful fighters subverting the initial mock-intertextuality of the fairytale damsel-in-distress.
Combining these two contradictory allusions, the comic utilizes implications of the latter vi-
sual to subvert the former’s power. This authorial act of luring readers into false predictions
based on the visual seems to be the modus operandi of Lumberjanes, preparing readers from page
one to disempower first impressions and embrace subversive representations.
This fairytale moment concludes with a bang, playing with the older version’s discourse.
Traditionally, Little Red questions the unsettling appearance of the wolf in grandma’s cloth-
ing, saying, “My what big eyes you have, grandmother.” Perhaps setting up the series’ focus
on seeing/questioning the visual, this is the only (somewhat) quoted line of the older version.
Here, as the girls are attacked by three-eyed foxes, Ripley, the smallest of the Lumberjanes,
discovers their weakness: the third eye. Leaping onto a fox’s back, she screams, “WHAT
WACKED-UP EYES YOU HAAAAAVE!” followed by, “All the better to punch you in!”
before doing so. The fox subsequently “poofs” into nothingness, further emphasizing the
vulnerability of the eye and the fragility of seeing (vol. 1, no. 1).
354
More than meets the eye: Apollo and April’s subversive repetition2
When representing gender as a social construct, the portrayal of that construction in a visual
medium, such as a comic, forefronts the body-as-tool in that construction. Judith Butler
explains this as performativity, or “the view that what we take to be an internal essence of
gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered styl-
ization of the body” (xv). However, performativity may embody subversive repetition if it
serves as an approximate representation with a crucial alteration within the performance.
“Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a
dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural
itself ” (Butler 200, emphasis in original). Depending on the way it is integrated into the
performance, the subversive repetition may be used by an author/actor for either ridicule
or renovation. The purpose is to unsettle and disentangle characteristics—particularly the
visual—from meaning in a way that liberates identity from a limited view of performativity
(Butler 200).
Two characters in the series play on readers’ expectations of gender performativity in a
way that sets up subversive repetition: the hypermasculine Scouting Lads director, Apollo,
and the feminine Lumberjane April. When readers first encounter Apollo he is disguised as
the Mr. Theodore Tarquin Reginald Lancelot Herman Crumpet’s Camp for Boys camp di-
rector. This camp, home of the Scouting Lads, serves as the gender-binary counterpart to the
less rigidly gendered (at least linguistically) Lumberjanes’ camp for “Hardcore Lady-Types.”
Apollo, in disguise at this point, bursts through the door, his embodied representation epito-
mizing hypermasculinity, defined by Erica Scharrer as one who “eschews and even ridicules
‘soft-hearted’ emotions, celebrates and views as inevitable male physical aggression, blocks
attempts by women or others to appeal to emotions by belittling…women in general, and
exhibits sensation-seeking behaviors that bring a welcome sense of vigor and thrill” (617).
With his rippling muscles, thick body hair, red face, visible arsenal, and even black pirate eye
patch (for good measure), Apollo embodies hypermasculinity. Even when speaking, Apollo’s
words are printed in oversized, all-caps letters, emphasizing a booming, aggressive voice.
Disregard for domesticity and disrespect for others mark his actions as he stomps in with
mud-covered boots ignoring the “Please Be Neat & Wipe Your Feet!” sign the Scouting
Lads have posted. He immediately begins gendering and critiquing the boys’ actions as he
yells, “I THOUGHT I HEARD A TEA KETTLE. PATHETIC” and “COOKIES ARE
FOR THE WEAK. REAL MEN SHOULD BE SPLITTING WOOD AND SMOKING
PIPES” (vol. 1, no. 4, all caps in original). He blusters through the cabin, calling the girls
stupid and slapping cookie trays, markers of femininity/failed masculinity, out of the boys’
hands before stomping out.
Concern about a loss of defined adult masculinity has recently manifested as a “boy crisis,”
effecting debates about gender in education, literacy, children’s media, and more (Wanna-
maker 1). While Apollo’s embodiment epitomizes the rules of hypermasculinity, his policing
of the Scouting Lads’ behavior implies fragile masculinity. Drawing on Timothy Beneke’s
work on masculinity, Annette Wannamaker avers “masculinity can be made quite visible as
a social construction because masculinity must always be proved over and over again…. And
if it must always be proved, then it is always being threatened, always in process, fluid and
tenuous and subject to change” (24). As such, it is through Apollo’s protestations and chas-
tisement of the young boys who are failing to reinscribe manhood that the reader may find
masculinity’s Achilles’ heel.
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Karly Marie Grice
This hypermasculine embodiment is very different from Apollo’s natural form. From the
reader’s initial glimpse of the boys’ camp, signs warn to “be watchful, be prepared” (vol. 1,
no 4), a reminder to continuously question the visual. Readers are eventually provided the
background to understand Apollo’s identity by his sister, Artemis (who has been pretending
to be fellow Lumberjane Diane). Artemis reveals Apollo’s name and subterfuge through an
extradiegetic panel presenting him looking young, thin, and—most notably—androgynous
thanks to the combination of Grecian toga and Brooke Allen’s simplified, iconic illustration
style that glosses over the fine details which would mark characters’ race, gender, and age
(vol. 2, no. 7). Through this, readers are made aware that the androgynous Apollo wears his
hypermasculine embodiment for power and control in society. Further analyzing the god,
Friedrich Nietzche understands the “construction” of Apollo as “der Schein, which one trans-
lates as ‘appearance’ but must also at times render as ‘illusion,’ ‘image’” (Gonzalez-Reigosa
and Kaminsky 159).
It is not only the subversive repetition represented through the extradiegetic panel that
reveals the cracks in Apollo’s illusory masculinity but also the way it is seen and called out
by Scouting Lad Barney. Before Apollo enters the room, Barney remarks to April and Jo,
“Something isn’t quite right around here, but I can’t quite put my finger on what. Just be-
tween you and me, I have this weird feeling about our camp director” (vol. 1, no. 4). Thus,
before ever being seen, Apollo is set up as being “off.” As Wannamaker writes, “[T]hose
moments where borders are being articulated through binaries, are also those sites where the
abject appears as a threat because it challenges the fixity of the borders and unmasks them
as porous, fluid, constructed, and illusory” (28). The Scouting Lads’ read as the feminine/
queer abject to Apollo’s hegemonic hypermasculinity. The most notable marker positioning
Barney as blurring the boundaries occurs when he confides to Jo his feelings of being mis-
placed. Jo confesses to recognizing herself in him, saying he reminds her of who she would’ve
become if she would’ve “had to become a Scouting Lad,” a scene the creators intended as a
subtle nod to Jo’s identity as a trans girl (Rude). In this scene, Jo solidifies her identity as a
girl, standing rock solid in contrast to Apollo’s fragile masculinity, saying to Barney, “I know
exactly where I belong. And it was never across the lake with the Scouting Lads. Maybe it’s
the same for you” (vol. 4, no. 16). Barney’s initial critique of Apollo’s authenticity, his mar-
ginalized position as the feminine/queer abject by Apollo’s hard binary masculinity, and this
ultimate identification with gender as porous and constructed help to denaturalize Apollo’s
“natural” manliness and throw it into critical relief.
In her study of boyhood and children’s literature, Wannamaker explains, “The current
fixation on boys is also clearly a reaction to recent progress feminists have made and our hopes
or uncertainties about the future direction of accepted gender roles in the United States” (5).
Of all the Lumberjanes, the one who most visibly fits traditional gender expectations is April,
the character Grace Ellis comments is meant to represent the “pinnacle of femininity.” April
is drawn stylistically different from all the other characters. While every other character is
presented in a highly iconic style with simple black dots for eyes, April has the oversized
eyes of a Disney princess. In fact, with her red bouffant bangs, prominent hair accessories,
and doe eyes, April bears striking resemblance to a similarly named Disney princess: Ariel,
The Little Mermaid. This visual allusion connects April to the monopoly Disney princesses
hold on femininity in girl culture, one Peggy Orenstein argues is deeply connected to the
capitalistic hypersexualization, objectification, and co-optation of girlhood. However, while
April largely presents as visibly feminine and evokes comparisons to the princess who gave up
her voice to gain a husband, Ellis comments that she and her co-creators wanted to use this
character to take the representation of femininity and “flip it on its head.”
356
April’s difference from the other Lumberjanes fractures her visual representation of a tradi-
tional gender identity in generative ways for the comics’ readership. Nothing (other than her
eyes) demarcates April as different, and largely she fits into the expectations of her feminine
representation. However, in issue three, readers are given a clue into something contradictory
about April’s appearance: her super strength. After jumping down a mysterious tunnel, the
Lumberjanes come across a giant talking statue. The statue informs them that “one of you
must best me at arm-wrestling for the privilege of passing through my doorway” (vol. 1, no. 3,
emphasis added), dictating this while performing a series of hypermasculine bodybuilder
flexes. His words along with his embodiment convey the “privileging” of physical strength
and the coupling of that privilege with masculine bodies. Much to everyone’s surprise (except
for Jo, April’s oldest friend), April volunteers, eliciting both concern from the other girls and
ridicule from the statue. The latter bursts into laughter mocking April’s weak appearance
saying, “You? But you are the smallest of all your friends! Your arms are little twigs! I will
snap your twig arms like twigs for your arrogance” (vol. 1, no. 3, emphasis in original).
April responds to his commentary coolly, and in the following panels proceeds to best the
talking statue, literally ripping off his arm and handing it back to him with a smile. In this
way, April’s super strength does not just “flip [femininity] on its head” as Ellis hoped—it rips
off the arms of oppressive, patriarchal masculinity and its devaluation of femininity, handing it
back to them smiling. Ultimately, the subversive repetition of femininity seen through April’s
embodied representation reminds the reader that despite the cisgender feminine girl’s apparent
visual adherence to social expectations, there is still more than meets the eye.
Many elements within Lumberjanes are intended to disorient the reader by subverting
their expectations in various ways, from the mildly unexpected to the fantastically shocking.
However, it is important to note that amidst all the supernatural, the queer representations in
the text are never utilized for this act. The identities, representations, acts, and scripts frac-
tured by subversive repetition are those most often positioned as expected social norms (e.g.,
cisgender femininity, hypermasculinity, and fairytale scripts). In contrast, the recognition of
Jo as trans and the same-gender attraction between Mal and Molly appear in the narrative
without any of the typical outing fanfare of the children’s or young adult LGBTQ narrative
(Crisp). It is only that which is taken for granted in the U.S. milieu that is “outed” as a con-
struct, undermining the invisible ideological basis of its assumed inherent naturalness.
Playing with the peritext and rewriting girlhood

Lumberjanes goes beyond just meaningful content and characters in how it also utilizes com-
position to convey an understanding of texts as constructed, an awareness of the fallibility of
texts, and the capability of the young reader to be agentic in rewriting the text herself. The
Lumberjanes help encourage the imagined reader’s agency by serving as models of agentic
creation and critical engagement; significantly, this is performed through the text’s elements
that create the mimetic effect. Laura U. Marks describes the mimetic effect as a “‘radical
formalism,’ which pays such close attention to the form—or composition—of an image that
it goes beyond representation and towards ‘a trace of an originary event’” (qtd. in Rose 75).
As the text’s construction hints at a reality—the trace of the real hand that constructed the
image—such techniques seemingly erase some of the boundary between the text and the
real world and create this mimetic effect. Unlike the synthetic, which reveals the author-as-
fictional-text-creator’s hand, a characteristic Gene Luen Yang uses in his Boxers & Saints dip-
tych to create a post-colonial materiality (Grice), this kind of trace of the real hand is meant
to imply the inherent reality of the text and, likewise, the character who created it as real.
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Karly Marie Grice
In Lumberjanes, the peritextual frame creates this mimetic materiality for a poststructural
constructivist approach to gender. Peritext includes the materials within a publication that
surround the narrative but are not directly a part of it, such as the table of contents, front
cover and back matter, copyright page, footnotes, etc. Mike Cadden explains that “[t]he
peritext is a good example of an aspect of narrative theory of special interest to those who
study children’s literature exactly because it has so much to do with assumptions about the
implied reader, itself a central concern in children’s literature” (viii, emphasis in text). Fur-
thermore, he posits “a playful peritext” as “the measure of what the author and the publisher
in combination believe to be true about the audience(s) of a children’s book” (ix). Lumberjanes
bookmarks each issue with peritext that sets up the book the audience is reading as the offi-
cial Lumberjanes Field Manual, transforming the copyright and title pages into a “Message
from the Lumberjanes High Council.” Within the collected volumes, each chapter/issue is
also prefaced with introductory material that makes the comic appear to be inserted into
the actual handbook itself. The creators use this handbook peritext as a framing device to
contrast the prescriptive formal handbook genre with the descriptive representations of the
girls’ varied embodiments in the informal comics medium. Furthermore, the framing peri-
text constructs the girls as agentic authors who do not just defy the edicts of institutional
discourse but actively alter and rewrite the text to both fit and reflect themselves and their
lived experiences. Following Cadden’s argument, the inclusion of this kind of peritext speaks
to the creators’ beliefs in the attitudes, abilities, and agency of the imagined child reader.
Throughout the series, the girls actively question and reject the prescribed structures of
society. The fallibility of texts to speak to their real lives comes up explicitly in the narrative;
as the girls choose to go farther into a mysterious tunnel, Mal remarks, “I’m pretty sure there
wasn’t a chapter in the Lumberjanes handbook about stuff like this” (vol. 1, no. 3). Indeed,
the handbook seems quite incapable of preparing them for their world filled with fantastic
adventures. Beyond critiquing the handbook’s practical inadequacy, the girls also reject some
of its ideologies. The most explicit rejection of the construction of girlhood is related to the
handbook’s dictates on appearance. The peritext closing every chapter/issue focuses entirely
on the proper way to wear the Lumberjanes uniform. This page emphasizes conformity
through uniformity, particularly chastising the “selfishness of a few individuals” who choose
not to follow the rules. The regulations include wearing a skirt that is the “right length,”
“shoes and stockings [that] are in keep[ing with the] uniform,” not wearing “necklaces,
bracelets, or other jewelry,” and having one’s hair “neat and kept in place with an insonspic-
uous [sic] clip or ribbon” beneath the beret.
Only Jen, the girls’ rule-abiding counselor, wears the uniform. The girls appear only once
in the series wearing the uniform. After breaking numerous rules, Jo recites the Lumberjane
pledge for the camp director. In a panel representing this moment, the girls are all wearing
their standard diverse outfits, but the next page and panel accompanying Jo’s recitation shows
each of the girls standing outside wearing the Lumberjanes uniform. The edges of the illus-
tration are faded and foggy noting its position as a dream or mental projection. While the
girls are wearing recognizable Lumberjane uniforms, each uniform is altered to reflect the
individual girl’s personality and how she presents her idea of girlhood to the world. The girls
show their respect of the pledge, standing along with Jo, but do not follow the dictates of
the organization’s prescriptive dress, choosing instead to emphasize supportive acceptance of
individualistic disunity in their community. This image, contradicting the “ideal Lumber-
jane” image that appears in the peritextual handbook preface, suggests the series’ ideological
pulse is that girlhood should be approached as variously descriptive instead of singularly
prescriptive.
358
Beyond the girls’ rejection of the handbook’s formal dictates is their physical obfuscation
and alteration of the text itself. As mentioned before, the peritextual frame creates the illusion
that the book the reader is holding is the actual Lumberjanes handbook. However, the final
page of this official text—the same page dictating the uniform—is mostly obscured by photos
of the girls’ adventures affixed into the handbook with tape. The cartoonistically illustrated
medium of Polaroid photography adds immediacy to the act and removes gatekeepers from
the equation of textual production: the girls would not need to bring the film to another per-
son to get it developed. Instead, the girls would be entirely in control of its production. Here,
the presence of the girls’ hands is visible in the captioning of each photograph. As opposed to
assuming that the pictures are recaps provided by an omniscient external presence, the word
choice locates the pictures as having been placed in the text by the girls themselves. For ex-
ample, in the peritext of issue one, the polaroid of Jen is captioned “Jenny, our cabin leader!”
(vol. 1, no. 1, 29, emphasis added). The “our” positions the girls as the mimetic authorial
hand behind these alterations. Furthermore, the compositional layering of the pictures on
top of the handbook with tape exhibits a kind of rudimentary alteration of the sacred text by
the profane. Instead of taking the word of the handbook as the hallowed Word of how to be,
they place reproductions of themselves into the text. In this way, the girls present themselves
as agentic in writing their own words and their own world.
These examples of both rejecting and rewriting the text imply that readers, like the Lum-
berjanes, can alter the limiting scripts they are assigned to be more inclusive of their own
ways of embodying girlhood. Readers are provided with a model of questioning the texts
they see, including models of girls enacting agency over and above the prescribed texts and
cultural scripts of girlhood. Ultimately, by utilizing this visual text that shows traces of al-
tering the traditional construction of girlhood (something that is itself often constructed and
inculcated visually), the text implies that readers can reconstruct traditional texts in their
own lives. Perhaps this is why the peritext asks the reader to induct herself into the Lumber-
janes tribe symbolically. Each volume’s copyright page has a place for the reader to fill in her
“Name,” “Troop,” and “Date Invested.” This can be perceived as a call to action, a moment
where the reader is asked to pick up her own pen and alter the text. This might be a small
move, writing one’s name in a book, but it is a strong first step to writing oneself into the
world symbolically. Furthermore, acknowledging the date one is “invested” is important.
The date all girls are invested into the conversation of girlhood is the day they are born,
perhaps even earlier as the doctor reading the sonogram announces “it’s a girl,” symbolically
inducting the unborn child in the “womb to tomb” childhood gendering that will bombard
her personally at birth with the flourishes of “relentless color coding of babies” (Orenstein
183, 2). But the date a girl chooses to become invested in the conversation of girlhood, the
day she chooses to not be conscribed by what has been written before about girls but to write
her own definition, is an important move toward agency and independence, something our
society provides in very small doses for children and women alike. Thus, a child’s choice to
read this book, to answer the call to action from the Lumberjanes, and to take up the pen to
write herself into the ever-evolving book of girlhood is a date of investment indeed.
The Lumberjanes, like all girls, face many texts that prescribe what it means to be a girl.
Instead of acquiescing to the rules, when the girls find the messages they are receiving to be
unacceptable, they alter the text to better reflect their own construction(s) of their lives versus
their pre-constructed surroundings. This agentic girlhood is quite different from the imag-
ined tabula rasa childhood that often accompanies the hand-wringing over youth; “[T]he
rhetoric of the current boy crisis quite often ignores the complexities of subjectivity forma-
tion and the nuances of gendered identity that is negotiated by subjects, not merely imposed
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Karly Marie Grice
by either culture or nature. Of course, public debates may simplify issues of subjectivity
precisely because boys are being used as blank slates in public discourse” (Wannamaker 8).
Before the foxes attack, Mal, the planner of the group, tells the girls to get in “Little
Red Formation” (vol. 1, no. 1). Instead, the other girls launch into a hectic, self-driven
counterattack (to Mal’s chagrin as she later exclaims, “Are we ever gonna actually do one
of my plans…?” [vol. 2, no. 6]). The implications of Mal’s “Little Red Formation,” like the
constructs of gender itself, could be read as control and uniformity; however, “Little Red
Formation” ends up entirely individualized and “order”-less. There is no controlling or
chaperoning the girls’ actions. In this way, the call to get in “Little Red Formation” becomes
less about falling in line and more about stepping out, in all of the gendered and queer mean-
ings of the term—not a formation of order/objectivity but one of individualized, agentic
subjectivity formation. Ultimately, the chaperoning that occurs in Lumberjanes is one that
provides readers an alternative road map to gender—one unafraid of wandering through the
forest in the dead of night.
Notes
1 While the peritext of Lumberjanes is paginated, the core comics narrative is not. As such, I’ll record
the page numbers for peritextual references when relevant but will instead list only the volume and
issue numbers for non-peritextual citations.
2 My deepest gratitude goes to Rachel Rickard Rebellino for her brilliant insights and editing of this
piece as a whole but especially this section.
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Part V
Worldly interventions
Taylor & Francis
26
“A revelation not of the flesh,
but of the mind”
Performing queer textuality in Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home
Maite Urcaregui
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has, in many ways, become
the urtext of queer comics. Fun Home explores the author’s lesbian identity through her
fraught relationship with her father, his own sexuality, and his death through an intertextual
collage that queers time, space, form, and, in the process, our reading practices. While Fun
Home has become Bechdel’s most celebrated and celebrity text, especially after its adaptation
into a Tony-award-winning musical, Bechdel has used the comics page to visually and ver-
bally work through what it means to be queer since 1983 with her Dykes to Watch Out For
strip. Dykes to Watch Out For begins rather sporadically but, by 1987, starts developing and
following continuous characters in serial form. In the comic, which is not autobiographical
but is informed and influenced by Bechdel’s life,1 the cartoonist confronts conflict within
the queer community through the protagonist Mo’s skeptical, anxious voice, which wavers
between radicalism and conservatism depending on the issue at hand (Figure 26.1).
In “Pride and Prejudice” (1987), Mo bemoans the increasingly conservative influence on
Pride. Among protest signs that read, “Fight AIDS Not Gays” and “Fuck Gender,” groups
such as the “Gay & Lesbian Catholic Martyrs,” a gay men’s chorus signing “Yankee Doodle
Dandy,” and the “Le$bian Investment Bankers” announce themselves. Each group occupies
its own panel and proudly parades a sign that presumably mark its shared identity and politics.
Mo, standing in the corner of each panel, remarks on the situation with a visible side-eye
and a dialogue bubble. Fed up after seeing the investment bankers, she bursts, “Religion!
Patriotism! Financial security! Doesn’t anyone realize?! We’re conspiring in our own op-
pression!” and asks, “Where has our spirit and outrageousness gone?!” (Bechdel 10). “Pride
and Prejudice” simultaneously points to a troubling conservatism within lesbian and gay
communities, particularly those that have a closer proximity to race and class privilege, and
illuminates Mo’s own “prejudice” regarding who is included in queerness; her critique of
financial security speaks to a skepticism of capitalism’s co-optation of queer identity and
politics but also to a romantic flippancy regarding the material precarity of many queer indi-
viduals, made particularly salient by the presence of the “Fight AIDS Not Gays” sign. Dykes
to Watch Out For strategically uses the serial comic strip form to return to issues within the
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Maite Urcaregui
Figure 26.1 Alison Bechdel Dykes to Watch Out For (1987) and collected in The Essential Dykes
to Watch Out For (2008), p. 10
queer community as the characters work them out in real time. The strip defines itself and
builds its story world on questions of queerness.2 I open with this foray into Bechdel’s earlier
work to draw out an auteur genealogy of reckoning with queer identity, collectivity, politics,
and cultural production through the comics page. Dykes to Watch Out For begins to theorize
how comics might be used to think about questions of queer identity and community in ways
that attend to the embodied, material realities of queerness—work that Bechdel continues in
Fun Home in a more intimate, familiar way.
While Dykes to Watch Out For’s serialized form stages and returns to political debates
within the queer community in real time, Fun Home, in its graphic memoir form,3 narrates
Alison’s particular experience of queer identity through a deeply recursive, self-conscious
collage of past and present.4 Through the narrative layers—the simultaneity of the visual
and verbal, the temporal complexity, the self-conscious incorporation of literary allusions—
Bechdel artfully constructs her queerness on the page. In the graphic narrative, Alison comes
to understand and to reveal her sexuality through recursive acts of reading and writing;
the recognition and revelation of her sexuality is, in many ways, a literary event. Similar to
how her father Bruce exchanges books to express his own desire and find sexual partners,
Alison expresses her sexuality through the construction of a queer literary canon as well as
through erotic (re)readings of modernist texts. Fun Home both theorizes the links between
and among writing, reading, and sexuality and challenges the stability of a discrete, readable
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Performing queer textuality
queer subject. I investigate the way that acts of reading and writing inscribe, describe, and
perform queerness in two parts. First, I look at Alison’s initial coming out to her parents via
letter and her father’s response as examples of how writing can be used to either bring into
view or obscure queerness. From there, I move into an analysis of how reading and literature
inform the imaginative horizon of Alison’s emerging queer feminist politics and identity—
often seeping into her sexual experiences in material ways. Ultimately, this chapter looks
toward a queer textuality that operates beyond mere identification or representation and
plays an active role in the embodied construction and performance of sexuality. In both form
and content, Fun Home stages this queer textuality for the reader, revealing the possibilities
of the comics form—in its shifting visual representations, the liminal spaces between panels,
the extension or refusal of closure, and its archival tendencies—to not simply mirror queer
identity but manifest queer ways of reading, knowing, and being.
Fun Home is a text about wanting—about, of course, queer identity, sexuality, and, above
all, desire but also what we long for when we open a book. As the text probes the porous re-
lationship between textuality and subjectivity, it reveals how reading, identity, and desire are
inextricably linked. Lee Edelman argues that writing or textuality is incorporated into the
very structure of homosexuality in his conceptualization of “homographesis” (9). Accord-
ing to Edelman, “Like writing, then, homographesis would name a double operation: one
serving the ideological purposes of a conservative social order intent on codifying identities
in its labor of disciplinary inscription, and the other resistant to that categorization, intent
on de-scribing the identities that order has so oppressively inscribed” (10; emphasis original).
Homographesis, Edelman argues, works twofold: it involves the way that queer sexuality is
assumed to be inscribed on the body, against a naturalized heterosexual norm, and it also
includes the way that queer individuals strategically choose to make themselves legible or il-
legible in order to resist, subvert, or elude the disciplinary purview of heterosexuality. While
Edelman’s work focuses exclusively on gay cis-male experience and identity, I find his explo-
ration of the way that textual acts give a face or form to sexuality useful for thinking about
a breadth of queer sexualities. Building from Edelman’s homographesis, I employ the term
“queer textuality” to think more capaciously about how queer folks articulate and (dis)iden-
tify themselves through the page.5 Once sexuality becomes distilled into a totalizing identity
entrenched in gender ideology, as Michel Foucault argues in his History of Sexuality—a shift
in knowledge and power that occurs, in part, through the “speechifying” of sexuality—it
becomes necessary to read the presumed threat of queerness on the body (32). While queer-
ness is read unevenly and differently across diverse genders and sexualities, this simultaneous
demand and desire for legibility is pervasive. Edelman’s homographesis draws out not only
how the ideological process of reading sexuality occurs through writing and textuality but
also, and most importantly, how queer individuals strategically de-scribe or re-inscribe their
identities. I turn to Fun Home to investigate this double operation of queer textuality. Fun
Home, I argue, plays with both modes of homographesis: theorizing the mutually constitu-
tive relationship between textuality and sexuality while also strategically using comics to
illuminate the always already multiple, recursive, shifting layers of queer subjectivity.
Alison first explicitly names her queerness through writing. She comes out to her parents,
just four months before her father’s death, in a letter. Consciously choosing the medium for
its remoteness, she writes a sparse, declarative sentence: “I am a lesbian” (58). The rest of the
contents of the letter remain out of view, never disclosed to the reader (Figure 26.2).
In J. L. Austin’s seminal How to Do Things with Words, he declares constative sentences as
those that describe and performative sentences as those in which the utterance itself performs
the actions (5–6). Alison’s letter, however, has both a descriptive and a performative function,
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Maite Urcaregui
Figure 26.2 Alison

Bechdel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007), p. 58
which reveals the slippery, vexed relationship between desire and identity. It names her desire
(one that cannot be reduced to the letter and, indeed, existed long before it) while it simul-
taneously calls her sexuality—or at the very least her legible sexual identity—into being. As
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet, the speech acts that coming out
can comprise are strangely specific, “and they may have nothing to do with the acquisition of
new information” (4). While the letter does not generate or create Alison’s desire, the perfor-
mative sentence provides a container to hold this knowledge. In the next panel following the
letter, adult Alison narrates, “Only four months earlier [before my father’s death], I had made
an announcement to my parents. My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoreti-
cal, an untested hypothesis” (Bechdel 58). Alison’s letter is both the hypothesis and the result.
It brings her identity and sexuality into view—announces it—for her family, the reader,
and, more importantly, herself. As Judith Butler notes in her own theory of performativity,
“identity is an effect of discursive practices,” yet there are, of course, real material, embodied
impacts of the discursive regimes through which we make ourselves intelligible, or not (18).
While the medium of the typewritten letter might seem to make the embodied experience
of queerness distant or removed—obscuring the hand at the keys in a way that handwriting
does not—it actually further stages the letter’s co-creative capacity to simultaneously reveal
and shape Alison’s sexuality. Aaron Kashtan, calling for an attention to media- specificity and
materiality in comics studies, critiques how viewing handwriting “as a privileged channel
for the expression of self hood, subjectivity and personality” presumes an essential self that
precedes mediation through discourse—a critique that evokes echoes of Foucault’s genealogy
of the speechifying of sexuality into an essential truth (Kashtan 95). According to Kashtan,
“The trouble with this graphological understanding of handwriting, however, is that it as-
sumes the relation between self hood and writing technology is a one-way street: writing
merely expresses the self and does not change the self ” (99). Like the double operation
of homographesis, Alison’s letter not only expresses but also actively constructs her queer
identity—one that is consistently remade and revealed through acts of reading and writing.
As Alison writes the letter, she writes the terms of her queerness, recognizing that, even as
she articulates it, the sentence cannot help but fail to hold the fullness of her sexuality.
The visual details of the panel, such as the use of labeling devices and strategic framing, fur-
ther highlight the performative aspects of the letter and the mutually constitutive relationship
between writing and self. An arrow box zooms in on the sentence and labels what otherwise
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appears to be a blank page. The box visually dramatizes how the letter labels Alison’s sexual-
ity, both for herself and for the intra- and extradiegetic audience, her parents and the reader
respectively. The box circumscribes a sentence that Alison has crafted to inscribe and describe
her own identity; the simple sentence within gives her sexuality form. While Bechdel’s arrow
strategically points to the page, the mode of announcement, it might just as well point to
Alison. This declarative box is sandwiched between two books, an unspecified Plato collec-
tion and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, literally framing Alison’s statement with these
works: one that considers the relationship between material shape and formal essence and the
other that contends gender is a process of becoming rather than a biological fact. Alison’s letter,
with its decisive and declarative “I am a lesbian,” writes her sexual identity into being—one
that challenges the ideological interconnections of patriarchy and heteronormativity. At the
same time, the letter draws attention to the fact that it is something that must be disclosed
through discourse, rather than an immediately readable fact of the body.
Reading Alison’s letter alongside her father Bruce’s response, one that the reader does not
receive until much later in the narrative, illuminates two divergent modes of queer textuality
in dialectical tension. In response to Alison’s coming out, Bruce addresses her mother Helen’s
earlier responses and subtly alludes to his own queer desire, veiling it in existential questions
and abstract heroics. Alison narrates, “Instead of at last confiding in me, he took the novel
approach of assuming that I already knew—although at the time he wrote the letter, I did
not” (Bechdel 211) (Figure 26.3).
His letter is an attempt at queer connection and, at the same time, a recognition of the
impossibility of such, the impossibility of his own coming out. He writes:
Helen just seems to be suggesting that you keep your options open. I tend to go along with
that but probably for different reasons. Of course, it seems like a cop out. But then, who are
cop outs for? Taking sides is rahther [sic] heroic, and I am not a hero. What is really worth it?
There’ve been a few times I thought I might have preferred to take a stand. But I
never really considered it when I was young. In fact, I don’t htink [sic] I ever considered
it till I was over thirty. let’s [sic] face it things do look different then. At forty-three I find
it hard to see advantages even if I had done so when I was young. (Bechdel 211)
Whereas in the panel portraying Alison’s letter we see her in the action of writing with a
label highlighting her confession, here the letter fills the space of the panel. Bruce, unable
Figure 26.3 Alison

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Maite Urcaregui
or refusing to name his sexuality, remains out of view—although the various typographic
errors hint at the hands at the keys, the embodied nature of writing. In a response to Alison’s
precise declaration, “I am a lesbian,” the word “lesbian” is remarkably missing from Bruce’s
letter, which resorts to phrases such as “keep your options open,” “taking sides,” and “take
a stand.” In the lines “But I never really considered it when I was young. I don’t htink [sic]
I ever considered it till I was over thirty,” the antecedent to that pronoun “it” multiplies in
its lack of clarity (Bechdel 211; emphasis added). Yes, “it” refers to taking a stand, but for or
against what? It refuses to name Bruce’s sexuality, yet, knowing what we know about his
relationships with other men and teenage boys, it is also tense with the fact of his desire,
made all the more profound because it goes unnamed. The letter corroborates José Esteban
Muñoz’s assertion that “queerness is often transmitted covertly” (6). Although queerness is
not explicitly named, it haunts the page. Sedgwick maintains that the silence of the closet is
itself a performative speech act: “‘Closeted-ness’ itself is a performance initiated as such by
the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by
fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it” (3).
Bruce’s letter, with its gaps and silences, accrues meaning, in part, in its response to Alison’s
coming out. Whereas her speech act of coming out circumscribes her identity, giving her
sexuality form, Bruce’s silence, evasion, and questioning invite multiple interpretations and
readings. The rhetorical questions “who are cop outs for?” and “what is really worth it?” urge
both Alison and the reader to consider the significance and efficacy of silence. The questions
also open or allude to other possible versions of Bruce’s life, trajectories that are foreclosed
almost as soon as they are brought to mind. The elusive “it” of the letter, the simultaneous
emptiness and weightiness of those question marks, the gesture yet refusal of queer connec-
tion, these are the “fits and starts” of Bruce’s queer textuality.
While Bruce’s letter might be less decisive and, thus, less satisfying in its refusal of closure,
it challenges the assumption that queerness must always be made visible and speakable; that
coming out is equally available, safe, and accessible to all; and that those who choose not to
come out necessarily do so out of some sense of internalized shame. It reveals the ways that
textuality can simultaneously be wielded for regulatory or resistant means and that the bound-
ary between the two is fraught. Drawing attention to the conflicted queer affinity between
Alison and Bruce, Hillary Chute maintains that “Fun Home is itself a map of the network of
transversals for the two ‘directions’ embodied by Alison and Bruce Bechdel; it tracks both their
divergence and convergence (lesbian-child-artist, gay man-father-dilettante)” (182). Together,
Bruce and Alison’s letters offer divergent ways of strategically employing writing to render
one’s queerness legible or illegible, to choose how to make one’s sexuality visible and to whom,
and to challenge the idea queerness is always already written on the body.
Having investigated how Alison and Bruce strategically employ acts of writing to express
or evade their sexuality, I now turn to how acts of reading inform Alison’s queer identity and
shape its imaginative and embodied horizons. That Alison’s coming out takes place on the
page is fitting given that the bookstore is the site of her queer recognition. The reader wit-
nesses Alison’s coming out retroactively, first through the declarative letter and then through
a recursive coming out narrative. As Kate McCullough argues, the structural and temporal
asynchrony of the text reverses and reconfigures coming out narratives and enacts a “queer
reparative temporal vision” (381). After revealing the letter to the reader, Bechdel returns
to her initial recognition of her queerness, saying, “My realization at nineteen that I was a
lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing. A revelation not of
the flesh, but of the mind” (74). The texts she encounters at the bookstore incite and invite
erotic revelation. Alison’s recognition occurs not through sexual relations but in relation to
370
books. I consciously use the term recognition to address the fact that Alison’s queer desire
existed before her realization in the bookstore: recognition evokes a return to or affirmation
of self that is always in flux in its formation. Challenging heteronormative expectations that
one confirms or legitimizes their queerness through sexual acts, Alison’s sexuality is not
made legible through a physical encounter, a fact that gets comically played up in the stage
production’s musical number “Thanks for the Care Package….” when Joan presumes that
Alison has had an adventurous public tryst in a bookstore (Colindrez & Skeggs) (Figure 26.4).
That Alison’s “revelation” occurs at the level of the text is echoed in many coming out
stories, particularly in erotic encounters with the dictionary. Alison notes that her first
“qualms,” or her questioning, began at 13 when she saw the word “lesbian” in a dictio-
nary (Bechdel 74). This moment recalls the opening of the chapter in which Alison notices
“queer” in the dictionary as she contemplates the queer circumstances of her father’s death
(Bechdel 57). While these dictionary definitions might have ignited her qualms, finding
other queer narratives and coming out stories in the shelves of the bookstore offers a more
expansive vision of what “queer” or “lesbian” might actually look like in practice. For in-
stance, Alison notes how Word Is Out, a book “about people who had completely cast aside
their own qualms,” elaborates on that definition she found when she was 13 (Bechdel 74).
For Alison, Word Is Out recalls her insinuating encounter with “lesbian” in the dictionary
and extends the possibility of queer community and a desirably queer future. While it does
not create Alison’s desire, the book offers an imaginative, discursive framework that sets the
stage for her epiphany. Her coming out is a literary event, and, as coming outs go, it knows
Figure 26.4 Alison

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Maite Urcaregui
no beginning or end. One book leads her to another, as she embarks on a reading odyssey of
queer community and world making.
This Odyssean allusion brings me to a particularly salient example of how Alison’s sex-
uality not only is informed by her reading but also alters her reading practice, seeping into
her encounters with various texts. In a comic short precursor to Fun Home entitled “Coming
Out Story,” originally published in Gay Comics #19 in 1993, Bechdel recounts her coming
out story, beginning fully clothed in the campus bookstore and ending naked in bed with
her first lover Joan (Figure 26.5).
In this short, Bechdel, again narrating her experience as an adult, as in Fun Home, says, “My
full academic passion was reserved for a different odyssey… the quest for my people” (Bechdel
“COS”; emphasis original). Reading not only creates a sense of community but also is an erotic act
for Alison as the reader see her “whacking off” (Bechdel “COS”). The allusions to Alison’s queer
odyssey continue in Fun Home when Alison describes a sexual experience with Joan. The two
lie naked on the bed, Alison between Joan’s legs. Alison turns to literary allusion as she narrates
the significance of the encounter, saying, “Like Odysseus on the Island of the Cyclops, I found
myself facing a ‘being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant
nothing,’” as she prepares to have sex for the first time (Bechdel 214) (Figure 26.6).
Figure 26.5 Alison Bechdel “Coming Out Story” in Gay Comics #19 (1993)
Figure 26.6 Alison Bechdel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2007), p. 214
372
In the first panel, a stack of books is visible partially out of frame beside the bed, a visual
reminder of the intertextual progression of Alison’s sexual odyssey. In another strategic use of
labeling boxes, Bechdel draws attention to other material markers of Alison’s queer feminist
identity and politics, noting a shirt that announces, “Lesbian Terrorist,” and a protest sign
that reads, “Keep your god off my body,” artifacts “from a recent one-woman protest against
some visiting Christians” (214). These markers—the books, the protest remnants, the allu-
sion to The Odyssey—accumulate and accrue meaning to highlight how Alison’s sexuality is
informed by textuality. Ultimately, though, it is her sexual encounter with Joan that occupies
the center of the panel and the focus of the rest of the page. Her embodied experience of
queerness takes precedent in the end: reminding the reader that the material reality of the
body and its pleasures undergirds Fun Home’s investment in queer textuality.
Fun Home is filled with erotic readings of literature through the lens of Alison’s queer
pleasure and desire. For instance, Alison and Joan describe the wet, sticky walls dripping
with peach juice in James and the Giant Peach as “pornography,” turning this childish literary
setting into one of erotic play and possibility (Bechdel 81). Alison consistently connects the
sensory experience of reading to the body, sex, and sexuality. Her recapitulation of her sexu-
ality through literature reveals how, according to Muñoz, “fiction then becomes a contested
field of self-production” (20). Like her father, who also finds queer community in reading
and exchanging books with partners, literature informs Alison’s formation of sexual iden-
tity and expression. Her queer reading practice beautifully reveals the fluid, porous, messy
relationship between reader and text. Her sexuality and sexual politics seep into her reading
experiences, and we see how the process of reading, and I would argue writing, is always
already imbued with desire, longing, and pleasure. Fun Home links the pleasures of the text
to the pleasures of the body.
Alison and her father Bruce come to understand and express their sexuality to varying de-
grees through reading and writing—discursive acts that are unable or unwilling to fully ex-
press the embodied, material condition of queer desire even as they articulate it. Fun Home’s
concern with texts and the material and imaginative impressions they leave on their readers
illuminates the erotic and affective capacities of the comics medium. In their introduction to
a special issue of American Literature entitled Queer about Comics, Ramzi Fawaz and Darieck
Scott suggest that comics are queer in form: “the formal character of comics—the idea that
you can have infinite iterations of a given story that never reproduce a single trajectory—
helps clarify the ways that fabulation underwrites our realities, in decidedly queer ways”
(202). They go on to explain that comics create a visual fabulation, or “open mesh,” that
“underscores the limitless differences produced between an ever-expanding range of images
and the figures and worlds they represent” (203). Comics visualize on the page multiple,
conflicting, divergent possibilities for readers. I am both invested in exploring the ways that
comics formally enact queerness, particularly queer epistemologies, and careful of how blan-
ket statements about form might obscure the material, embodied stakes of queerness, stakes
that are felt disproportionately based on one’s positionality. Fun Home, in the way it queers
the comics form to tell a narrative (or narratives) of queer embodiment, aptly uses the geom-
etries of the comics page to enact the plural ways that queerness is negotiated and performed
through acts of reading and writing. If comics, as Scott McCloud says, “is a vacuum into
which our identity and our awareness are pulled, […] we don’t just observe the cartoon, we
become it” (36). Just as Alison employs reading and writing to craft her sexual identity, Fun
Home invites the reader into a similar process of co-creation at the site of the page, tapping
into the latent possibilities of comics to not merely mirror queer identity but manifest queer
ways of being and reading.
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Maite Urcaregui
Notes
Works Cited
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, 1962.
Bechdel, Alison. “Coming Out Story.” Gay Comics #19, 1993, accessed through Oberlin College LGBT
Community History Project, www.oberlinlgbt.org/bechdel/bechdel-1.html. Accessed 4 January 2019.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Mariner, 2007.
Bechdel, Alison. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
Bechdel, Alison. Interview with Chris Dodge. “Interview with Alison Bechdel: Writer and Lesbian
Cartoonist.” Alison Bechdel: Conversations. Edited by Rachel R. Martin, University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press,
2010.
Colindrez, Roberta and Emily Skeggs. “Thanks for the Care Package …” Fun Home: A New Broadway
Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording), P. S. Classics, 2015, Genius, https://genius.com/albums/
Original-broadway-cast-of-fun-home/Fun-home-original-broadway-cast-recording.
Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. Routledge, 1994.
Fawaz, Ramzi and Darieck Scott “Introduction: Queer about Comics.” Queer about Comics, special
issue of American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 197–219.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I. Vintage, 1990.
Kashtan, Aaron. “My Mother Was a Typewriter: Fun Home and the Importance of Materiality in Com-
ics Studies.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 92–116.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994.
McCullough, Kate. “‘The Complexity of Loss Itself ’: The Comics Form and Fun Home’s Queer Re-
parative Temporality.” Queer about Comics, special issue of American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018,
pp. 377–405.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Min-
nesota Press, 1999.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women and Perfor-
mance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 2, no. 8, 1996, pp. 5–16.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.
Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4,
2006, pp. 965–979.
374
27
BLOOD, or
Gender and nation in the
contemporary Polish comic
Kalina Kupczynska
2018 was a jubilee year – Poland celebrated 100 years of independence. On this occasion, the
Warsaw Educational Publishing House (WSiP) published a large-scale comic project with
didactic ambitions, addressed to young readers. Adam Radoń was responsible for the artistic
design, Witold Tkaczyk for the concept and coordination of the comic section; Radoń is the
director of the Lodz Festival for Comics and Computer Games, Tkaczyk is Comic Publisher
(Zin Zin Press), comic critic and author of comic scenarios. Out of seventeen short comics,
three were (co-)created by female cartoonists; essays with a focus on “comics and history”,
included in the book, were written only by male comics critics. It was no different in the
case of the anthology 11/11 = Niepodległo ść (11/11 = Independence), which was published
by the National Cultural Centre in 2007 as a contribution to the 90th anniversary of Polish
independence. The editor Witold Tkaczyk invited experienced authors of historical comics
(including Maciej Jasinski, Janusz Wyrzykowski, Andrzej Janicki) as well as debutants such
as Jacek Grudzień and Łukasz Ciaciuch to collaborate. Among eighteen participants there are
two female cartoonists – Gabriela Becla and Aleksandra Spanowicz; scenarios for the stories
were written exclusively by male authors. It is important to draw attention to the disparity
in the participation of male and female authors in this sort of prominent publications, be-
cause its repeatability forms a regularity that can give the impression that there are no female
comic authors in Poland who are interested in the genre of “historical comics”. Yet, this
impression would be false – only when you take as examples the anthologies of the Warsaw
Uprising Museum in which female cartoonists are represented in large numbers, but also
individual comic books such as Ogród (The Garden) by Agata Bara (2012) or the anthology
Złote pszczoły. Żydzi międzywojennej Warszawy (Golden Bees. Jews in Warsaw in the Interwar
Period) from 2011, which was designed exclusively by female comic authors.
Another anthology was published in 2018 – the comic author Beata Sosnowska from the
Warsaw collective of female cartoonists “dream team” invited eight female cartoonists for
her comic project Krew/Blood (among them Olga Wróbel, Marta Zabłocka, Anna Krztoń);
male cartoonists are not represented. Unlike in the two anniversary anthologies mentioned
above, in Blood each artist is responsible for both the text and the drawings. The anthology
was published bilingually (Polish/English) by the Poznan comic publisher Centrala without
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Kalina Kupczynska
state support and without an explicitly named occasion. In the short foreword Sosnowska
explains her concern:
It is no coincidence that I have invited only female graphic artists to participate in

the project. I wanted to create a significant counterweight to the masculine nar-
ration that accompanied the cultural and historical aspects of blood. I think that an
interesting HERstory was created. A story that shows personal experiences on a na-
tional background but is universal enough to fit beyond the Polish cultural context.
(Sosnowska n.p.)
Inspired by the anthology of the female author’s collective, this text is devoted to the gender
gap that can be observed in Polish historical comics at the level of comics production, the
choice of historical topics and the aesthetics. I would like to describe this gap along the track
of blood in the comics in order to find out: how the medium comic takes up the established
semantizations of blood in Polish culture, or what happens with these semantizations when
the gender perspective comes to the fore.
Blood, history and the Polish comic

In the Polish culture, blood is strongly connected with sacrificial death for the homeland,
threatened and occupied by external enemies for decades, and with heroism, in short: with
martyrdom on the one hand and national pride on the other.1 Bloodshed is equated with
patriotism, this is considered unquestionable in the national narrative of sacrifice; therefore,
a new occupation of traditional symbols of the national struggle brings with it the sentiment
of indignation. One example is the recent case of the feminist recoding of the anchor, which
was a sign of Polish resistance against the Nazi regime in occupied Warsaw during the Sec-
ond World War. In the course of the so-called black protests against the introduction of a
radical abortion law by the right-wing conservative PIS government (2017), on the banners
of the protesting female activists the historical label of Polska Walcz ąca (Fighting Poland) was
slightly changed and transformed into Polka Walcz ąca (Fighting Polish Woman); patriotic
(i.e. right-wing) organizations then threatened the user of the re-coded symbol with legal
consequences. This example reveals another characteristic of the Polish national culture –
the male occupation of martyrdom is strictly monitored in official cultural mediation, and
women are hardly visible in symbols and allegories of the struggle for freedom (unlike in
France, for example). This is due to the collective idea of patriotism, which in Poland with
the common conservative notions of “motherhood, willingness to sacrifice and pain” forces
the vision of women “in an ambivalent erotic tension, strangely uncoupled from any sen-
suality” (Graff 86), whereas in France since the French Revolution the national identity is
combined with an emphatically sensual representation of the national symbolism of women.
The “mythical imperative” ( Janion, Płacz generała 251) of Polish national consciousness
occupies the mainstream of Polish culture, as can be seen in the historical film productions (cf.
Miasto 44 by Jan Komasa 2014, Katyń by Andrzej Wajda, Dywizjon 303, Historia prawdziwa by
Denis Delic) (Żmijewski 205–216). The “mythical imperative” includes, among other things:
the necessity of insurrection, military action (often forced by the fear that the action would
come too late, which would be tantamount to a loss of honour), the notion of “the world
should see it and be ashamed” (Poland as a heroic nation par excellence), struggle at all costs,
as sacrifice for future generations ( Janion, Płacz generała 251–259). The imperative is realized
in the “ideal of a male community” ( Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna 268), a powerful
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Gender and nation in Polish comics
construction whose dynamics influenced the formation of nationalisms. The male community –
in Poland imagined as “national cavalry, hussars and ulans, all beautiful” ( Janion, Niesamowita
Słowiańszczyzna 268) – bears the characteristics of a homosocial order whose dominance in
many cultures produces a special relationship to women as mothers. “The male brotherhood
idealizes motherhood and uses it as a safeguard against all non-reproductive discourses of
sexuality” (Parker et al. 6) within the national discourse. As El żbieta Ostrowska, a Polish
Culture Studies scholar, explains, the mother phantasm has a double power: the mother is
not a danger to the fraternal bonds and at the same time legitimizes them, because every
brother must have a mother (Ostrowska 218). At the top of the mother hierarchy in the Pol-
ish national narrative is the Immaculate Mother – the Mother of God ( Janion, Niesamowita
Słowia ńszczyzna 273) – legitimized by the hegemonic position of the Catholic Church and
the de facto inexistent separation of state power from the church institution.2
The Polish comic reproduces the national myth of heroic bloodshed in historical comics,
which have been a stable segment of the Polish comic market since 2005. Since 2011, the
Warsaw Educational Centre of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has been or-
ganizing the Historical Comic Strip Festival, dedicated exclusively to historical comics and
computer games. Thematically, the Polish historical comics focus on more recent history, i.e.
the Second World War and the PRL (communist) period; this seems plausible when one con-
siders the long-standing distortion of history in the real-socialist People’s Republic of Poland
(1952–1989). While Polish cinema, despite censorship in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was
able to show the practices of the security service in Bugajski’s Przesłuchanie (The Interroga-
tion), Wajda’s Człowiek z marmuru (The Man of Marble) and Kieślowskis’s Przypadek (The
Chance), in the comic book from this period there is not a sign of such themes. The comic
was used to manipulate historical narratives – already in the early 1950s comics about the
Second World War appeared in Poland, in which the representation of history was consistent
with the ideology of the political rulers.3 Today, “a large number of such publications (…) are
produced thanks to state institutions that subsidize historical comic books or even publish
them themselves. This type of comics” – writes Justyna Czaja, author of a monograph on
historical comics in Poland – “is thus increasingly becoming an instrument of state historical
policy” (Czaja 59). Czaja concludes:
There is a visible predomination of comics that deal with heroism, sacrifice and the suf-
fering of fighters and civilians (…). The events are often transfigured by the religious and
patriotic symbolism with which they are drawn. (…) However, there is a lack of stories
that would ask about the meaning and price of the struggle for freedom. (Czaja 66)
In the name of presenting an unadulterated version of the historical events, such as the partic-
ularly popular Warsaw Uprising, there is a tendency to commission the making of historical
comics; the results are comics that support current political narration of the “good name of
the Polish nation” (Hackmann 5–6) and are conform to the male-centred image of history
(Kuczynska 38). These commissioned publications include well-researched comics with a
great deal of sensitivity to historical detail, such as the series Monte Cassino by Gabriela Becla
(drawings) and Zbigniew Tomecki (script), but they remain devoted to the male perspective
and formal “realistic correctness” (Kuczynska 38). Short comics that appear in the anthology
on the Warsaw Uprising Powstanie 44 (Uprising 44), which is conceived as a series, can be
seen as an attempt to reach uncharted area of Polish herstory. The anthologies contain com-
ics that are awarded in the annual competition of the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising; the
theme of each competition is prescribed by the organizers.
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Kalina Kupczynska
In the anthology Morowe Panny (Groovy Girls) from 2012 a beautiful nurse is even “allowed
to kill, women cook for the insurgents, deliver messages, care for the injured” (Kupczynska
210). In the anthology Archiwum historii mówionej (Archive of Oral History) from 2011, several
comics are based on the stories and biographies of former paramedics and soldiers of the AK
(Polish Homeland Army); the focus is on their courage and willingness to make sacrifices in
arms smuggling (Robótki, Handicrafts), on the rescue of wounded civilians (Łza, A Tear) or
their children (Awers, Obverse). However, the characters are hardly individualized – except
in one case, where the comic Krystyna Krahelska, Warszawska Syrenka (Krystyna Krahelska,
the Warsaw Siren) tells the story of the poetess and studied ethnography. Krahelska writes
poems and sings self-written soldier songs, sits as a model for the statue of the Warsaw siren
by the sculptor Ludwika Nitschowa; in the Warsaw Uprising she delivers reports and works
as a nurse until she is shot during a reporting round (Figure 27.1).
Krahelska is not anonymized, like most of the female figures in the comics about the
Warsaw Uprising, nor does she merge with the Warsaw Siren, protector of the capital, whose
statue she views ambivalently anyway. Her texts – a poem, a song, notes – are in comic hand-
written and do not only concern the Warsaw Uprising, because the Uprising is an episode in
the briefly sketched life of Krahelska, while in most comic-strip stories the respective biog-
raphy runs towards the Uprising and is overshadowed by it. So if there are women’s stories
in the anthologies mentioned, then the critical potential of a feminist or gender-sensitive
Figure 27.1 Berenika Kołomycka. “Krystyna Krahelska, Warszawska Syrenka.” Powstanie

44. Archiwum Historii Mówionej, 2012, n.p.
378
perspective is usually missed, because the herstoric level remains superficial as it is overshad-
owed by the heroizing narration. The reader can indeed learn “that Warsaw women had a
true patriotic attitude and bravely sacrificed their lives for the fatherland”, but not “how they
coped with monthly menstruation during military operations” (Fr ąckiewicz 82). Also, the
nurses and messengers are obligatory sympathetic, charming and feminine, so that the iden-
tification on which the patriotic narration relies works effortlessly.
Occasionally there are also exceptions, i.e. comics that exclude the narcissistic national
myth. The obligatory pathos is missing in the comic Co jest czarne, co białe, a co jest bez sensu
(What is black, what is white and what is pointless) – a Wehrmacht soldier is taken to a
Polish hospital during the Uprising; he was shot by the insurgents when he wanted to go to
the dentist on his bicycle. The doctor, confused, asks the insurgents how he should operate –
should the patient survive or better not; the nurse is outraged, but immediately laughs at the
absurdity of the situation. Nobody is heroic here, the Wehrmacht soldier is duly helped and
instead of delivering a serious punch line, the nurse chases away the insurgents, wiping away
the tears of laughter: “Go on, stop making me laugh. I have a lot to do” (Rostocka 6).
Ambitious historical comics, i.e. those that display some formal experiments and show
historical facts from several perspectives, remain on the edge of the Polish comics market. It
is due to the distribution, but also of the better position of subsidized works that arise from
concrete occasions (anniversaries of crucial national events, commemorative years) and are
promoted and advertised accordingly. Historical comics that tell stories from the perspective
of women and focus on a female figure are rare; in this respect, Polish comics are no excep-
tion in a global comparison. If one considers, however, that the historical comic is the leading
genre in the Polish comic landscape, not only the absence of women as protagonists in the
historical comic narratives becomes conspicuous, but also the aforementioned disproportion
in the participation of female comic authors in large-scale subsidized anniversary projects.
The exceptions mentioned, i.e. comics in which the Polish patriotic narration is demyth-
ized, in which alternative stories are told “that do not favor the cult of sacrifice, military
delusion and national phantasms” (Duniec, Krakowska 64), therefore have an emancipatory
dimension.
(No) blood
The American comic theorist Scott McCloud called a chapter of his book Understanding
Comics from 1993 “Blood in the gutter”. His intention was to take a metaphorical look at
the gutter, i.e. the space between the panels. In McCloud’s metaphor, the blood flows in the
gutter between two panels in which a murder is committed – and because the comic book
reader fills the empty space with his or her fantasy, because he or she imagines what happens
between a raised axe and a scream, the blood can remain invisible. And indeed, if one stud-
ies the many historical comics of the relevant publishers Zin Zin Press, IPN, Egmont and
the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, the invisibility of the blood is striking. This can be
astonishing, especially considering that bloodshed is a litmus test of national honour. In the
comics of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) W imieniu Polski Walczą cej. Kaminos
44 (In the name of Fighting Poland. Kaminos 44) and Wyzwolenie? 1945 (Liberation? 1945),
the content is limited to the depiction of combat operations in which it is important to stage
the enemy and one’s own troops accordingly and to integrate the battles into a larger war
narrative. It doesn’t matter whether the comic is black and white or colourful – the blood
as a sign of physical injury is omitted. In the comics of the Poznan publisher Zin Zin Press
Poznański Czerwiec 1956 (Poznan June 1956) and Ksiądz Jerzy Popiełuszko (The Priest Jerzy
379
Kalina Kupczynska
Figure 27.2a Maciej Jasiński, et al. 1981 Kopalnia Wujek. Zin Zin Press, 2006
Figure 27.2b Maciej Jasiński, et al. 1981 Kopalnia Wujek. Zin Zin Press, 2006
Popieluszko), the political context is in the foreground, the front runs schematically between
the “good” workers and the “bad” functionaries of the militia or the communist security
service; therefor are these comics black and white not only in the sense of graphic version.
Whether it’s the heroic struggle of Polish units against the fascist occupier or the resistance
against the communist regime – the shed blood is always present and therefore invisible.
380
This can be explained not only by McCloud’s reference to the genuine aesthetics of com-
ics, i.e. the induction that the reader achieves by understanding a sequence of images despite
the gaps between the panels, but also by the reader’s national “complicity”. McCloud writes:
“You all have this murder on your conscience. Each one of you had the axe in your hands,
and each one of you also struck” (McCloud 76), what in the context of the Polish reader’s
identification with the heroic defender of the homeland becomes a positive connotation of
the participation of defending the country. The guarantee of such identification is the mas-
culine mythization of the victim struggle perpetuated over generations and its freezing to
the mythical imperative. Obviously, the striking workers in the comics about the communist
period also offer themselves as identification figures, especially since, according to the black-
and-white aesthetics of such comics, they (must) represent splendid specimens of the male
genre. In contrast, the communist perpetrators are portrayed as hostile masses and as “evil on
principle, because non-national” (Keff 244).
However, there are also exceptions to the rule of bloodlessness. In the comic Kopalnia
Wujek (Coal Mine Wujek), which is black and white and mostly told from the perspective of
the son of a coal miner, red elements gradually appear: the soup is red, the militia tanks and
the confrontation with the workers are bathed in deep red even before the first shots are fired.
The blood of the workers colours the black-and-white surfaces of the large panels, the bloody
scenes are silent, except for a speech bubble: “They have live ammunition, will shoot us all to
death here” ( Jasiński, Michalski, Janicki 38). The blood here increases the gap between the
fronts – the workers and the militia – by emotionalizing the narrative (Figure 27.2a).
The barren symbolism – crosses, hussars, Polish flag – stages the political conflict between
the coal miner and the communist government as a national tragedy, suggesting a connection
with the Polish messianism. As in the popular song Jadą husarze od pracy (Workers Hussar
driving) from 1989, “the idealization of everyday efforts and the condition of the common
man (…), the advancement to a representative of national values” takes place “through the
attachment of the wings of the hussars”, “even if they are broken” (Duniec, Krakowska 69).
Blood versus Herstory

One finds an interesting insight into feminist or gender-oriented narratives in the recourse
to myths in Stworzenie (The Creation), the work of the initiator of the anthology Blood, Beata
Sosnowska. The Creation takes the reader back to the primeval times – at the beginning of
time stands an alliance of the primordial mother with the snake, it is this alliance that defies
the male destructive force and thus lets the feminine survive (Figure 27.3a).
The blood and the earth play a central role – the first humans are created from the earth
and the menstrual blood of the primordial mother. As long as the primordial mother keeps
her jug, the harmony between the sexes and between nature and human remains intact.
Other blood flows as soon as the male element appears – the male deity takes the jug, kills
the primordial mother and drinks the strength-giving blood (Figure 27.3b).
With this male God new laws come into the world, he demonstrates his power through vi-
olence; when the first woman visits the snake, guardian of the jug, and drinks the life-giving
blood, a punishment follows. It is therefore the first woman to ensure the preservation and
renewal of the human species, the cycle of life guarantees her natural connection with the
law of the mother.
It is interesting to see how Sosnowska formally ties in with the tradition of wordless narration
à la Masereel, by picking up mythical material and at the same time gendering it. She rounds off
the angularity of Masereel’s woodcut with the opulence of the primordial mother, who becomes
381
Kalina Kupczynska
Figure 27.3a Beata Sosnowska. “Stworzenie”/“Creation”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska.

Centrala, 2018, n.p.
Figure 27.3b Beata Sosnowska. “Stworzenie”/“Creation”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska.

Centrala, 2018, n.p.
382
the imagined “primordial form”, together with the deep red of the blood. With the primordial
mother at the beginning of the story of creation, the concept of the original antagonism between
mother and father rights developed by Bachofen is discursively recalled; matrilineal descent is
symbolically guaranteed by the jug and the blood. The descent from menstrual blood is rem-
iniscent of the creation stories of indigenous peoples,4 evoking at the same time the cultural
ambivalence of blood. The powerful taboo with which menstrual blood is documented in all
ethnologically researched cultures led, on the one hand, to the use of blood to heal or elimi-
nate pests or enemies and, on the other hand, to the isolation of menstruating women from the
community, since their temporary impurity rotten the food, made the wine cloudy, etc., and the
blood was used for the treatment of the pests and enemies.5 Sosnowska refers to the ambivalence
by positioning the healing and life-giving power of blood on the side of the primordial mother
and the first woman, associating destruction and death with the male factor.
The mythical element can also be seen in the attachment of the primordial mother and the
first humans to the Tellurian – this testifies to the scene of the fertilization of the earth, from
which humans are formed, in order to live from the fruits of the earth themselves. The snake
as the totem animal of the primordial mother reverses the Judeo-Christian primal scene of the
expulsion from paradise – the snake does not seduce, it is an ally of the woman. At the same
time the snake signals the semantic ambiguity of the chthonic deities – these were anchored in
the underworld, in the realm of death, as well as in this world as guardians of fertility.6
In the foreword to the new edition of Lynd Ward’s Six Novels in Woodcut, Art Spiegelman
writes about a “Secret of Wordless Narratives”: “(…) the secret locked inside all wordless novels:
the process of flipping pages back and forth, hunting for salient details and labeling them, shakes
the words loose to yield meaning” (Spiegelman xvi). Sosnowska can be placed in the tradition of
the woodcut only to a limited extent, but what I find interesting about Spiegelman’s remark is the
“producing of meaning” in the search for “speaking” details. In Sosnowska’s Creation, the absence
of words has a different function than in the masters of woodcut graphic novels because of the
gender aspect. This has to do with the blood that flows in the comic, whose characteristic is that
it “belongs to the few substances that are both significate and signifier: that exist materially and at
the same time have a high metaphorical meaning” (von Braun 17). Foucault described the blood
as “a reality with symbolic function” (Foucault 142), he saw its value “in its instrumental role (being
able to shed blood), in its functioning within the order of signs (being of the same blood, willingly
daring its blood) and also in its danger (it is easy to shed, threatens to dry up, it mixes all too easily
and spoils in no time)” (Foucault 142). Where blood is exposed, first the separating and differenti-
ating nature of words (their disintegration into signifier and signified) becomes implicitly evident
and explicitly visible, and second the search for meaning is focused on this “special juice”. The
search for meaning-generating details is decisively determined by the red colour, which results
from the cultural influence of the colour sensitivity of the sensory perception. The gender aspect
can thus be formally attached to the materiality of blood as an equivalent of language, which
guarantees the mythical dimension in the evocation of female origin. The fact that the mythical
message is unfolded here beyond the superhero aesthetics typical of comics suggests a feminist
self-location and thus a kinship with other recent explicitly feminist comics such as “The Origin
of the World” by Liv Strömquist (2017).
Blood ties
Beyond the mythical imperative operate comics in the anthology Blood that draw a private fam-
ily history along the blood trail. This is how Aga Gójska proceeds in the comic Więzi (Ties);
the word evokes in Polish the positive meaning of “belonging” and “relationship” as well as the
383
Kalina Kupczynska
negative connotation of “keeping imprisoned” (więzić). Gójska renounces verbal signals and
creates in the few isolated panels a disturbing metaphor, which eludes an unambiguous reading.
Black and red lines, inscribed in body forms, suggest ramifications, roots and veins; a rhizom-
atic as well as a genealogical-hierarchical structure is evoked (Figure 27.4a and b).
Black, red and white function complementarily; in conjunction with scissors, knives and
syringes, they signal not only continuity suggested by the lines, but also ruptures, cuts,
(blood) loss and a void. The last panel with empty chairs around a table, on which only a
bloody knife is lying, contradicts the idea of kinship in the sense of closeness and cohesion
suggested by the photos of parents and children; from blood kinship respectively blood ties
remains only blood (Figure 27.4c and d).
In Korzenie (Roots) Anna Krztoń also addresses family blood ties, but she is clear: kinship
has left traces in her, in her choleric temperament, in her addiction, in varicose veins, in her
talent as a draughtsman, etc. (Figure 27.5a).
Kinship means rooting within a number of relatives, it is a sum of potential influences or
markings; Krztoń metaphorizes it in the double image of the roots, which reach into the only
partly known depth of the family history, and a tree crown of the (family) tree to which her
avatar looks up (Figure 27.5b).
Figure 27.4a Aga Gójska: “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
Figure 27.4b Aga Gójska: “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Krew/Blood. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
384
Figure 27.4c Aga Gójska. “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
Figure 27.4d Aga Gójska. “Więzi”/“Bonds”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
Figure 27.5a Anna Krztoń. “Korzenie”/“Roots”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
385
Kalina Kupczynska
Figure 27.5b Anna Krztoń. “Korzenie”/“Roots”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
As with Gójska, no clear matrilinearity or patrilinearity is apparent; unlike with Gójska,

the root metaphor provides support and protection. Accordingly, the author’s self-portrait
is in the foreground and at the same time embedded in the roots or shadowed by them. In
Gójska, as in Krztoń, the ramifications of the blood ties in figurative way considers only the
biological dimension of heredity. The cultural imprinting of the patrilinearity, dominating
in the Western culture, i.e. the fact that “the (…) paternity line was based on media tech-
niques such as writing, law, money” (von Braun 401), is not even implied.
In my last example, the comic Rosół (Chicken Broth), family kinship is a source of social
memory, where blood flows at the interface between family history, national history and
world history. Wróbels story displays the typical features of her comics aesthetics – the avatar
of the artist directly addresses the reader, just like the other figures; the static composition
of the page stresses the significance of an encounter with family members, where talks and
eating are more important than action. Wróbel’s avatar remembers the taste of the chicken
broth as the aunt from Minsk made it. This reminds her grandmother of a family ritual –
they always had chicken broth on the first of May, the Workers’ Day. Once the chicken was
slaughtered, they went to the May parade with red flags – Wrobel quotes a socialist song The
Red Flag (which was a Polish version of the song by Swiss anarchists Le drapeau rouge from
1877) (Figure 27.6a).
Olga Wróbel makes a subtle reversal of national blood semantics – the slaughtered chicken
colours the flag, the small drops of blood mark the connection between the individual and
collective memory. At the same time, the red communist flag is brought together with the
“workers’ blood” (Sosnowska n.p.) in the quoted song. While in the historical comics men-
tioned at the beginning blood appears in the context of the workers’ struggle against the
communist regime, where the regime’s militia attacks the insurgents, Wrobel historically
goes deeper. With the song she recalls the birth of socialism, suggesting if not a reevaluation,
then a nuanced perspective on the red ideology. The time of the People’s Republic of Poland
is therefore not portrayed as a negative time: “Communist social advancement brought my
grandparents out of the countryside. My grandfather always said that he everything he has
was given to him by the party” (Sosnowska n.p.). The red of the communist flag, connoted as
the blood of the workers, thus draws attention to the original struggles for social justice and
brings them back to memory. Thus the comic escapes the black-and-white political instru-
mentalization of workers’ blood in the name of a new national order.
386
Figure 27.6a Olga Wróbel. “Rosół”/“Chicken Broth”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
Figure 27.6b Olga Wróbel. “Rosół”/“Chicken Broth”. Ed. Beata Sosnowska, Centrala, 2018
The artist refers to folk art (using as tokens paper cuts from the Kurpie region,
Mazovia), which can be purchased today as a recognizable symbol of Polish culture
(Figure 27.6b).
During the communist period, folk art was promoted as a pillar of popular sentiment
for the roots of Polish design and as such overglorified. That’s why folk art as a quotation is
regarded ambivalently in Poland – for the generation of Olga Wróbel (born 1982) it means a
reminder of the folklorization imposed by the regime, as a pillar of national identity. At the
same time, folk art is a genuine part of Poland’s material culture, which allows the preser-
vation of regional peculiarities in the cultivation of tradition; in this case, the responsibility
for the cultivation of tradition lies by women, who do the precise handwork. In the context
of the Polish historical comics, however, one thing seems to be of particular importance:
the handmade, simplistic patterns of the paper cuts are difficult to assimilate for the national
symbolism of blood sacrifice.
The anthology Blood is not an answer to the patriotic anthologies on Polish independence,
and yet at the same time it is one. It is not an answer, because it omits the central theme in
the “patriotic” anthology of Poland’s independence after decades of foreign rule. But it is
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Kalina Kupczynska
a response to the dominance of the masculine discourse of sacrificial death and heroism in
Polish historical comics, above all because it shows blood in contexts that are not the focus of
historical narratives. It places at its thematic centre a substance that, as Christina von Braun
shows in her book Blutsbande, for centuries was regarded as a guarantor of an order that legit-
imized the central role of fatherhood in Western culture. In this way, the anthology allows
the polysemy of blood to be expressed and illustrated, which opposes current national ideas
and thus underlines the constructedness of the “patriotic” narration. The striking features
of the most comics in Blood, such as the renunciation of action and verbal narration, seem to
underscore the polysemous layer of the visual representation, offering an approach to blood
which focuses more on the substance (or: the significate) than on the symbolic (the signifier).
It demonstrates how the women’s perspective on a phenomenon as culturally diverse as blood
on historical or mythical narratives can cast a different light.
Notes
1 Andre Gerrits and Joep Leerssen: “The loss of Polish political independence gave added poignancy
to the reputation of impractical passion and honour. Poland became a virtual concept, an ideal
nation without a state, carried in the hearts and idealism of its people rather than in institutions”.
Manfred Beller/Joep Leerssen (eds.). Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation
of National Characters. Rodopi, 2007, pp. 216–2019, here p. 217.
2 Ewa Hauser: “By asserting a symbolic unity between state and Church, the Church takes over all
the dominant symbolism. It further enforces an equation between Polish men and Catholic knights
and Polish women and the Mother of God”. “Traditions of Patriotism, Questions of Gender: The
Case of Poland”. Ellen E. Berry (ed.). Genders 22. Postcommunism and the Body Politic. New York
University Press, 1995, pp. 78–104, here p. 81.
3 Adam Rusek names the following elements of the falsification of history: “decisive share of com-
munist military forces among the partisans, positive representation of the ‘liberating’ Red Army
(…), negation of the merits of the Polish Army in the West”. “Dwa miecze, szabla i katiusza: polski
komiks w objęciach historii”. Zeszyty Komiksowe, vol. 12, 2011, pp. 16–23, here p. 18. (Translated
by K.K.)
4 Jean-Paul Roux mentions for instance the ideas of the inhabitants of a region of New Guinea. Le
sang. Mythes, symboles et réalités. Fayard, 1988, p. 48.
5 For Jean-Paul Roux, the phenomenon of the fear of menstrual blood is a universal phenomenon;
he categorically distances himself from the points of view of Lévi-Strauss and Lévy-Bruhl, which
relativize the universal validity of this phenomenon. Ibid., p. 60.
6 Cf. Johann Jakob Bachofen. Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt
nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 47–48.
Works Cited
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religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. Suhrkamp, 1989.
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National Characters. Rodopi, 2007.
von Braun, Christina. Blutsbande. Verwandtschaft als Kulturgeschichte. Auf bau, 2018.
Czaja, Justyna. “Der Comic als Instrument der Geschichtspolitik.” Translated by Viktoria A. Mika.
Kupczynska, Kalina, Makarska, Renata (eds.). Comic in Polen, Polen im Comic. Christian A. Bach-
mann, 2016, pp. 59–70.
Duniec, Krystyna, Krakowska, Joanna. Soc, sex i historia. Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978.
Fr ąckiewicz, Sebastian. “Za du żo Polski, za mało autora”. Zeszyty Komiksowe, vol. 12, 2011, pp. 82–83.
Fr ąckiewicz, Sebastian. Wyjście z getta. Rozmowy o kulturze komiksowej w Polsce. Stowarzyszenie 40000
Malarzy, 2012.
Graff, Agnieszka. Rykoszetem. Rzecz o płci, seksualno ści i narodzie. W.A.B., 2008.
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Grzebalska, Weronika. Płe ć powstania warszawskiego. Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013.

Hackmann, Jörg. “Defending the “Good Name” of the Polish Nation: Politics of History as a Bat-
tlefield in Poland, 2015–2018”. www.academia.edu/37606204/Defending_the_Good_Name_of_
the_Polish_Nation_Politics_of_History_as_a_Battlefield_in_Poland_2015-2018, pp. 5–6.
Hauser, Ewa. “Traditions of Patriotism, Questions of Gender: The Case of Poland”. Berry, Ellen E.
(ed.). Genders 22. Postcommunism and the Body Politic. New York University Press, 1995, pp. 78–104.
Janion, Maria. Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie. Sic!, 1998.
Janion, Maria. Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna. Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006.
Jasiński, Maciej, Michalski, Jacek, Janicki, Andrzej. 1981 Kopalnia Wujek. Zin Zin Press, 2006.
Keff, Bożena. “Rewers Borysa Lankosza, czyli chłop, diabeł, wice-Żyd”. Wiśniewska, Agnieszka,
Marecki, Piotr (eds.). Kino polskie 1989–2009: historia krytyczna. Wydawnictwo Krytyki Polity-
cznej, 2010, pp. 243–255.
Kuczyńska, Kinga. Polski komiks kobiecy. Timof Comics, 2012.
Kupczynska, Kalina. ““Diese und eine ganz neue Geschichte, Aufstand, Aktion im Bauch”: Wie der
polnische (Frauen)Comic den Mythos des Warschauer Aufstands hinterfragt.” Krause, Stephan,
Erdbrügger, Torsten (eds.). Leibesvisitationen. Der Körper als mediales Politikum in den (post)sozialis-
tischen Kulturen und Literaturen. Winter, 2014, pp. 203–222.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. Tundra Publishing, 1993.
Ostrowska, El żbieta. “Matki Polki i ich synowie. Kilka uwag o genezie obrazów kobiecości i mę skości
w kulturze polskiej”. Radkiewicz, Małgorzata (ed.). Gender. Konteksty. Rabid, 2004, pp. 215–252.
Parker, Andrew et al. “Introduction”. Parker, Andrew (ed.). Nationalism and Sexualities. Routledge,
1982, pp. 1–20.
Monika Powalisz in interview with Sebastian Fr ąckiewicz. “Wojna zawiesza realizm”. Fr ąckiewicz,
Sebastian. Wyjście z getta. Rozmowy o kulturze komiksowej w Polsce. Stowarzyszenie 40000 Malarzy,
2012, pp. 100–129.
Rostocka, Maria. “Co jest czarne, co białe, a co jest bez sensu”. Ołdakowski, Jan (ed.). Powstanie 44.
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Roux, Jean-Paul. Le sang. Mythes, symboles et réalités. Fayard, 1988.
Rusek, Adam. “Dwa miecze, szabla i katiusza: polski komiks w objęciach historii.” Zeszyty Komiksowe,
vol. 12, 2011, pp. 16–23.
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2010, pp. 205–216.
389
28
My grandmother collects memories
Gender and remembrance in
Hispanic graphic narratives
Radmila (Lale) Stefkova
When comics artist Ana Penyas told her grandmother Maruja that she was going to make a
comic based on her life, Maruja responded recommending that it would be better for her to
write a love story. Fortunately, Ana decided that “there are many love stories, but not many
about grandmothers”1 and went along to create her debut graphic novel Estamos todas bien
[We are all doing well]. The work won the National Comics Award in Spain in 2018 making
Penyas the first woman ever to win. This comical conversation between Ana and Maruja
reveals a problematic absence of women’s stories in the historical narratives from the His-
panic world. The late 90s saw an explosion of discourses focused on historical reconstruction
both in Spain and in Latin America. Both artistic production and academic criticism some-
what obsessively dealt with memory, reconciliation, justice, and collectivity to a “saturation
point,” as Jo Labanyi concludes (cited in Tronsgard 267). Yet, this ‘saturated’ debate seems to
have ignored a large part of the conversation which deals with women’s experiences in the
recent traumatic past of their countries. For a long time, the comics scene was no exception
to this trend despite an abundant creative production. After Franco’s passing, comics prolif-
erated de-sanctifying the image of Franco and revealing traumatic personal experiences. The
now-classic Paracuellos, published by Carlos Giménez between 1976 and 2005, creates a vi-
sual memoir of the author’s traumatic childhood in a state-sponsored orphanage. Narratives
written by the children of survivors often found their place in graphic novels in the past two
decades, especially in Spain. Seven graphic novels were published on the topic between 1997
and 2005 alone, all by male authors speaking primarily of male experiences.2 Likewise, the
South American dictatorships inspired an impressive although globally underestimated com-
ics scene, especially in the Southern Cone. Argentina’s traumatic regime under the military
junta is the narrative basis for the first full-length graphic novel in Latin America – Solano
López and Oesterheld’s The Eternaut. Also, the language of comics has been widely employed
for popular reads of historical fiction and graphic biographies of historical personalities like
Allende, Pinochet, “Che” Guevara, and various left-wing politicians and activists. Nonethe-
less, these works, although invaluable to historical debates, have largely ignored women as
both graphic authors and characters.
Two recent works make a valuable contribution to filling this gap: the aforementioned
Estamos todas bien [We are all doing well]3 by Ana Penyas and Notas al pie [Footnotes] by Argentine
390
Gender and remembrance
artist Nacha Vollenweider, coincidentally both released in 2017. These authors use graphic
narratives to document the past of their families, transforming their work into practices of
transmitting intergenerational memory. Taking the authors’ grandmothers as primary sources
of memory, the graphic novels visualize the complexities of women’s experiences during criti-
cal time frames – the years of the Franco regime, the Argentine Dirty War, and the aftermath
of these events with their ongoing consequences. Despite the differences in these two political
contexts, Penyas and Vollenweider find themselves facing similar social implications. Both
women are simultaneously distanced from the traumatic past as second- and third-generation
family members but have internalized the family’s memories. They both share a desire to save
the family narratives from oblivion while remaining conscious of the weight these memories
impose to their own identities and family structure. From a technical aspect, both authors share
documentary techniques, as they inform their narrative through interviews with family mem-
bers (primarily their grandmothers) and combine visual materials from the family and public
archives to imagine the past (photography, documents, reproduced personal objects, domestic
spaces, maps, and popular media). There are, however, clear differences between their social
position and aesthetics. While the Civil War has been long discussed in Spain, the Argentine
dictatorship is a much fresher wound. Argentina’s retaliation to its past has intensified only
recently, driven by the general frustration after the 2001 economic crisis and a shift in polit-
ical ideology with the Kirchner presidency that promoted legal support to long-unresolved
human rights cases (Fernández 193). These contextual differences translate to the ideological
approaches of the comics artists I study. While Penyas’ representation arises from a point of
curiosity and empathy toward her family members, Vollenweider’s story is heavily centered
around self-definition. Consequently, Vollenweider’s work is significantly more autobiograph-
ical and consciously introspective, where Penyas focuses largely on the stories of her grand-
mothers who are the principal protagonists.
Nonetheless, the element that both graphic narratives share and what inspires my discus-
sion is the peculiar female intergenerational memory transfer. As such, the narratives offer a
gender-focused lens toward past events in which gender hasn’t been considered as a relevant
element. Specifically, the conversation around human rights in the periods of state terror in
Spain and Argentina has rarely considered violence based on gender and other differences.
However, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer point out that during times of extreme aggres-
sion (they use the Holocaust as a case point), conversations about gender are crucial given
that the process of dehumanization of individuals inherently involves degendering (355). Far
from being irrelevant, Vollenweider and Penyas’ narratives raise questions about the impor-
tance of gender in the past, during the time of state oppression, and now, in the way we read
these experiences. As such, gender-centered readings of these events constitute “at the very
least, compensatory, reparative acts” (Hirsch and Spitzer 357). I highlight the ways in which
the works of Ana Penyas and Nacha Vollenweider serve as a “tactic of memory that might
allow us to challenge some of the political erasures that these stories effect” (Hemmings 75).
Furthermore, disregarding gender within these contexts illustrates a prioritization of expe-
riences in the public sphere when it comes to recovering historical memory: the “absence
of female narrators helps perpetuate conventions adopted by traditional historiography re-
garding military events, in which women are displaced from the position of subjects who
create discourses, towards the position of the enunciated (or omitted) object” (Galán Fajardo
and Rueda Laffond 75). Penyas and Vollenweider work with the testimonials of those whose
experiences might be deemed of secondary importance. In contrast to the plentitude of
accounts from imprisoned, beaten, and threatened subjects, these stories focus on domestic
and common experiences and visualize the struggle of everyday survival. The subjective life
391
stories of these women offer a glimpse into the seemingly mundane routines of daily life,
which nonetheless have much to tell about shared experiences. The graphic novels are rich
in attention to everyday bodies, objects, and conversations, where the “visualization of the
ongoing procedure of self and subjectivity constructs ‘ordinary’ experiences as relevant and
political” (Graphic Women 140). I propose a focused reading of these ‘mundane’ and ‘ordinary’
things that constitute a rich personal archive in the graphic documentaries. I seek to explore
the ways in which the domestic sphere can function as a space for gendered and tangible
transfer of memory. As such, I expand the definition of a ‘documentary’ and ‘documenta-
tion’ to include intimate conversations, private spaces, and personal objects. My discussion is
guided by the conjunction between gender, remembrance, and domestic objects of memory.
Drawing inherited memories

These graphic novels present engagement with multiple levels of remembrance where memory
is constantly curated: selected, described, reinterpreted, and reconstructed by multiple subjects.
The narrative reveals a process of witnessing that is deliberate, rather than spontaneous and freely
available. They contest the assumption that testifying is a fluid process and demonstrate it in
fact as something that “involves reflection, mediation, and much conscious effort” (Abrams and
Kacandes 19). The ‘truth’ about past events is continuously negotiated by multiple sources of
information. On one hand, the grandmothers appear as the primary ‘media’ of historical informa-
tion and first-account witnesses. Much of the dialogue-based communication comes from tran-
scripts of interviews and informal conversations between these witnesses and the documentarists,
their granddaughters. On their own part, the authors as second-generation witnesses participate
in their own curation of inherited memories influenced by their own understanding of history.
They engage with what Marianne Hirsch has termed ‘postmemory’: “the relationship that the gen-
eration after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those
who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and be-
haviors among which they grew up” (“The Generation” 106, my emphasis).4 What draws me to
Hirsch’s understanding of postmemory is her emphasis on relationships, signaling the constantly
evolving state of this type of remembrance and turning away from the view of memory as fixed
and unchanging. What the graphic novels reveal is not necessarily Penyas and Vollenweider’s own
remembrance of their families’ past, but their interaction with historical subjects and archives.
The narrative is constructed upon a sequence of moments of encounters. Gender becomes an
important component, given that the relationships between the documentarists and their subject
are based on highly feminine and affectionate bonds.
The interviews that compose the testimonial material are elaborated in a proximity that
implies intimacy, both in the interview register and the physical proximity of the interloc-
utors. We frequently view the women sitting closely together in the privacy of their homes
as in Figure 28.1. These images remind us of a similar setting in Spiegelman’s Maus, where
father and son sit together to discuss Valdek’s Holocaust experiences. However, their rela-
tionship is often conflictive as the son and his father struggle to achieve a shared interpre-
tation, resulting in Art drawing “against his father’s verbal narration, turning what he calls
the ‘cognitive dissonance’ between the two of them into representational collision” (“The
Shadow” 209). Quite the contrary, what we see in Figure 28.1 are zoomed-in moments of
affection. The corporal interactions between the women, such as holding hands and wearing
matching clothing, imply agreement and cooperation. Penyas and Vollenweider appear as
what Ann Cvetkovich has called a “sympathetic witness,” seeking identification with their
documented subjects (“Drawing” 113).
392
Figure 28.1 Ana interviews Maruja in her apartment. The panels zoom in on details of bodily
postures and intimate contact. (Ana Penyas, Estamos todas bien, Ediciones Sala-
mandra, 2017)
Nevertheless, the documentary narrative relies on constant collaboration between

the narrators and the subjects whose lives they document. The written dialogues that
contain the grandmother’s testimonials are delivered through a careful process of se-
lection. They appear on the page of the comic competing with the granddaughter’s
voice-over narrations and visual interpretations. What the reader gets to observe on the
page is a premeditated ‘zoom-in’ on visual and linguistic segments. Additionally, the
narratives are surrounded by material objects, both within and outside of the domestic
space. Newspaper clippings, posters, TV snapshots, and advertisements fill in the gaps of
personal recollections. The multimodal nature of comics, in this case, makes us aware
that the construction of memory is never a solitary or single-voiced work, but “an ap-
propriation and re-signification of elements of the narration of others” (Fernández 212).
The memories of the generation of postmemory are a result of a multitude of voices and
images. Penyas and Vollenweider illustrate that family knowledge does not exist in iso-
lation and it is constantly mediated by public discourses and images.
Moreover, the grandmother’s testimonies are often fragmented and incomplete due to
personal obstacles, such as Maruja’s advanced Parkinson’s disease, or self-censure as a result of
long periods of state control in the case of Nacha’s family. As Amy Kaminsky observes in the
case of Argentina, “not until the basic structures of society can once again be trusted might
the victim of collective trauma safely speak” (108). In these cases, the documentarist must
engage in research and rely on information from external archives to create a more complete
picture. These materials form a prosthetic memory that serves as “a call to others to take on
a memory that was never fully developed, or that was cut off from consciousness by official
silence during the time of state terror and unfounded fears of increased instability afterwards”
(Kaminsky 112). In many cases, the narrative opts to represent the self-assumed mutism of
the witnesses. Due to the personal and collective obstacles, the stories told by first-account
witnesses are often told in fragmented parts and the stories have no clear beginning or end.
Marianne Hirsch explains that postmemory emerges in the face of mutism: “These ‘not
memories’ communicated in ‘flashes of imagery’ and ‘broken refrains,’ transmitted through
‘the language of the body,’ are precisely the stuff of postmemory” (“The Generation” 109,
emphasis in original).
393
The organization of graphic narratives by fragments and gutters is relevant for the presen-
tation of traumatic stories. The ‘flashes of imagery’ that Hirsch speaks of translate to boxed
visual frames, where a verbal explanation is often unnecessary or impossible to produce.
Frequently, the present is interrupted by ‘flashes’ of past fears, such as a moment where we see
Maruja’s voiceless memories of her interaction with soldiers at a bar where she used to work
in her younger days.
The readers are given a verbal clue that it is midnight, as she tells her granddaughter:
“The bar disgusted me… I had to wait for my aunt, who didn’t use to return until mid-
night.” While closing the bar she spots Franco’s soldiers approaching. In Figure 28.2 we
see Maruja experiencing fear of uncertainty, she holds on to her crucifix necklace and
prays. A ring of a cellphone transports her back to the present and the traumatic scene
from Franco’s time ends with a mundane conversation: “¿Sí? - ¿Te acuerdas de que voy a
comer, mama? [Yes? – Remember that I’m coming over for lunch, mom?].” The clock on
the wall now transforms midnight into noon, time for lunch in her apartment. Suddenly,
the reader understands that what seems like a few minutes on the wall clock is actually the
span of decades. The empty space between the panels, the gutter, points to a fracture
of the temporal sequence and the readers must perceive this fast-forward by mentally
filling the gaps using what Scott McCloud calls “the closure” (63). The gutter between
the fragmented time instances “hints at the traumatic in what is left out, lost, repressed,
or silenced” (Ghiggia 2). Hillary Chute explains that the ambiguous space of the gutter
signals erasure: “comics manifests material frames— and the absences between them. It
thereby literalizes on the page the work of framing and making, and also what framing
excludes” (Disaster 17, my emphasis). What is excluded in these frames is the inability to
move past accumulated fear – the scene with the soldiers appears after Maruja has already
been verbally harassed by other customers at the bar. Seventy years later, the vulnerability
of a young and pretty girl in traditionalist Spain still haunts Maruja. Taking advantage of
the spatial organization of the graphic page, Penyas forces the past and the present to share
the same space. The reader can literally ‘see’ these temporal interruptions, signaling that
past traumas haven’t really stayed in the past.
Figure 28.2 Maruja’s memory flashes from the Franco regime. The scene is interrupted by
a moment in the present when Maruja’s son calls her cellphone. (Ana Penyas,
Estamos todas bien, Ediciones Salamandra, 2017)
394
Drawing an archive of feelings

Beyond their capacity to capture the ‘unspeakable’ of trauma, the visual elements also show
the process through which history is transmitted extralinguistically using material archives.
The testimonies are supplemented by objects, gestures, and spaces that are meaningful due
to their emotional value. Penyas and Vollenweider as documentarists function within the
spaces of their family homes. They learn as much from the interviews they conduct as from
nonverbal cues and the objects that surround them. I am particularly intrigued by what
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have termed “points of memory” – images, objects, and
memorabilia that serve as “points of intersection between past and present, memory and
postmemory, personal remembrance and cultural recall” (358). Direct access to these points
is what makes the family a privileged space for the transfer of memory. The first time Nacha
introduces her grandmother in the story, we observe her reading, surrounded by numerous
framed photos on the walls and furniture covered in memorabilia. The grandmother’s re-
count of the past is performed through a ‘tour’ of the family house starting with the bureau
in Figure 28.3.
The documentarist, Nacha, labels each of the items explaining: “Mi abuela es una gran
coleccionadora de recuerdos. Cada objeto en su casa cuenta una historia. [My grandmother is
a big collector of mementos. Every object in her house tells a story].” The linguistic ambigu-
ity of the word ‘recuerdos’ in Spanish, meaning either ‘mementos/memorabilia’ or ‘memo-
ries,’ points to the twofold significance of the objects in the house. Nacha’s grandmother is a
collector of memories – a curator who intentionally selects, displays, and maintains an exhibit
of the family’s past. Her collection contains mementos that carry memories of family experi-
ences, as well as national events. The left corner of the bureau displays a statue of the Virgin
Mary, accompanied by a drawing of the tomb of Eva Perón and a photograph of Néstor
Kirchner’s visit to the town. Perón was Argentina’s first lady between 1946 and 1952, popular
for charity programs and speaking on behalf of labor rights and women’s suffrage.5 Kirch-
ner served as president (2003–2007) and was instrumental in abolishing pardoning laws for
military criminals of the Dirty War, which led to new trials.6 Also, his administration estab-
lished a strong bond with the human-rights organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The
Figure 28.3 A bureau in Nacha’s family home displays the grandmother’s collection of
mementos, combining family and national events. (Nacha Vollenweider, Notas al
pie, Maten al Mensajero, 2017)
395
right side of the bureau holds a set of mate gourds used by the family, bottles from trips with
Nacha’s belated grandfather, and photographs of Ignacio, Nacha’s uncle and grandmother’s
first son who became one of the 30,000 disappeared during the regime. Through the ‘house
tour,’ the reader learns that the grandmother was one of the early members of the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo and spent years in search of her son. Thus, the collection reveals the ideo-
logical and political orientation of the grandmother, justified by her personal connection to
the Dirty War. The objects blur the lines of the individual and the collective, as family mem-
bers and political figures occupy the same shelf. As Hillary Chute explains, graphic narrative
established an “idiom of witness, a manner of testifying that sets a visual language in motion
with and against the verbal in order to embody individual and collective experience, to put
contingent selves and histories into form” (Graphic Women 3, emphasis in original). As evi-
dent from this example, traumatic experiences can put pressure on the conventional form of
the archive, transforming mundane objects into relics of remembrance. Trauma creates what
Ann Cvetkovich has called an “archive of feelings.” She explains: “the memory of trauma is
embedded not just in narrative but in material artifacts, which can range from photographs to
objects whose relation to trauma might seem arbitrary but for the fact that they are invested
with emotional, and even sentimental, value” (Cvetkovich 17).
Furthermore, the points of memory in this archive of feelings are what challenges the
notion of historical narrative as linear and progressive. They embed the clash of temporalities
as they testify the presence of people and events in the past, and yet they still occupy space in
the present. Hirsch and Spitzer explain that the term ‘points of memory’ “is both spatial—
such as a point on a map—and temporal—a moment in time” (358). The concept is easily
translated through the medium of comics considering that time is determined spatially – the
sequence of frames signals the passing of time. Thus, the points of memory are what ruptures
the continuity of the present and serve as a portal to the past. Penyas consciously employs
these points as a narrative strategy to transport her readers back and forth between her grand-
mother’s youth and the present. The door to the past is always a simple object: a necklace,
a saucepan, a shopping bag. For example, the reader can observe that elderly Maruja still
wears the crucifix she is holding in her palm in Figure 28.2 while fearing Franco soldiers. In
a similar scene, we observe her younger self learning to cook lentils to gain ‘prestige’ with
her husband and sister in law, only to be reprimanded by her son in the following frames
for burning her hands with, precisely, the saucepan of hot lentil soup. These objects demon-
strate that, regardless of the many changes that have happened in Maruja’s life, many of her
relationships have remained constant. Similarly, Vollenweider uses the family home as a map
through which the past can be traced. As she and her grandmother traverse the house, the
narrative is constantly interrupted by flashbacks of events decades earlier. What is more, the
objects displayed embody the absence of family members who are no longer alive. Nacha
passes by two jackets hanging in the hallway in Figure 28.4. She explains that one of the
jackets was left behind by her uncle Ignacio, who forgot to put it on the same night he was
kidnapped; the jacket has remained in its place for the past 40 years. The other jacket belongs
to her grandmother who used to wear it during her trips to Buenos Aires to look for her
disappeared son and protest with the rest of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Ignacio’s jacket, which will never be worn by him again, magnifies the absence of his
body in his mother’s house. The jackets, hanging side by side, serve as proof that Ignacio and
his mother occupied the same space. As Nacha and her grandmother stand in front of the
jackets, the reader is transported to the past multiple times to ‘witness’ Ignacio’s disappear-
ance and his mother’s protests in Buenos Aires. As these examples demonstrate, the points
of memory, recreated on the page of the comic, serve as points where different temporalities
396
Figure 28.4 The jackets of the disappeared Ignacio and his mother still hang by the door
40 years later after his disappearance. (Nacha Vollenweider, Notas al pie, Maten
al Mensajero, 2017)
converge. Penyas herself explains: “When we talk about Francoism, it is always done in past
tense. I wanted to link it with the present, with the heritage that is still in our homes” (“Las
abuelas de Ana Penyas”). Gender is a crucial element in the formation of this heritage, as
women are its main collectors. History is recounted through affective bonds the witnesses
establish with their own archive: a mother who refuses to dispose of her son’s clothing,
grandmother who refuses to stop cooking even when motor functions fail her. The archive of
feelings gives value to personal objects and spaces, transforming them into historical material
worth of recording.
Drawing the family album

Family photographs are a special kind of points of memory due to their ambiguous po-
sition as both an intimate possession and its status as a conventional historical document.
Photography’s power comes from its indexical nature, its seemingly direct and unmediated
relationship to reality. In his influential Camera Lucida, Barthes states: “every photograph is a
certificate of presence.” No other point of memory in the house has such power as photog-
raphy to testify that something or someone had a physical presence. The camera-produced
image has enjoyed a privileged status as a truthful, almost scientific way of capturing reality.
Yet, this long-held conception is questioned in graphic narratives, where photography is
never isolated, and it is always carefully positioned to function within the page surrounded
by other visual elements and textual narration. Both Penyas and Vollenweider include pho-
tographs only through drawn reproductions where the overt human touch of the drawing
challenges the idea of photography as unmediated and ‘objective.’ Of course, the docu-
mentary nature of photography helps the authors to establish authenticity in their narrative
and demonstrate that these people and events are, in fact, real. The use of photography as
paratext is commonly employed in Hispanic graphic narratives of postmemory (Tronsgard,
De la Fuente Soler). However, as Nancy Pedri points out, photography in comics does not
only fulfill a documentary function that corroborates the facts in the drawn story (2). Rather,
photographs cooperate with other visual and textual elements to advance the storytelling.
The drawn reproductions of photographs encompass subjectivity as they draw attention to
397
the hand that drew them. The reader is aware that these photographs are reproduced not just
as stand-alone objects, but things that are being looked at. Photographs are always associated
with a subject that interacts with them: the hand of a woman holding an album, or the hand
of another cleaning a frame on the wall.
An example from Vollenweider’s story points out photographic reproductions as sites of
remembrance. An intriguing reproduction that reemerges continuously throughout the nar-
rative is the photograph of Nacha’s disappeared uncle, Ignacio. Although he disappeared
several years before Nacha was born, the uncle’s presence is frequently manifested through
the numerous framed photographs the grandmother keeps in the family house and his per-
sonal belongings – his furniture, books, and clothing. Ironically, the photograph of the uncle,
while keeping a record of his existence, is a constant reminder of his absence. Hirsch explains
this duality: “The referent is both present (implied in the photograph) and absent (it has been
there but is not here now). The referent haunts the picture like a ghost: it is a revenant, a
return of the lost and dead other” (Hirsch 5). What is more, Nacha has a personal connec-
tion to her uncle. She inherited his name after his disappearance (Nacha is short for Ignacia).
The ghost from the photo still haunts Nacha’s life, he is someone whom she has never met
but whose name she carries and whose jacket still hangs by the entrance door. In a scene
where Nacha walks through her hometown with her girlfriend, they spot a memorial site
where portraits of the disappeared hang above the street. In Figure 28.5 we see the women
interrupting their walk to look at the portraits where Nacha spots her uncle. The reader can
recognize the same subject from an earlier photograph in the house while Nacha interviewed
her grandmother.
Ignacio’s specter interrupts the present through by appearing on the street through his
portrait. Nacha’s interest in her uncle’s history is not just driven by curiosity, but out of
necessity to define her own identity. An earlier scene in the story portrays a government
official who explains that a person cannot be given any legal status if their death is not con-
firmed: “Pero mientras sea desaparecido, no puede tener ningún tratamiento especial. Es una
incógnita. No tiene entidad. No está. [But while he is missing, he cannot have any special
treatment. He is unknown. Has no entity. Doesn’t exist.].” The government official is facing
the reader, and in the moment of drawing, he would be facing the author, Nacha herself. Her
drawings, then, are a conscious statement of the burden of the past – she carries the name,
Figure 28.5 A photograph of Ignacio hangs above a public street and catches the attention of
Nacha and her girlfriend. (Nacha Vollenweider, Notas al pie, Maten al Mensajero,
2017)
398
and by extension the identity, of someone who doesn’t exist. Hirsch explains: “To grow up
with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded
one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences dis-
placed, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation” (“The Generation” 107). Thus,
by looking at Ignacio’s photographs, Nacha is looking not only for information, but also for
an affective connection. The photographs are a testament to his existence and by extension
her own. She struggles to define her present identity in the face of the inherited memories
from her family’s past.
However, photographs as points of memory can also offer a positive opportunity for women to
appropriate history. Photography can serve to rewrite stories and give context beyond the scope
of the photograph by juxtaposing the image with the contrasting verbal explanation. Graphic
narrative can revise historical images by giving them fluidity on the page as they are literally
‘redrawn’ to reimagine and re-mediate the historical (Cutter and Schlund-Vials 6). Penyas fre-
quently portrays herself sitting with her grandmother Herminia sitting on the kitchen table and
listing through the family albums. They always hold the albums and point at the photographed
subjects – their hands and fingers imposed on top of the photographs to remind us that the images
we see are subjected to the women’s interpretation, they come with a story. It is through these
albums that we see the technology of a matrilineal knowledge. Herminia points at a picture of
her own grandmother, explaining: “Mi abuela era quien me contaba los cuentos, esos que luego
te contaba yo a ti, cuando eras pequeña. [My grandmother was the one who used to tell me the
[family] stories, the ones I would then tell you, when you were little].” Furthermore, the pho-
tographs serve to point to the hidden bitter experiences of women, those that remained hidden
behind societal taboos for generations. In Figure 28.6 we see a scene where Ana asks her grand-
mother about the sexual experience of women in her generation. Herminia explains that women
would engage in intercourse only to satisfy their men, never experiencing sexual pleasure. Her
explanation is ironically surrounded by two photographs: on the right, a handwritten romantic
message on top of a photograph of a handsome young man, and on the left, a wedding photograph
of a smiling bride and her friends.
Herminia’s contextualization of the images points to the fact that love and sex had a
different meaning in traditionalist Spain. It certainly explains that the smiling bride in the
photograph will not keep her smile on her first wedding night. Photographs are assigned new
meaning on the page of the graphic narrative, revealing female experiences hidden behind
staged smiles and romantic portraits. The image-text interplay in such cases questions the
perception of the archive as fixed and unchanging, giving way to stories that have been long
disregarded.
Figure 28.6 The grandmother Herminia uses the photo album to reveal unpleasant sexual
experiences for women in her generation. (Ana Penyas, Estamos todas bien,
Ediciones Salamandra, 2017)
399
The examples I have discussed here illustrate a unique intergenerational transfer of

memory where women, both as witnesses and documentarists, record a highly gendered
version of history. The ongoing process of curation that is evident in graphic storytelling
is precisely the work of a documentary, where ‘raw material’ of history is selected and
arranged into a sequence to provide a coherent narrative. Documentary theorist Phillip
Rosen insists on the sequence as a crucial element of the documentary ethos: “This value
lies in the great assistance sequenciation provides for centralizing and restricting mean-
ings derived from the points at which actual contact with the real is asserted—the realm
of the document” (74). Penyas and Vollenweider as members of the generation of post-
memory draw from a multitude of fragmented and often sentimentally overwhelming
archives. Through graphic documenting they construct a historical puzzle that contains
pieces of memory carried through verbal testimonies, nonverbal cues, family spaces and
objects, and prosthetic memory. Robyn Warhol suggests that through drawing, autobi-
ographical narratives reappropriate the archive in an attempt to create a more coherent
narrative of life (5–6). The syntax of the comics medium, which depends on the spatial
organization on the page, allows for an organization: “through sorting memories, order-
ing, understanding, the comics page allows for organization, not just of space but also
mind” (“The Shadow” 203). The language of comics is transparent in how the historical
narrative is organized, as evidence is collected frame by frame, what Hillary Chute has
called “the unfolding of evidence” (Disaster 2).
Telling stories through drawing brings attention to witnessing and subjectivity due to
the inherent relationship between drawing and looking. Art critic John Berger explains
drawing is a process that depends on a sum of experiences, multiple views, and moments
of sight: “From each glance a drawing assembles a little evidence, but it consists of the
evidence of many glances which can be seen together […] what is unchanging in a draw-
ing consists of so many assembled moments that they constitute a totality rather than a
fragment” (71). The many fragmented boxes on the graphic narrative page collaborate
to form a totality and express a view of history that is more abstract and complete. The
unapologetically subjective glances and narration operate intimately in comics. Testi-
monies and objects in the medium are always linked to a speaker who carries with them
a perspective, time, and origin. The witness and their account are physically linked on
the page. As Rachel Rys explains, language in comics always has an associated voice,
“words emanate from a speaker and exist in time” (9). These voices that carry identi-
ties are paired with hand-made drawings and handwriting to redefine what it means to
record and document history. It challenges the notion of a documentary as impersonal,
objective, and factual. Quite on the contrary, the value of the record Penyas and Vol-
lenweider collect lies precisely in its subjectivity. They give meaning to the ‘ordinary’
and the ‘mundane,’ where an archive of personal objects can offer alternative modes of
knowledge. In this way, the family home becomes a museum of memory where women
serve as the curators of an archive that carries affective value. The reader has access to a
double-mediated window of history: on a basic level through the pieces of history the
older generation of women presents, and on a secondary level through the archive the
younger women depict. Women’s graphic documentaries can stand in opposition to in-
stitutionalized archives, offering a rightful status for the ordinary women and families as
witnesses of history. These graphic narratives invite readers to not only revisit historical
sites through the lens of gender but also challenge the way in which history is told and
documented.
400
Notes
3 The pronoun ‘todas’ [all of us, we all] in Spanish carries an implication of a female plural subject.
4 Various scholars have discussed similar concepts in attempt to look at the broader concept of sec-
ondary memory: “absent memory” (Fine 1988), “inherited memory,” “belated memory,” “pros-
thetic memory” (Lury 1998; Landsberg 2004), “mémoire trouée” (Raczymow 1994), “mémoire
des cendres” (Fresco 1984), “vicarious witnessing” (Zeitlin 1998), “received history” (Young
1997). I use Hirsch’s “postmemory” due to the term’s implication of memory curation and transfer,
as well as for its link with cultural productions, such as comics and photography. When Hirsch first
introduced “postmemory” she used Spiegelman’s Maus as a case point.
5 Eva’s husband, Juan Perón, was strongly supported middle class and got elected three times as
president. His presidency alongside Eva’s popular programs was the start of the political movement
peronismo. Over time peronismo has grown to have a variety of social and political implications,
although the insistence on popular labor politics remains and was the rhetoric promoted by the
Kirchner presidencies until 2015. On the rhetoric of the ‘politics for the poor,’ see Javier Auyero’s
La política de los pobres. Las prácticas clientelistas del peronismo (Manantial 2001).
6 It is still disputable to what degree Kirchner’s law reforms helped the legal resolution of dictator-
ships crimes, but they are valued as symbolical acts to recognizing victims and their families.
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29
Feminist riots and gay giants
The Mayo Feminista and cultural context
of contemporary Queer Chilean comics
Sam Cannon
The hetero-friendly cover of Gabriel Ebensperger’s graphic novel folds over to hide the bold
letter title Gay Gigante. What I would call the “beard” cover, described in the book as a
cover appropriate for reading in heteronormative spaces, appears to be a 1987 tourist guide to
Chile. The trick to this heteronormative beard cover is that it is still fuchsia pink, thus sub-
verting its own playful concealment and offering a criticism of Chilean culture by suggesting
that the need for a concealed queer reading is a behavior befitting the patriarchal dictatorship
era, not 2015 when the graphic novel was published by Catalonia. The reality of this heter-
onormative double cover is expressed in the graphic novel through the declaration: “Un gay
gigante no se puede esconder” [“A gay giant cannot hide”] (Ebensperger 35). Reading this
phrase along with the fold-over 1987 Chilean tourist guide beard cover, I offer that Chile
is a gay giant that cannot hide. The oppressive past of the dictatorship, nor contemporary
conservative politics can completely convince anyone that Chile is a heteronormative space –
fuchsia does not lie (Figure 29.1).
Figure 29.1 Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay Gigante (2015)
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Sam Cannon
Queer artistic voices have existed as the undeniable fuchsia of Chile as gay giant.
From Gabriela Mistral to Pedro Lemebel to today’s Mapuche drag king textile and comic
artist Melina Rapimán/Don Arsenio Guñelve, Chile has queered oppressive heteronor-
mative politics and spaces. Indeed, Carl Fischer’s book Queering the Chilean Way (2016)
extensively explores a continuity of queer existence, activism, and love throughout the
nation’s last 50 years of history. The fuchsia voice of the gay giant most recently spoke
to me through an appropriately colored graffiti on May 25, 2018. The morning of the
feminist takeover of the Universidad Católica, a new fuchsia graffiti appeared on Calle
Monjitas where I had been staying while conducting field research on Chilean comics
and graphic novels. It read: “Macho muerto no viola!!!” [“Dead men don’t rape!!!”]. This
message written on the walls reminded me of a passage from Ariel and Sol Rojas Lizana’s
graphic memoir Historias Clandestinas (2014). The story of the two siblings who survived
the military dictatorship as part of MIR (an armed leftist resistance party) explained,
“No tenemos TV ni radio ni rostros solo tenemos muros” [“We have no TV, radio,
news, face, identity. We have just walls”] (translation provided by the author) (119). The
following page of their graphic novel depicts a screaming face shouting from within the
bricks of the wall (Figure 29.2).
This face screaming from the walls, the fuchsia graffiti denouncing the macho-patriarchal
systems dominating Chilean politics, education, and life was voiced that same day of May by
the feminist protesters that took over one of Chile’s most prestigious universities. Along with
the graffiti and the Pussy Riot masked protesters at the university, contemporary Chilean
comics have begun to develop non-heteronormative cultural spaces from which to illustrate
and voice the gay giant. Within the context of the Mayo Feminista and under the shadow
of the military dictatorship, I offer analyses of several queer and feminist comics that chal-
lenge hetero-patriarchy within the realm of Chilean popular culture and inside the national
comic industry. In this chapter, I will look to the following pieces of sequential art to ex-
plore a selection of contemporary Chile’s queer comics imaginary: Hambre Prístina (2014)
by Melina Rapimán, Acid Rain (2018) by Yaritza Aguilera, and Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay
Gigante (2015) (Figure 29.3).
Figure 29.2 Ariel and Sol Rojas Lizana’s Historias Clandestinas (2014)
404
Contemporary Queer Chilean comics
Figure 29.3 Author photo. Graffiti painted on Monjitas Street in Santiago
Mayo Feminista
The Mayo Feminista protests are the context that pushed my research on Chilean sequential art
toward questions of LGBTQ representation. The appearance of the graffiti referenced above liter-
ally made me stop in my tracks and contemplate the power of visual protest, and since I research
comics, I had to inquire how contemporary Chilean comics confront the problems produced by
patriarchal heteronormativity. Likewise, a deeper understanding of the Mayo Feminista protests
was necessary to inform and contextualize my readings of these comics. Here I offer a brief, and
by no means comprehensive, reflection on the Mayo Feminista protests as one of the contexts in
which the comics analyzed in this chapter can be read.
The takeover of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Universidad Austral de
Chile on April 17, 2018 is one possible starting place from which a discussion of the Mayo Fem-
inista can begin. This takeover addressed a series of cases of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse
against female students and staff. The takeovers spread to other campuses and the charges against
identified offenders transformed from individual cases to the creation of demands that would alter
the system within which the abuses occurred. Faride Zerán signaled the significance of the con-
solidation of specific systemic demands in her introduction to Mayo Feminista: La Rebelión Contra
el Patriarcado (2018) by stating that the demands point to “un objetivo mucho más nítido y espe-
cífico: la estructura ideológica patriarcal de la sociedad chilena con las consiguientes inequidad de
género y violencia contra la mujer” [“a much more defined and specific objective: the ideological
patriarchal structure of Chilean society with its resulting gender inequality and violence against
women”] (9–10). Zerán also notes that this series of protests against patriarchy challenges gender
roles broadly, as well as the economic logic of neoliberalism (10). These challenges to the sex-
ist, heteronormative, and ableist educational system in Chile spread across the country between
April and July of 2018. On May 9, CONES (Coodinadora Nacional de Estudiantes Secundarios)
organized a march known as the “Pingüinazo” in support of the university takeovers. This was
followed by the May 11 “Ni Una Menos” protests against rape culture and the enormous Confech
(Confederation of Chilean Students) protest on May 16 which brought 150,000 protesters into
the streets (Batarce & Silva). Finally, the takeover of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
on May 25 marked another important milestone. In total 33 institutions were taken over during
the Mayo Feminista protests.
405
Sam Cannon
These actions resulted in the production of a set of demands developed by women and
gender dissidents to address the systemic patriarchal abuses in the Chilean educational system.
The student petition demanded the creation of new protocols to combat systemic sexual
abuse and harassment, the creation of committees and training programs on gender violence
and disabilities, the establishment of gender and dissident quotas for faculty and administra-
tive positions, the implementation of gender studies for all students and inclusive language
at all levels of the university, gender balance in the representation of assigned authors, meth-
ods for measuring and reporting discrimination by university employees, the recognition of
transgender individuals’ social names, and the implementation of tools and infrastructure for
differently abled students (Batarce).
The professor Alejandra Castillo noted that the protests carried out during the Mayo Fem-
inista disrupted the patriarchal order and made visible the methods that institutions use to re-
produce an androcentric societal system (35). The Mayo Feminista protests broadly denounced
patriarchal systems of power in Chile and at the same time focalized their demands toward
transforming sexist educational systems and practices. Cristeva Cabello succinctly describes
the educational reality of queer students in Chile through the statement: “La educación de la
crueldad se trafica entre estudiantes y profesores, y de profesores a estudiantes” [“The education
of cruelty is trafficked between students and professors, and from professors to students”] (23).
This cruel educational context fosters a culture that the Mayo Feminista protests, the fuchsia
graffiti, and queer comics, among many other actors, seek to transform. Cabello expressed this
moment in Chilean culture, in a gender-neutral Spanish, by describing the nation as student
in a sex ed workshop: “Chile es un niñe que participa en el taller de educación sexual. Chile
nació con vagina, Chile es mujer, Chile usa el cabello corto, le hablo a Chile y lo trato en mas-
culino, porque así se expresa” [“Chile is a kid attending a sexual education workshop. Chile
was born with a vagina, Chile is a woman, Chile has short hair, I speak to Chile and I address
him in the masculine, because that is how he expresses himself ”] (22). The interrogation that
Cabello demands be made is not that queer identities be questioned or dissected by Chile’s
patriarchal society, but that it is the moment to interrogate “los <<normales>>, esa casta de
heterosexualidad patriarcal que gobierna” [“the <<normals>>, that governing caste of patriar-
chal heterosexuality”] (25). With this in mind I hope to offer an analysis through which con-
temporary Chilean comics can be read as interrogations of a violent hetero-patriarchy rather
than as a defense or revelation of queer Chile. In order to do this, I propose following Cristeva
Cabello’s recommendation for rewriting history from a feminista perspective: “volver explícito
el orden masculino que organiza el relato histórico” [“to make explicit the masculine order that
organizes the historical narrative”] (38). Each of the graphic narratives presented here can be
interpreted as works that question the heteronormative context in which they are read as they
reorganize and re-present Chile as a gay gigante that cannot hide, and as a series of panels and
sequences that interrogate “los normales.”
Hambre Prístina
Hambre Prístina is a foundational feminist required reading in Chilean comics, and Melina
Rapimán’s role in feminist and queer comics, embroidery, and performance should not be
overlooked. The cover of her collection of comics features a gagged woman with crosshairs
aimed between her eyes and calls direct attention to the cultural violence directed at women
in Chile. Years before current large-scale feminist protests made headlines, Melina Rapimán
was instrumental in the development of feminist spaces in the nation’s independent comic
production. Hambre Prístina (2014) recompiles the majority of Rapimán’s comic production,
406
which previously appeared in fanzines or was unpublished. Prior to the publication of Ham-
bre Prístina, Rapimán invested years of work to foment feminist comic production in Chile
through projects such as Tribuna Feminina Comix (2008) and Malen Splendor (2009). Like-
wise, she worked with the comic collective Informe Meteoro as far back as 2004, years before
the boom that revitalized Chile’s comic production. Melina Rapimán’s body of work spans
comics exploring the fantasy-like experiences of young girls to comics challenging the in-
ternalized victim-blaming narratives resultant from heteronormative social interactions to
experimental embroidered comics that offer a way around “la falsedad de respuestas supues-
tamente sabias como la que dice ‘todo depende de tu actitud’, respuesta tan abundante, que
ofrece una solución individual, pero aparentemente fácil de aplicar también a problemas
en que está envuelta toda la sociedad” [“the falseness of the supposedly wise responses like
that of ‘it all depends on your attitude’, an abundant response, that offers an individual
solution, but apparently can also easily be applied to problems that all of society is wrapped
up in”] (Plaza 8). It is precisely the problems that are personal and simultaneously societal
that Rapimán engages in her comics and which makes them necessary in a review of Chilean
feminist and queer graphic narrative.
Two dream-like stories about characters named Aliló and Alelí open Hambre Prístina as
types of internalized fear and repressed memories. The short comics are unsettling in their
simplicity and hint at the patriarchal violence underlying fairy tales, religion, and the sup-
posed sanctity of the familial home. “La Niña Aliló: Obra en 4 Actos” [“The Girl Aliló: A
Work in 4 Acts”] begins with the line “érase una vez” [“once upon a time”] lending it the
tone of a fairy tale while accompanied by the illustration of Aliló on a stage with a small
devil hiding behind the curtains. The following pages explain that god had given her beau-
tiful gifts, but that “un día, la niña aliló se descuidó…” [“one day, the girl aliló let her guard
down…”] (16–17). The image depicting Aliló’s error shows her levitating horizontally while
asleep, imagery that rhymes with the content of the next story in Rapimán’s collection. After
Aliló lets her guard down and sleeps, the comic concludes with the line, “…y el diablo se
la llevó” [“…and the devil took her away”] (18). While this short comic can be read as an
allusion to the constant vigilance women must have against misogynist violence, it suggests
additional terror when read together with “El Sueño de Alelí” [“Alelí’s Dream”]. In a vi-
sual rhyme, Alelí is first shown sleeping horizontally within a frame and page layout similar
to the moment when Aliló let her guard down and the repetition of the word “hermoso”
[“beautiful”] as descriptions of Aliló and Alelí’s experiences forces the connection between
the two comics even further. In this story, Alelí dreams of “un enorme oso ponzoñoso” [“an
enormous venomous bear”] although the illustration of the venomous bear looks as though
it could appear in a children’s storybook (24) (Figure 29.4).
The venomous bear caresses Alelí’s stomach, makes her laugh, and then vanishes as the
day dawns. The imagery of sleeping women becoming vulnerable to the devil or venomous
bears points to fears of domestic abuse, molestation, and rape that are often cast as dreams
or fairy tales by their perpetrators and by society at large through the disbelief of survivors.
This disbelief becomes a central criticism of heteronormative rape culture in “El Sentido
del Silencio” [“The Meaning of Silence”]. As the first story in the collection that is not pre-
sented through a fairy tale or dream-like lens, the fear and violence suggested in the preced-
ing stories is here illustrated directly. As if the lingering effects from the stories of Aliló and
Alelí continue to hover over this comic, it begins by explaining “Soy triste. Siempre estoy
triste. Las cosas perdieron su sentido” [“I’m sad. I’m always sad. Things have lost their mean-
ing”] (28). The narrator explains that on a certain day when she was feeling particularly mal-
adjusted and things were blurry, she went down to a bar near the port for a drink. In the last
407
Sam Cannon
Figure 29.4 Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014)
panel on the page, she states that “the man” came over to her, greeted her, and stayed near her
(29). With the page turn Rapimán inverts the black and white to fill only this page’s gutters
with black and use white lines for illustration, thus visually cuing not only the darkness of the
night but also the sinister situation that is unfolding. The man takes the protagonist by the
arm and leads her outside “to smoke” and up a series of outdoor stairways that bifurcate and
cover the hillsides of several important port cities in Chile. The protagonist states, “No sé
cuántas escaleras subimos. Ni cuán arriba estábamos. Nunca he vuelto a sentir tanto miedo”
[“I don’t know how many stairs we went up. Nor how far up we were. I have never again felt
so much fear”] (30). It is interesting to note that this single inverted color page ends with a
panel emphasizing the fear that was experienced, while the statement “Me violó en la escalera
de un cerro” [“He raped me on the stairs of a hill”] occurs on the next page which returns to
the white guttered standard of the rest of the narrative (31) (Figure 29.5).
In this moment, Rapimán begins to draw attention to the destructive internalized
narratives that protect men and are pervasive across heteronormative patriarchal societies
such as “Somehow I deserved it” (31). In another comic in the collection titled “Cuando
Me Senté en la Cuneta a Llorar” [“When I Sat on the Curb to Cry”], the author puts
other persistent social justifications for violence against women on the page, like “Soy
tan tonta” [“I’m so stupid”] (39) or “Nadie más puede amarme. Solo él. Por eso me pega”
[“No one else can love me. Only him. That’s why he hits me”] (41). Rapimán displays
these discourses and unravels them through the medium of comics by presenting com-
plete narratives that contextualize the violence and the resultant false justifications for it.
The aftermath of the rape in “El Sentido del Silencio” is where Rapimán’s most scathing
critique appears.
The protagonist and the man return to the bar where she finds a group of friends and
informs them about what just happened and asks them to help her get away from the man,
who now wants to take her back to his place. In a single panel showing the faces of the
protagonist’s friends, she narrates “Pero nadie me creyó” [“But no one believed me”] (32).
After finally having to walk home alone, the protagonist is shown in a full-page illustra-
tion contemplating what just happened. As dark tendrils descend from the top of the page,
so do captions with the thoughts: “How do I tell this? To whom? Who could believe me?
It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. I deserve it” (33). Rapimán’s point appears in the
final lines that explain that the protagonist has been locked in her room for four days and
408
Figure 29.5 Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014)
no one has come to check on her, no one has called, no one has asked what happened,
and the comic ends with the words “Esa es la historia” [“that is the story”] (33). I suggest
that the final line offers a cultural critique in that the story, or point, of this comic is not
necessarily the story of the rape, which is not illustrated and which is expressed outside
of the inverse color page, but the story is that silence is the only way that rape could be
communicated in the protagonist’s situation. The story is that no one believed, no one
checked in on her. Thus, Rapimán’s critique of misogynist violence becomes an indict-
ment against the man, her own friends, and society at large, and gives the comic’s title “El
Sentido del Silencio” a cutting bite.
While “El Sentido del Silencio” was first published in 2008 in Monos Serios, the recent
Mayo Feminista marches, which protested sexual abuses by professors and demanded new
methods of addressing sexual harassment and violence across Chile’s educational system,
show that the criticisms offered by Melian Rapimán are still relevant today. As cited above,
many forms of heteronormative violence are exemplified by instructors and then reproduced
by students (Cabello 23). Beyond the comics compiled in Hambre Prístina, Melina Rapimán
has published a collection of dissident embroidery patterns and developed the drag king
persona of Arsenio Guñelve. Currently, Melina Rapimán is heading up a project that looks
beyond the binaries of gender by editing Pan, a collection of comics by trans and non-binary
comic creators to highlight narratives that have not frequently appeared in Chile’s sequential
art. Rapimán’s role in comics has been foundational for female comic creators and feminist
comics and, at the same time, is forward-looking in engaging and creating visual and narra-
tive space for LGBTQ comics.
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Acid Rain
Yaritza Aguilera’s comic Acid Rain (2018), published by Pezarbóreo Ediciones, is a recent
work of sequential art that directly and openly explores masculine homosexuality in Chile
through a juxtaposition of perspectives on out-ness and confronting homophobia between
the comic’s protagonists Angel and Eidan. Acid Rain employs a visual style reminiscent of
yaoi manga where gay or quasi-gay homoeroticism is central to the visual and textual narra-
tive, which I believe allows this Chilean comic to portray gay intimacy in ways that few of
the nation’s comics have. Aguilera’s comic narrative begins by exploring tensions in Angel
and Eidan’s early relationship that culminate in Eidan reflecting on his experience confront-
ing heteronormative society (Figure 29.6).
Eidan is older than Angel and it is insinuated that he has had to live a more carefully
guarded experience as a gay man in Chile. As Eidan takes out the trash, and I believe this
visual metaphor is intended, he observes several hetero couples publicly expressing their
affection, and contemplates: “Tantas parejas expresando lo que sienten abiertamente. Me
enamoré de la misma forma que lo han hecho ellos. ¿Y sin embargo tengo que sentirme
diferente solo porque para los demás es algo difícil de entender?” [“So many couples openly
expressing what they feel. I fell in love in the same way that they have. And still I have to
feel different just because for everyone else it is something hard to understand?”] (Aguilera 5)
(Figure 29.7).
Acid Rain then dedicates a segment of the comic to putting on display the monogamous
commitment shared by Angel and Eidan, which could be read as an attempt to dispel myths
surrounding gay promiscuity while at the same time potentially reproducing what Claudio
Barrientos and Juan Carlos Garrido identify as “la homosexualidad construida desde la heter-
onormatividad” [“homosexuality constructed from heteronormativity”] (48). Eidan’s char-
acter can be read as a representation of Chilean homosexuality that was deprived of the
possibility to exercise its own form of love because it was restricted and exposed to public,
moral, and criminal sanction (48). According to Barrientos and Garrido, many of the early
conceptualizations of dissident sexualities in Chile developed during Aylwin (1990–1994)
and Frei’s (1994–2000) repressive Concertación governments and ended up producing legal
discourses surrounding sodomy that resulted in a heteronormative gay masculinity becoming
the hegemonic model for sexual diversity for decades (26). Although Eidan is written as a
Figure 29.6 Yaritza Aguilera’s Acid Rain (2018)
410
Figure 29.7 Yaritza Aguilera’s Acid Rain (2018)
character who is openly gay, his actions tend to reflect earlier forms of public sexual diversity
than his partner Angel does.
Through a confrontation with the hateful and homophobic character Demian, Angel’s
confrontational effervescence is displayed in contrast to Eidan’s peacekeeping avoidance. At a
birthday party Eidan wipes a bit of sugar from Angel’s face; the panel illustrating Eidan’s fin-
gers on Angel’s lips is shaded in a gray tone that visually links it with the panel showing half
of Demian’s face colored in a similar manner. The close-up panel representing gay intimacy
and the following panel showing Demian’s scowling disgust summarize many instances of
heteronormative reactions to public queer affection and emphasize how heterosexual forms
of public affection are not observed under the same close-up scrutiny. Additionally, this mo-
ment can form a visual braid with Eidan’s contemplation of hetero public intimacy earlier in
the comic and his longing to openly express his love for Angel. The fear and disappointment
Eidan expressed become reality when Demian is introduced to the couple and says to their
mutual friend, “Pero no me dijiste que eran maricones” [“But you didn’t tell me they were
fags”] (Aguilera 19). This panel is angled from above and visually positions Demian as loom-
ing over Eidan and Angel, suggesting a sort of cultural superiority or power wielded by the
antagonist’s homophobic rhetoric and visualizing the intention to marginalize the couple.
This confrontation escalates on the following page with Demian saying, “Qué asquerosos”
[“How disgusting”] (20). Here Aguilera presents a variety of responses to hateful speech: An-
gel shouts and eventually, in preparations to fight, grabs a hold of Demian’s shirt collar; Caro,
the mutual friend, apologizes for Demian’s behavior and tells them not to take him seriously
because he must be drunk or stoned; and Eidan forces a smile, tells Angel not to worry,
and suggests that they leave the party. While Eidan and Angel’s mutual friend’s response
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Sam Cannon
privileges homophobia by ignoring it and uses the command “No le hagan caso” [“Don’t pay
attention to him”] (21), Acid Rain dedicates pages to explore Angel’s anger at both Demian
and Eidan rather than dwell on the all-too-familiar dismissals of bigotry by society at large.
Angel shouts, “¿Y tú por que no hiciste nada, ¡por la mierda!” [“And why didn’t you do
anything, shit!”] as Eidan sits in an armchair at home looking resigned (24). Eidan explains
that the situation was very simple, that Demian felt “invadido” [“invaded”] by seeing a gay
couple being so explicit and that with time Angel will come to understand that things will
never change, that there will always be “cavernícolas” [“cavemen”] like Demian, and that it is
necessary “tener una coraza” [“to have on armor”] wherever you go (25–26). Angel responds
with hope that people are changing and that they will finally accept them as they are. The
discussion is resolved by Eidan saying as long as they can be together then he does not need
anyone else’s acceptance (27). The purpose of the analysis of this scene is not to offer a cri-
tique of how LGBTQ individuals decide to confront homophobic aggression but instead to
signal the strife and interpersonal struggles that it produces. Acid Rain signals the safety of gay
intimacy versus the perils of gay existence in publicly heteronormative spaces, and by explor-
ing the tensions between the two it offers a grim look at the social advances made in Chile.
In their chapter “Amores Clandestinos: Discursos, Prácticas y Escenarios de la Homosex-
ualidad Masculina, Chile 1990–2005” Barrientos and Garrido point out that many openings
have been made in Chilean society for queer expression, but that these “aperturas están aún
llenas de continuidades y legados autoritarios que imposibilitan el acceso a derechos sexuales
diversos y radicales” [“openings are still full of authoritarian continuities and legacies that
make access to diverse and radical sexual rights impossible”] (48). The conclusion to Yaritza
Aguilera’s comic Acid Rain seems to resonate with Barrientos and Garrido’s comment by
ending with Eidan being killed in what appears to be a hate crime. Angel’s dream of a bet-
ter Chile where they are accepted is shattered in the midst of his birthday celebration at a
disco. Just before Eidan’s death, Angel contemplates the disco scene stating, “Esa noche, la
música vibraba con fuerza. La alegría, el festejo y las luces eran más acogedoras que nunca.
Era un ambiente lleno de alegría y libertad. Y a pesar de los excesos y la lujuria exacerbada
caí en cuenta que este es uno de los pocos lugares en donde podemos ser nosotros mismos
sin máscaras” [“That night, the music vibrated with force. The joy, the party, and the lights
were friendlier than ever. It was an environment full of happiness and freedom. And in spite
of the excesses and exacerbated lust, I realized that this is one of the few places where we can
be ourselves without masks”] (Aguilera 30–31). The comic illustrates aspect-to-aspect panels
of the disco, representing a diversity of identity and sexual expressions. Eidan’s beating and
death at the disco echo back to the police raids on movie theaters and discos that served as
hubs for the LGBTQ community during the return to democracy. In comic form, Acid Rain
develops a narrative that juxtaposes beautiful visuals of gay intimacy and celebration with
the reality of homophobic violence in Chile. The visual distancing of the yaoi style permits
Yaritza Aguilera to explore this intimacy and yet the violence with which the comic closes
ruptures the joyful boy love visuals it borrows. The reality suggested here is documented by
MOVILH (Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation) which dubbed 2018 as
the “Year of Fury” against the LGBTQ community and registered a 45% increase in trans
and homophobic cases, including legal actions, beatings, public attacks, and threats (movilh.
cl). While the core of Acid Rain focuses on the relationship between Eidan and Angel, the
contours of their experience are formed by homophobia and heteronormative society. By
reading the moments that put pressure and eventually violence into the lives of the couple,
it becomes possible to see the dangerous realities of the current increases in violence against
the LGBTQ community in Chile.
412
Gay Gigante
Gabriel Ebensperger’s graphic novel Gay Gigante opens with a question that takes on a sinister
tone when placed in dialogue with the implications of Yaritza Aguilera’s Acid Rain: “¿Has
tenido el presentimiento de que aunque quieras, nunca pasarás desapercibido?” [“Have you
had the feeling that even if you wanted to, you can never go unnoticed?”] (20). With the doc-
umented increase in crimes against LGBTQ individuals, a hopeful and empowering comic
like Gay Gigante suggests that hiding and attempts to avoid being noticed are not the answer,
and are maybe not even possible at all. In an interview with the comic creator and historian
Carlos Reyes, the author of Gay Gigante explains:
El libro habla sobre un tipo de miedo a no poder pasar desapercibido, a no poder escond-
erte de ser visto (valga la redundancia). Creciendo no me di cuenta de todo el daño que
ese miedo me estaba haciendo, porque para mí de a poco se fue convirtiendo en parte de
mi vida cotidiana, un modo en que me sentía a menudo. Pero ahora que puedo recordar
y reflexionar con más distancia, con más vivencias en el cuerpo y algo de madurez, me
puedo dar cuenta que sí me paralizó bastante. Cuando tienes miedo no puedes vivir el
presente, porque estás temiendo cosas que -según tú- podrían pasarte.
[The book speaks about a type of fear of never being able to go unnoticed, never
being able to hide from view (it’s worth repeating). Growing up I didn’t realize all the
harm that that fear was causing me, because for me it little by little became a part of
my daily life, how I felt myself in the world. But now that I can remember and reflect
with more distance, with more bodily life experience and a little bit of maturity, I can
recognize that it paralyzed me a lot. When you are afraid, you can’t live in the present,
because you are fearing things that – according to you – could happen.] (ergocomics.cl)
The paralyzing fear that Ebensperger refers to here can link all three comics analyzed in
this project, and the massive activism modeled in the Mayo Feminista protests can be read
as a means of pushing back against that fear through solidarity. In between that paralyzing
fear and large-scale solidarity, we can also find graffiti speaking from the walls or fuchsia
comics as other forms of solidarity and empowerment. While I do not wish to conflate the
two, I believe that in the recent Chilean context the activism of the Mayo Feminista also
represents queer activism as the demands made of the Chilean educational system clearly
expressed reforms to protect and empower sexual dissidents. In addition to this, the Chilean
cultural critic Nelly Richard recently engaged in a conference with Judith Butler in Santiago
to discuss not only feminist but broader queer themes as well. As a result of this conference
Richard commented in an interview:
Creo que el feminismo debe seguir refinando sus instrumentos de comprensión analítica
para hacer frente a los neofascismos, que ya no hablan el mismo lenguaje del fascismo
histórico, sino que movilizan las pasiones primarias del odio, el temor y la venganza en
los planos miniaturizados del inconsciente colectivo, en los que se entromete la cultura
mediática como fábrica de subjetividades dóciles.
[I believe that feminism must continue to refine its instruments of analytical com-
prehension to confront neofascisms, that no longer speak the same language as historic
fascism, but that mobilize the primary passions of hate, fear, and vengeance on the min-
iaturized planes of the collective unconscious, where media culture intrudes as a factory
of docile subjectivities.] (Keve)
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Sam Cannon
What Richard, the Mayo Feminista protests, and Gay Gigante are all communicating is that
there is an alternative to fear, and I offer that feminist and queer comics in Chile form part of
the cultural process that engages on those miniaturized planes of the collective unconscious
to promote change and empowerment.
Gabriel Ebensperger develops a narrative of change and empowerment by focusing on the
personal as a realm of struggle and acceptance. The graphic novel opens with the protago-
nist leaving Santiago and entering a tunnel on the drive to an unknown destination. This
journey becomes important and I will return to this topic later. On this drive the fourth wall
of the comic is broken as the protagonist looks directly at the reader as he begins to explain
the impossibility of going unnoticed. A sequence of instances that served as clues to his own
sexuality and identity are listed: playing with dolls, not playing soccer, singing Yuri songs,
and loving Alanis Morisette among others. But the most significant moment was when he
looked at himself in a photo and recognized himself by stating: “Oh qué gay… Y qué… gi-
gante” [“Oh how gay… And how… giant”] (Ebensperger 34). It is the following page where
Ebensperger explains “Un gay gigante no se puede esconder” [“A gay giant cannot hide”]
(35). From this point forward the graphic novel then invites the reader into the intimacy of
the protagonist’s life, exploring his family, friends, work, relationship to TV characters, and
loneliness. While I opened this section referring to solidarity and the collective power of
the Mayo Feminista, Gay Gigante contrasts the effervescent political protest with intimate
loneliness (Figure 29.8).
I suggest that this internal place is where queer identity and future solidarity can be
developed, and Ebensperger maps this personal journey from isolation to solidarity in his
graphic novel. As cited earlier, the fear of being out, of self-acceptance, is paralyzing and
isolating, and it is precisely this reason that the current production of queer comics in Chile
is so important. Narratives like Gay Gigante, Acid Rain, Melina Rapimán’s forthcoming Pan,
the feminist magazine Brígida, and other comics offer miniaturized planes of knowing and
sharing, and importantly visualizations of queer existence. In this way comics can contribute
to the development of personal self-acceptance and empowerment.
Figure 29.8 Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay Gigante (2015)
414
In the case of Gay Gigante, these visualizations include the protagonist’s first experience
masturbating to Fox Mulder from The X-Files, discovering the #gaychile chat room, and the
joy of a first kiss, but one of the comic’s most important moments is when the protagonist
faces his own internalized homophobia after his first kiss. With a full-page illustration that
centers the protagonist and leaves ample empty space around his figure, the isolated character
thinks to himself, “Mari… ugh… homo… gay…” (235). The isolated image of the protago-
nist on this page centralizes the fact that these forms of learned self-hate can happen without
anyone else present.
Ebensperger handles this moment by rupturing what is actually an extended flashback to
point out that his youthful fear of being called a “maricón travesti peluquero” [“gay cross-
dressing barber”] was absurd and commenting that today it is “una combinación demasiado
cool. Aunque quizás demasiado cool aún para un lugar tan santo y fino como $hile [sic]” [“a
combination that is too cool. Although maybe still too cool for a place as holy and refined
as $hile”] (236).
This rupture then takes on the form of an imaginary rewriting of the past, a sequential
art love letter to the comic’s young protagonist. The isolated teen struggling with his own
internalized homophobia looks up to see a 1974 Citroen CX, decked out like the Back to
the Future Delorean, descend from above. From the futuristic flying Citroen CX appears
the future Gay Gigante with white hair and beard, wearing a long glittering duster. The
future version of the protagonist explains that he arrived precisely at the moment when he
was having “un momento dramático ‘soy gaaaay’” [“a dramatic ‘I’m gaaaay’ moment”] be-
cause that moment was his only chance to not end up alone in a dystopic future (where all
pigeons were extinct due to a flesh-eating moth plague) (246). The emphasis placed on alone
brings this moment back into dialogue with the earlier reflections on loneliness, while the
appearance of the protagonist’s future self visually plays on the ideas of self-acceptance as a
path to, what I would suggest is the opposite of loneliness, solidarity. This can even mean
solidarity with one’s self.
The final sequence of Gay Gigante is a peyote flued dance with Bjork that ends with a face-
to-face encounter and embrace between the protagonist and a mirrored image of himself.
This all fuchsia self-acceptance is one ending to the comic journey that opened the graphic
novel, but when teaching this comic to a group of undergraduate students they brought an-
other possible ending and interpretation of Gay Gigante to my attention. At the beginning of
this chapter, as well as the beginning of the discussion I had with my students at Louisiana
State University Shreveport, I focused on the fold-over cover for use in heteronormative
spaces. What I failed to study was how this functioned for the back cover of the graphic
novel. When we were concluding our discussion, a student pointed out that when the back
cover is unfolded a photo of the protagonist with what we supposed could be his partner,
two children, a house, and two cats appears. The car parked near the house connects this
final destination with the drive away from Santiago that opens the graphic novel. A possible
reading of this potential alternate ending is that the lonely journey taken throughout the
graphic novel does lead to community, solidarity, and joy. Camila Gutiérrez points out in her
introduction to Gay Gigante, “…la soledad, que es pura valentía, me parece bellísima porque
no implica la ausencia de un proyecto de comunidad: Gay Gigante está solo, todos lo estamos,
somos un grupo de un montón de solos, y en esa modulación comunitaria radica algo pro-
fundamente político” [“…loneliness, which is pure bravery, seems beautiful to me because
it does not imply the absence of a project of community: Gay Gigante is alone, we all are,
we are a group of a bunch of alone individuals, and in that community modulation resides
something deeply political”] (10). Just because we are alone or lonely does not mean that the
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journey won’t lead to internal change or political empowerment. Gay Gigante serves as a love
letter and a fuchsia guide through self-acceptance to potential solidarity and community.
As noted earlier, in Chile, 2018 was identified as the “Año de la Furia” [“Year of Fury”]
against “activistas y personas Lesbianas, Gays, Bisexuales, Trans e Intersexuales” [“activists and
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex persons”] (movilh.cl), and during the same year
large-scale protests demanding changes to make education more inclusive, less sexist, less ho-
mophobic, less transphobic, and less ableist also occurred. It is in this context that Chilean comic
artists produce works that press against heteronormativity and offer a popular culture space
where queer experiences are visualized. In Chile, comics have been an important feature of
recovering memory that was repressed under the military dictatorship, and I suggest that just
as Hugo Hinojosa Lobos points out about comics dealing with the dictatorship, that comics
exploring feminist and LGBTQ experiences are “un gesto profundamente político” [“a deeply
political gesture”] (58). Likewise, these comics form an important cultural dialogue about fear
and violence that help to inform readers about the ways “in which meanings about crime and
justice are negotiated and contested in comic books and the way these imaginings form part
of a broader cultural context in which readers absorb, reproduce, and resist notions of justice”
(Phillips & Strobl 2). The movement and circulation of comics and their content form a network
of visualizations of feminist and queer experiences that can help to transform understandings
and culture by framing the restrictions and limitation patriarchal heteronormativity places on
individuals and society. These comic artists are drawing against these limiting frameworks by
creating panels and frames that are inclusive rather than restrictive.
I would like to offer another reading of the tourist guide presented on Gay Gigante’s “portada
familiar para lecturas en lugares heteronormados” [“family-friendly cover for reading in heter-
onormative spaces”] as a manner of returning and closing this chapter (Ebensperger). I propose
that Gay Gigante, and other feminist and queer comics, can serve as methods of mapping queer-
ness, and that comics allow this through the grid and block networks that give form to these queer
guides to Chile. The false travel guide cover created by Gabriel Ebensperger suggested the idea of
comics as maps to me, and I look to each of the gutters and panels in these comics as intersections
and sites of engagement, negotiation, and learning. Visually, the movements of the Mayo Femini-
sta protests across Chile, sites of violence against women and the LGBTQ community, and spaces
of community and solidarity can be plotted across the grids and blocks of maps as well as comics.
Hambre Prístina, Acid Rain, and Gay Gigante are only a few of the guides that map out queer expe-
rience and offer challenges against “los normales” [“the normals”] or the caste of the governing
patriarchal heterosexuality, as Cristeva Cabello states (25). Beyond the few titles explored here,
there are creators such as MJ Barros, Gaspar Dos, Rowein, Maliki, Pati Aguilera, Sol Díaz, Isabel
Molina, Bernardita Ojeda Labourdette, Daniela Viviani, Vicente Casanova, Catalina Bu, and
Natalia Silva (among many others) that are making comics that critique heteronormative and
patriarchal society. Likewise, Chilean academics such as Camila Gutiérrez and Nicole Larrondo
are producing important research at the nexus of comics and queer studies. All of these works
form constellations, panels, gutters, blocks, and grids of signification that help to map out a fuchsia
guide to feminist and queer experience in Chile. The 150,000 protesters that took the streets of
Santiago during the Mayo Feminista protest, the prolonged takeovers of universities, the fuchsia
graffiti denouncing violent machismo, and the feminist and queer comics being produced suggest
that Chile is a gay giant that cannot hide. These queer graphic novels can serve as the guides and
snap shots of a nation that is being pushed to look at its own photos, so to speak, and to say, like
Gay Gigante’s protagonist, “Oh qué gay… Y qué… gigante” [“Oh how gay… And how… giant”]
(Ebensperger 34).
416
Works Cited
Aguilera, Yaritza. Acid Rain. Santiago: Pezarbóreo Ediciones, 2018.
Barrientos, Claudio and Juan Carlos Garrido. “Amores Clandestinos: Discursos, Prácticas y Escenarios
de la Homosexualidad Masculina, Chile 1990–2005.” Políticas del Amor: Derechos Sexuales y Escrituras
Disidentes en el Cono Sur. Edited by Fernando A. Blanco, Mario Pecheny, and Joseph M. Pierce.
Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2018.
Batarce, Catalina. “El Petitorio de las Alumnas que Mantienen Toma en Casa Central de la U.
Católica.” La Tercera, www.latercera.com. Accessed 15 July 2019.
Batarce, Catalina and D. Silva. “Dirigentas Cifran en 150 Mil los Asistentes a la Marcha por la Edu-
cación No Sexista.” La Tercera, www.latercera.com. Accessed 15 July 2019.
Cabello, Cristeva. “Educación No Sexista y Binarismos de Género. Agitaciones Feministas y Disiden-
cias Sexuales Secundarias en la Escuela.” Mayo Feminista: La Rebelión Contra el Patriarcado. Edited by
Faride Zerán. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2018. 21–34.
Castillo, Alejandra. “De la Revuelta Feminista, la Historia y Julieta Kirkwood.” Mayo Feminista: La
Rebelión Contra el Patriarcado. Edited by Faride Zerán. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2018. 35–48.
Ebensperger, Gabriel. Gay Gigante: Una Historia Sobre el Miedo. Santiago: Catalonia, 2015.
Fischer, Carl. Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2016.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Gutiérrez, Camila. “Este es el Prólogo.” Gay Gigante. Edited by Catalina Infante. Santiago: Catalonia,
2015. 8–11.
Hinojosa Lobos, Hugo. “Una Memoria Ilustrada: Problemas de la Narrativa Gráfica Histórica Con-
temporánea en Chile.” CuCo, Cuadernos de Cómic. No. 11, Dec. 2018. 52–80.
Keve, Carolina. “Nelly Richard y el Sexo de la Escritura.” Clarín, www.clarin.com. Accessed 15 July
2019.
MOVILH. “Preocupante: Un 45% Aumentaron los Casos por Homofobia y Transfobia en Chile en un
Año Calificado como de <<la furia>>.” MOVILH, www.movilh.cl. Accessed 15 July 2019.
Phillips, Nickie D. and Staci Strobl. Comic Book Crime: Truth Justice, and the American Way. New York:
New York University Press, 2013.
Plaza, Vicho. “Sentir Hambre Prístina.” Hambre Prístina. Santiago: Tabula Rasa Limitada, 2014. 7–10.
Rapimán, Melina. Hambre Prístina. Santiago: Tabula Rasa Limitada, 2014.
Reyes, Carlos. “Gay Gigante: Una Lucha Sentimental.” Ergocomics, www.ergocomics.cl. Accessed 15
July 2019.
Rojas Lizana, Ariel and Sol Rojas Lizana. Historias Clandestinas. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2014.
Zerán, Faride. “Prólogo: Escrituras Rebeldes para Tiempos de Cambios.” Mayo Feminista: La Rebelión
Contra el Patriarcado. Edited by Faride Zerán. Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2018. 9–20.
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30
Questioning obscenity
The place of “pussy” in manga
and the world
Lindsey Stirek
Artist and manga author Rokudenashiko is perhaps best known internationally for her
3DMK Boat, a yellow kayak fitted with an enlarged 3D scan of the artist’s manko (used
interchangeably with “pussy” in translations of her work and writings) and decorated in
bright colors. The work was funded via crowdfunding, and contributors received the digital
file of the 3D scan so they could print and decorate their own artwork from it. She gained
even more fame from the ensuing arrest, obscenity charge, and court case that stunned the
art world and social activists worldwide. Her manga What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good
for Nothing Artist and Her Pussy, published following her first arrest, is a memoir tracking
Rokudenashiko’s experience with the Japanese legal system, but the message it conveys is one
that has resonated with feminists the world over.
Historical precedent of obscenity

The immediate situation surrounding the arrest and the historical precedents surrounding
the legal term “obscenity” in Japan are important to fully setting the backdrop of the manga.
On July 12, 2014, Rokudenashiko, also known by her legal name, Megumi Igarashi, was
taken into custody by police for charges related to obscenity. She was handcuffed and forbid-
den to change clothes, put on her wig, or fix her makeup. At the police station, she was forced
to endure a strip search, called by a number instead of her name, and subjected to myriad psy-
chological cruelties by the police. She was released from jail on July 18, 2014, but would be
arrested a second time for obscenity-related charges on December 3, 2014 along with fellow
gallerist, Minori Kitahara, who is known to have created the first sex toy shop exclusively
for women in Japan. Rokudenashiko would be held 20 days beyond her arrest processing
procedure, the maximum allowed by Japanese law before charges must be brought. She was
officially charged with “Digital Electronic Distribution,” referring to the 3D print data of
her vulva she sent to her crowdfunding contributors, on December 24, 2014. She would
ultimately be found guilty of electronic distribution of obscene materials, and paid a fine of
400,000 yen (close to $3,400.00 by the December 2014 exchange rate) as punishment.
At the core of the arrest and ensuing court case is the question, what is “obscenity?” The
short answer is, technically, there is not a legal definition of it in Japan. However, according
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to the Japanese courts’ interpretation of Article 175 of the Criminal Code of Japan, which
forbids distribution of obscene materials, it is “anything illiciting sexual desire, excitement or
arousal in vain, or that violates a reasonable person’s sense of propriety, or principles of righ-
teous and moral sexuality” (Rokudenashiko 36). This is a purposefully vague definition and
its interpretation can therefore change with each case presented before the court. The case
against Sei Itō’s translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was famously protracted, lasting from
1951 to 1957, but eventually resulted in a guilty verdict and set the precedent for the working
definition of obscenity previously quoted. The less well-known 2002 case against the erotic
manga Honey Room, the first obscenity case against a manga, also ended in a guilty verdict. In
Rokudenashiko’s case, she was found guilty on the charge of “digital electronic distribution
of obscene materials” and not guilty on the charge of “public display of obscene materials.”
The hypocrisy of the ruling—how can something not be obscene when displayed but be-
comes obscene when distributed via internet?—has not gone unnoted by Rokudenashiko
and her supporters, and her legal team has vowed to appeal the ruling.
In looking at this legal precedent, however, there is a major difference in the three works
charged as obscenity. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a work of erotic prose fiction with scenes that
are sexually graphic, whether you consider them tasteful or not. Honey Room is a pornographic
manga, not remarkable in that regard, but singled out for its particularly graphic depictions of rape
and torture and a lower level of self-censorship than other pornographic manga. Rokudenashiko’s
work, however, does not depict sexual acts or attempt to induce sexual arousal in any way. The
only way it could be construed as obscenity is if we consider manko, a body part possessed by about
half the world’s population, inherently sexual, and the mere sight of it, therefore, to be sexually
arousing. This gives rise to the question: if manko are inherently sexual, then are penises as well?
If so, then there are many cases of obscenity in Japan that have gone unprosecuted for longer than
Rokudenashiko has been alive. Artistic or otherwise, works featuring genitalia in various states of
censorship have been part of Japan’s history long before this moment in time.
Censorship
In the United States and other Western countries, several social movements regarding wom-
en’s bodies have gained ground in recent years. One such movement, #FreeTheNipple, tar-
gets the same kind of hypocrisy evident in the existence of a penis festival and the arrest
of a pussy artist. Why are men’s nipples uncensored in social media and women’s must be
censored, even and particularly in non-sexual situations? While nipples are not subjected to
the same censorship in Japan as in Western countries, the deeper issue of over-censorship of
women’s bodies and indifference toward censorship of men’s bodies is the same. Similarly, the
Menstrual Movement has been acting to destigmatize menstruation, which has long been a
taboo subject, and which is very closely linked to the misogyny inherent in tamping down
discussion of the pussy in non-sexual terms. Pussy stigmatization, and control/censorship of
women’s bodies in general, is by no means a problem limited to Japan.
Taking a deeper look at censorship, defining what must be censored and what may be
spared has proven difficult in Japan. Pornography, including but not limited to erotic an-
ime, manga, and live-action film, must pixelate or blur out genitalia, unless it is produced
for the international market, in which case it gets a free pass. Lack of sufficient censorship
is what landed Honey Room in hot water, and until the 1990s, “sufficient censorship”
included even pubic hair, effectively banning nude portraits and the like. Several works
greatly loosened censorship criteria in Japan, including the notable book Mapplethorpe,
a collection of black-and-white photos including several full-frontal nudes of both men
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and women. Though ruled as obscenity by the Tokyo High Court in 2003, the Supreme
Court overruled it in 2007, ruling that the book was “composed from an artistic view-
point,” and the pictures “do not directly depict scenes of sexual intercourse,” so “it is
difficult to find it to be appealing primarily to the sexual interest of people who see it”
(Supreme Court of Japan).
Shunga, which gained much of its current fame from exhibits designed by the British
Museum, are Japanese erotic woodblock prints that, radically different from Mapplethorpe,
are specifically intended to arouse to the extent that they were used as masturbatory mate-
rial. They feature detailed illustrations of (mostly) men and women having intercourse. The
penises are often abnormally oversized and are typically the focal point of these images, but
illustrations of vulvas, including the famous one of an octopus performing cunnilingus on
a naked woman, are frequent as well. They were considered obscenity and censored from
display in Japan until Toyo Bunko Museum finally took a chance and ran an exhibit from
August 20 to December 26, 2014 in which several shunga were included. Following the
success of the Toyo Bunko exhibit (and a lack of government interference), the Eisei Bunko
Museum in Tokyo opened an exhibit in 2015 that took over the entire museum and featured
exclusively shunga. This exhibit was created with support from the British Museum, and
also had a gift shop with folders, postcards, tote bags, etc., with shunga prints. In 2016, there
was another shunga exhibit at the Hosomi Museum in Kyoto. All of these exhibits were im-
mensely popular; when I attended the one at Eisei Bunko toward the end of the exhibit run,
I waited in line for more than two hours with hundreds of other people still behind me, and
the museum workers reported to me that every day had been as crowded.
Looking at contemporary Japanese artists, Ken Kagami has been creating work on the
Tokyo art scene since the early 2000s with a main motif of humorous and unusual takes on
bodily functions and sex organs. In an interview with SHIPS MAG, a fashion and lifestyle
magazine, he claims to particularly enjoy using sexual items that are “fake” in his work and
examining the gap between adults’ perception of such things and a childlike interpretation
of them. Some of Ken Kagami’s art features cartoon penises and pussies with smiling faces,
one piece features a toy model penis pushed through the front door of a doll house, and
yet another features a cartoon dog performing fellatio on a cartoon man. At the Frieze Art
Fair 2015 in London, Kagami did live cartooning of guests’ penises or breasts, though he
refrained from drawing pussy caricatures, claiming “it’s difficult because it has no character”
(Frizell). Though he primarily works on the international art circuit, his work was on display
at the Parco Museum in Ikebukuro, Tokyo until late 2018.
These developments would seem to suggest a general trend away from censorship, partic-
ularly in art, and toward a more limited definition of obscenity; however, Rokudenashiko
was charged for obscenity only seven years after the Mapplethorpe ruling and was released on
bail the exact same day the Toyo Bunko exhibit featuring shunga ended. Rokudenashiko’s
exhibit was being monitored by police collecting evidence against her while SHIPS MAG
was releasing their interview of Ken Kagami. What is unique about Rokudenashiko and her
work that makes her a target for government intervention? The main difference seems to
be that she is a woman representing women’s bodies in a way that does not cater to or even
acknowledge men’s pleasure. During a similar time frame, other artists, like Ryudai Takano
whose exhibit at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art included several full frontal, non-
sexual nudes, also have been targeted by police intervention, suggesting a move back toward
a more conservative view of obscenity. Meanwhile, Japanese pornography in its uncensored
cut is distributed around the world without such scrutiny by the police. This hypocrisy
moves beyond the art world. It is entrenched in society.
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Societal hypocrisy and power dynamics

One example of societal hypocrisy brought up in What Is Obscenity? is Japan’s Kanamara
Matsuri held annually in the city of Kawasaki, a festival that celebrates fertility, specifi-
cally by displaying large penis sculptures. The mythical origins of the festival reinforce
a fear of vaginas, as the original steel phallus around which the festival is based is said
to have been created to break the teeth of a demon living inside a woman’s vagina that
kept biting the penises off her lovers. In this narrative, the penis is literally the hero of
the tale, while the vagina is both the monster and victim. This problematic origin story
has resulted in a veneration of the penis while vaginas are generally much less visible at
the festival. Aside from the penis displays, vendors sell penis-themed items such as penis
lollipops, penis decorations, drinks that are supposed to taste like semen, and more. You
can also find one or two vulva-themed items, mostly limited to lollipops and a sake the
name of which is spelled in such a way that it could be read as manko. When I attended
in 2016, the vulva lollipops were sold in a set with penis lollipops at a ratio of about 5:1,
while the manko-named sake was sold in a set with another sake named after testicles.
While the festival is touted as celebrating fertility, female genitalia, an absolutely integral
source of fertility, tend to be represented “only in contrast to the male” (Frischherz 252),
and certainly not as something celebrated in its own right.
Additionally, although the genitalia-related goods are sold openly and displayed publicly, no
obscenity charge has ever been pressed against any participants or vendors at Kanamara Matsuri.
This is in stark contrast to Rokudenashiko’s artworks which were distributed to far fewer people,
displayed to a limited audience of gallery attendees, and which were never intended to arouse.
Unlike penis lollipops, which are created for the express purpose of imitating fellatio, Rokudena-
shiko’s Manko-chan figurines, 3DMK Boat, Dioramanko, and Deco-man sculptures are not in-
tended for use in performing or imitating sexual acts. And yet, the reaction to the simple creation
of a non-sexual, often humorous artwork featuring manko is completely different from the passive
amusement shown toward people sucking on penis lollipops. In her manga, Rokudenashiko
describes the fury and disgust of many men, and sexually charged comments and leering from
others. Rather than let it deter her, she decided “to keep making even more ridiculous work, with
all seriousness” (Rokudenashiko 4). Her work rebels by celebrating manko in much the same way
the penis is celebrated at Kanamara Matsuri, and her direct reference to the festival takes aim at
the hypocrisy it represents in society at large.
Though Rokudenashiko expresses a desire to spread celebration of manko to the world, her ire
toward the kind of hypocrisy revealed in Kanamara Matsuri seems reserved for Japan. On pages
48–49, a quote from The Economist about Japan’s methods of extracting confessions and convicting
based upon them is printed across from a photograph of a penis sculpture that is one of the trav-
eling mikoshi (a portable Shinto shrine) at Kanamara Matsuri. The sense of condemnation toward
Japanese society is apparent, but the connection between the phallus festival and forcing criminal
confessions is less obvious. By juxtaposing these images without further explanation of a specific
connection in the surrounding text, she encourages her readers to identify a larger social issue. By
page 112, however, it is spelled out a bit more (Figure 30.1).
In the upper left-hand corner of the last panel, directly next to the illustration of the same
phallus that appears in the photograph on page 49, the words “Japan the great and power-
ful…” are written. The phallus is depicted being carried by men, as it is at the festival, a
portable Shinto shrine in which resides a deity, ostensibly a penis deity. Even without getting
into a discussion of Shinto’s history and its connection to machismo and patriarchy, this im-
age shows a clear connection between maleness and power.
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Figure 30.1 Rokudenashiko. What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good for Nothing Artist and Her
Pussy. Koyama Press, 2016, p. 112
However, preceding this, Rokudenashiko questions the validity of this connection by

portraying herself in a position of power at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club and aligning
herself with the international community it represents. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club
invites her to speak, bringing her into affiliation with “high dignitaries and celebrities”
(Rokudenashiko 110), and then takes her picture to be placed on the wall alongside those fa-
mous people, legitimizing her as a powerful figure. On page 111, Rokudenashiko is replaced
by Manko-chan, suggesting that Rokudenashiko sees the appearance as an opportunity for
liberation of the pussy and for all women by extension. Another time we see Manko-chan
substituted for Rokudenashiko is on page 43, where we see her in the jail cell with her room-
mates. This is part of a two-page spread, and page 42 shows two quotes from Pablo Picasso
and Rokudenashiko, respectively, about art as rebellion. Here too, she aligns herself with a
powerful figure—is there a more well-known artist than Picasso?—and then replaces herself
with Manko-chan, suggesting that her imprisonment was akin to the suppression of both art
and women’s bodies. Simultaneously, the figure of Manko-chan represents the same pussy art
the police are trying to suppress as obscene, so in depicting Manko-chan instead of herself,
Rokudenashiko is reasserting her own power just as she does on page 111.
She further asserts her power through use of the word manko itself. The word manko is
so taboo in Japan that when I first learned of Rokudenashiko’s work and explained it to my
Japanese friends, that single word brought about a total shut down of the conversation. Not
only were they completely unwilling to utter the word themselves, but simply hearing it
seemed to cause them crippling embarrassment. The word chinko, meaning penis, however,
tended to cause laughter rather than distress, and no one objected to use of the word, partic-
ularly when uttered by my male friends. To combat this same discrepancy, Rokudenashiko
tries to humorize and normalize the word manko. She does this by making unexpected,
humorous word connections as well as by making her characters use the word constantly.
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For example, she opens the English edition of her manga with the words, “Mannichiwa,
America!” This combines manko and konnichiwa, Japanese for hello, in an innocuous and
humorous greeting. She also calls the river on which she launched her 3DMK Boat the
Tama(nko) River, playing off a combination of the Tama River and manko.
Rokudenashiko also turns society’s own scorn for manko against them by forcing them
to use the word manko. There is a moment in chapter 13, on page 81, when she rejects the
police officer’s rephrasing of manko as “female genitalia,” and when she realizes that the offi-
cial suspect statement will be read in court, she forces the police to edit the statement to use
the word manko exclusively. Following procedure, the officer must read the statement back,
and on page 83 is depicted blushing with embarrassment and surrounded by Manko-chan
illustrations with a gleeful Rokudenashiko looking on (Figure 30.2).
This is a depiction of victory for manko in both word and image; it is a handcuffed and
demoralized woman versus the cop holding the keys, and she wins simply by insisting on
using the word manko.
These assertions of power in the manga are representations of power assertions she has
made in real life, and it is this seizure of power and retraction of the idea of male entitlement
to the female body that causes so much resentment among “a bunch of small-minded men”
(Rokudenashiko 4). The final panel of page 162 toward the end of the manga pushes back
against policing of manko with one simple question: “Who does your ‘manko’ belong to?”
One way Rokudenashiko attempts to answer this question is by addressing the problem
of censorship as a power dynamic. There is some level of censorship in What Is Obscenity?
on behalf of Shimako Iwai, an actress and writer who came to interview Rokudenashiko.
This censorship is in the form of a circle with a plus in the middle instead of an illustration
of Shimako-san’s vulva in the panel depicting Rokudenashiko making a mold to create more
pussy art.
Though this certainly could serve the purpose of preventing further obscenity charges,
this time against her manga, within this particular scene, Rokudenashiko expresses a sense
of obligation to protect Shimako-san from scrutiny and particularly from police scrutiny, so
it seems just as likely that the censorship is for Shimako-san’s sake rather than any particular
urge to maintain censorship standards on Rokudenashiko’s part. This functions as a sort of
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relinquishment of control. In censoring that particular image, Rokudenashiko is indicating

that she does not own rights to Shimako-san’s manko. At the same time, Shimako-san had
given Rokudenashiko permission to take a mold of and replicate her manko to create art-
works, and the resulting artwork templates in the following panels are not censored. There
is a clear differentiation between Shimako-san’s manko and the manko molds created from it.
Rokudenashiko does not take control of Shimako-san’s manko simply because she has per-
mission to create the artworks from its likeness.
There are other instances of nudity (mainly Rokudenashiko’s own) and portrayals of manko,
often as the character Manko-chan, but the previous is the only instance of self-censorship in the
manga. This is fitting, since according to the definition set by the Japanese Supreme Court in the
Mapplethorpe case, none of her works, divorced as they are from even the suggestion of intercourse
and in fact taking the pussy to be a body part disconnected from the body as a whole, can be
considered “appealing primarily to the sexual interest of people who see it.” Not utilizing cen-
sorship is Rokudenashiko’s statement of ownership of her own image, and censorship of another
woman’s pussy is equally a statement about ownership and the choice not to encroach on some-
one else’s ownership. This fleeting moment in the manga is actually a microcosm of the larger
message repeated throughout the work. As she does literally on page 162, throughout the manga
via moments like these Rokudenashiko begs us to question, “Who gets to decide that pussy is
obscene? Who owns the rights to a woman’s pussy?” She does this in subtle ways, like in the panel
in Figure 30.3, and less subtle ways, as in her speech during her press conference on page 113 and
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her direct question of the same nature on page 162. Ultimately, she leads us to a definitive answer:
women own their own pussies and they are not obscene.
Innocent bodies
This is not to say that Rokudenashiko thinks obscenity does not exist, simply that her body
and her work do not fall into that category. She brings up the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case in
her interview with Sion Sono on page 127, and includes her lawyer’s quotation of the court’s
ruling from the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case on page 36 of What Is Obscenity? However,
Rokudenashiko avoids mentioning the Honey Room case in connection to her own despite
very likely being aware of it. One reason for this is evident in the beginning of the manga,
on page 4; men’s reaction to pussy art was to immediately associate it with sex. While she
avoids condemning the sex act, it is treated as something generally unrelated to manko, and
especially manko art. As previously mentioned, unlike the creator of the pornographic manga
Honey Room, Rokudenashiko is not in the business of encouraging sexual arousal through
her work. She has a separate work entitled My Body Is Obscene? Why Are Only Lady Parts
Taboo?, the very title of which suggests that the author considers the body itself as innocent.
This innocence of the body is reflected in What Is Obscenity? through non-sexualized images
of manko and naked bodies as well as in attitudes of characters, particularly in depictions of
Rokudenashiko herself (Figure 30.4).
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In the first three panels on page 9, the innocence of the body, and particularly manko, is
shown in the second panel in stark contrast to the sexualized interpretations of women and
their bodies in the panel preceding and following. The first panel shows Rokudenashiko
as a child, innocently talking about manko and being censored by her mother and flipping
through a magazine and finding the word and image of manko censored. The second panel
presents a full-frontal nude illustration of a woman next to an image of a baby suggesting
the blamelessness of women, who are simply born with manko further underscored by the
ultimate image of innocence, an infant, which was born via manko. The third panel features
Rokudenashiko with a bewildered look on her face up against a crowd of unidentified people
making lewd remarks about Rokudenashiko because of her choice to use the word manko.
These three panels drive home the delineation between the innocence of manko as a body
part—and Rokudenashiko by extension—and the forced sexualization and censorship of it
by a misguided public. Manko is sexualized via outside pressure, and is not inherently sexual
on its own. This reasoning extends to Rokudenashiko’s justification for her art as well, which
she puts forth specifically to combat the view of manko as obscene.
This point is driven home even further by the final section of the manga entitled “This Is
My Story” in which Manko-chan is the main character on a journey of self-discovery. She is
portrayed as naïve and innocent, and so when she is shown revulsion and sexual aggression in
turn simply for existing, the reader’s sympathy goes out to the crying figure of Manko-chan,
the innocent, injured party. It is particularly important to note of this section that the reader
is invited to sympathize with and relate to Manko-chan’s plight. At the end of the section on
page 176, readers are invited not only to relate to the story, but to see themselves in it, the
final words of the manga insisting, “This may be my story but it could be yours too.”
Community
Although What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good for Nothing Artist and Her Pussy is presented
in the title as one woman’s story, throughout the work, Rokudenashiko lets it be known that
she is part of a larger movement and a larger community.
One way in which she conveys a sense of community in the manga is through the in-
troduction of specific people such as Shimako-san and Kazuyuki Minami, one of her law-
yers, alongside numerous unnamed people who praise her work and show general support
for her plight. Her inclusion of a two-page spread (102–103) of the Change.org petition
#FreeMegumi, which generated 21,182 signatures on her behalf, also imparts the importance
of her supporters, and suggests to readers that they, too, are part of that larger community.
Another way she conveys community is through direct outreach to readers. In her introduc-
tion on page 6, she encourages readers to pay attention to her blog and communicate with
her on Twitter. She also has an active Facebook page through which she shared information
about her trial and which she now uses to promote like-minded projects such as the Vagina
Museum in the UK which is currently running a crowdfunding campaign.
Though she does not reference them directly, Rokudenashiko is also part of a commu-
nity of feminist comics artists. There are many excellent works to compare with What Is
Obscenity?, but in addressing policing of women and their bodies and in addressing the trauma
of feeling powerless, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming stand out as
particularly relevant. In Persepolis, though the style of policing is different, Satrapi is depicted
fighting the same kind of discrimination against women’s bodies that Rokudenashiko fights
in her manga. The section of Persepolis entitled “The Socks” brings up the idea of obscenity
when a patrol officer demands Satrapi stop running because “your behind makes movements
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that are…how do you say…obscene!” (301). In the next panel, Satrapi flips the scenario and
shifts the blame onto the officer, commanding that he stop staring at her “ass,” and in us-
ing the word “ass” she refuses to use the euphemism “behind” and conform to the officer’s
attempt to force their ideals upon her. In directing him to change his actions, she rejects
responsibility for the officer’s perception as well, making the idea of obscenity a problem
with him, not a problem with her. This is just one instance of women’s many small struggles
for power over their own image in Persepolis, but ultimately Satrapi boils down the reason
for the policing to the same conclusion Rokudenashiko suggests: maintaining men’s power
over women.
To some extent, What Is Obscenity? is a mode through which Rokudenashiko is able
to work through her traumatic experience and seize back power after being trapped in a
situation that left her utterly powerless, and this is very much parallel to Una’s Becoming Un-
becoming, which gives the main character a voice after her sexual trauma left her powerless
and voiceless. On the cover of Becoming Unbecoming, we see Una holding her empty speech
bubble, isolated, voiceless, and alone. Rokudenashiko also shows moments of isolation, par-
ticularly in chapter 5 of “Why I Became a Manko Artist” when her work is rejected because
she will not censor it, she contemplates suicide and is depicted alone and miserable, crying
on the floor (Rokudenashiko 153). Yet both Una and Rokudenashiko are buoyed up by
other women who support them directly and indirectly. Rokudenashiko is saved from sui-
cidal ideations a page after she expresses them, thanks to a fan who expresses her admiration.
Though the fan is one person, the final panel of their encounter on page 154 shows that
Rokudenashiko felt solidarity with a larger group of women symbolized by the chain of
Manko-chan in the background. On page 121 of Becoming Unbecoming, a globe surrounded
by empty speech bubbles shows Una is not alone in her forced silence, and the depiction of
the women who came forward in the Cosby trial on pages 128–129 along with the words,
“The more numerous we are, the harder it will be for the world to ignore us,” suggests that
through a community of women, Una was able to find her own voice. In Persepolis as well,
Satrapi is not without her own women’s support system, who rebel against the misogynistic
Iranian regime right along with her.
These three women graphic artists also find a way to deal with their trauma and reestab-
lish their own identities through creating their graphic memoirs. Becoming Unbecoming allows
Una to “claim representational control over their health and medical experiences” (Donovan
and Ustundag 225) and to represent her experiences in ways that make sense to her rather
than in ways society demands. Persepolis struggles through erasure of Iranian identity and
women’s identity in turn, allowing Satrapi to establish a multi-faceted, sometimes contra-
dictory identity that rebels against expected norms. What Is Obscenity? documents the artist
overcoming literal and figurative stripping of her physical and artistic self to present herself
exactly the way she wishes to be seen. As part of a larger community of women and graphic
artists, Rokudenashiko reasserts power over her body and how it is represented, supported by
and supporting others whose stories are the same.
Her journey began as an attempt to create an interesting manga while also taking back
pussy as something humorous and celebrated, but it ended up becoming a crusade against the
entire Japanese legal system, bringing awareness not only to other Japanese, but perhaps even
more to international audiences. It is particularly significant that Rokudenashiko did this
through the medium of manga. Though times are changing and opinions with them, comics
in the West have long been considered immature and made for children, manga have been
frequently lumped in with their pornographic counterparts, and both have been considered
“low art” at best.
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In What Is Obscenity?, Rokudenashiko challenges these preconceptions. She even suggests

that her manga is a form of artistic protest, quoting herself, “I am using my anger as a spring-
board, laughter my weapon of choice in this battle. If the police want to use this manga to
further wear me down, I will hold my drafting pen with this hand even harder,” and holding
herself up as an artist by presenting this alongside a similar quote by Pablo Picasso on the same
page, “We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be
almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on
the dusty floor of my cell” (Rokudenashiko 42). Thus, in reclaiming manko through manga,
Rokudenashiko is reclaiming manga as an art form and her identity as a manga artist along-
side her identity as a woman and a feminist. Through manga, Rokudenashiko is able to resist
categorization of herself and her works as “obscenity” and to claim a place in a much broader
community of artists and activists, carving out her own place in society, but with enough
room for as many people as will join her.
Works Cited
Cather, Kirsten. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.
da Silva, Joaquin. “Obscenity and Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code: A Short Introduction to
Japanese Censorship.” EigaNove, 22 Dec. 2015, eiga9.altervista.org/articulos/obscenity.html.
Donovan, Courtney, and Ebru Ustundag. “Graphic Narratives, Trauma and Social Justice.” Studies in
Social Justice, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 221–237.
Frischherz, Michaela. “Affective Agency and Transformative Shame: The Voices behind The Great
Wall of Vagina.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 38, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 251–272.
Frizzell, Nell. “Ken Kagami: ‘A Small Penis Is so Sad’.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16
Oct. 2015, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/16/ken-kagami-frieze-art-fair-london-
genitals.
“Ken Kagami: Inside the Head of Heretical Contemporary Artist Kagami Ken.” SHIPS MAG, Sum-
mer 2014, www.shipsltd.co.jp/shipsmag/people/2014summer-1905/.
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31
See him, see her, see Xir
LGBTQ visibility in shōnen manga
at the turn of the century
Zachary Michael Lewis Dean
The LGBTQ literary tradition in Japan, stretching as far back as the Nihon Shoki (tr. The
Chronicles) in the eighth century, is rich with stories, legends, and intriguing characters
that reach their hands out across the landscape of time. Authors of these works represent
diverse perspectives on both the tangible struggles and existential qualities of the human
condition, transcending the barriers of nationality, language, and religion. This remains true
within the contemporary realm of long-form graphic narratives found in manga (comics),
where Japanese mangaka (comic artists) have allowed LGBTQ characters to flourish in a way
that American and other Western artists have only recently begun to do with mainstream
comics—such as trans characters like Loki in Marvel Comics’ Thor, or the canonical estab-
lishment of long-time X-Men character Iceman as gay. While more adult-oriented material,
such as yaoi/shōnen-ai manga (boys love comics), have been examined vigorously during the
last few decades, little study has been dedicated to depictions of LGBTQ characters in an-
other popular genre of Japanese graphic narratives: shōnen manga (boys comics).
The shōnen genre of manga, akin to many superhero-themed comics in the American
canon such as Superman, often involves a male protagonist saving their region or the world
from some manner of villainous threat. Utilizing queer studies and current scholarship in
the fields of gender and sexuality studies, this chapter intends to chart a historical course
of LGBTQ representation in shōnen manga from the period of the mid-1980s through the
early-2000s by examining three of the most popular comics of those decades. In doing so,
this chapter will demonstrate that depictions of the LGBTQ subject—previously utilized
solely as villains or antagonists, often meant to be mocked and derided—now encompass
spheres of both normalization and positivity within the space of Japanese boys’ comics.
The primary texts that will be covered in this chapter include Akira Toriyama’s Dragon
Ball (1984–95) and its successor manga/anime Dragon Ball Super (2015–current), Yoshihiro
Togashi’s Yū Yū Hakusho (1990–94), and Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (1996–current). These pri-
mary sources have been selected for two purposes. First, the texts provide a diverse sampling
of variances in both implementation and execution of their respective LGBTQ characters
from multiple mangaka over a broad stretch of time. And second, these particular franchises
have garnered universal popularity outside of Japan, most notably in the United States, that
429
transcend the typical barriers between sex and gender that many Western media properties
have historically been divided along (Lynch 10–11).
It should be noted that the author of this chapter acknowledges the attendant terms and
the neologisms comprising other identities (intersexed, asexual, non-binary, gender non-
conforming, pansexual, etc.), some of which are under consideration for being added to the
more conventional LGBTQ acronym. These include—but are certainly not limited to—
acronyms such as LGBTQIA, LGBTTQQIAAP, LGBTQ+, and others that are currently
being utilized by activist groups, political bodies, and medical organizations. However, this
chapter intends to utilize the current initialism of “LGBTQ” to describe the various sexual
and gender minority groups under discussion, as a formal consensus has not yet been reached
as it concerns these future additions to the existing acronym.
Akira Toriyama
Apart from the likes of Osamu Tezuka (Kimba the White Lion, Astro Boy, Black Jack, etc.), there
is no single figure who has influenced the direction of modern shōnen manga more during
the last 30-plus years than Akira Toriyama and his worldwide-hit Dragon Ball. Through
Dragon Ball’s protagonist, Son Goku, Toriyama either created or elevated many of the tropes
now seen as commonplace to protagonists in shōnen battle-manga (i.e. young/child main
character, often simple-minded and kind-hearted, voracious eater, a genius fighter who gets
progressively stronger through training and conflict, ability to transform/augment their
body, etc.). The manga, which follows Goku and his friends in their numerous adventures
to acquire the series’ seven namesake MacGuffins—which can grant any wish—has sold
around 300 million tank ōbon (individualized volumes) as of March 2019; making it the sec-
ond best-selling manga of all-time after Oda’s One Piece (Statista.com).
In addition to the comic, Dragon Ball has spawned numerous merchandising and mul-
timedia properties, including toys, video and card games, music, five anime series, three
television specials, and twenty theatrical films. These various properties have helped to make
Dragon Ball one of the highest grossing media franchises in the world, and the most profitable
individual shōnen property as of June 2019 (Wikipedia). Fellow mangaka—such as Eiichiro
Oda, Tite Kubo (Bleach), and Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto), who have also produced all-time
best-sellers—have pointed to Toriyama as inspiring either their artwork or characters (One-
piecepodcast.com). Kubo in particular points to Toriyama’s crafting of villains, stating that they
can be “cool” from an artistic standpoint, yet have strange aspects to their personalities that
make them memorable (Toriyama 172). Due to the international success of Dragon Ball, par-
ticularly from a financial standpoint, Toriyama’s influence can be seen in successive genera-
tions of shōnen mangaka during the last 35 years. This makes his opus an ideal starting point
for an examination of LGBTQ representation in the medium.
With Kubo’s comment in mind, it is pertinent to point out that the LGBTQ characters
Toriyama created during his 11-year run on Dragon Ball serve as a graphic narrative time
capsule that demonstrates the comic as a product both of its own period and of the heter-
onormative social order that the author belongs to. LGBTQ characters in general—either
explicitly or implicitly—are sparse, and the ones that do exist all operate as either antagonists
or villains. The few depictions that can be found in Dragon Ball’s 1984–95 run are often de-
rogatory popular culture stereotypes and caricatures that reinforce outdated and regressive
messages of the LGBTQ subject not just as a social and sexual “other,” but also as a threat to
the sexuality and/or bodies of those who do not identify with that community—messages
that were rampant during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s (Smith 2).
430
During Chapters 70 through 85, which were serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine
from April 15 through July 29, 1986, the character of General Blue is introduced. This takes
place during what’s known among the fandom as the aptly named “General Blue Saga,” itself
a part of the larger “Red Ribbon Army” narrative arc, named for the military entity that
serve as its primary villains. Blue, the third of the army’s generals to encounter Goku during
his travels, serves as a threat to Goku and his friends while both parties are in search of the
dragon balls. The character is drawn as a conventionally attractive and muscular Caucasian
man with blonde hair and blue eyes in Toriyama’s colorized artwork. He also seems to be
coded as German based on his appearance, his sparse use of German-language phrases, and
the Nazi-style military attire he wears—which bears a striking resemblance to uniforms
worn by the Sturmabteilung (Davis 22) (Figure 31.1).
Outside of Blue’s basic appearance, masculine in terms of general artistic aesthetic, To-
riyama has added other touches to the character that signify him as being different from
all other male characters introduced to the series at this point. These include pronounced
eyelashes and defined irides that were commonly used to denote Toriyama’s female char-
acters during this period, as well as mannerisms that have been socially coded as being
of a performatively feminine nature (Butler 166–167). This works to mark General Blue
as an effeminate gay male to readers, even though the question of his orientation is only
implied—in the manga, at least— when he rebukes the sexual advances of the series’ female
protagonist, Bulma. After he expresses his disgust at this advance, numerous translations
have Bulma stating that he “must be gay” since he’s not showing any interest in her (ch. 76,
pp. 11). It is worth noting that in the original Japanese, Bulma uses the word ketsumodoki
(katakana: けつもどき), a Japanese slang term that roughly translates to the homophobic
English pejorative “faggot.”
If this were the extent of how General Blue’s sexual orientation was presented, while
muddled and certainly insulting to the LGBTQ community, the depiction could likely be
seen as an instance of Toriyama playing a character off for laughs, something common to
early Dragon Ball. During this period of its serialization, the comic was largely a gag manga
with battle-manga elements that took aim at many different social groups and identities;
including societal standards for masculinity, with the chubby-limbed and diminutive Goku
toppling villains illustrated as stereotypical macho figures. However, due to how the Dragon
Ball anime handles General Blue’s character and further expands on his sexual proclivities
Figure 31.1 Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball (1984–95)
431
during a filler-scene exclusive to the cartoon, the topic of Blue’s orientation requires compar-
ative analysis of the two mediums, as some Western fans consider the anime—even filler—to
be the definitive canonical representation of the series and its character lore (Figure 31.2).
In 1987, during Episode 56 of the Dragon Ball anime (titled “Uhoho~i! Arale Boards the
Cloud”), Blue is shown to be a pedophile when he monologues internally about his attraction
to the cameo character Obotchaman: an android with the body of an early adolescent boy
whom Blue attempts to kiss after thinking that Obotchaman is his “type.” This filler scene,
added by series director Minoru Okazaki and approved by Toei Animation, plays into the
persistent social stereotype of LGBTQ individuals as a threat to children, something that
activists and scientific researchers have been combatting for decades (Freund et al. 163–169).
While there are no definitive sources stating that Toriyama had any knowledge of Toei or
Okazaki’s intentions regarding this portrayal, it has become a defining part of Blue’s charac-
ter within segments of the fandom—particularly in Western countries where the popularity
of the Dragon Ball anime supersedes that of the manga.
In addition to General Blue there is also the minor antagonist character of Otokosuki
(a portmanteau of otoko/man and suki/love), who is briefly introduced during Chapter 518.
The character is drawn with the same style of feminized eyelashes and irides as General
Blue, but otherwise appears to be artistically based on real-life singer Glenn Martin Hughes:
to be more specific, Hughes’ “Leatherman” persona from the Village People disco band.
However, unlike with Blue’s portrayal in the manga, Otokosuki is openly homosexual and
makes advances at various major and minor male characters during a seeding lottery for the
28th Tenkaichi Budōkai (The Number One Under Heaven Martial Arts Gathering). While
Toriyama is including an openly gay character in the final chapters of his manga, Otokosuki’s
display of sexual aggressiveness embodies similarly harmful stereotypes about gay men and
promiscuity (Ball 4), demonstrating the author’s lack of growth on the subject. However,
as the final two examples in this section will show, there appears to be a progressive devel-
opment that has taken place regarding Toriyama’s character work in the franchise during
production of the 2013 animated theatrical film, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, and its 2015
follow-up manga/anime series, Dragon Ball Super (Figure 31.3).
Perhaps demonstrating his own evolving social awareness following the conclusion of
Dragon Ball’s serialization in 1995, Toriyama’s creation of the character Whis for Battle of
Gods, along with female characters Caulifla and Kale for Super (which Whis also appears in),
432
provides the series with its first positive depictions of LGBTQ characters. For Whis—
attendant and teacher to the universe’s God of Destruction, Lord Beerus—there is once
again the utilization of feminized eyelashes and irides. However, the overall artistic aesthetic
of Whis’ design is far more androgynous. The character’s body and facial features are drawn
in a slender and elongated fashion, with a level of softness that differentiates Whis from most
of the male-identifying characters in Dragon Ball’s second half (known as Dragon Ball Z in
most English translations), who are drawn in an angular fashion with defined musculature.
The character’s clothing also works to differentiate him from other members of the cast,
as his flowing, restrictive maroon robe and high-heeled shoes (with spats) are not what one
would expect an otherworldly martial arts master to wear. This continues a Dragon Ball trope
of unconventional figures being some of the series’ best fighters, which began with Goku’s
first teacher, the Muten R ōshi (Invincible Old Master). In addition, Whis appears to wear
makeup, with his lips and long fingernails prominently colored purple to match the color of
his irides: though these features are more prominent in the anime, due to the manga being in
black and white. Regarding both outward appearance and innate personality, the character
has demonstrated mannerisms that fall across the gender spectrum.
While his stature, personality, and appearance seem to indicate him as an effeminate
figure, he has demonstrated the ability to expertly fight off many of Dragon Ball’s strongest
characters. This can be evidenced in his domination of the macho-archetypical villain Broly
in the franchise’s 20th film, Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2018), and easily overpowering both Son
Goku and rival Vegeta when the two seek Whis out for martial arts training (Dragon Ball Z:
Revival of “F,” ch. 2, pp. 5). In the Dragon Ball canon, as of June 2019, Whis has been estab-
lished as one of the strongest fighters in the multiverse, which includes 11 other universes
outside of the one the series takes place in.
While the character does answer to he/him/his pronouns, the surface-level artistic design
and internal personality of Whis fall into a non-binary spectrum, as he defies the expected
conventions and social norms of both masculinity and femininity. In this sense, he would be
best defined as a genderqueer character (Corwin 262). For example, in a canonical promo-
tional manga by artist Toyotarō —with story by Toriyama—for the 2014 film Dragon Ball Z:
Resurrection of F, when asked who he is Whis replies by stating that “I am the life form known
as Whis. I suppose that must suffice” (ch. 2, pp. 14). In other words, his acknowledgment of
masculine pronouns can be seen as an accommodation to the characters of Universe 7 (where
433
Dragon Ball takes place) who know only of a binary system for gender; with the notable ex-
ception being self-reproducing asexual alien species, such as the Namekians.
In the case of Caulifla and Kale—jointly created by Toriyama and artists from Toei Anima-
tion (Dragonball.news)—the two characters are drawn in a petite style, indicating their youth. As
shown in the above image, Caulifla is drawn with more eccentric hair than Kale and her clothing
is akin to athletic garb. This indicates visually that Caulifla is the more aggressive partner in the
duo, which is further expressed through their personalities, with Caulifla being hotheaded and
Kale demonstrating a demure disposition. The two even join physical bodies at one point while
battling Goku in a tournament through a magical process called “fusion,” where two people be-
come one and multiply their strength severalfold. Based on these factors, the relationship between
the two can be read as being akin to the yuri (lily) genre of manga. Yuri is a style of erotic manga
that operates as a “girls love” equivalent of the relationships found in yaoi manga, both of which
are targeted mainly toward an adult female demographic of readers.
The Japanese version of the Super anime and manga has downplayed this pairing, likening
it more to a senpai/kohai (senior/junior) relationship, in which Kale looks up to Caulifla based
on her strength and seniority. However, Funimation Productions LLC, which has handled
the localization of various Dragon Ball multimedia properties since the mid-1990s, decided to
remove the subtext and read the relationship as an explicitly romantic one. This is asserted
through dialogue between the two during Episode 93 of Dragon Ball Super’s English dub by
Caulifla (“You’re the Tenth Warrior! Goku Goes to See Frieza!!”) and restated by Kale in
Episode 100 (“Out of Control! The Savage Berserker Awakens!!”), which aired on Cartoon
Network’s Toonami bloc on January 12 and March 2, 2019, respectively.
Negotiating Toriyama’s past depictions of LGBTQ characters with his current ones
demonstrates that the author has likely changed his own personal perspective regarding ori-
entations and identities that differ from his own, as well as acknowledging that the Dragon
Ball fanbase has diversified over the last 35 years. Both early- and late-Dragon Ball depictions
of the LGBTQ subject caricatured those communities through open mockery of both sexual
orientations and gay pop-culture icons, something that Super—to an extent—has rectified.
However, while Toriyama’s transition to more positive depictions of LGBTQ characters
should be lauded as a positive development, both his and Toei’s reluctance concerning Kale
and Caulifla’s relationship might leave some LGBTQ fans wondering if their newfound in-
clusion in the series’ canon is disingenuous.
Yoshihiro Togashi
Togashi’s manga Yū Yū Hakusho (1990–94)—which began during the height of Dragon Ball’s
popularity—presents a more nuanced perspective regarding sexual and gender minority
groups than Toriyama ever attempted. The comic follows protagonist Yusuke Urameshi, an
eighth-grade juvenile delinquent, as he solves demon-related incidents for the Underworld
as their detective. Despite this initial premise, the comic ultimately fits into the same genre
archetype as Dragon Ball, with Yusuke training to become stronger as he faces an ever-
increasing stream of otherworldly threats. While there are still only a handful of LGBTQ
characters included in Yū Yū Hakusho, it is both Togashi’s presentation and execution of those
characters during the period that makes it a worthy candidate for inspection (Figure 31.4).
The first of these characters is Miyuki, a member of a villainous gang of demon enforcers
known as the “Ogre Triad.” She only lasts for a few chapters before being defeated by Yusuke
and his schoolyard rival Kuwabara: however, she provides this paper with its first example of
a person who is questioning their socially assigned gender versus what they truly are. During
434
Figure 31.4 Yoshihiro Togashi’s Yū Yū Hakusho (1990–94)
their fight, Yusuke discovers that Miyuki—while outwardly performing as a woman—has

male genitalia, indicating that she is a non/pre-operative trans-woman (the manga refers to
her as a cross-dresser in the English translation). This leads Miyuki to chastise the two boys as
bigots and exclaim that while she’s “a man in body, [her] soul is a woman’s” (ch. 48, pp. 59).
Yusuke responds by telling her that until she can “make up [her] mind” on whether she’s a
man or a woman, she should avoid picking anymore fights. In other words, he’s not judging
Miyuki for being transgender: instead he is judging her for not bringing her mind, body, and
soul into balance with one another.
On the surface, this can be seen as a positive message regarding transgenderism, with
the cisgendered Yusuke stating that he doesn’t care if Miyuki is a trans-woman or not: he’s
more than willing to fight her again once she’s aligned herself both internally and externally
with her identity. However, underlying this is the fact that it still enforces a binary system of
gender, with a transitional figure such as Miyuki facing ostracization for operating outside of
that social construct. While Miyuki is undoubtably performing as a female outwardly (Butler
519), and is one inwardly, Yusuke’s refusal to recognize her as a woman until she surgically
transitions is undoubtedly a bigoted stance by modern standards. While the message being
espoused would have been progressive during the early-1990s, the notion that a transperson
can only have their gender identity validated after meeting specific demands from the cis-
gendered hegemony represents contemporary transphobic opinions: ones often espoused by
trans-exclusionary radical feminists and other groups (Hines 148–149).
The remaining two LGBTQ characters in the manga, Shinobu Sensui and his accomplice
Itsuki, introduced in Chapters 121 and 122 respectively, continue the trope of major LGBTQ
figures in this era functioning as villains. Sensui, Yusuke’s predecessor as the Underworld’s
detective, operates as a character that embodies an extreme perspective on eco-queer studies
which deny humanity’s place as a privileged creature (Bauman 748–749). Due in part to his
own lived experiences, Sensui has decided that humanity deserves to be eradicated for its
abuse of nature and wickedness toward other living creatures, including denizens from the
demon realm—who in Yū Yū Hakusho are another race of humanoids. Itsuki, himself a de-
mon, has romantic feelings for Sensui that the latter does not reciprocate. Yet he operates as
a willing partner in Sensui’s stated goal of omnicide by helping to open a portal between the
demon and human realms, relegating humanity to the same chattel status it forces on other
living creatures (Figure 31.5).
435
Figure 31.5 Yoshihiro Togashi’s Yū Yū Hakusho (1990–94)
Both characters are depicted as conventionally attractive Asian men in their mid-20s.
However, Itsuki appears to be coded as more feminine, given that Togashi draws him with
long hair and softer contours to his features than the rest of Sensui’s group. By contrast,
Sensui is drawn in a more angular fashion. The difference in their personalities during the
story also establishes a power dynamic between the two. Sensui, with his tall and chiseled
frame, enjoys physically engaging Yusuke and his friends during multiple confrontations,
while the more reticent Itsuki prefers to use subterfuge and psychological manipulation to
deal with opponents. Like Caulifla and Kale in the previous section, Sensui is established as
the aggressor and Itsuki as the passive partner when examining their relationship dynamics.
As one might expect in a shōnen battle-manga, Sensui is ultimately defeated by Yusuke.
However, when the prince of the Underworld attempts to take Sensui’s soul to the afterlife,
Itsuki admonishes the prince and exclaims that Sensui “cared nothing for [the Underworld’s]
values. His soul is not [theirs] to claim” (ch. 153, pp. 75). Itsuki then takes Sensui’s body into
another plane of existence, one cut off from all the other realms, stating that “We’ll deal with
eternity our way, just the two of us” (pp. 76). To frame this a different way, Sensui and Itsuki
continue to defy the expected social order and ruling hegemony even in death. In addition,
Itsuki—whose lifespan can last for millennia due to his demon heritage—accepts what is
essentially a state of living death as a consequence of his unrequited love for Sensui.
The literary basis for this end to Sensui and Itsuki appears to come from Japan’s myth-
ological tales: specifically, the story of two “unruwashiki-tomo (beautiful/intimate friends),”
Shinu no Hafuri and his lover Ama no Hafuri (Murray 72). Depending on the translation,
the two are described either as attendants of the gods or as gods themselves. Regardless, the
myths describe them as the entities that brought male same-sex love into the world. How-
ever, they suffer tragedy when Shinu no Hafuri dies suddenly, leading Ama no Hafuri to
commit suicide in his grief. The two are interred in the same grave, on which the chief deity
Amaterasu, goddess of the sun and universe, refuses to shine (72–73). While it may simply be
coincidence, Sensui and Itsuki’s ultimate fate eerily mirrors that of Shinu and Ama, where
one party refused to live without the other and would not let even death stand as a barrier
between their union.
While Togashi does not linger on these topics for very long, dedicating only a handful of
pages to them, Yū Yū Hakusho provides a level of maturity concerning LGBTQ topics that
most shōnen mangaka of the time either did not attempt or grossly mishandled. It is unfortu-
nate that he utilizes the “bury your gays” trope found in numerous works of fiction by hav-
ing his LGBTQ characters killed off once they have fulfilled their narrative purpose (Hulan
17). Yet despite this, it is also laudable that unlike mangaka such as Toriyama, for whom
436
caricature and mockery are integral, Togashi writes his characters as human individuals: with
earnest wants, needs, and desires that he refuses to characterize using the typical norms and
morals of the period (McLelland 102). In doing so, while far from perfect, Togashi manages
to touch upon crucial elements of the shared human condition in his characters: most notably
the importance of love and acceptance.
Eiichiro Oda
If Togashi represented a step in the right direction regarding depictions and visibility of
LGBTQ characters, Oda and his manga One Piece (1996–current) might on first impression
be viewed as representing a return to the mean. The comic follows pirate captain Monkey
D. Luffy and his crew on their adventures across the Grand Line in search of the world’s
greatest treasure. Since the main characters are pirates operating outside the boundaries of
their society’s laws, there are no true villains in the series—just antagonists. Like Toriyama,
Oda tends to fashion his characters as extreme manifestations of whatever they might sym-
bolize; this includes appropriated historical figures such as Blackbeard the Pirate and a par-
ody of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, named “The Adventurer of Lies” Orlumbus
(ch.704, pp. 68). However, Oda often subverts the expectations a casual reader might have
in this regard, as he’s quite different from Toriyama as it concerns execution. And the two
openly LGBTQ characters found in his 940-plus chapter epic, Bentham and Emporio Ivan-
kov, demonstrate this quite well (Figure 31.6).
The character of Bentham, introduced in Chapter 129, is a master kenpo fighter outfitted
in a ballerina dress adorned with swans who also wears heavily applied lipstick, blush, eye-
liner, and mascara. Bentham is a self-described okama (“queer” in the English translation)—a
word that can mean either homosexual or cross-dresser—and initially functions as an an-
tagonist before later becoming friends with Luffy. While the term okama has negative con-
notations in the real world, the okama depicted in One Piece are all male-assigned at birth
(MAAB) individuals who have adopted various traits coded as feminine (dress, mannerisms,
etc.), with some opting to change their biological sex permanently to female.
However, this desire for permanent transition does not apply to Bentham, due in part to
their devil fruit powers—a magical item that gives its eater an ability that varies from fruit to
fruit. Upon consuming theirs, Bentham gains the ability to copy the face, body, and voice of
whomever they touch, as well as store the characteristics of those bodies in their memory to
bring out whenever they desire. While Bentham does acknowledge he/him/his pronouns,
their attire, psychology, personality, and powers establish them as both genderfluid and gen-
der nonconforming. By refusing to be anchored to any socially identified or coded gender
Figure 31.6 Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece (1996–current)
437
expectations, Bentham demonstrates the “private understanding of one’s gender” that many
trans-activists and gender scholars espouse (Galupo et al. 166).
Moving to Ivankov, nicknamed “Iva” by Luffy after they save his life, the character is quite
similar to Bentham, though with some striking differences. From a purely artistic standpoint,
Iva looks like a super-deformed caricature of Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror
Picture Show (1973), a role popularized by actor Tim Curry. Operating purely from visuals,
a reader could be forgiven for viewing Iva as another jab at LGBTQ pop-culture figures, as
Otokosuki was in the latter chapters of Dragon Ball. However, just as he did with Bentham,
Oda takes the reader’s initial impressions and turns them on their head. By using their spe-
cial hormone manipulation abilities, which they gained from a devil fruit, Iva can navigate
multiple states of gender at will. They can also do the same thing for others seeking perma-
nent transition between genders by penetrating the person with their fingernails—perhaps
alluding to Iva as possessing bisexual leanings. Otherwise speaking, Iva operates as a physical
manifestation of both humanity’s gender and sexual fluidity.
As a result of these abilities and their charisma, Iva stands at the pinnacle of a diverse
understanding of gender in the world of One Piece, and other okama—including Bentham—
desire to be and think as Iva does. Iva goes on to tell their fellow okama that “I’ve already
shattered the borders of gender! We all have! We’ve already transcended it! We are the new
humans” (ch. 537, pp. 103). To frame this a different way, Iva is declaring that the binary
system of gender is rendered defunct by the mere existence of the okama, and that the queer
subject represents a positive step in human social evolution. In addition, Iva’s revolutionary
declaration against the cisgendered hegemony in One Piece can also be viewed as a repudi-
ation of the shōnen genre’s past depictions of the LGBTQ subject. Indeed, the above quote
sounds as seditious against heteronormative shōnen manga as the content of Judith Butler’s
Gender Trouble was for early-1990s Western society.
One Piece provides readers with positive depictions of transgenderism, gender fluidity,
genderqueerness, and nonconformity through the characters of Iva and Bentham that would
have seemed unfathomable in a shōnen manga during the 1980s. While Oda’s stories and
characters are all quite outlandish, he has demonstrated a unique talent for giving side char-
acters depth and nuance. Despite the fact Iva and Bentham occupy queer spaces, they defy the
expected conventions of shōnen battle-manga by both their prominent inclusion and positive
portrayal of LGBTQ individuals and subjects. This is especially true in the case of Bentham,
who has maintained his popularity with the One Piece fandom for nearly two decades, rank-
ing as the 25th most popular character in the series as recently as 2018 (Vol. 87, pp. 204). The
two also demonstrate how quickly the shōnen genre reversed course from Dragon Ball’s gross
mischaracterizations of LGBTQ individuals just a short time before (Note: Bentham was
introduced in 2000 and Iva was brought into the manga during 2009).
As evidenced in the descriptions and analysis this chapter has conducted, each of the above
authors artistically presents their LGBTQ characters in one of two ways. The first is by uti-
lizing either orientation or ambiguous gender as a feature in the design of dramatis personae
or in their on-panel mannerisms, thereby making those internal qualities an outward com-
ponent of the overall characterization. This is clearly evidenced in Toriyama and Oda’s art-
work for their LGBTQ characters, though it is more muted in Toriyama’s more recent (and
positive) creations. The second method, utilized by Togashi, is to draw the characters as he
would any other in the manga and then establish sexuality or gender through dialogue and
action. There is a question as to which artistic approach is more effective. Togashi’s method
allows for a more realistic depiction of human interaction, while Oda’s technique creates a
more vocal platform to address issues related to those communities.
438
Regardless of quibbles on artistic technique, Togashi and Oda have utilized their plat-
forms as mangaka, both during and immediately following Dragon Ball, to subtlety produce
what might best be described as an application of contact hypothesis through the graphic
narrative form. They, along with other influential mangaka during this period such as Naoko
Takeuchi (Sailor Moon), Nobuhiro Watsuki (Rurouni Kenshin), Rumiko Takahashi (Inuyasha),
Kaneda Mario (Girls Bravo), and others, have been successful in both elevating and normal-
izing LGBTQ characters in the space of Japanese children’s comics. Unlike the yuri and yaoi
genres of manga, meant for an adult readership, these comic artists and their successors stand
in a position to affect a strong degree of change for the next generation—both in Japan and
around the world—through the power of graphic narrative communication.
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32
An age of sparkle and drama
Exploring gender identities and cultural
narratives in 1970s shōjo manga
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
In recent years, the genre of shōjo manga has attracted considerable scholarly attention.
While previously commonly relegated to the side-lines, as more mainstream manga genres –
like, for instance, shōnen, which includes famous examples such as Dragon Ball (Doragon Borū
1984–1995) and Naruto (1997–2014) – functioned as a primary focus, shōjo has been gaining
more critical traction. Manga scholar Masami Toku suggests that academic attention has be-
gun to shift and “look beyond” genres that would normally get the most prominent “public
attention” (2015, p. 1). As a result, shōjo manga has been placed at the centre of a series of
scholarly evaluations and reviews, which have drawn attention to the importance of this
particular manga category as part of a wider cultural discourse (Prough 2010b; Shamoon
2012). This popularity, of course, had long been established among fans. Hordes of avid
readers – primarily located in Japan – have been taken with shōjo ever since its cultural es-
tablishment and transformation in the early 1970s. Indeed, this decade proved not only very
prolific for shōjo, but also definitive in establishing the characteristics, scope, and reach of the
genre, providing some of the most influential publications of their kind. The manga indus-
try, as Frederick Schodt argues, is “a colossal machine”; shōjo artists has been gaining steady
ground, and becoming an established and diversified category, where artists have brought
“an entirely different set of expectations” (Schodt 2013, p. 3). As scholarly attention for shōjo
manga grows, it is important to re-evaluate the impact of the publications and manga artists
that emerged in the 1970s, as important starting points for contemporary incarnations of the
genre. Within this group, Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara 1972–1973)
is of particular note, as an important example not only of how shōjo manga developed as a
significant genre within the manga-scope, but also of how it has historically been reflective
of important attitudes and shifts within Japanese culture and society, with a particular focus
on gender and sexual identities. The Rose of Versailles – also affectionately known as BeruBara –
negotiates gender identities as part of a wave of stylistic and cultural re-inventions that were
characteristic of shōjo manga in the 1970s. Taking Ikeda’s manga as a characteristic example,
this chapter investigates the intersection between binary gender canons and veiled queer
identities in 1970s shōjo manga, with a particular focus on the portrayal of homosocial rela-
tionships. As part of the examination of the cultural significance of The Rose of Versailles, this
chapter also considers the important legacies left by this specific narrative, within the broader
441
spectrum of both shōjo manga and cultural performance, in the decades that followed its
publication and initial success.
Shōjo manga and the ‘Beru-Boom’

Shōjo manga is a very broad category, which encompasses “a wide range of comics that os-
tensibly target female readers, from pre-adolescence to adulthood” (McLelland and Welker
2016, p. 3). The primary characters of shōjo manga are generally either girls or young women,
but there are a number of examples from the genre where male characters take centre stage.
Although the intended readership for shōjo manga is young and female, there is convincing
evidence to suggest that many shōjo manga have had a diverse readership, which “includes
male and older readers” (McLelland and Welker 2016, p. 4). This cross-over readership is not
a phenomenon exclusive to shōjo manga, of course. Several examples from shōnen, includ-
ing Masami Kurumada’s long-standing Saint Seyia (Sainto Seyia 1986–1990), have a broad
readership, which, during the manga’s several decades of publication, has widened to include
not only the expected young boys, but also young men and women. When it comes to shōjo
manga, however, the diverse readership is particularly significant as it is representative of this
category’s ability and desire to deal with subject matters that are seen as aspirational. These
commonly focus on explorations of emotional growth, physical development, and, most no-
tably, the discovery of gender identities and sexuality.
The narrative of shōjo manga ordinarily unfolds in the midst of everyday situations –
often focusing on the perturbations of young schoolgirls – but it can also take place in the
realm of fantasy, or even a different historical era. With its focus on interpersonal relation-
ships, shōjo manga projects girls’ and young women’s pursuit of “ideal love”, ambition for
“career goals”, and “search for justice” (Dollase 2018, p. 129). Examples like The Rose of
Versailles represent one of the most lavish and over-the-top incarnations of the shōjo manga
narrative, where discussions over both women’s identities and their place in society are inter-
laced with melodramatic stories of love and desire. Although operating primarily as a fantasy
space, shōjo manga also provides a useful and significant counterpart for the exploration of
women’s identities, and the notion of what it means to be ‘female’ in Japan, with both local
and global influences taken into consideration. Shōjo manga stories are eccentric, excessive,
and exaggerated, and inhabit a transient space, which exploits the realm of the imagination,
while also keeping a firm hold on the cultural reality in which it exists. The greatest value
of shōjo manga is perhaps its ability to reflect “women’s desires and dreams”, via the repre-
sentation of subjects and expressions, which in turn echo “female aesthetics” and search for
fulfilment (Toku 2007, p. 20).
The Rose of Versailles was published in serialised form between 1972 and 1973, in the
manga magazine Margaret. The story focuses on Oscar François de Jarjayes, a fictional char-
acter whose adventures take place in pre-revolutionary France. The life of Oscar is intrigu-
ing from its very beginning and complicated from its very beginning. After being blessed
with many daughters, her father, General de Jarjayes, was desperate for a son. Upon Oscar’s
birth, General Jarjayes decides to raise the young girl ‘as a man’, so that she may continue
the family’s illustrious military legacy. This unexpected move proves successful, as Oscar
grows up showing a natural talent for swordplay and leadership. Raised firmly within the
military arts, Oscar becomes the Captain of the Palace Guards at Versailles, and is extremely
proud of her achievements. The tale of The Rose of Versailles is also populated by fictionalised
versions of real historical figures, including, and most notably, Marie Antoinette. The young
princess, and later Queen of France, becomes a close acquaintance of Oscar, who – for most
442
Age of sparkle and drama
of the narrative – shows a strong sense of loyalty and admiration for the Royal family. Other
important figures in Oscar’s life are her attendant and childhood friend André Grandier, and
Count Axel von Fersen, another fictionalised version of a real-life character, who in time
becomes the lover of Marie Antoinette and a brief love interest for Oscar herself. In the back-
ground of the everyday stories in The Rose of Versailles lie a series of important commentaries
on historical events – including the advent of the French Revolution – which have a strong
impact on Oscar. As the story progresses, Oscar is forced to negotiate her conflicting feelings
between class loyalty and her growing awareness of the impoverished state of the common
French people, on whose side she eventually fights in the Revolution. As far as gender iden-
tities go, the narrative trajectory of The Rose of Versailles makes for a complicated set-up from
the start. The protagonist is, essentially, a woman who dresses and behaves like a man, in a
context that does not openly allow for fluid gender and sexual identities. As a critical side
note, it is important to mention here that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – as well as ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ – are, of course, extremely complicated terms, whose definition has been the cen-
tre of much debate and discussion within a number of disciplines (Connell 1987; Lancaster
and DiLeonardo 1997; Jackson and Scott 2005; McCann 2017). Nonetheless, within The Rose
of Versailles, both terms are given very specific meanings, which are aided in both concept and
representation by conventional notions relating to dress codes, mannerisms, and sexual pref-
erence. In this particular manga, gender is a matter of both contradiction and coherence, and
involves a degree “of rebellion and resistance”, where identities are “diverse and dynamic”
(McCann 2017, p. 2).
Ikeda, who was 24 years old when The Rose of Versailles was first published, encountered a
lot of opposition from her editors, when she first proposed her work. The original focus on
pre-revolutionary France, and Marie Antoinette as the main character, was met with scepti-
cism by the artist’s editors. As a result, Ikeda was strongly “dependant on fan feedback, in or-
der to ensure continued publication of her story” (Shamoon 2007, p. 7). The manga changes
significantly as the story progresses, both aesthetically and in terms of characterisation. At
the time when Ikeda was writing, the biggest change to take place through the narrative of
BeruBara was indeed the shift in focus from Marie Antoinette to the androgynous Oscar. The
latter proved incredibly popular among readers, as she encapsulated the freedom that ‘dress-
ing like a man’ provided, while also maintaining the perceived determination and clarity of
being a (clearly heterosexual) woman (Figure 32.1).
Figure 32.1 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973)
443
The conventions employed by Ikeda successfully merged the schoolgirl narratives that
were typical of shōjo manga – to be found in the love affairs and gossipy quarrels of Marie
Antoinette herself – with the promise of homosocial relationships, which were channelled
through Oscar’s cross-dressing persona.
The response from fans to The Rose of Versailles was huge and unprecedented, especially
for a comic belonging to a genre that, up until that time, had been relatively obscure, and
had sat at the fringes of cultural production. Natsu Onoda Power contends that, even within
the broader manga-scope, shōjo has traditionally remained a “transient genre” – especially
compared to its relative counterpart, shōnen – where the success of the narrative is reliant on
being able to “relate” to readers (2009, p. 127), and the abilities of capturing the relevance of
emotional discourse, as the socio-historical and political context continues to shift. In spite
of the difficulties generally encountered by shōjo manga as a category, the love for Ikeda’s
publication was immediate, and it sparked the so-called “Beru-Boom”, a veritable craze
among teenage girls for anything related to Oscar and her adventures in the manga. The
boom produced an explosion of manga-related merchandise, as well as other items with a
French flair, which only peripherally recalled the world inhabited by the characters of The
Rose. What began as, effectively, a shōjo manga version of Marie Antoinette’s biography, soon
transformed into a revolutionary narrative that was not afraid to explore matters of gender
and sexuality, and negotiate the perceived difficulties of fluid and alleged ‘in-between’ iden-
tities (Butler 1990, p. viii).
The ‘Beru-Boom’ quickly expanded beyond the limits of the manga itself, and reached
the folds of cultural adaptation, both within and outside of Japan. The Rose of Versailles
was adapted into an anime series, which originally aired in 1979–1980; this animated ver-
sion reached international fame, and remains extremely popular even today, especially in
European countries such as Italy. Ikeda’s manga was also adapted into a film, titled Lady Oscar
(1979). The film, however, did not find the same success as the anime, as a critical eye was
turned to the director Jacques Demy’s apparent decision to virtually suppress the narrative’s
queer undertones, and remove Oscar’s androgyny, through the choice of a conventionally
feminine actress (Catriona MacCall) to play the titular character. Most notably, however,
The Rose of Versailles was adapted into a revue for Takarazuka, a form of theatre performance,
where the whole cast comprises solely women actors. Because of shōjo manga’s focus on ro-
mance and relationships, Takararuka had long favoured this category as its source for adapted
narratives, a characteristic that continues to be recognisable today. The Tazarazuka Revue of
The Rose of Versailles – which was first staged in 1974, and toured until 1976 – was an imme-
diate triumph, and remains to this day a beloved show, which, while undergoing a number of
reviews and re-adaptation, continues to be extremely popular with the audience, whenever
it is staged (Robertson 1998, p. 74).
The success of The Rose of Versailles within Takarazuka theatre should not be a surprise.
Anne E. Duggan suggests that, because of the “tradition of romance that inflects its cor-
pus”, the Tazarazuka Revue ordinarily “challenges gender and sexual norms” (2013, p. 114).
While many have argued that, while playing with gender identities, Takarazuka theatre
remains profoundly “asexual”, the Revue also constantly plays with a complicated notion of
“female masculinity” (Nakamura and Matsu 2005, p. 70). Inevitably, the very nature of the
Takarazuka Revue points to very complicated set of sexual dynamics, which inevitably recalls
the same-sex love of traditional shōjo manga, while also proposing a distinctive patriarchal
ideology. It is not difficult to see how the interaction between Tazarazuka and The Rose of
Versailles draws attention to the possibly subversive nature of gender itself. Indeed, the notion
of gender ‘as performance’ becomes even more unavoidable as Oscar is the centre of a theatre
444
show. While Takarazuka versions “are not entirely faithful” to Ikeda’s original manga (Shinji
2014, p. 664), the long-lasting connection between the comics and theatre dimensions of the
story unveils Oscar’s adaptability as a cultural figure.
The Takarazuka performance of The Rose of Versailles draws even further attention to the
complexities of gender representation in the story. In Takaruzuka theatre, all characters, both
male and female, are played by women; but in the case of BeruBara, the actress impersonating
Oscar is actually a woman, pretending to be a woman with openly ‘masculine’ traits. Within
the Takarazuka setting, and arguably also within Ikeda’s manga, Oscar fully represents “the
slippage between sex and gender” (Robertson 1998, p. 74). A series of subtleties needed to
be introduced as part of the Takarazuka performance, in order to differentiate the character
of Oscar from other characters such as André. While wearing male clothing and uniforms,
Oscar also displays a softer use of make-up: she is not burdened by the conventions imposed
on male characters in the show, whose features are hardened – especially around the nose
and brow areas – by a distinctive use of make-up, comprising of defining and countering
lines. The difficulty of portraying a female character who takes on a male persona is a clear
characteristic of Tazarazuka, but it is also a legacy of the gender fluid characterisations and
interactions that are proper of Ikeda’s manga.
Shōjo manga in the 1970s

In spite of the fact that, generally speaking, the content of shōjo manga focuses primarily on
girls as protagonists, and the stories have girls and young women as their intended readership,
one should not think that shōjo mangaka (girls’ manga artists) have been exclusively female.
Indeed, in the decades preceding World War II, and for a significant period afterwards, shōjo
mangaka were primarily male. Important artists such as Osamu Tezuka and Testuya Chiba
were the creators of several important publications, and were major contributors in the devel-
opment of shōjo manga as the category we know today. Tezuka, in particularly, was a promi-
nent creator of shōjo manga in the 1950s and 1960s, penning examples such as Princess Knight
(1953–1956). The latter, in particular, received a lot of attention among readers of shōjo, as
it provided one of the most well-developed example – at least until then – of the ‘woman
dressed as man’ trope. While he is primarily remembered for his manga in the category of
shōnen – with a long list of works, including Kimba the White Lion (1950–1954) and, perhaps
more famously, Astro Boy (1952–1968) – Tezuka proved a very influential figure for shōjo
manga, whose depictions of female characters, and their struggles with gender identification
and sexuality, would leave an unshakable legacy on the genre.
The arrival of the 1970s, however, brought a new wave of difference for shōjo manga.
Consumer culture reached a distinct high in the Japan of the early 1970s, producing a pre-
viously unprecedented magnitude for products that could be targeted to a variety of demo-
graphic groups, including girls and young women. With great demands for products came
the possibility of creative exploration, which was typical of the 1970s era, and which in turn
produced a number of iconic figures that became a clear part of Japan’s cultural history. Girls’
manga, as Nobuko Anan suggests, “became a site for women to collectively and critically
explore their bodies, gender, and sexuality” (2014, p. 43). This shift in the influence and
importance of shōjo manga, as well as its content and creative reach, is perhaps connected to
an important factor, which marked one of the most distinctive shifts in shōjo manga history:
the rise of female shōjo mangaka. The 1970s witnessed the rise of “24 nen gumi” – “The
Year 24 Group” – a group of women manga artists born around the 24th year of the reign
of the Shōwa Emperor, corresponding to the year 1949 of the Common Era. Ikeda herself
445
was actually born in 1947, but she is included in the “24 nen gumi” in virtue of the fact that
she began to produce her manga at a similar time as the others, and her works rose to fame
as part of the same creative revolution that shōjo manga underwent during the early years of
the 1970s as a decade.
The development and success of shōjo manga in the 1970s should not be taken as an iso-
lated occurrence. The explosion of examples such The Rose of Versailles, and its ability and
desire to delve into much more complex themes, often relating to gender and sexuality,
owes a great deal to the conceptual shift that shōjo manga underwent in the decades before
the time that the great female mangakas came to pass. Before the 1960s, tales of a romantic
nature – especially in a heterosexual context – were not favoured within the genre. For sure,
shōjo manga from the previous era, especially from the 1920s and 1930s, had been known
to explore matters of a personal nature, but the extent to which relationships were given
attention remained contained, on the larger scale, to homosocial connections between girls
as a form of “same-sex love” (Shamoon 2007, p. 4). These tales played an important part in
the development of shōjo manga as a privileged category where to explore gender and sexual
identities. Overall, however, it was not until the 1960s that shōjo manga began to fully ex-
plore the revolutionary take on bodies and identities that would become its primary attribute
in later decades. In 1965, Mary Lou by Yoshiko Nishitani was thought to be ‘the first’ shōjo
manga to actually portray the romantic concerns of average Japanese teenage girls (Mazur
2014). A few years later, Hideko Mizuno’s Fire (Faiyā! 1969–1971) openly proved that the tide
was shifting on shōjo manga’s desire to explore issues of bodies and identity, as it openly por-
trayed factual – although clearly non-explicit – sex scenes. These 1960s examples opened the
way for the gender and sex revolution that would be characteristic of the works by women
pioneer mangaka emerging in the following decade.
The vast majority of 1970s shōjo manga, which primarily incorporated the work of the
Year 24 mangaka, proposed a “delirious wave of exuberance and excess” (Mazur and Danner
2014, p. 74). The narratives from this era did not shy away from great amounts of emotion,
visual experimentation, affected outbursts, and an overall distinctive vitality of “gleam and
glitter” (Mazur p. 74). The storytelling was energetic, and proposed a series of heroines whose
lives were filled with both melodrama and sparkle. The female protagonists of this era were
motivated and determined, and set the standards for shōjo manga characterisations in the
decades that followed. The pleasures of romance literature, especially as proposed by classic
European tales of previous centuries, were mixed with the dramatic exploits that were often
seen in 1970s American soap operas. Examples such as Yumiko Igarashi’s Candy Candy (Kyandi
Kyandi 1975–1979) – the tale of a forever-hopeful orphan, who eventually finds her place in
the world via a whirlwind of both catastrophes and joy – were particularly representative of
the ways in which shōjo narratives from this era joined the conventions of classic literature
with the “irresistible package” of manga aesthetics (Mazur and Danner 2014, p. 75). The
playfulness and glitzy nature of early 1970s manga also translated into a distinctive desire to
play with gender identities. While the aesthetics of shōjo manga from this period were par-
ticularly marked by a wave of sparkle, one can also note the emergence of a certain “playful
fluidity of gender” (Mazur and Danner 2014, p. 74), which, while owing to the development
of shōjo manga in previous decades, also established its own brand of representation and appeal.
In 1971 and 1974, respectively, Moto Hagio published November Gymnasium (11-gatsu no
Gymnasium) and The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no Shinzō). Hagio was part of the ‘Year 24
group’, and is often credited as being one of the founding artists of contemporary shōjo
manga. Hagio is especially regarded as one of the most influential 1970s shōjo mangakas for
the sub-category of shōnen-ai. The term shōnen-ai, while originally carrying derogatory
446
tones in the Japanese language, took on a different meaning when it became the primary
way to describe a sub-genre of shōjo manga in the 1970s, which was chiefly concerned with
portraying ‘boys in love’. These stories were, and still are, largeley platonic in nature, only
occasionally delving into the physical side of relationships, and firmly maintaining the focus
on romance. Hagio was a pioneer in the development of this sub-category of shōjo manga,
and heavily contributed to the establishment of the bishōnen – literally, ‘beautiful youth’ – a
figure whose beauty and appeal is able to transcend the boundaries of both gender and sexual
orientation. The development of bishōnen within shōjo manga represented an important shift
in gender representation, as it distanced the genre from proposing ostensibly female figures
who ‘dressed as men’ – like, for instance, Sapphire in Princess Knight – and included arguably
safe figures who could embody romantic desires for young female readers, without introduc-
ing a complicated sexual aspect.
Indeed, bishōnen were seen as the ideal way through which the readers could channel
their feelings. Power argues that “the delicately slim, androgynous body of the bishōnen were
often depicted with excessively ‘feminine’ traits such as thick eyelashes and long flowing
hair” (2009, p. 127). This physical representation was aimed precisely at targeting the female
readership of shōjo manga, and exploited the genre’s established protocols by encouraging
readers to place a focus on central characters and, in turn, identifying with them. The pa-
rameters of shōjo manga channelled a perception that allowed for “the boy character to be a
stand-in for a girl reader” (Power 2009, p. 127). These ‘boys in love’ narratives provided a
safe set-up for exploring desire, both romantic and sexual: while shōnen-ai manga ostensibly
focused on relationships between boys, those interpersonal connections would seamlessly
translate into the fantasy of a heterosexual relationship for the female readers. The physical
representation of the bishōnen was but the beginning of its depiction, as tales of love and
passion were specifically intended to be genderless and, therefore, largely universal. When
discussing the impact of the genre on readers, Mark McLelland proposes that boy-love shōjo
manga were, and still are, “an imaginary playground”, in which one could “flee the realities
of everyday life” (2010, p. 17) (Figure 32.2).
In 1970s shōjo manga, the bishōnen narrative allowed for a model of interaction that
was tied to neither ‘female’ nor ‘male’ gender identities. The inclusion of the ‘beautiful
boys’ in shōjo manga “allowed the readers to weave through a number of possible interpre-
tations, functioning as a safe metaphor” through which they “could explore and embrace
Figure 32.2 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973)
447
their sexuality” (Power 2009, p. 127). All the same, a critical awareness must be maintained
as to the provable success of shōnen-ai within shōjo manga in actually breaking the bound-
aries of gender characterisation. There is no doubting the impact of these narratives on the
genre overall; and, indeed, one can only appreciate the steps made by Hagio, among oth-
ers, towards portraying less-regulated gender identities in shōjo manga. Nevertheless, while
this shift in both characterisation and narrative was both influential and revolutionary, the
meta-narrative of shōnen-ai was still firmly anchored to the traditional gender system. Un-
doubtedly, the bishōnen opened shōjo manga to a suggestively fluid gender discourse, but,
overall, the politics of the narrative remained covertly heterosexual. To some extent, in The
Rose of Versailles, the character of Oscar could be interpreted as a morphed version of the
bishōnen, where heterosexual politics are explored in conjunction with the potential of queer
identities. The mixture of a suggestively androgynous body, joined with both the perfor-
mative characteristics of a male persona and the unwavering framework of the heterosexual
woman, challenges the easily categorisable construction of both gender and sex binaries.
The Rose of Versailles, gender identities, and girls’ storytelling

The period of the early 1970s, when The Rose of Versailles was serialised, represented an
important point for the rise of the women’s liberation movement in Japan. Like it was in
other parts of the world, women activists were engaged in a number of gender discourses in
Japan, and their voices were the focus of both prominence and marginalisation. The fight to
overthrow an ancient regime, which inevitably privileged men’s place in society over wom-
en’s, was an essential part of the cultural discourses in which Ikeda, together with the other
members of the ‘year 24 group’, was producing her manga. In the midst of the rebellious
and radical voices of 1970s Japanese feminism, The Rose of Versailles found success precisely
for its decision to stage the life of a “revolutionary adrogyne who fights to overthrow the
ancient, powerful regime” (Anan 2014, p. 42). While the ‘regime’ fought by Oscar in Ikeda’
manga is, ostensibly, that of the old French monarchy, one can easily see how the system that
is subtlety being overthrown, for both the characters and the manga’s readers, is also that of
patriarchal gender and sexuality. While actual women activists were largely marginalised in
1970s Japan, the world of shōjo manga provided an important platform for the discussion of
women’s rights and liberation, especially in relation to the control over their own bodies.
While the vision of a “socialist revolution” (Anan 2014, p. 47) was difficult to achieve in real
life – where the women’s movement encountered constant political opposition, including
within their own leftist groups – the realm of shōjo manga was left largely untouched. Likely
because it was seen as an inconsequential part of entertainment for girls, shōjo manga was not
the focus on political censorship, and allowed female mangaka to explore issues of gender and
sexuality, as well as social value and political power, in ways which would not have otherwise
been permitted. Examples like The Rose of Versailles are an only lightly veiled critique of the
long-standing cycles of gender oppression in Japan, where women activists continued to
fight for sexual liberation. To some extent, the revolution supported and achieved by Oscar
in The Rose of Versailles was, as Anan argues, the revolution that female “liberationists were
struggling for” (2014, p. 47). Ikeda’s manga epitomises the social and political upheaval of
its time, and provides an insight into the potential role played by manga in general as part of
radicalised gender discourses.
Upon its original publication, The Rose of Versailles was an instant hit among teenage girls
in Japan. Deborah Shamoon argues that “at a time when shōjo manga was just beginning to
shift its demographic from elementary school students to high school students, The Rose of
448
Versailles was part of a larger trend toward longer and more complex storytelling for girls”
(2007, p. 3). In response to the readers’ expectations, BeruBara’s focus was, expectedly, placed
on the characters’ feelings and emotional tumult. As it is often the case with shōjo manga from
the early 1970s, the backgrounds in the panels of the BeruBara are often blank; at times, they
morph into either swirly lines or hard, punchy shapes, which function as a reflection of the
characters’ emotional state. While maintaining a few aspects of the universal manga style –
characterised by the tendency to be “monochrome” (Schodt 1996, p. 23) – the aesthetics
of BeruBara are typical of the revolutionary techniques of the Year 24 group, who showed
a propensity for moving away from the cinematic, rectangular panel construction that had
been typical of shōjo manga in previous decades – like, for instance, in the works of Tezuka.
As Jennifer Prough contends, the artists from the Year 24 group found the traditional format
of Japanese comics to be “restrictive”, and “re-fashioned the page in order to better represent
the more interior and emotional content of their manga” (2010a, p. 97). Women mangaka
from the 1970s favoured a more abstract set of conventions – often referred to as the ‘mon-
tage’ technique – which placed an emphasis on characterisation, rather than sequence.
The depiction of characters and setting in the manga certainly remains faithful to the
rococo and excessive style favoured by the French aristocracy in the late eighteenth century.
Marie Antoinette’s dresses, for instance, are hyper-feminine and lavish, as are her elaborate
hairstyles and preferred flower arrangements. Simultaneously, however, The Rose of Versailles
exposes its own historical background context, by presenting elements of style that are proper
to the early 1970s, including the distinct appearance of flared trousers in both uniforms and
everyday clothing. These are commonly coupled with shirts and blouses displaying billowy
sleeves, as an unmistakable nod to the sartorial preferences of the era when Ikeda was writ-
ing. Both the depiction of extravagant pre-revolutionary style and subtle evocation of 1970s
fashion “appealed to girls’ sensibilities” (Shamoon, p. 3). Nonetheless, it was the interactions
between characters, with their distinct focus on tortured romance and an unexpectedly pow-
erful female character that, arguably, transformed The Rose of Versailles into the immensely
popular manga that it actually was.
The style chosen by Ikeda is not only typical of 1970s shōjo manga, but also reflective of
specific gender politics that are inherent to the narrative. In keeping with the general manga
approach, The Rose of Versailles has “realistic graphics of scenery and props” (Anan p. 44),
but, in keeping with its generic placement, its “graphic images of people are not realistic
and function clearly as signs” (Anan 44). For example, the size and shape of the eyes can be
taken to signify gender: girls’ eyes, such as Marie Antoinette’s, are larger and ‘sparkling’,
to render a highly prescribed sense of femininity and innocence. But eyes can also signify
age, and one can see how her eyes become smaller as the manga progresses, and sees Marie
Antoinette become a mother. In favouring this aesthetic depiction for facial features, and eyes
in particular, Ikeda fully subscribed to the style favoured by the 24 nen gumi, who are known
for popularising “disproportionately large liquid eyes”, with often marked extra “shine” or
a “starburst near the pupil”; these were not only “indicative of femininity”, but also func-
tioned as the visual characteristics that would become “the hallmarks” of shōjo manga even
today (Danziger-Russell 2013, p. 142). As it is also typical of the shōjo narrative from the
early 1970s era, men’s eyes in BeruBara are depicted instead as more oval, as it is the case of
Fersen’s. A notable exception here can be found in the character of André, whose eyes are
large and round in nature, and continuously resemble those of Oscar. This is definitely not
by chance, as there is a subtle suggestion throughout the narrative that Oscar and André are
emotional counterparts. Indeed, at times, they appear to even swap the characteristics of
traditional gender roles, as André is known to be more emotional – a characteristic often
449
expected of female characters, especially in shōjo – while Oscar forcefully maintains a stoic
outlook, in answer to her imposed ‘masculine’ military persona. This is not to say, of course,
that stoicism is a universal male characteristic. The Rose of Versailles, however, presents it to
be so. Therefore, the aesthetic similarities between Oscar and André, which defy the gen-
der representation of other characters through the manga, are significant in expressing the
breakage – at least in part – of conventional representation, as far as gender identities are con-
cerned. The physical similarities between Oscar and André also foreshadow their eventual
romance, which crowns the achievement of heterosexual love, upon which the story actually
pivots (Figure 32.3).
Oscar, of course, is a complicated character, as far as gender identities are concerned.
This begins, unsurprisingly, with her aesthetic depiction. Oscar is, aesthetically speaking,
a clear example of shōjo androgyny. She has long, flowing hair, which could be taken to
be synonymous with a conventional representation of femininity. Ikeda’s style, however,
subverts representation and is sited in the world of exceptions, as long, flowing hair in The
Rose of Versailles is often associated with male characters, as it is the case with both Fersen and
Girodelle – Oscar’s lieutenant within the Royal guards – and, to some extent, André himself.
Women, within the story, are regularly depicted with their hair tied, often in elaborate de-
signs, especially when members of the aristocracy appear. Marie Antoinette is a clear example
of this, as her hair regularly appears in complicated up-dos, which signify both her adult
femininity and her royal status. Oscar further resembles the masculine ideal within the story
by commonly wearing a realistically drawn uniform, which reminds both the characters and
the readers of her status as a liminal entity, whose fluidity is openly acknowledged, if not
fully explored. The realism of the clothes is part of the ways in which manga, and particularly
shōjo, is able to communicate gender identities; facial features – lacking realism – are easier to
manipulate. In the case of The Rose of Versailles, “such unrealistic ways of representing human
bodies make the visualisation of the androgyne possible” (Anan 2014, p. 44). Oscar is taller
than female characters, but shorter than male ones. As such, she is openly presented as a fluid
figure. This physical representation is also illustrative of her gender identity, whose depiction
is evocative of the bishōnen. Oscar oscillates between conventional notions of femininity
and masculinity, as her aesthetic representation renders her as extremely appealing to both
characters and readers of the manga.
Figure 32.3 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973), p. 98
450
Although she dresses like a man, Oscar’s sexuality is never kept a secret: she is conve-
niently portrayed as falling with love by Count Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s lover. Oscar’s
ability to blur gender boundaries is further re-iterated when, in an attempt to seduce Fersen,
She decides to interrupt her male-orientated narrative, as she dons conventionally feminine
clothing – including an elaborate gown – and attends a court ball (Figure 32.4).
When her attempt is not successful – and she is rejected by Fersen – she dramatically dis-
cards the possibility of a feminine persona, and once again retreats into her military existence.
Eventually, she finds love and fulfilment with her attendant and childhood friend André, whose
passion for Oscar had been made clear through. This is achieved even after a failed attempt on
André’s part to confess his feelings to Oscar, which results in a disturbing episode shadowed
by the momentary threat – thankfully never realised – of sexual violence (Vol. 5). Oscar is
neither intersex nor transsexual, but embodies the heterosexual figures who do not fall easily
into gender binaries. To some extent, Oscar liberates the female readers by providing them
with “the image of a strong, intelligent, and adventurous woman in male guise” (Power 2009,
p. 122). Her masculine clothes clearly give her privileges, as she is not made to suffer the ev-
anescent subordinate status that the other women in the manga, including Marie Antoinette,
are subject to. A well-defined sense of “gender hierarchy” (Butler 1990, p. vii) underscores the
representation of characters in The Rose of Versailles. It is clear that, as far as she embraces her
role as a military person, Oscar is successful not only in imitating the gender that is prescribed
to her by her social status, but also in achieving the independence that goes with a conventional
notion of masculinity. Through Oscar, Ikeda challenges confining notions of gender opposites:
gender is indeed revealed as performative, and deprived of any notion of “internal” or “nat-
ural gestures”, which are often assumed to be intrinsic to cultural notions of masculinity and
femininity (Butler 1990, p. ix). While assuming an ostensibly masculine role, Oscar’s gender
performance draws attention to the conventionality of gender boundaries, and how they can be
subverted. Although Oscar’s gender performance is social rather than theatrical, its efficacy lies
specifically in the character’s ability to channel a variety of identities, suggestive of a non-binary
categorisation of gender itself. Oscar’s androgyny and ‘male persona’ open the way for a num-
ber of allusive narratives, where the queer sub-text is brought into the foreground.
In discussing the potential for queer politics in The Rose of Versailles, Anan contends
that this manga “abounds with homoeroticisim, even though there is technically no
Figure 32.4 Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara, 1972–1973), Volume 4, p. 121
451
homosexual relationship” in it at all (Anan 2014, p. 48). Oscar is customarily referred to as

‘he’, especially by those who do not know her well, and simply admire her as an attractive
individual. Ikeda often suggests that aristocratic women – including Count Fersen’s own
sister, Sophie – naturally assume Oscar to be male, and even go as far as addressing her
with the masculine ‘monsieur’ (Vol. 4, p. 109). In addition, women commonly indulge
in romantic and wistful reveries about the cross-dressing captain of the Royal Guards:
“I’m going to dream about him tonight”, exclaims a besotted lady in waiting at Versailles
(Vol. 1, p. 88). Marie Antoinette herself is smitten by Oscar on their first encounter,
and quietly wishes that the captain was, in fact, a man (Vol. 1). The queer sub-text is
idealised more pointedly in the relationship between Oscar and Rosalie Lamorlière, the
servant girl who is taken in by the de Jarjayes family, after Occar rescues her from a series
of dangers. Rosalie openly fantasises about Oscar on a number of occasions, and even
goes as far as confessing her love to her, before she is forcefully taken away to live with a
different family. She claims to love Oscar “even though [she is] a woman” (Vol. 4, p. 67).
The relationship between Oscar and Rosalie is an extremely complicated one, as it plays
on both gender identities, and conceptions of sexuality that are kept largely unaddressed.
It is clear that Rosalie’s love for Oscar will forever remain unrequited, as Oscar rejects her
advances, by clarifying her attraction to men. Oscar’s sexual ambiguity is also restrained
by Ikeda when Jeanne de la Motte – Rosalie’s adopted sister – accuses Oscar of being
“Marie Antoinette’s lover”. Oscar is enraged by the accusation, and openly threatens to
“kill” Jeanne as a result (Vol. 4, p. 36).
Nonetheless, upon Rosalie’s departure from the de Jarjayes household, Oscar voices
her own sadness to André, regretting that her own “woman’s body” could never allow her
to fully love the girl. The connection between ‘a woman’s body’ and heterosexuality here
is clear. While hinting at queer possibilities of ‘same love’ and ‘girl-girl’ romance – which
had been popular in previous incarnations of shōjo manga (Shamoon 2007, p. 19) – The
Rose of Versailles rejects any actual romantic possibility by keeping Oscar firmly out of
the openly queer spectrum. Oscar’s fate is forcefully removed from the dreamy realm of
schoolgirl romance, as she rejects Rosalie’s affection in favour of a desired heterosexual
relationship. While Oscar embodies, to some extent, both conventional masculine and
feminine characteristics, and she is portrayed as the epitome of many women’s desires and
fantasies, her rejection of the romance with Rosalie does not allow BeruBara to stretch
into the yuri genre, a category of manga that openly depicts homoerotic relationships
between female characters. Indeed, the overall features of The Rose of Versailles are still
openly sited within the broader genre of shōjo manga which, generally speaking, “tends
to favour homosocial” relationships (Shamoon 2007, p. 4). Broadly speaking, Oscar’s
fluid gender identity is more openly suggestive of shōnen-ai and the bishōnen, as her
androgynous body refuses to be prescribed within binary categories. Fantasising about
Oscar was a safe endeavour for the girl readers of the 1970s. Although she is attractive
in a suggestively masculine way, she is also unavoidably female and, as it is revealed, un-
compromisingly heterosexual. Oscar is, therefore, a safe space, as far as both gender and
sexual identities are concerned. In her, one can find the suggestion of queerness, but that
suggestion is merely an ethereal one, as no actual homoerotic deeds could ever come into
fruition. As a multifaceted and suggestively ambiguous character, Oscar problematises the
very notion of gender identity. This is in keeping with the approach presented in early
1970s shōjo manga, which often provided an outlet for “minority and marginal” views
(Galbraith 2019, p. 358), in order to negotiate the complex cultural relationship with,
simultaneously, hegemonic masculinity and hyper-femininity.
452
Oscar’s revolution and its legacies

As one considers the impact and influence of manga in the twenty-first century, The Rose
of Versailles seems like a distant and disconnected presence across the larger spectrum of the
shōjo narrative. Oscar, with her revolutionary intents and refusal to belong to any strictly
defined categories, is arguably a remote figure in the broader social, political, and cultural
debates that surround the representations of gender and sexuality in our contemporary mo-
ment. And yet, as one turns a critical eye to the decades that followed the publication of The
Rose of Versailles, it is not difficult to see how the ripples of Ikeda’s manga become visible,
as gender and sexuality are represented in a variety of more contemporary examples. In the
early 2000s, Ikeda attempted to revive of The Rose of Versailles by adding a series of newly
written volumes to the tale. Unsurprisingly, these volumes were not met with the same
enthusiasm bestowed upon the 1970s version, but this did not affect the impact of Ikeda’s
original tale. The aesthetic and political impact of Oscar, across shōjo manga as a category,
is undeniable. As Dani Cavallaro suggests, The Rose of Versailles is not only “pervaded by the
memory of the epoch” it was written in, but, most importantly, “the memory of its hero-
ine” distinctly resonates in later manga works “in the guise of intersexual allusions” (2009,
p. 183). For instance, the echoes of Oscar’s representation are felt in other iconic examples
of shōjo manga (as well as anime), such as Sailor Moon (Bish ōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn 1991–1997),
where suggestively queer characters – particularly Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune – clearly
channel the representation of non-binary gender identities and sexualities. Most significantly,
later manga such as Chiho Saito’s Revolutionary Girl Utena (Sh ōjo Kakumei Utena 1996–1998) –
which features a number of women characters in uniform – make a virtue of exploiting the
legacy of The Rose of Versailles, in order to realise the full extent of queer narratives and iden-
tities, which were kept tacit and unfilled in Ikeda’s manga.
Visually, Revolutionary Girl Utena recalls many aspects of The Rose of Versailles, by showing
young women whose intent is set on protecting those who are vulnerable in a number of sit-
uations. While borrowing from fairy tales elements and ‘magic girl’ shōjo manga – including
classic examples such as Creamy Mami (Mah ō no Tenshi Kurīmī Mami 1983–1984) – Utena fol-
lows in BeruBara’s footsteps by providing an intricate socio-political commentary on gender
roles and sexuality. Engaging openly with yuri conventions, Revolutionary Girl Utena focuses
on bisexual characters, who do not deny their desires and gender fluidities. Indeed, most of
the characters are placed on a non-binary spectrum, unapologetically depicting transsexual
identities, and, in so doing, constructing non-formulaic expressions of shōjo manga icons,
including a non-binary prince. While Revolutionary Girl Utena is explicit in its expression of
queer identities, its success is the result of multiple narrative transformations that owe their
existence, both visually and culturally, to the iconic representations of earlier manga such as
The Rose of Versailles. The politics of ‘revolution’ are intrinsic to the narratives of both Utena
and Oscar, as Saito’s manga pays homage to Ikeda’s work by embracing its aesthetic represen-
tation and cultural resonance.
In The Rose of Versailles, Oscar’s fluid representation challenges “gender and heterosex-
ual norms by opening up a space of experimentation for both queer and straight readers”
(Duggan 2013, p. 116). As the narrative progressed, Ikeda played with gender and sexual
identities, titillating the reader with the promise of possibility, but eventually subscribing to
expected and permissible representations of identities, which do not challenge the cultural
status quo. The political undercurrents of BeruBara were firmly sited in the cultural and
creative landscape of the 1970s, but its impact extended beyond the boundaries of time and
space. The narrative and characterisation of The Rose of Versailles were composed of a series of
453
negotiations and compromises that, while still placing heterosexual relationships at the centre
of the story, provided a ground-breaking outlook on both gender and sexual identities within
the broader category of shōjo manga.
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Taylor & Francis
Part VI
Queer and feminist
intermedial textures
Taylor & Francis
33
Representing the extreme
end-point of sexual violence
Ethical strategies in Phoebe
Gloeckner’s La Tristeza
Rebecca Scherr
The most visually disturbing work of graphic narrative I have read in the past few years is a
short novella by the comics artist Phoebe Gloeckner titled La Tristeza, focusing on the sexual
violence and murders that have plagued Juárez, Mexico for the past decades. Gloeckner’s
reputation in the comics world derives from her nuanced and boldly explicit depictions of the
sexual exploitation of her semi-autobiographical avatar “Minnie” at the hands of older men
in two works, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002) and A Child’s Life and Other Stories (2000). In
these two works, some of the comics panels so explicitly depict sexual abuse that the works
have been banned and contested in a few well-publicized instances; Fredrik Byrn Køhler
mentions that in banning A Child’s Life, the Stockton, California library system, called it “a
‘how-to’ manual for pedophiles” (140).
Yet the depictions of rape and murder that comprise La Tristeza are even more confron-
tational and horrific, in my view. The first page of the novella consists of a two-page spread
displaying the photograph of a very young girl. She is maybe three or four years old, dressed
in roses and an abundance of frilly lace as she lies in her tiny coffin, a large purple bruise
visible all the way down her lifeless face. The text reads: “Has anyone supposed it lucky to
be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it” (n.pag.). This
is only the first page; and astonishingly this is one of the least violent and disturbing images
in the entire work. La Tristeza as a whole is difficult to endure. The remainder of the novella
depicts, in gruesome detail, the extreme end-point of sexual violence: rape, murder and even
an image that suggests necrophilia. Many of the victims throughout these pages are children.
La Tristeza also stands as an artistic departure for Gloeckner in terms of both content and
form. While continuing to represent acts of sexual violence, she is no longer negotiating the
difficult line between autobiography and fiction as she does in the works mentioned above (see
Chute Graphic, Køhler, Michaels), but has entered into the field of documentary representation
where the ethics of representing other people’s pain is at stake. And the other, in this case, is also
The Other vis á vis Gloeckner’s own position: her focus is on young, poor girls and women of
color whose lives are marked by extreme economic and gender-based precarity.
459
Rebecca Scherr
On top of this, in terms of form, La Tristeza is not comics. It is graphic narrative, but
instead of telling this story in hand-drawn frames and gutters, as Gloeckner does in her
previous narratives, here she creates hand-sewn dolls, places them in diorama settings and
photographs the tableaux in full color. Most of the “frames” of La Tristeza are single-page
spread or double-page spreads. Gloeckner often manipulates the photographs of these scenes,
sometimes transposing photographic faces onto the dolls’ figures. Some of the pages are
merely manipulated photographs without the dolls; one spread is an artistically rendered map
of the Juárez area. Added to these pages and framed—for the most part in text boxes—are
quotations from Whitman and Rilke, and direct Google translations of newspaper articles
that detail the murders of several women and children in Juárez. If anything, La Tristeza
uncannily echoes the fotonovela, a popular form of graphic narrative in Latin America, and in
particular the genre of fotonovelas rojas that depict reenactments of true crime and which most
often feature violence against women (Flora 97).
Precarity in its many forms is absolutely central to a huge portion of comics and graphic
narratives, from the vulnerable victim in need of a superhero savior to the kinds of real-life
vulnerabilities and violence portrayed in non-fictional comics about trauma, war, conflict
and genocide, and that very often include representations of gender-based violence (Precup).
I would claim that precarity in the form of bodily vulnerability absolutely marks the comics
and graphic narrative mediums more than most other kinds of images. Not only is it one of
the medium’s most central thematics, but the image of the suffering body also performs a con-
nective and visceral role for the reader, for it is through the image of the suffering body that
many of comics’ bodily, corporeal and empathic effects and affects become manifest (Scherr).
In this vein, it is by looking closely at how Gloeckner constructs the images and texts of La
Tristeza that I will attend to the larger questions and implications of graphic representations
of sexual violence: in depicting sexual violence, how can the text-image relationship be used
by artists to influence a reader’s ethical considerations and sense of emotional engagement?
Are there aspects of the text-image relationship, or of the techniques particular to graphic
narrative more generally, that can produce unique or radical ways of seeing that challenge
the traditionalist, colonialist paradigms of “us” and “them” that have long structured repre-
sentations of victimhood?
In addressing these questions, I will analyze the various ways that Gloeckner represents
bodily precarity in La Tristeza, and discuss the visual mechanisms and contexts that influence
readers’ ethical perceptions of these bodies in relation to the real-life stories they tell. How-
ever, before I closely analyze these images, it is important to point out that in choosing to
document the “femicides,” as they have been called, of Juárez, Gloeckner steps into a field of
representation where these bodies are already over-determined by various discourses of race
and gender as they are understood in relation to economic and class issues. Juárez as a partic-
ular place is an extreme example of the precarity of modern-day life. Situated on the border
between Mexico and the United States, Juárez is a “free trade zone” where several US-
owned multinational corporations run factories so as to avoid paying certain taxes and tariffs,
and, needless to say, are dependent on a low-paid and highly female labor force. Many of
the female workers at these maquilas are also internal migrants, having arrived in Juárez from
all over Mexico in order to work, further underscoring these women’s precarious positions.
Several of the murder victims have been factory workers, as well as women who worked
in unofficial sectors of the local economy. Because of the geographical positioning of Juárez
as a border space, combined with the economic conditions that govern the city, the murders
are most often “read” in economic terms connected to factory labor. In other words, the eco-
nomic reality of Juárez had rendered the victims “consumable,” “disposable,” “exchangeable,”
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Ethical strategies in Gloeckner
treated as excess, to be consumed as desired and then thrown into the desert. In this way, the
victims’ bodies become metaphors for the gruesome, exploitative and dehumanizing under-
belly of modern-day capitalism (Biemann). Ursula Biemann succinctly threads these many
strands together in her documentary work about Juárez, writing: “The border is a highly
gendered region. Economic power relations along the lines of gender difference are spelled
out in sexual terms” (16).
As if to underscore the place-specific (but not economic) dimension of these murders,
Gloeckner follows the spread of the little girl in her coffin with a map, covering two full
pages, of the borderland region between Juárez and its American sister city, El Paso. Appear-
ing at first glance like a typical geographical survey map, a second glance reveals that Gloeck-
ner has played with type and language, “writing over” the official map to create an intricate
feminist and political statement on Juárez. In other words, this is no ordinary map. For one,
Juárez is not named as such. Instead, Gloeckner calls it “Ciudad Rojiza: Mexico, Estado des
perros chicos” (Reddish City: Mexico, the nation of male dogs), while El Paso is re-named
“El Pastor,” The Shepherd; racial and gender irony are clearly embedded in these names.
The map is strewn with what appear to be pink push-pins marked with an X, and the map’s
key tells us that these pins represent “APPROXIMATE DISTRIBUTION OF FEMALE
CORPSES LOCATED FROM JUNE 1990 – DECEMBER 2000” (4) (Figure 33.1).
This kind of image work where Gloeckner literally draws on and manipulates images that
seem to belong to “official” discourse, and doing so in such a way so as to bring forth the
suppressed, gendered dimensions of official imagery and discourse, resonates powerfully with
Gloeckner’s much earlier work with medical illustration. Trained as a professional medical il-
lustrator, for a period in the 1990s Gloeckner produced artworks in the style of medical illus-
tration that brought into view the gendered and sexual aspects of women’s bodies, playing on
themes of taboo and obscenity as counterpoints to the seemingly objective practice of how
these bodies appear in medical textbooks (see the appendix to A Child’s Life). In La Tristeza’s
Figure 33.1 Phoebe Gloeckner’s I Live Here (2008)
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Rebecca Scherr
map of Juárez, the textures of the landscape look remarkably like drawings that depict what
is under the flesh: blood vessels, fat, muscle and veins. Thus it seems Gloeckner purposely
chose the style of the geographical survey for Juárez, which is a type of map that investigates
what is under the surface in order to render highly textured pictures of a given area. In effect,
Gloeckner simultaneously abstracts Juárez in the form of a map, and brings forth its fleshi-
ness, so to speak. This map is like an image of a body yielding glimpses of the secrets buried
beneath the surface, and in turn these secrets are themselves, quite literally, bodies. The key
that I mentioned above, the one that explains the use of the X-marked push-pins, is followed
by the explanation: “X= 10 bodies +/–2.5 per area +/–.25 km” (n.pag.). This represents the
coldness and distancing of abstraction, the transforming of deep suffering into a formula of
spatial distribution. At the same time, it illustrates that the murders have become part and
parcel of the landscape itself, both literally and figuratively: these murders are embedded in
the geography of Juárez, as bodies buried in shallow graves and as bodies simply left out in
the desert to rot.
While in some ways this image—a map—would seem the least “intimate” or “human”
of all of the images of La Tristeza, it is the only one that attempts to show what is “under the
skin” of both landscape and the body. All of the other bodily images in this work, some of
which I will discuss below, depict the outer surface of dead, female bodies: in fact, most of the
images are structured as crime scenes and are practically forensic in their detail. This map,
then, can be read as collapsing the boundaries of standard ideas of perspective. A seemingly
objective overview of a geographical area is re-visioned to become a depiction and com-
mentary on what is underneath the flesh, and what is underneath is revealed to be horrific,
misogynistic violence; what is presented as an abstracted landscape without the presence of
people is transformed into a deeply felt depiction of women’s extremely vulnerable bodily
materiality.
The map is thus rendered both fleshy and abstract, and functions as both a personal and
collective statement. In this way, Gloeckner’s method of “writing over” official imagery
speaks to the reader of inversion and paradox. With closer inspection, what we think we see at
first glance is turned upside down and inside out, placing us as readers/viewers into a position
of insecurity that is also a reminder of our own vulnerability as spectators. The map invokes a
sense of a concrete locale yet at the very same time it is disorienting; it undermines the read-
er’s sense of locating where we “are,” of where to place our focus, and of how to distinguish
what is real and objective from what is created by the artist with an ostensibly larger, political
and feminist purpose. These slippages become especially crucial in terms of the ethics of
seeing, as La Tristeza is ostensibly a documentary project that aims to educate and tell some
kind of truth about what is happening to these women in Juárez. As the second image in this
graphic novella and one which seemingly provides a stable overview of the ground in order
to orient readers toward the accumulation of this knowledge, the map simultaneously effects
the opposite reaction. This can be seen as an ethical move on Gloeckner’s part, pulling the
proverbial rug, so to speak, so that viewers begin the reading experience in a state of insecu-
rity, one might even say of vulnerability, so that from the very beginning we cannot presume
to “know” or “understand” precisely what we are seeing.
It is in this way that Gloeckner begins the project of developing an alternative form of
empathic seeing in La Tristeza, where inducing this state of disorientation and not-knowing
becomes an alternative to the more standardized notions of spectator sympathy that structure
many images related to representations of trauma, violence and violation. This standard-
ized structure of sympathetic spectatorship is premised on the act of looking at the pain of
others (to use Sontag’s evocative phrase) in a way where the sight of the other’s pain evokes
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an emotional response in the viewer, yet stops short of revealing the politics of sympathy as a
particular affective response. Images of suffering participate, in the words of Wendy Hesford,
in “an affective economy that transforms others into objects of feeling and sight” (57). Yet
this kind of affective spectatorship all too often fails to interrogate or question the power
dynamics embedded in the act of looking itself, or in the case of the suffering of others, of
witnessing, where “we” look at “them,” and “they” are all too often subjects whose lives have
been ruled by utter precarity very much predicated on a history of colonialism. The result is
a reification of ways of seeing that, despite creators’ and viewers’ good intentions and experi-
ences of sympathy, does nothing to overturn the underlying colonial gaze.
This is extremely important in regard to the context in which La Tristeza first appeared.
The work did not appear as a stand-alone graphic narrative, but was published as the final
contribution to the larger multi-media, graphic narrative project titled I Live Here, supported
by Amnesty International. With the exception of Gloeckner’s piece (and a select few others),
I Live Here stands as a textbook example of the misguided and unreflective sympathy for
suffering others that I have just briefly outlined, and that is a prevalent mode in the “market-
place” of life narratives about suffering (Whitlock).
I Live Here is a difficult text to categorize, but its main objective is clear: it is an exploration
of the precarious lives of women in “humanitarian hot-spots,” with an emphasis on sexual
violence and exploitation. It comes in the form of a fold-out box, inside of which are four
pockets. Each pocket contains a glossy faux notebook titled by place-name, highlighting the
plight of violence against girls and women: the locations are Chechnya, the Thai-Myanmar
border, Malawi and of course Juárez in Mexico. Each notebook consists of several contri-
butions from artists and writers, some of them very well known for their work with human
rights; for example, the section on Chechnya includes a short comic by Joe Sacco. Tying the
whole work together is the “voice” of the project’s initiator and driving force, the Canadian
actor and human rights activist Mia Kirshner (famous for her role as Jenny on The L-Word).
Kirshner opens and closes all four notebooks with hand-written “diary entries” that reflect
on her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and as a survivor of rape, as well as her
impressions of the places she visits in the creation of I Live Here. Hers is the dominant voice
of the work, pulling all of the disparate geographies and stories together.
On the opening page of the Juárez notebook, a polaroid shot shows the corner of an empty,
neat bedroom, and Kirshner begins the written component by sketching a quick portrait of
the mother of one of the missing girls, explaining how the mother keeps her daughter’s bed-
room immaculate. Then, instead of continuing with writing about this mother and daughter,
Kirshner suddenly veers off-topic and starts to write about her grandmother’s weekly visits to
the hairdresser, “chauffeured by my grandfather in his Cadillac” (n.pag.). We find out in the
other notebooks that the grandmother is a Holocaust survivor; however, at this moment and
in this particular context, Kirshner’s weird attempt at forging a personal connection based
on the notion of suffering comes off, to say the least, as tone-deaf. In the longest piece in
the Juárez notebook, written by Mia Kirshner’s sister Lauren and titled “Twenty Poems for
Claudia,” the line between self-absorption and other people’s pain is rendered so thin as to
appear plainly colonialist. Here is a quick example from one of the “poems,” where Lauren
Kirshner writes about herself: “Claudia, I once loved a man who was married. I was nine-
teen, the same age as you were when you did the same thing. I won’t sit here and say it was
all blues and rain. He made me feel very sexy…” (n.pag.).
In both examples, the dead and missing women “disappear” (for a second time) into the
first-world, white women’s musings and recollections of their own girlhoods and experi-
ences. The underlying message of the Kirshner’s writing on Juárez goes something like, “we
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are so alike, it could have been me.” This attempt at what might be called compassion or
empathy comes across as clueless at best, and at worst complicit in the larger power structures
that perpetuate global inequalities. This is because, ironically within the context of such a
work, this form of sympathetic engagement entirely ignores the national, racial, economic
and gendered power dynamics that go very far in explaining why indeed it is not them who
have gone missing or murdered. In their analysis of I Live Here, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg
and Alexandra Schultheis Moore call this sympathetic mode one of “elision” (247). This, in
short, is the structure of sympathetic looking that La Tristeza opposes—within the very work
of which it is a part.
In my previous writing about comics and graphic narratives that deal with violation and
human rights abuses, I have argued that graphic narrative is, in some ways, perfectly poised
to address the growing consensus among critics to produce more nuanced, critical represen-
tations for thinking about images of suffering. These representations would ideally not only
evoke the reader’s empathy—which is distinct from sympathy, in that it is experiential rather
than simple acknowledgment of the other’s pain—but also open a space for that empathy to
become an object of analysis in the reading process itself, enacted within the space of the
page (Scherr). This is because one of the strengths of graphic narrative is that the drawn
image possesses a visceral, resonant dimension (Gardner). In addition, the medium most
often consists of sequences of panels that give the impression of the movement of time and
space, so together these two aspects of graphic narrative—its iconic viscerality and its simu-
lation of movement—can communicate the experience of pain, and not just its existence. Thus
graphic narrative can touch upon the politics of empathy in immediate, instructive ways.
I am arguing here that Gloeckner’s narrative strategies allow for bodily vulnerability to func-
tion both as the content of the work and, to certain extent, as an affect that directs readers
toward an awareness of what Judith Butler calls “shared precariousness,” an understanding
of suffering that does not elide “the other” with self-portraiture but rather acknowledges
others’ sufferings while maintaining a critical distance. This distance, or gap, is of the utmost
importance. The map’s palimpsestic aesthetic is one area in which Gloeckner creates a kind
of gap between objective facts and interpretation, and this gap is created in the relationship
she constructs between text and image. As I will discuss below, Gloeckner maintains a strat-
egy of creating gaps between empathy and distance through the bluntness of the images she
creates, through the juxtaposition of text and image and through her choice of material to
work with—dolls.
A cursory glance at La Tristeza shows that Gloeckner skips over even the possibility of en-
gaging the reader’s sympathy for the victims simply through the blunt horror of the images.
Gloeckner focuses almost exclusively on the moments after death, and these murder scenes
are visual recreations of all girls and women’s absolutely worst fears come true (Figure 33.2).
These pages relentlessly depict the most horrific and painful deaths imaginable: rape, tor-
ture, murder. The content is so deeply disturbing that the possibility for sympathy is blown
to pieces by the sheer impact of the scene; what is left on the page is female precarity and
bodily vulnerability in its rawest form. This is part of graphic narrative’s visceral possibilities:
the image enacts a form of violence or invasion on the reader in its very horror. Its power is
to hold, even force our attention, even though our impulse is to look away. These are images
that cut the reader to the quick, leaving a mark: once seen, they cannot be unseen. This cut-
ting through with horror renders utter vulnerability as the overarching affect of these scenes.
There is no room to make these stories “ours,” nor is there any possibility for a redemptive
reading—the subjects in the images, after all, are dead. At the very same time, they speak to
some of our deepest, most painful fears that are entrenched in bodily, gendered experience.
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Figure 33.2 Phoebe Gloeckner’s I Live Here (2008)
The realness of the horror in combination with the sense that the tableaux give an im-
pression that something very much like this happened contrasts sharply with the obvious
deliberateness and extreme detail with which each page is composed. In La Tristeza the
hands of the artist are clearly present in every single detail: this is one aspect that the work
shares with comics and other drawn graphic narratives. Yet in this instance the artist’s
hands have not drawn comics. They have taken the time to sew dolls, place them in careful
order, create small stage sets for their display, photograph these dioramas of horror and af-
terward manipulate the photographs toward an aesthetic cohesiveness. Like with the map,
the overall impression is of a highly charged and disorienting gap between representations
of the real and what is created in order for that sense of realness to make a quick, sharp,
profound impact.
The effect of disorientation and distancing is also underscored by the text-image juxta-
positions throughout La Tristeza. For example, the first doll tableau we see is of a young girl
lying dead in a garden; and she is shown as having been penetrated by a blunt object—it is
utterly sickening to see. This image is accompanied by a typed text box that appears to be
taken from a short newspaper article with the title “Minor found without life.” The girl on
the page is not named; she is simply the dead minor. In this way, the tableau and text frame
her as simultaneously a specific victim, yet through anonymity she also stands in for victims
in general. The actual text, although presented in English, contains multiple language er-
rors: incorrect syntax and non-idiomatic expression, odd vocabulary and the incorrect use
of pronouns. These are the typical mistakes and syntax of Google translate. This wonky use
of Spanish-English translation allows Gloeckner to produce a kind of paradox in its affective
reach: the reader is, again, not quite sure of what she is reading, put off by the strange ex-
pressions and having to go over certain sentences again and again to figure out the meaning.
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The words are meant to detain us; we must spend time on deciphering some of the details of
this murder. We cannot simply absorb the meaning easily with a quick glance over the words,
yet as we are doing this the horrific explicitness of the image continually cuts through,
burning in our peripheral vision, producing a layering effect and affect of precarity through
words and images crashing against each other. This layering effect is another kind of “gap”
in the work, as the juxtaposition between the image of the murdered girl and the text box is
highly dissonant: it opens a huge distance between the image, which carries total shock and
horror, and the accompanying text element which is confusing, but even more disturbingly,
it is dry, almost clinical.
Gloeckner herself has said that she chose to make dolls instead of drawing these stories
because, “if you’re writing or drawing it’s like you become all of the characters,” while
creating dolls, in her view, allows for more distance to the subject matter at hand (Chute,
“Interview,” n.pag.). She goes on to say that in creating La Tristeza, her thought process was
that “I could just make [the narrative] with dolls. It’d be really quick, and then it wouldn’t
have to be in my head so long, and the dolls could be all bloody and die, and I don’t care,
because then I could just wash them off, and they won’t be really dead. As if they would be
alive. They wouldn’t be alive because they’re dolls, but it doesn’t matter” (ibid.). In a related
yet very different context, Laurika In ‘t Veld studies the function of drawings of dolls in
graphic narratives about genocide, and she echoes Gloeckner in her analysis of their func-
tion: a doll’s “human likeness allows for a distanced interaction with the human world” (59).
In addition, dolls are invariably connected not only to childhood and innocence, but more
specifically to girlhood (In ‘t Veld 67); thus, the reader’s interactions with Gloeckner’s dolls
are already suffused with an underlying, extremely gendered atmosphere. While In ‘t Veld’s
examples are of dolls as they are drawn by artists in the various texts she analyzes, Gloeckner
adds layers of depth to the function of the doll in narratives about unimaginable (or perhaps
all too imaginable) suffering by making it her primary material, a replacement for the drawn
image. There is a kind of materiality, a touchiness that these dolls evoke. Hilary Chute claims
that Gloeckner’s use of dolls and dioramas in La Tristeza plays on both of the uses of the word
materiality—material, as in an evocation of things that can be touched and held; and mate-
riality, as a process whereby “cartoonists endeavor to enter ethically into others’ histories by
materializing them on the page” (Disaster 263).
What I think comes forth most powerfully in Gloeckner’s use of dolls in relation to the
issues of ethics and empathy—and this is certainly articulated in her own thoughts about the
dolls quoted above—is the way the reader must negotiate the doll’s strange position as a spe-
cial category of “thing” that vacillates between notions of humanness and non-humanness.
As mentioned, unlike ink or pencil drawing, dolls are hold-able things as much as they are
representations or approximations of human bodies. In La Tristeza this dimension of the doll
reminds us that certain bodies—in this case, poor girls and women of color—are far too
often reduced to the status of both sexualized and worthless things, like dolls, which then
allows for exploitation, violence and murder. The doll bodies that are centrally framed in
this work attest to the existence and ubiquity of discourses that dehumanize certain bodies,
transforming them into human-like things that can be violently harmed and tossed away like
garbage. In ‘t Veld puts it in a slightly different way when she writes, “the presence of these
non-human metaphors ultimately raises questions around the (in)human dimensions of mass
violence and trauma” (74).
Gloeckner, however, also provides a counterforce to the status of the dehumanized thing-
ness of the dolls, in the aesthetic choice of transposing photographic faces onto many of the
doll bodies. While the doll bodies are reminders of the processes of dehumanization, these
466
realistically rendered faces function in an opposite manner to reinforce the fact that this work
is about real people, about what really happened to particular bodies. The faces serve to hu-
manize the doll bodies in a work about the extreme consequences of gender- and class-based
dehumanization. This is somewhat reminiscent of the use of photographs in works like Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, where the strategic inclusion of actual photographs provides a reminder
that the main narrative, while employing animal faces to tell the story, is a story about the
reality of suffering, violence and mass murder.
This “writing over” of the doll’s body with a human face can be read as yet one more gap
created to unsettle the reader, for it communicates to us in a single moment the discourses of
dehumanization in combination with the emotional, ethical appeal of the face. Faces in pain
move us, stir something deep within the spectator; their inclusion in works about suffering
offers up a recognition of shared bodily life. As Andrea Liss argues, via Levinas, “the other’s
face…conveys a forceful demand on the subject to open the tense and impalpable space be-
tween self and other” (112). Most of the photographic faces in La Tristeza either are in pain,
or are the faces of death. Gloeckner has furthermore chosen to scan in faces that display in-
tense emotion, thus speaking to the reader’s sense of ethical obligations to others, to human
connection and to the existence of shared precarity. Like with all of the other methods used
throughout La Tristeza, this particular gap—between doll body and realistic face—draws
readers into a complex engagement with the pain of others. We are at once drawn close to
the image by way of all its visceral affects, at the same time as the distance between “us” and
“them” (the object of vision) is maintained precisely through the seeming paradox set up
between the image’s empathic address (the face) and the distancing effect to which the dolls
stand testament.
All of these various gaps—in the “writing over” method used to create the map of Juárez,
in the text/image relationship more broadly, in the use of dolls with photo-realistic faces—
co-exist on the same page, providing layer upon layer of disorientation and horror for the
reader. This is one way that the page itself enacts or creates a space that allows for reflection
on how to engage with representations of sexual violence, asking open questions about how
to represent such traumatic experience and providing no answers, only paradoxical and con-
flicting affects. These gaps also, to my mind, represent a fascinating transference of one of
the comics medium’s most central techniques into a new and productive formation. “Gaps”
as visual structures are axiomatic in the more traditional comics medium, of which Gloeck-
ner has long been a practitioner. The gap in comics I am referring to here is the gutter, the
space between frames. And it is in the act of closure—making meaning out of connecting
the comics frames across the gutters—that is at the very heart of reading comics. As Thierry
Groensteen argues, the gutter is “the site of a reciprocal determination, and it is in this dia-
lectic interaction that meaning is constructed” (115). In other words, it is the site where the
reader does not simply observe the narrative, but is also the site where the narrative becomes
experiential for the reader in the act of meaning-making (McCloud 67–69). Gloeckner has
re-mapped the gutter into the space of the full page itself in the form of the gaps I have
analyzed, so that readers are directed to make meaning not across panels, but rather within
the detailed tableaux themselves, negotiating the various aesthetic and emotional jumps and
juxtapositions created in the form of these gaps. This method seems to communicate that
traditional closure in La Tristeza is impossible: the gaps remain gaps; they become a site for
maintaining the overall sensation of vulnerability that is also the purpose of image’s content.
The impossibility of closure here resonates powerfully with the fact that these murders are
unsolved, and that the pain of the victims and their loved ones is ongoing, impossible to
“elide” or subsume into another narrative.
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34
The people upstairs
Space, memory, and the queered family in
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris1
Shiamin Kwa
The transmission of memory, especially in the aftermath of trauma, accepts that the passage
of memories from one generation to the next is defined by a sense of fragmentation that is
mirrored by the way that these fragments are collected and absorbed. Each fragment is able
to exist on its own, as Baudelaire suggested in the preface to his book of poetry The Spleen
of Paris (“Chop it up into many fragments, and you will see that each can exist on its own,”
Baudelaire 275). Nevertheless, individual fragments may also deepen in meaning when consid-
ered as part of a series, in the same way that individual vertebrae form a supporting structure
when joined. This mutual meaning-making of each fragment and the spatially and tempo-
rally defined spaces between them is especially prominent in the comics form (McCloud;
Groensteen, The System of Comics; Postema), and critics have argued that this may account for
the medium’s use in fictional and non-fictional examinations of memory (Marianne Hirsch,
Family Frames; Chute, Graphic Women; Chute, Disaster Drawn). Emil Ferris’s book My Favorite
Thing Is Monsters is a “graphic novel about a kid (Karen Reyes) who must solve the mystery
surrounding a neighbor’s death” (Ferris, “From Paralysis to a Debut Graphic Novel”). The
still unfinished narrative elides the coming-of-age story of a non-conformist young girl, a
murder mystery, and the plots and iconography of the monster movies and horror comics that
she identifies with, consumes, and reproduces in her journal. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
is a reproduction of Karen’s notebook journal, showing the reader, in Karen’s own hand,
the things that she sees, hears, reads, remembers, and imagines. The object of the murder
mystery, the dead neighbor from upstairs, is Anka Silverberg, who lived in the apartment
on the first floor of a walkup building in Chicago’s North Side, directly above the basement
apartment where Karen lives with her mother Marvela and brother Deeze. These are the
most obvious mysteries, but they are tied deeply to others: Karen’s sexuality, the identity and
whereabouts of her missing father, the cancer that slowly kills her mother, the mercurial and
irresistible older brother who may have killed someone when he was eight years old, and the
identity of her brother’s victim, Victor. This chapter considers the curious ways that Ferris’s
comic book braids together the notion of reproduction in its many forms. From the me-
chanical reproduction of the comic book, to the drawing hand’s reproduction of the artist’s
observations, to human sexual reproduction, notions of the copy ramify and are mutually
supporting, revealing striking insights about the nature of truly meaningful connections.
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Shiamin Kwa
Near the end of the first volume of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the narrator Karen
and her brother Deeze face their reflections in a dirty plate glass door. Deeze stands behind
her, grasping her shoulders tightly. Karen appears to the reader as she has from the book’s
first pages, when she transforms into a werewolf: hirsute, with big pointed ears, her under-
bite emphasizing two elongated fangs protruding from her lower jaw. In these two pages,
which depict this moment five times, the two are seen in their reflected state. With very few
variations—mostly registered in the direction of Karen’s gaze—Ferris draws the two consis-
tently, their distinguishing facial characteristics are unchanged. On the next page, however,
for the first and only time in this volume, Karen looks different. A more conventionally hu-
man face is reflected back, the impenetrable surface of the glass door still there, emphasized
by diagonal lines at the picture plane that cross her and her brother’s faces. “Look at her!”
Deeze says, “she might be a girl who needs her mouth washed out with a big bar of soap but
she is a girl!…a girl!” (Figure 34.1) Karen’s immediate response directly refers to this empha-
sis on the face and what it shows: “You’re the two-faced jerk!” This confrontation with the
mirror, in which her brother forces her to see herself as others see her, causes Karen to reveal
what seems invisible to even those closest to her. At the bottom of the facing page, on the
recto side, three panels again show Karen in the same position, from the neck up, forehead
covered with a wide-brimmed hat. She appears again in her typical “Wolf Man” persona, and
stutters: “I like…um…um…I…uh…/…I um like…I like…uh…/…girls” (Ferris, My Favorite
Thing Is Monsters n.p.).
Karen’s coming out to her brother is tied specifically to vision and to seeing. She empha-
sizes that Deeze “stood for a long time staring at [her] with this look on his face like he’d just
really seen [her] for the first time.” At the bottom of the same page, the visible and the audible
are emphasized in close-up views of Deeze’s mouth, on the left, and, on the right, his eyes,
one of which has its iris replaced by the hole of Karen’s three-hole spiralbound notebook. Just
as quickly as Karen has come out to her brother, he pushes her back in, citing the precarity
of their mother’s health, and his fear of how the neighborhood boys will react. These three
pages efficiently weave the larger mysteries of the book’s plot together with the mysteries of
human relationships, especially those between family members. They crystallize a central
question of the book: is it possible to get closer to understanding things if we look closely
enough? My Favorite Thing Is Monsters takes full advantage of the word and image hybrid of
Figure 34.1 “Look at her!” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics,
2016. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books
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Space, memory, and the queered family
the comic book form, repeatedly drawing the reader’s attention to the sometimes unexam-
ined ways that knowledge is communicated at the surface level.
By presenting the story as if it is a found object, a record of the direct and unmediated mus-
ings in the protagonist’s own hand, Ferris makes suggestive comparisons between the acts of
reading, looking, and spying in pursuit of a solution. These are all literal and figurative acts of
“connecting the dots.” The book repeatedly references dots in relation to completed actions
of understanding or wish fulfillment, from the pointillist paintings of Seurat to the comple-
tion of a Japanese Daruma doll’s eyes, and a large part of Karen’s artistic education involves
learning not simply how to connect things but how to notice them in the first place. The
medium of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters facilitates a direct record of Karen’s learning process,
which thus also becomes the reader’s learning process, so that the copy is raised in esteem as
a crucial player in knowledge making. It is in Karen’s copies of famous paintings, or copies
of her sibling’s face, and copies of sounds overheard on audiotapes or in the chambers of her
memory that significant visual and verbal details are emphasized. The visual narrative in My
Favorite Thing Is Monsters allows contemporaneity between images separated by both time
and space, as with Karen’s copies of paintings in museums, the tattoos on Deeze’s body, and
the letters, words, and shapes that Karen records in her portraits of friends and family. The
reader can see these clues in the text along with Karen, closely linking the reader’s progress
with the protagonist’s. In learning how to develop visual literacy with Karen, Ferris’s reader
might develop a more sophisticated relationship to history. In analyses of Richard McGuire’s
Here, a rumination on the passages of time that all occur in one corner of the world, Laura
Moncion writes that “the visual literacy images demand can and often does complicate con-
ceptions of linear historicist time and thus opens up alternate ways of viewing history: the
adjustment of form necessarily adjusts content” (Moncion 199; see also Chaney 178–179).
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters produces the copy as a mechanism of rewriting and inscrib-
ing one’s own family as a choice rather than as an inheritance. Ferris presents inherited narra-
tives spatially, whether through concrete structures like staircases in the apartment buildings
of Chicago’s north side, or through more figurative structures in the form of verbal and visual
allusions and quotations. She then complicates the vertical line implied and imposed by those
structures, introducing the ways that memories resist singularity as well as strictly vertical
motions. Reproduction figures in the book as a way to continued life and representation
within its diegetic world, but it is also referenced in the materiality of the book itself. The
journal is Karen’s own life story, a negotiation between the direct experience of her eyes and
ears on to the paper through her hand. The reader is thus lulled into feeling that the images
and text captured on the page are real and lived experience, but is then sometimes caught up
in reminders that the narrator’s real and lived experiences are frequently those of others’ or
potentially imagined creations.
Ferris presents a book that is a re-embodiment of the life stories of the people upstairs,
patched together through materials that are not the effects of Karen’s own direct experience.
The comic book itself facilitates this patching together, suspending multiple perspectives
and perceptions together in what Groensteen calls the “braid” or tréssage (Groensteen, “Le
Réseau et Le Lieu: Pour Une Analyse Des Procédures de Tressage Iconique”). My Favorite
Thing Is Monsters raises these questions from beyond its pages to the world of its reader: what
is Ferris’s project, after all, if not a conscious engagement with inherited narratives, from
Spiegelman’s Maus, to horror movies and magazines, to paintings encountered as originals
on museum walls and as copies in postcards, photographs, and catalogue reproductions?
Ferris presents her book as a tribute to her own people upstairs, whose extant work does not
diminish her own but rather provides it with layers of resilience. Individual memory and
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Shiamin Kwa
subjectivity depend on a vast variety of sources for their construction, and our understand-
ing and acceptance of such diffuse constructions make us capable of positive, productive
effect. One of the most profound effects made by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is its radical
rethinking of reproduction, which reframes our view of what family inheritances and family
structures can be, proposing a braided formulation of inheritance that accommodates and
supports Karen’s queerness.
The people upstairs: postmemorial artifacts

Photographs, audio cassettes, and the varied media records of other people’s lived experience
contribute to Karen’s own memory, constructing what Alison Landsberg calls prosthetic
memory, the kind of memory that
emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at
an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an
experience occurs through which the person pictures himself or herself into a larger his-
tory [and] does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal,
deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live.
This effect is important, Landsberg argues, because it has the ability to “shape that person’s
subjectivity and politics” (Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory 2). This relationship to other people’s
pasts not only changes the subject’s perspective, Landsberg later writes, but may well be a
“strategy for activating one’s own personal stake in that knowledge, for making the past
matter” (Landsberg, Engaging the Past 19). These arguments parallel those made by Marianne
Hirsch in her investigations of postmemory. Hirsch regards the subject’s attention to other
people’s memories as the work of reactivating and reembodying “distant political and cul-
tural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms
of mediation and aesthetic expression.” Hirsch argues that memory, unlike history, engages
“less directly affected participants…even after all participants and even their familial descen-
dants are gone…through an affective link to the past…mediated by technologies like litera-
ture, photography, and testimony” (Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory 33). That
is to say, memory allows for a sense of direct connection to the past, and is especially linked
to testimony in the form of word and image. Focusing her argument specifically on the
traumatic ruptures and breaks of the Holocaust on the memories of generations who did not
themselves live through those experiences, Hirsch explores “affiliative structures of memory
beyond the familial, and…[sees] this connective memory work as another form of affiliation
across lines of difference” (Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory 21). Memory,
then, is not only handed down from parent to child, but is passed on through “structures of
mediation that would be broadly available, appropriable, and, indeed, compelling enough
to encompass a larger collective in an organic web of transmission” (Marianne Hirsch, The
Generation of Postmemory 36).
The form of the comic is integral to the construction of meaning in a narrative that is
premised on the success of looking closely and of developing a more discerning visual acu-
ity. Reproduction is the central and most salient metaphor of the yet unfinished My Favorite
Thing Is Monsters, offering a postmemorial way to understand reproduction in families. Al-
though it is customary to think teleologically about parent-child relationships as the unques-
tioned system for transmitting family narrative, Ferris offers instead a radical conception
of the way that the queer protagonist creates her family, a family that is similarly ruptured
472
by trauma. Paralleled in the copies recorded in the journal and in the material form of the
book itself—a text that, in spite of its sensuous materiality, is also a copy—she proposes that
copies are productive of originality, capable of producing new versions of the past or a new
origin narrative. In Karen’s story, the reader finds a firm connection between her developing
sense of self and reproductions of her biological family that intersect with family as defined
spatially—and, ultimately, temporally—through the narratives of the tenants in her walk-up
apartment building. This conception of family is informed by the postmemorial family sys-
tem, that of the “people upstairs,” people who transmit narratives to the next generation,
but whose filiations are more flexibly constructed through narrative rather than through
biological determinism.
The varieties of reproduction in the book recur in the protagonist’s attempt to copy down
the memories of her own lived experience as well as the memories she acquires at second or
even third hand, emphasizing how the memories of the subject and the prosthetic affiliative
postmemories are effectively equalized in the mediating drawing and writing hand of Karen,
the journal keeper. Ideas of normativity are persistently modeled and enforced, and Karen’s
queerness is ignored and sometimes explicitly refused by the authority figures in her family
line. Yet, in the elision of memories and a new claim to authority that comes with authorship,
Karen also revises and reshapes her own narrative. Sara Ahmed has noted the difficulties of
shifting one’s orientation, sexual or otherwise, in response to the straight line of inheritance
that is traditionally imposed by biological and social narratives. Ahmed writes that for the
mixed-race queer the choice is not either to become white and straight or to disappear.
This is a choice between two different kinds of death. The task is to trace the lines for a
different genealogy, one that would embrace the failure to inherit the family line as the
condition of possibility for another way of dwelling in the world. If orientations point
us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the possibility
of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps that do not clear a common
ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray. (S. Ahmed 178)
The pressure to accept this strictly linear and vertical line as the only line of family inheri-
tance stresses the queer subject by pushing a narrative that precludes alternative paths. Ahmed
writes:
We do not know what we could become without these points of pressure, which insist
that happiness will follow if we do this or we do that. And yet, these places where we
are under pressure don’t always mean we stay on line; at certain points we can refuse the
inheritance—at points that are often lived as ‘breaking points.’ (S. Ahmed 90)
By focusing on the collective memory of the literal and figurative people upstairs rather than
exclusively on the biological family, Ferris’s book argues for the people upstairs as a power-
ful metaphor for new family systems, one that stops at precisely those spatial and temporal
breaking points that challenge the straight line. Houses, rather than trees, are the model for
the queered family unit, in which filiations are not dictated by “naturally” given branches
but instead by human-constructed rooms that are affiliative, occupied by any and all kinds
of people. What if, instead of family trees, we think of family buildings, where the structure
is fixed but the population is open? My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is an exploration of how
such spaces could be constructed and nourished. Karen lives in a basement apartment with
her mother and brother, above which the Silverbergs live and, above them, the Grobans.
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Shiamin Kwa
The characters and their narratives may occupy the same plot of land, but vertical divisions
separate them. Vertical space thus inscribes memory and creates new prosthetic memories
for both Karen and the reader. This movement produces the possibility of radically different
versions of family and inheritance, following the form of the braided, rather than straight,
line. In her exploration of the possibilities of reproduction and reinterpretation that comes
down to us from the people upstairs, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters rejects the unidirectional
and teleologically fixed family narrative.
Thy firmness makes my circle just: looking back and looking up

The resistance to the straight line in Landsberg and Hirsch’s critical works on memory, and
in Ahmed’s on cultural and affect studies, finds especial resonance in the material form of the
comic book. Ferris’s graphic narrative accommodates multiple temporalities on its page, even
though it does not typically follow the grid format of sequential panels that read from above
to below and left to right. Instead, Ferris reminds the reader of other ways that sequence is
suggested in an image, pointing to implicit shapes that Deeze shows Karen in drawings and
paintings: “how the lines of the things in paintings…create triangle compositions.” He tells
her to “get up close and look at the painting” (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.).
Deeze shows her the ubiquity of circles, namely “the vesica piscis,” that recur in manmade
shapes: “He said that out of this shape, that is like an eye laying on its side, ‘the whole world
is born.’ Every shape that is known comes from the vesica piscis” (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is
Monsters n.p.). The almond shape, or sideways eye, created by the intersection of two circles
with the same radius, becomes a kenning for metaphysical inquiries: the center of one shape
sits on the periphery of the other, as Deeze shows Karen with a compass. Not only does this
keen attention to shapes highlight the strategies of reading that are integral to these pages,
but it introduces major themes embedded in the book, namely that of the twin, or copy, and
the “pattern of creation” that structures their world. Reading and looking are thus heavily
freighted with the expectation of interpretive work: the reader is trained, from the start of the
book, to be alert to meaning in forms. Ferris’s book might be misapprehended as suggesting
that there are hidden elements and symbols that surround us, but the actual argument it pro-
poses is that hiddenness is actually a symptom of careless looking: the elements and symbols
are already present at the surface of the image, if only we know how to see them.
Varieties of narrative are kept simultaneously in place, in the same ways that the eye might
travel around the comics page, limning the shape of a circle or of a triangle. In his reading
of Richard McGuire’s Here, Thierry Groensteen discusses the bande dessinée, or comic strip,
and its traditional narrative associations with a strict linearity that follows a straight line, and
“unfurls from its beginning all the way to its end, regularly, with neither obstacle nor inter-
ruption, like a roll of film or the Bayeux tapestry” (d’un récit qui se déroulerait depuis un début
jusqu’à une fin, régulièrement, sans obstacle ni interruption, à la manière d’une bobine de pellicule (ou
de la broderie de Bayeux)) (my translation from Groensteen, “Le Réseau et Le Lieu: Pour Une
Analyse Des Procédures de Tressage Iconique” 118; Groensteen, The System of Comics 22).
Groensteen proposes alternate methods of reading, articulated by the form of the network,
or réseau, that are better apprehended not through the sense of a continuous unfurling, but
rather through the idea of braiding, or tressage. This metaphor addresses how comics,
far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, offers the reader a story that is
full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning…It is the role of art in general to
manufacture “the surreal with the elliptic” [and] every comics reader knows that, from
474
the instant where he is projected into the fiction…he forgets, up to a certain point, the
fragmented character and discontinuity of the enunciation. (Groensteen, The System of
Comics 10)
The thread of the narrative has a singularity and continuity that is guaranteed by the un-
derstanding that if it were broken the whole network would also fall apart. Even though
we do not see the continuity, we trust that it is there. The reader, then, is trusted with the
responsibility of following this thread, which dips above and below the open work netting
of the réseau.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters builds on the reading structure of the réseau in the comics
form to conduct a series of variations on reproduction that redound to the central question
of sexual reproduction, what Karen calls the “night machine,” at the heart of her quest to
understand herself by understanding how her biological family is constituted. Along the way,
the book meditates on other forms of reproduction, including the reproductions of like-
nesses, testimonies, and canonical and popular works of art copied by the characters in the
book. The tools of technological reproduction contribute to this network of copies: photog-
raphy and audio recording play central roles in preserving records of people and events that
are no longer there. Ferris’s book itself extends this inquiry, in its overt references to copied
forms. By laying bare her own artistic and storytelling inheritance in the form of direct quo-
tations of her influences, but using those influences to create her original and future-looking
narrative, Ferris shows a way toward a relationship with the past that is both celebratory and
path-breaking.
Verticality and the act of looking up

Karen’s book offers a version of reproduction, in the form of the copy, that is informed by the
copies that surround her, making literal the act of “looking up to” others. Her older brother
Deeze is both teacher and protector, and Karen writes that “it is because of Deeze that [her]
favorite place is the Art Institute” (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.). In a drawing
that memorializes the first time he brings her to the museum, when he is 12, and she is “so
little that he had to lift [her] up so that [she] could see things,” they are pictured at the bot-
tom of a long stretch of stairs. Holding her hand, Deeze reassures her: “Don’t be scared Kare,
we’re going to see some friends” (Figure 34.2). This pattern of looking upward, repeated in
the image of being literally held up to see pictures and of going up the stairs in order to “see
some friends,” is emblematic of the relationship between Karen and an inexorable pull from
above. The staircase is evoked repeatedly in the book, suggesting a vertical line of transmis-
sion from the possessor of wisdom and experience that sends the knowledge downward to
the child inheritor who receives it.
The book frequently presents Karen at the bottom of stairs, looking upward. Those at
the top of the stairs possess privileged knowledge that Karen seeks, and from which she is
typically excluded. Upstairs, in the apartments above, and in the landings between the build-
ing’s stories, is where people have sex, as her brother does in the apartment landing with his
“Broadway friends,” and upstairs with Mrs. Groban in her top floor apartment. Upstairs is
also where Karen’s always hungry, wraithlike, friend Sandy, who no one else can see, lives
alone in an abandoned apartment. Upstairs is where the surviving belongings of the mur-
dered neighbor Anka Silverberg remain, in the form of the plants she kept on the landing,
the cat with an ankh on its forehead, and the audiotapes kept by her husband of Anka tell-
ing her life story. The Chicago apartment buildings of Karen’s childhood function as what
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Shiamin Kwa
Figure 34.2 “Don’t be scared Kare, we’re going to see some friends.” My Favorite Thing Is
Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2016. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris.
Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books
Bachelard noted are guarantors of a “phenomenology of the imagination” (Bachelard 17–18),

in which the attic and roof are associated with the rational and the cellar with the irrational,
or subconscious. He writes in particular about the way that stairways seem to work in only
one direction in the imagination:
Then there are the stairways: one to three or four of them, all different. We always go
down the one that leads to the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember, that
characterizes its oneirism. But we go both up and down the stairway that leads to the
bed-chamber. It is more commonly used; we are familiar with it…we always go up the
attic stairs, which are steeper and more primitive. For they bear the mark of ascension to
a more tranquil solitude. (Bachelard 25–26)
Going down the stairs is linked to mysteries better left unknown as well, as when Karen
discovers a locked door that leads to a sub-level beneath their basement apartment. Her
mother warns “promise me you’ll never go down there or tell anyone about it!” (Ferris, My
Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.). Karen’s investigation of the subterranean is further empha-
sized by a hallucinogenic encounter in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery with the ghost of
Pinkerton agent Kitty Warn, who tells her: “that hidden room…is very likely not a room
at all but an entrance—of which there are many to a great network of underground tunnels
and rooms…a city beneath the city” (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.) which can be
accessed, pointedly, through a mausoleum engraved with the name “Macguffin.”
The staircase highlights the realities of the progression of time, but the reconstruction
of meaning in Karen’s book shows how diffuse these pathways really are. Karen’s version
of reproduction marks out the potential for a newly constituted identity composed of Sara
Ahmed’s non-linear breaking points. Reproduction of faces abound in the pages of her jour-
nal, and like a mise en abyme, they also appear on Deeze’s body (Figure 34.3). His torso is
inscribed with portraits of his namesakes Emilio Zapata and Diego Rivera, flanking their
mother’s face, which sits “smack dab in the middle of his chest” (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is
Monsters n.p.). Because the entire book takes the form of Karen’s journal, where images taken
from life and images taken from representations are all copied out in the same drawing hand,
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Figure 34.3 “Deeze is a great artist!” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fanta-
graphics, 2016. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books
reproduction is the dominant and consistent framework through which the diegesis is cre-
ated. Marvela the tattoo on Deeze’s chest is indistinguishable from Marvela the mother who
shares an apartment with Karen and Deeze. The blurring between reality and representation
created by Karen’s copying hand introduces an element of leveling that erases hierarchies of
authority.
The reader is left unsure about the reliability of what Karen sees, but this allows for a con-
verse effect: there is no alternative but to accept her perspective and experience completely.
In Karen’s case, the structure accommodates a sense of monstrosity that she associates with
her growing understanding of her sexuality, one that she instinctively understands as the
good kind of monstrosity:
I knew there were good monsters and bad ones…the monsters who murdered Reverend
King and the President were the worst monsters…those are the kind of monsters who
want no one to be free…No, the bad monsters want the world to look the way they want
it to. They need people to be afraid…they don’t live in their lair and mostly mind their
own biz…I guess that’s the difference…a good monster sometimes gives somebody a
fright because they’re weird looking and fangy…a fact that is beyond their control…but
bad monsters are all about control…they want the whole world to be scared so that bad
monsters can call the shots… (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.)
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Shiamin Kwa
The book that the reader holds thus becomes the good monster’s guidebook to the world,
what Maaheen Ahmed calls “a plaidoyer against the unfair monstrocization of others…em-
brac[ing] the denigrated genre of horror and its frequent denizens, monsters, as well as the
popular medium of comics and its fraught history” (M. Ahmed 172). In her embrace of
influences that enfold and equalize comics, tattoos, beet marks, paintings on the walls of
museums, and the edifices on the buildings that hold them, Ferris destabilizes those hierar-
chies. What matters, she argues, are the distinctions between bad and good in the context of
displays of control and fear, and which apply to all categories of being.
Early work: touching the past

Extradiegetically, Ferris frequently reminds the reader of her debt to her own people up-
stairs. Resonances activate a sense of proximity to other characters and works that are not
registered or acknowledged by the characters in the book, but which are available to the
reader of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. While characters within the book have namesakes,
as Deeze does, other characters in the book are associated extradiegetically with similar
namesake characters as well. Karen’s mother’s name Marvela, for example, evokes the
figure of “Maleva the gypsy” from the films “The Wolf Man” (1941) and “Frankenstein
Meets the Wolf Man” (1943). This parallelism takes on even greater visual resonance when
Marvela begins to wraps her head in a scarf after she begins treatment for cancer. Karen’s
journal shows how much these late night horror films influence her experience of the
world. Her protective classmate, Franklin, has scars on his face like Frankenstein’s monster,
the comparison emphasized by portraits of each on facing pages (Figure 34.4). Likewise,
Figure 34.4 “Frankenstein.” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics,

2016. Two-page spread. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of Fantagraphics
Books
478
Karen understands her abandonment by her best friend and first love, Missy, as a kind of
vampire-like burial: “inside of Missy that part is in a coffin, in a crypt, staked, and hungry
and all alone” (Figure 34.5). These images recall the two girls’ past shared love of Dracula
and Alucard and, transitively, of each other, before Missy rejected Karen. On the very next
page, following a page turn, Karen immediately makes a new friend, Sandy, who looks like
a cross between Andy Warhol and the encrypted Missy drawn in the imagined x-ray of the
previous page. Sandy, like the hungry and staked entombed Missy, is “always hungry” as
well (Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters n.p.).
The most striking and direct extradiegetical reference in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
is to Art Spiegelman and his monumental work, Maus, a book which Ferris describes as
having “a profound and timeless beauty that emboldened [her] to make [her] own graphic
novel” (Ferris, “From Paralysis to a Debut Graphic Novel”). Maus details Spiegelman’s
parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, largely taking the form of his father Vladek’s
story as told to the author. Spiegelman’s work is also a rumination on the toll that his
parents’ trauma has taken on him and his relationship to his art. In Maus, writing and art
are figured as a way of resurrecting not only Vladek’s story, but also the vanished story of
Vladek’s wife and Art’s mother, Anja Zylberberg. As Anja and Anka are both diminutives
of the name Anna, and Silverberg and Zylberberg are alternate spellings of the same name,
Figure 34.5 “Because inside of Missy that part is in a coffin.” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters,
Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2016. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of
Fantagraphics Books
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Shiamin Kwa
Ferris’s character Anka Silverberg is barely distinguishable in name from Spiegelman’s

mother. Later in the book, Ferris again highlights the ways that writing can obscure how
sounds are received and understood, when Karen realizes that what she has earlier re-
corded as the word “shoots” was actually the name “Schutz.” Art’s mother, Anja, haunts
the pages of Maus, especially in the pages of an earlier short comic from 1972, “Prisoner
on the Hell Planet,” in which the same characters who are drawn as mice in Maus are de-
picted as human figures. Spiegelman reproduces the entire comic in Maus, showing it in
the mouse Art’s hand and then, after the page turn, in a close-up of the hand and a near
full-page spread that copies the first panel in “Prisoner”: a drawn hand holds a reproduc-
tion of a photograph of the young Art and his mother (Spiegelman 101–102). “Prisoner” is
presented as a separate artifact, different in style from the rest of the book, and reproduced
on the pages of Maus against a black background (Spiegelman 101–105). In “Prisoner,” Art
dissects his guilt about his mother’s suicide, and his rage about her figurative second death,
which occurs when Vladek reveals to Art that he has destroyed all of Anja’s meticulously
kept diaries. In providing Karen an audiotape testimony to transcribe in a large section
of her journal, Ferris resurrects the first person testimonial that Vladek had denied Anja.
Giving her own Holocaust survivor the name Anka Silverberg, Ferris inserts a network of
associations and parallels from the earlier text. Spiegelman’s reproduction within his own
text suggests a way to understand Karen’s narrative, from the substitution of the animal-
like faces for the human to the overwhelming sense of guilt that the child feels about dis-
appointing the mother figure, and the “trope of maternal abandonment and the fantasy of
maternal recognition” (Marianne Hirsch 108).
Karen’s and Ferris’s drawings remind the reader that while one can imagine the trauma
that Anka experienced, it is after all only an act of imagination. The documents included
in the book double down on that surface-depth divide, reminding the reader that these are
prosthetic memories. Artifacts on the page entice the reader to distinguish foreground from
background, pasted-in scraps as layers on top of a lined page, the metallic intrusions of spiral
binding and paperclips as real objects holding together sheets of lined paper. Just as quickly,
the material facts of the page remind the reader that this is simply an illusion, the result
of technical reproduction. The book counterbalances the trompe l’oeil effects of pasted-in
objects by referring to the way it has tricked the reader’s eye. Paper clips on one side of a page
are not seen on the other side when the page is turned over. The paper clip has no depth: its
reflective quality is simply shaded in. The drawings on one page do not show traces of ink
or pressure marks from ballpoint tips on the other side of the paper, even though the faint
markings of the pink margin show through as if from the other side. The book encourages
the reader to, like Karen, look closer. Looking closer, however, reminds the reader that this
is a reproduced text, one whose layers are flattened and inaccessible, whose lines literally do
not line up.
While there are many slips of paper that appear as if clipped in or stuck in to the book,
only one of them is not a drawing. It is a card that Missy gives to Karen for Valentine’s Day
(Figure 34.6). Unlike the works of fine art that appear in the book as copies in Karen’s hand,
the valentine appears as if photographically reproduced. This object, unlike the one of a
kind works that are copied, or the one of a kind drawings that are made by Karen or Deeze,
is a mass-produced greeting card, free of sentiment or personal association, one of many of
its kind. The holiday it commemorates is itself a commercial enterprise, reinforcing heter-
onormative sexual pairings as mass-produced souvenir. What does this preoccupation with
reproduction reveal about the family romance, the constructed family that is so crucial to the
self-identification and self-formation of the succeeding generation? Like the monsters that
480
Figure 34.6 “I’m NUTS about ya!” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraph-
ics, 2016. n.p. Copyright © Emil Ferris. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books
Karen categorizes, there are good forms of reproduction and there are bad ones. The child
narrator at the center of the narrative embodies and also offers a way through the disruptions
and breaking points of a permanently decentered line. In Karen’s pages we are given a new
conception of the family as an inextricable mass of images and words circulating in popu-
lar culture, individual testimonial, the world viewed through her own body with all of its
unreliability and incomplete understanding. This perspective offers the promise of a justice
that exceeds the juridical, one that reclaims reproduction as a special power even when,
perhaps especially when, it does not follow a straight path, does not only move forward. For
all of its musings on reading as a kind of spying, on its critiques of the poisonous dangers of
the male gaze and its expectation that the female body will naturally receive it, My Favor-
ite Thing Is Monsters serves as a pointed reminder that while it is the eye that perceives and
reads the clue, it is the hand that makes the final assenting act of drawing it all together by
connecting the dots.
Note
1 I would like to thank Emil Ferris and members of the Fantagraphics team, Jacq Cohen, Paul
Baresh, and RJ Casey, for generously providing these images and the permission to reproduce them
in an essay about reproduction—Shiamin Kwa.
481
Shiamin Kwa
Works Cited
Ahmed, Maaheen. Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics. University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 2019.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, First Edition. Duke University Press
Books, 2006.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, Reprint edition. Beacon Press, 1994.
Baudelaire, Charles. Œuvres Complètes, Vol. 1. Gallimard, 1975.
Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic
Novel. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.
Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Belknap Press, 2016.
———. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Ferris, Emil. “The Bite That Changed My Life.” Chicago Magazine, www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-
Magazine/February-2017/Emil-Ferris-The-Bite-That-Changed-My-Life/. Accessed 11 July 2019.
———. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Fantagraphics, 2017.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Le Réseau et Le Lieu: Pour Une Analyse Des Procédures de Tressage Iconique.”
Time, Narrative, and the Fixed Image, Rodopi, 2001, pp. 117–129.
———. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2009.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Harvard University Press,
1997.
———. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, Mar. 2008, pp. 103–128.
———. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Columbia University
Press, 2012.
Landsberg, Alison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia
———. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Co-
lumbia University Press, 2004.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.
Moncion, Laura. “Time Frames: Graphic Narrative and Historiography in Richard McGuire’s Here.”
Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2017, pp. 198–213.
Postema, Barbara. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. RIT Press, 2013.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. Pantheon, 1996.
482
35
Fat bats, postpunks,
and ice witches
Afrogoth and the undead music of Militia
Vox and the comix of Calyn Pickens Rich
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley
Imagine a comic sketch of a glorious mass of unruly silver tendrils on the head of a brown-
skinned, black lipstick wearing, and unapologetic round womanist body. She wears red and
black striped thigh-high stockings, a red and black body-con mini dress, a silver cross choker,
and holds a coffee cup inked with half of the slogan “world’s greatest poser.” Mischievously,
she gives a side-eye to her Black postpunk collaborator. Her waiflike, pink-Mohawk, studded
black jacket, silver tag wearing accomplice holds a coffee cup that dons the other half of the
“poser” slogan; his cup over-flows with liquid from a bottle with “X” scrawled on the front.
Above the two is a caption in a thought balloon that reads, “You do you,” and an advice
column underneath for those who identify with blackness on the darker side (Figure 35.1).
“I wanted to ask you,” begins an insecure and undead adolescent to columnist and comix
creator Calyn Pickens Rich, “How did your parents feel about you being Black and Goth?”
She continues, “My dad calls it white people shit and that I know nothing about our people’s
culture – that I’m ‘turning white.’ It hurts me because then I do start to feel like I’m not Black
Figure 35.1 Dining with Dana, a webcomic (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich)
483
enough for him… What do I do?” Pickens Rich consoles the tortured soul and simultane-
ously addresses the Black cultural police:
Remember this: there is no such thing as being ‘Black enough.’ That is the world’s big-
gest myth next to Diet Coke. Take a look at … 70s through the 90s Goths and punks of
color as well as the Afropunk movement. Your parents … need to understand that there
are multiple facets to Black culture, [including] the … metal-heads of Botswana. His-
torically speaking, the [African] Herero people began incorporating Victorian fashion
into their traditional wardrobe to protest against German occupants. [At] the end of the
day, what really matters is that you do not bend to pressure and [that you] pursue your
own interests.1
Pickens Rich’s comic illustration and advice frames the problem and posits the reality
of a Black cultural subgroup grappling with the dark and witty Other-side of blackness:
Afrogoths. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter Movement, a coalition formed in 2014 to
address the murder of people of African descent by vigilantes and the state,2 the advisor and
advisee may seem to engage in privileged, pre-teen angst and frivolous, identity politics. Yet,
it is precisely distorted ideas of blackness in the dominant imagination and parochial ideas
of blackness that underpins Black death in the public sphere and how we choose to survive
in the wake of our neo-lynching and misogynoir era.3 Pickens Rich’s comic work engages
with the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black female and male solidarity, and the reality
of what cultural critic Karla Holloway defines as “Black death.” For Holloway, Black death
constitutes the racialized way Black people die and the Black cultural response to ritualizing
Black death.4 Afrogoth subculture informs upon the discourses of blackness that make our
humanity and complexity invisible. Pickens Rich’s visual collide of Goth and blackness re-
imagines the burden of Black death and offers a compelling narrative of the lived experience
of the undead. In this brief exchange between one Afrogoth comic artist and a budding baby
Black Goth hitherto described, the culturally antiquated is obliterated by experiential and
historically informed blackness.
Afrogoth constitutes the expression, style, and practices of people of African descent who
are participants in and creators of Goth music and culture. As a literary category, comics’
scholar Julia Round writes that the Gothic genre comprises terror, supernatural, and melo-
drama elements and subdivides among “English Gothic, Pulp Gothic, American Gothic,
and Southern Gothic … beginning in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (subtitled “A Gothic Story”) with its revivalist medieval style and content.”5
As a distinct music subgenre and subculture, Goth came of age in the early 1980s postpunk
era. Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby describe Goth as a “discordant bricolage of
hyperromantic elements,” which constitutes “glam, punk, and new wave subcultural an-
tecedents.” Explaining the interdisciplinary aspects of the form, they write that Goth draws
from aspects of the “gothic literary-historical tradition; from vampire cults, horror flicks, and
B-movie camp; from Celtic, Pagan, Egyptian, and Christian mythology; from oppositional
sexual practices including queer, drag, porn, fetish, and b-d/s-m; and, from subterranean
drug cultures.”6 Bands such as The Cure, Bauhaus, Nine Inch Nails, and Siouxsie and the
Banshees are quintessential Goth icons. Though black is a preferred color of dress and adorn-
ment among Goths, which often provides a contrast to whiteface makeup, and blackness as
a self-described feeling of mystical darkness is fundamental to Goth, actual Black people are
rarely associated with the subculture.7 The popular identity signifier of the Goth is that of a
white racial identity and as a result, Afrogoths are an invisible and an understudied group. In
484
Fat bats, postpunks, and ice witches
response to this representative and scholarly omission, I situate Afrogoth as a Black identity
and cultural practice through an exploration of the relationship between gender, blackness,
Goth music, and comix (i.e., indie or alternative comics).
As an aesthetic and cultural form, Afrogoth represents blackness in articulation, where
seemingly disparate elements combine to create new meanings or identities.8 One of the most
iconic articulations and moments in Afrogoth cultural production is a 2006 live performance
of the Goth signature song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by the Afropunk band TV on the Radio
(TVOR), former Bauhaus9 front man Peter Murphy, and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
TV on the Radio’s diverse influences of funk, rhythm and blues, postpunk, and alternative
rock provides a sonic remix and texture to the original Bauhaus song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
Murphy’s baritone voice and bravado and Reznor’s howling and haunting chorus create on-
going ruptures against the fluidity of TVOR’s hand clapping, coiled bass lines, electric guitar
riffs, and drum recompositions.10 Their collaboration constitutes remixtures of meaning and
style that rethinks the derisive connotation of cultural appropriation that gatekeepers propa-
gate about assumed authentic culture forms, to recast and to more accurately think through
Afrogoth as ethnic, cultural, and creative bricolage. In this way, their combined performance
and Afrogoth subculture do not constitute Black people appropriating an assumed Euro-
pean or white subculture. Rather, as an articulation, Afrogoth is a Black, postpunk identity,
which like the Goth subculture, more generally, utilizes aspects of horror – both visual and
corporeal – as a representative anchor. As film and media scholar Robin Means-Coleman
argues, horror offers a unique representational space for Black women and men, which “por-
trays the diversity within blackness itself.”11 Afrogoth as a subculture and as an aesthetic is an
example of the representational space Means-Coleman lays bare.
Like the band TVOR, whose name signifies a fusion of visuality and music, artist and writer
Calyn Pickens Rich and Goth musician Militia Vox make the music, politics, esthetics, and ori-
gins of Afrogoth legible. Pickens Rich has two webcomix: Dining with Dana and Dill Comics, and
Vox has been on the Goth music scene for decades. Pickens Rich self-identifies as an Afropunk12
and describes herself as a “mad scientist” who uses comics to teach about culture, politics, and
social relations through Black, postpunk, Goth, and undead13 characters.14 Undead is a term that
refers to characters that while deceased function as if they are alive. A Black woman born in Paris
to American parents, Pickens Rich’s undead comix are as much about the type of cultural collab-
oration and mixture that Peter Murphy, Trent Reznor, and TVOR’s rendition of “Bela Lugosi’s
Dead” exhibits, as it is about the making of and experience of the transnational and transcultural
identities of which she inhabits (Figure 35.2).15
Her core characters consist of an Afrogoth “fat Bat” named Dana and a depressed
suburban teenager named Dill.16 These characters allow Pickens Rich to critique the spa-
tial and geographical complexity of Black identity, body image, and social stratification.
Militia Vox conjures the identity of the Black Ice Witch in her performances, which is in
keeping with the gender performance of female Goths more generally. Yet, she integrates
her own Afropunk stylization and multiracial identity into her performances and into her
lyrics. Both Pickens Rich and Militia Vox use narrative and unique visual landscapes to
assert Afrogoth as an insurgent movement and musical practice. Of course, all people of
African descent do not embrace the term of Afrogoth, even when describing the feeling
of negotiating Goth and blackness. Connecting the term to the Afropunk movement and
explaining the latter’s genre expansion over the past decade, Militia Vox argues, “the
term Afrogoth is a very obvious delineation of Afropunk. It’s somewhat strange for me to
acknowledge such a subgenre because to me, it’s all Goth regardless of skin tone. In NYC,
there’s always been Goths of color.”17
485
Figure 35.2 Image of Calyn Pickens Rich (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich)
Pickens Rich seems to embrace the term Afrogoth and Vox provides a necessary criti-
cality of the label, but both women illustrate Afrogoth as an artistic expression that asserts,
yet paradoxically rejects the culture of belonging. Thus, in exploring their work and the
Goth subculture primarily though not exclusively through the eyes of these female artists, I
engage with the following questions: how do Afrogoths create community and recast Black
identities anew through music production, style, and consumption? In what ways do musical
artists such as Militia Vox and the webcomix Dining with Dana and Dill employ the interdisci-
plinary aspects of Goth to create new affinities, oppositional identities, and emergent cultural
politics for Black female and male youth? Drawing from interpretations of their art, primary
and secondary interviews, and materials, I locate Calyn Pickens Rich’s comix, and Black
women in Afrogoth subculture as creating what I name Black, sonic-political platforms. Taken
together, the music and culture of Afrogoth and Afrogoth comix foster ongoing possibilities
for rethinking and expanding notions of death, pleasure, resistance, and genre while drawing
from traditional and untraditional aspects of horror.
Black sonic political platforms and the resurrection of the ice witch
Black Goth and Afropunk bands Militia Vox, Whole Wheat Bread, O. Children, Blasphemy,
Wicked Wisdom, and Pure Hell provide the sonic backdrop through which Afrogoths such
as Pickens Rich experience and present visual, sonic-political platforms. The tendency to
name cultural forms and expressions as constituting political practice for subcultural groups
at times inflates their relevance and consumption and, in so doing, it ignores aspects of
pleasure and community-making that need not serve any political function at all to exist as
culturally viable. In contrast to this over-reaching, I argue that it is the reality of people of
African descent using music and its attendant subcultural practices as a form of resistance and
as a simultaneous space of pleasure in the face of racism and subjugation, which allows us
to remake sound and style anew while seeking social justice and social spaces. This process
is seen in the spirituals of African slaves, Blues singers’ engagement with the woes of Black
migration from the South to the North, freedom songs of the civil rights movement, hip-
hop artists’ response to the economic displacement caused by the blight of the post-industrial
city, Rastafarian sonic-religious articulations, and the unique expression of Black punks. Our
layering of complex and percussive rhythms, tonal rearrangements, and lyrical interventions
486
that voice how we act, react, and envision our identities and liberation is the cornerstone of
the sonic-political that permeates every music genre in which we create and help innovate,
including blues, jazz, gospel, rock, soul, and hip-hop. Black women’s historic innovation in
rock is now garnering written treatment, most notably in the important work by scholars
Maureen Mahon and Nicki Greene, and journalist Laina Dawes.18 Yet, Black participation
in music genres such as Goth, perhaps because of its assumed embrace of whiteness and
unapologetic investment in the mystical aspects of the undead and unsacred, has gained no
significant intellectual treatment.
Black female Goths are not interested in the politics of respectability, recognition based in
normalcy, or Christian-centered narratives of redemption. Nor do Afrogoths enact typical
codes of assertive sexuality and the profane seen by 1970s Black feminist rock musicians,
twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black female hip-hop artists, or mid-twentieth-century
Black female blues musicians.19 To the contrary, they invest in the more ambiguous compo-
nents of the afterlife and evoke discourses of evil as a necessary combative practice to enlight-
enment. However, Afrogoths like blues women and men of the 1930s and onward covet the
depressive impulse as a launching pad to introspection. Instead of seeking freedom or refuge
from the rabbit hole of darkness, they jump into it, live in, relish in it; Afrogoths think and
express their desires from the emotional energy source that metaphorically sucks the hollow
life out of the living. Similar to insurgent Black thinkers, writers, as well as their rock and
blues sisters of yesteryear, Black isolationism is also a voice through which they too use.20
Afrogoths negotiation of being a part of yet distant from the larger society provides a space to
critique and reveal limiting racial, sexual, and gender scripts, especially as envisaged through
the identity of the “Black Ice Witch.” As a fictive and lived identity, the Black Ice Witch is
cold in expression and intellectually calculating, unapologetically dark and dangerous, some-
times witty, yet culturally furious; she is a seductive, musical sorcerous.
Militia Vox, also known as MilitiA or M for short, and actor Jada Pinkett Smith, as lead
singer of the band Wicked Wisdom (now named Wicked Evolution), are arguably two of the
most creative and diverse Afrogoth female artists (Figures 35.3 and 35.4). Pinkett Smith is
second in the visibility of Black women in Goth and nu-metal music because of her celebrity
status and work as an actor. MilitiA’s ongoing Goth aesthetic and leadership in the Afropunk
and metal movement, in contrast to Pinkett Smith’s periodic heavy metal leanings, solidify
her permanence and relevance in the Afrogoth scene. In addition to MilitiA’s solo work, she
Figure 35.3 Image of Militia Vox (courtesy of Militia Vox)
487
Figure 35.4 The band Wicked Evolution
is the front person for the Judas Priest female tribute band Judas Priestess, lead singer and
songwriter of the progressive hard rock band Swear on Your Life, and plays the lead in rock
musician Dee Snider’s heavy metal horror orchestra “Van Hesling’s Curse.” Her coining of
the slogan “disgrace your stereotype” is an Afropunk anthem and affirmation of Afrogoth’s
complex blackness. M’s music tracks “Born Out of Darkness,” “Vow,” “Covet,” and “I Put
a Spell on You” centers the way Black women use horror and Goth to illustrate the Black
undead. Her original tracks and covers eschew the sacred for the danger of the profane.
Pickens Rich’s fat bat Dana and the persona of MilitiA are inverted mirrors of each other.
Both conjure the presumed danger of the Black Ice Witch as a sex positive identity of power
and autonomy that scrambles and rejects commonly embraced Black feminine identities and
sexualities. Not unlike the recorded confessions and literary re-imaginations of the African
slave Tituba, who during the Salem Witch Trials proudly admitted to practicing “the craft,”21
Afrogoth women confess and conjure established Goth aesthetics from a position of defiance,
which allows them to re-imagine darkness on their own terms. Of this experience, M shares
Out of desire for this world to be different, I have to kill … racial and gender stereotypes
to make the world I want to see and hear. That’s why I can identify with being goth/
metal/dark alternative – whatever you want to brand it – but I don’t stay within those
boundaries, aesthetically or musically. And now with the social climate being so intense,
I feel it’s more important than ever for me to be a conductor and channel this static and
try to make sense of it through music and art.22
Militia Vox affirms that there is a reassuming of an assumed abject blackness in the popular
imagination by Afrogoths into a metaphorical turbine of possibilities. That is to say, for
Afrogoths, their subcultural identity reclaims what it means to be and to live within the
skin of emotive darkness, with all of its rotating blades, circularity, and potent sources of
meaning.
Afrogoth, like all identities, are a performance but it is also a potion, and depending
on its wily deployment, it is healing, magical, and poisonous to stereotypes of blackness.
Though more svelte, MilitiA’s performance of the Black Ice Witch is visually congruent
with Pickens Rich’s character Dana. The two wear unruly thick tendrils, black lipstick,
and clothing traditionally associated with witches and female Goths: black capes, black
488
lace, black high top and high heel lace boots, crushed velvet attire, and corsets. Dana
is waggish with her Afrogoth musings; her body type notwithstanding, she is largely
non-threatening. M’s performances are, as is said in popular vernacular, “cheeky” and
“dead serious.” She displays her full four octave range in her songs, especially when per-
forming live, and she moves her body in threatening gestures at her shows, thus making
the music fully animated and physically combative. In many of M’s live shows, her string
sections shoot fire flames from their horns; black smoke erupts from the ground obscur-
ing her figure until she ascends from what appears like black, misty clouds. M leans for-
ward into the real or assumed face of an audience member in a jarring gesture to spook,
scare, and freeze as she sings. Coiling and sticking out her tongue, kicking, and moving
her hands circularly as if to replicate the conjuring of a spell or the awakening of the dead
becomes a way in her concerts to say, “I am not hear to make you feel comfortable. I am
here to scare you, shake you, show you my power and the power that I have over you.”
Witchery is a purposeful aesthetic performance for M, and she embodies it to explore
and explode the social construction of sanity. “I definitely play with the witch!” she
shares. “I also fuck with the madwoman. Society has a love/hate with these archetypes of
women. There’s a great power in both. But with that power comes an equal and opposite
reaction – isolation, solitude and sometimes mourning.” 23
She sings in a slow, bluesy alto chord, a high soprano melody, and a loud, vicious
scream. Replica blood drips from her mouth in music videos, most impressively in her
cover of alternative rock musician PJ Harvey’s song “Rid of Me.” Yet, her enunciation –
whether she is singing or screaming the lyrics through bloodied teeth – shows that the
words in the songs are as key in the meaning as is the way in which she performs the
songs. Her musical clarity is also a manifestation of octave range. The ability to sing in
and beyond registered keys with precision and control marks her as a unique voice in
Afrogoth and in punk music as a whole. Vocal ability, pitch, and control have never been
a requirement to the success of punk and postpunk artists. To the contrary, singing off
key and defying palatable ranges is a part of the punk and sometimes the Goth aesthetic.
Militia Vox’s howling, purring, and growling constitutes beautiful noise24 and strategic
choices, allowing her voice to ascend in loudness at key lyrical moments; she interjects
such sounds in an improvisational way in her live performances. While her blues sisters
Billie Holiday and Nina Simone would slow down the lyrics to romantic standards to
create melancholy and introspective meaning, 25 M’s covers of rock and pop standards
turn them into industrial, scary, or power-packed Goth ballads, most notably in her
rendition of Tina Turner’s classic “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” In a world where
the dominant culture’s construction and fear of the “angry Black woman” acts as way to
marginalize and dismiss racial and gender grievances, MilitiA’s stage performance usurps
anger for seductive ends and is defiant in her harnessing of wrath as a source of power.
M is musically wicked and enchanting all at once.
Calling upon the haunting specters of Black rock’s past, such as Etta James, Betty Davis,
Grace Jones, Tina Turner, and Nona Hendrix, but unique in her Afrogoth stylization and
death metal core, her original song “Born Out of Darkness” is the musical anthem that Pickens
Rich’s advisee desperately needs. In the music video for the song, M sings in front of a screen
that displays a projection of red and blue light clusters, ongoing fades to black are interrupted
with close-ups of M in a spotlight, and her silhouette transitions to replicate that of a crucifix.
Her lyrics name Afrogoths as “American outcasts,” as subjects that defy rules and comfortable
appearances. Rather than apologizing for or tempering her difference, sexual audacity, and
unconventional tastes, she places the Black Ice Witch as an identity that highlights societies
489
discomfort with unconventional Black womanhood. “Born Out of Darkness” lyrically plays
with dominant misperceptions of Black feminine identities and uses various metaphors of
darkness as useful signifiers of freedom. M proclaims in “Born Out of Darkness” that she is a
rebel soul, off the grid, a black sheep, sexual on her own terms, but not a whore.
The song begins with 30 seconds of instrumentation. Bass chords layer with a reverberat-
ing drum track that provides the “shaking” and echo refrain common in horror film scenes
and in Goth music. As the drum slowly heightens, M’s alto voice comes in with a haunting
talk-sing shout accentuated by bass guitar riffs that provide an exclamation and emphasis to
words and phrases such as her being “mad,” “bad,” “addicted to the fight,” and “making it
right.” The electric guitar comes in and a steady synthesized track increases louder in the
song after she sings that “hell is on her side,” and lastly when she argues that one cannot
control her; as she queries to a presumed listener, “does that make you mad?” Moving from
the sound of the electric guitar to a low murmur of drumbeats similar to the song’s begin-
ning, the ending of “Born Out of Darkness” – in its slower tempo – encourages reflection
regarding control and freedom. M addresses in her lyrics the fear of women who society
cannot have, buy, or control easily, that is to say, women who refuse to act in concert with
the nation’s reliance on complacency and containment. Akin to the slow and steady whisper
to a heighten scream reminiscent of the trademark sound of Trent Reznor from Nine Inch
Nails,26 a singer and band she covers in her live shows, M informs in this song that she is:
BORN OUT OF DARKNESS

Born to be bad
You can’t control me
And I can’t be had
‘cause I’m BORN OUT OF DARKNESS
Born to be bad
No, you can’t control me
Does that make you mad?27
In “Covet,” M departs from the identity of Black outcast to create affinity and then fear; her
conjuring of the Black Ice Witch is an identity that is, as she sings, just like “your sister or
neighbor; I’m just like family.” After establishing a sense of connectivity and drawing in the
listener in a softer, soprano note, M moves through her four-octave range and settles into an
alto note. She sings lyrics that reveal that outside constructs of identity are born within the
distorted consciousness of the dominant gaze. Her existence, desire, and wanting, the singer
offers, will put kindness, or vapid, nebulous, sentiments to the test. M metaphorically freezes
the distorted view of Black women in the dominant imagination by offering remnants of evil
one may come to associate with blackness, but then she muddles that image. Not only will M
covet you, she will also control and consume you, while blood drips through her white teeth,
down her curved lips, and to the side of her cheek. One might interpret “Covet” as com-
mentary on the way M seeks to redirect the occurrence of the dominant culture consuming
blackness divorced from cultural contexts and without regard to actual Black lives – what bell
hooks coined so many decades ago, yet still relevant to today as “eating the other.”28 Or, one
might interpret the lyrics in “Covet” as espousing the simple delight she takes in knowing
that her presence and the fullness of all that she is eats away at those who enviously gaze upon
her deliciously dark performance. Leaving the industrial synthesizer known in Goth behind
in this track to highlight drums, the electric guitar, and the intensity of sound popularized
by the 1980s metal band Judas Priest, M sings:
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Hey you know me (softly in a soprano note)

Yeah (in a deep contralto growl)
I’m your sister or neighbor (alto)
I’m just like family yeah
Can I put your kindness to the test? (contralto)
I just might steal your last breath
I think you know what I mean! (screaming)
[…]
Hey you look just like a weakness
That I can sink my teeth into
I cannot help myself I COVET
If I see it touch it taste it love it (timbre)
I live inside you all you know it
I cannot help myself
I, Yeah….29
This song situates consumptive lyrics and gestures as beyond language play and the gim-
micky shenanigans of metal rock musicians, such as Ozzy Osborne, who in his early days was
known to bite the head off of rubber (and in one instance real) animals on stage. In her words,
reassessing eating the other for historically marginalized groups is a
Constant theme in my music, video and life that I probably reference more than I even
realize. If you want to get really heady with it, it’s likely because as an artist I have an in-
cessant hunger to engage and experience new things. When I take in new information --
music, art, other people- I want to ingest them to understand them as deeply as possible.
There’s definitely an air of defiance to it, because it’s somewhat of a power thing, but
ultimately it’s symbiotic.30
M’s sonic-political platform stages aspects of horror, that is, vampire, sorcerer, and coven im-
agery in her performances to scare the hell into spectators and listeners. Crescendoing minor
chords, the echo sounds produced by repetitious synthesizer beats, electric guitar licks, and
intermittent horn solos that sound like screams accompany M’s voice, which enunciatively
dances through chilling and expository lyrics. Taken together, Militia Vox’s sound, writing,
and performance conjures, embodies, and answers central questions that the Black undead
resurrects: what does it mean for people of African descent to haunt one into reassessing
their limiting views of blackness and Black women? What power is usurped by turning
Black death and melancholic mourning into Black defiance and finely crafted fury through
Afrogoth? As a, in her words, “Horrorist,” the undead esthetics of Afrogoth for M constitutes
creating music that defies the boundaries of genre, gender, and race. Literary theorist Maha
Marouan reminds that African American women authors often use Black female sorcerers as
protagonists in order to rewrite “the stigma of the witch” into an “empowering symbol.”31 It
is this written and lived defiance of the Afrogoth that comix writer and artist Cayln Pickens
Rich recreates through her ability to turn Goth music notes into graphic inkblots.
Inking Black lives and the undead in comix

Dana and Dill, the undead characters that Cayln Pickens Rich cooks up in her mad scientist
lab, are inventions that, like Militia Vox’s ice witch, rescript Black identities and, in so doing,
provide templates for insurgent self-making. Other indie comic artists employ a mixture of
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Goth and horror as an aesthetic, including the beautiful drawing and compelling narrative
work of noir comics by John Jennings (Kid Code and Blue Hand Mojo), Regine Sawyer (Ice
Witch), and Tony Puryear and Erika Alexander (Concrete Park).32 All three weave a seamless
tapestry of groundbreaking ethnic, sexual, and class representation. A distinction in Pickens
Rich’s work from the aforementioned artists and writers is her purposeful engagement with
the music subculture of Afrogoth and the use of characters that conspicuously identify as
Afrogoth. Though the work of Rich is especially strong in its portrayal of Black womanhood
via the character Dana, her use of undead Black male and ungendered characters situates her
larger vision of how one might rethink Afrogoths as transcending masculine and feminine
identities that work separately and in concert to enact visionary Black cultural politics.33 Her
Afropunk rebel Dill rebukes the ongoing tendency to use assumed authentic blackness as a
litmus test of productive Black masculinity. As Dill pronounces in one of Rich’s strips, he is
“a bi-facted black and white dawn of the decade statesman, spawned of the x, y, z generation,
and defected by default.” “I am my own creator,” says Dill.34 The character Dill goes beyond
the crafting of self-rebellion and Goth-style politics, however, by advocating for direct po-
litical action in the public sphere, including the dismantling of institutions that limit Black
freedom.35 Drawing from the punk attitude of anarchy and rebellion, yet making it racially
specific to institutional racism, Dill and his Afrogoth comrades leap from panels to critique
and metaphorically destroy systems of racial and gender confinement.
In one installment of the series, Rich uses three successive panels, where Dill appears
in the first panel. He has a sneer on his face and wears a leather jacket, t-shirt, and classic
Mohawk hairstyle. A cigarette dangles from two of his fingers as the smoke blows into the
second panel. “What are you doing,” asks Dill of a fellow Black Goth. A thought balloon in
the shape of an explosion appears in panel two, with the words “breaking the system,” and
Rich pictures Dill’s friend stepping outside of the panel carrying a hatchet that crumbles
the third panel, which is now ripped from the center.36 In this strip, both characters remark
upon oppression being something that requires splintering from its core, and it uses the
“angry Black male” stereotype strategically through its redeployment within punk anger
and anarchy. This reconfiguration of Black masculine identity mixes punk and blackness to
create new and largely illegible iterations of Black masculinity via its articulation of Afro-
goth stylization and rebellion. Dill and his friend appear as zombie Afrogoths, that is, their
facial features suggest they are dead Black men who have come back to life to attend to the
dismantlement of oppressive systems. To have undead characters engaged in acts of rebellion
brings agency to the corpses of Black male bodies. Death does not kill struggles for liberation
Pickens Rich shows with this illustration. To the contrary, Black men exist in contrast to
how the larger society sees and tries to contain their bodies.
Leaping outside of panels is an ongoing aesthetic that Rich uses for her characters, un-
derscoring the way in which writing and illustrating is a process of thinking outside of the
box. Indeed, Pickens Rich animates this idea in a series of panels where an undead character
ponders that “it is about time to think out of the box.” In the second panel he climbs out of
the panel, and in the third panel he stands completely outside of it, proclaiming that being
free from being in a box “put’s life in a whole new perspective”37 (Figure 35.5).
Rich’s Dill and other characters thus speak directly to the creative way Black men in
Afrogoth subculture situate an identity that is firmly invested in racial blackness and Black
liberation theology, but divested from the limited ideas of Black masculinity in the popu-
lar imagination. Cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal informs that Black men exist as “in-
terchangeable fictions” in the popular imaginary, “scripted for the desires of the many
who … deny [Black men a] semblance of humanity.”38 This reality exists strikingly in our
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Figure 35.5 Dill Comics, a webcomic (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich)
post-Obama moment, where the assumed deviance and violent threat of Black manhood
and womanhood is not a product of the past but rather a reflection of contemporary times.
The fervor to subject Black male bodies to surveillance and deny their humanity is rampant.
An ongoing denial of their humanity and hatred for Black ascension, perhaps signified best
by the 2008 election of President Barak Obama and reactionary formations such as the Tea
Party, the birther movement, racialized neo-conservativism, and the election of the 45th US
president, plays out in the compulsory, and at times state sanctioned violence that Black men
and women experience in the public sphere at disproportionate rates.39
It is perhaps because of the active subjugation of Black bodies in the public sphere that Rich
uses her character Dill as the face of her Black Lives Matter social movement merchandise,
which she offers online free of charge. The artist inked a mixed media narrative with pho-
tographs and silhouette sketches of the Ferguson uprising in 2014, titled “Hands Up, Don’t
Shoot,” in response to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Using the charac-
ter Dill as narrator, Pickens Rich shows the role of social media in transmitting on the ground
struggle of protestors.40 She conveys how the shooting of Brown was not an isolated incident,
and she quotes both former President Obama and social media activist Feminista Jones to knit
together the work of a movement upheld by a diverse group of men and women (Figure 35.6).41
As an iteration of Black masculinity that is aggressive and not heteronormative in style,
or dress – a character that code switches between contemporary Black struggles and 1970s
punk insurgency – Rich foregrounds Dill as constituting a Black masculinity through the
eyes and inking of her own consciousness. Through dialogue and visualization, then, her
male and female characters elevate intellectual contemplation as a necessary step before and
as a precursor to physical action, therefore highlighting the Black, philosophical tradition
of seeing theory as the basis for and instrumental to calculated actions that might follow. In
so doing, her sonic-political platform articulates the aural of Afrogoth defiance through the
visual. For the Afrogoth, then, Afrogothness may exist as a performance and visualization of
pleasure and artistic activism.
Pickens Rich’s Dining with Dana is more than a funny and bewitching webcomic; it is a
social movement. Rich defines and organizes the site as a place for what she names fab bats,
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Figure 35.6 “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”: an illustration of the Ferguson uprising (courtesy of
Calyn Pickens Rich)
or real size Afrogoth women, rabid readers, and foodies. Her site includes style, health, and
fitness advice, recipes, music recommendations, and comic illustrations. In this way, Dining
with Dana is a guide to the do-it-yourself Afrogoth lifestyle and a space of representative
healing for Black Goth women. Dana associates food wivth anarchy – both comfortable food
consumption and alternative, healthy-focused cuisine. Narratives in the comic commonly
highlight food consumption as positive and as constituting a plethora of choices absent of the
judgment of the thin, emaciated image, which women and men are culturally conditioned
to elevate as an ideal. Her illustration of a large refrigerator with the caption “Anarchy Baby”
depicts this well; it is a comic initially drawn in black and white where Dana holds a bottle of
a beverage and asks in a thought bubble of her comrade, “Dean, you got any food in here?”
Dean responds with, “Yeah, sure,” and among the chaos of bottles in the fridge shows her a
package of Kraft cheese singles. In the next panel, we see the two at the grocery store, drawn
in color, and he remarks, now pictured with Dill, “Get in the cart. We’re going shopping.”
Dana smiles, and looks to the side (Figure 35.7).42
Instead of presenting restriction, discipline, and shame discourses toward Dana, Rich’s
characters affirm rather than judge her healthy appetite and this is followed in the comic
by body positive and body moving instruction. Dana, who is scripted as a vegetarian in the
comic series, is commonly drawn eating or makes reference to voluminous amounts of food,
but she is always moving her body and presenting DIY Afrogoth clothing for real size figures.
Such imaging champions food consumption among real size women who are often shamed
494
to not consume food in public, she dismantles stereotypical discourses that proffer larger size
women’s apathy to fitness, and she rejects societal pressure for real size women to hide their
bodies. Dana’s self-awareness crystalizes in a strip where Dill queries whether vegetarians are
afraid of meat and she replies that “it’s multinational corporations” involvement in meat pro-
duction that concern her and her other vegetarian Afrogoths.43 Wedding all of these themes
together, in another installment of the comic, the character Dill shares that “The world
has … turned upside down! We’re killing our own species, eating others and then wearing
their skin; everything is bad for you, justice is a fairy tale, and fetuses matter more than or-
phans. We need something to bring us together.”44 Like the lyrics of Militia Vox, the idea
of “eating the Other” in Dining with Dana is turned on its head and takes on contemplative
meaning as voiced through the consciousness of the Afrogoth.
If being unconventionally thin for the character Dill means the rebuke of male gym cul-
ture, which includes health fitness, but also includes compulsive weightlifting, bulking, and
chest flex posturing, being a fat bat for Dana demands a rethinking of fat being associated
with physical “un-fitness.” Dana takes bikini selfies in the pool, and proudly celebrates her
birthday in a tightly fitting purple and white bat ensemble most would don only on Hallow-
een. Her most interventionist contribution to body positive imagery emanates from her fab
bat yoga illustrations, which provide women with images of real size bodies engaged in adap-
tive yoga poses.45 These illustrations transform her comic art to accessible fitness instruction
and are marketed as visual classes women can perform at home as to not have to combat the
racial dynamic that is prevalent in yoga studios. In a Dining with Dana column, she provides a
reminder about the alarming statistic of women’s self-esteem going down exponentially after
viewing magazine advertisements, wherein many make comparisons between their bodies
and the bodies of models.46 “Hey Fab Bats!” writes Pickens Rich,
As heat rises and we begin to shed our layers, a coat of armor dismantles to reveal our
physical selves. Now before you go out and dismember your friend, remember you don’t
have to exchange limbs with an Instamodel. … here is not a human being on this ball
of earth and water that does not at least once get worried about their body. You may have
the urge to perch yourself high upon that weeping willow and claim that it is not true,
but even in this bird-like state, you must give into the feels.47
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Dining with Dana fuses physical health with mental health resources, and links in everything
from explanations of pansexuality as a response to monosexuality to the consequences and
psychology of self-harm. Using the rhetorical device of situating herself within rather than
separate from body image struggle, and situating and querying her readers to join in on
solutions to body image dysmorphia, Dining with Dana is a co-creative artistic force between
artist and consumer.
Adorning the undead: Afrogoth style politics

Black, undead subcultures and Afrogoth cultural production reach beyond Bela Lugosi hero
worship. Female Afrogoths have their own style icons, including Militia Vox and the fat bat
Dana. Other Black, velvet wearing Heap Mamas like Lucy Furr, who is an Afrogoth over 30
icon, Black Lolita fashionistas, Steamfunk indie musicians, and online communities nego-
tiate the metaphorical blackness of Goth with the lived blackness of the Afrogoth.48 Afrogoth
icon Lucy Furr makes this distinction acute by placing a finer point on the differentiated
history of the Afrogoth. She argues that Afrogoths constitute an oppositional identity that
for some is about more than a diverse musical form and style. The Afrogoth rubs up against
signs of blackness in the popular imagination; yet, the Afrogoth can also constitute the his-
tory of the aggrieved status of people of African descent. As an ongoing target of both racial
exclusion and exotic-baiting, she articulates – that is to say she links together and lays bare the
conditions under which Afrogoths historically and contemporarily exist and simultaneously
create new meanings – the complex, subcultural existence among Black Goths:
My great-grandmother helped [in the founding of ] the NAACP in the Midwest, and
was an ancestor of … George Mason. My father was an angry man, who was one of the
Washington Seven, turned down from joining Malcom X’s group of haters because the
founder of ‘By All Means Necessary’ himself said my father ‘loved blood too much’… I
wear a little bit of my culture [and Goth] whenever I go out…whether it be an African
sort of head-wrap, a Celtic ring, a Norse rune on my necklace, a feather woven into
my hair, whatever. Do I get stares? Of course, because people seem to think that I am
‘being something I am not’ by wearing [something] other than obviously African or
Goth clothing.49
Afrogoth is more than style, argues Furr, but style is not divorced from the cultural and
historical specificity of blackness that lives in the flesh of and permeates in the blood of the
Afrogoth’s body. Like Furr, Calyn Pickens Rich’s character Dana and musician Militia Vox
present the common style politics of female, cis identifying or purposeful hyper-feminine
performances of Afrifemcentrism and Goth.50 Afropunk and alternative soul artist MeShell
NdegeOcello, a member of the Black Rock Coalition, is indicative of this feminist, gender,
and cultural sonic mix. As Maureen Mahon writes in her seminal book on the Black Rock
Coalition, NdegeOcello’s music defies genre, her look mixes or oscillates between masculine
and feminine performance and as a bisexual artist, NdegeOcello resists the pressure to speak
for, represent, and confine herself to monosexuality.51 However, rejecting common perfor-
mances of femininity and displaying signs associated with aggressive masculinity among
Black female Goths is also indicative of the subculture, and many find Goth as an ideal site
to express oppositional gender and sexual identities.
Though she does not mention the participation of Afrogoth women in Goth female sub-
culture at all, writer Kristen Schildt informs upon the different sub-facets of Goth and style as
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it relates to gender and sexuality. Those who identify as female do so through an exaggerated
femininity in the Goth scene or a rejection of femininity in the industrial Goth scene. Those
who identify with or who are marked as male by society often perform markers of feminin-
ity in the Goth scene or hypermasculinity in the industrial Goth scene.52 The subgenre and
sub-subculture of industrial Goth, then, heightens aggressive, normal-typical masculinity
among those marked as women and men. However, whether coded as masculine, feminine,
or a third, de-gendered space altogether, beauty politics for Black women historically and
currently are fraught with consequences that women and men of the dominant culture ex-
perience on a sliding, racialized scale. Decisions about style are rarely apolitical for Black
women; many notice first what is on or growing out of our head, inflect meaning into
our hairstyle choices, and make assumptions about Black women’s expression of blackness,
Black pride, and their cultural consciousness through skin color gradation, dress, and style.
Intellectuals such as Kobena Mercer argued forcefully in a seminal essay on Black hairstyle
politics in 1987 that there is no such thing as natural Black hair. Any imaginable style, in-
forms Mercer, is worked upon by the hands, is manipulated in some way, and most hair
products – from shampoos and conditioners to styling products marketed as “natural” –
contain chemicals.53 Nevertheless, tiresome discourses and terminology in academic realms
and in the public sphere about “natural” Black hair continue to circulate, can rightfully serve
as positive self-affirmation, but can also work as a delimiting gatekeeper of Black conscious-
ness and artistic expression. It is perhaps because of this that many Black punks and Afrogoths
self-consciously mix visible signifiers of blackness through a collision of colorful hairstyles
and hair textures that are conspicuously “Afrocentric” to mitigate accusations of Afrogoth
being a performance of whiteness.
Cultural critics Nowlie Rooks and more recently Tanisha Ford affirm that hair and style
choices for Black women are historically situated and political.54 Style decisions carry in-group
and out-group scrutiny and are associated with myths of Black womanhood falsely correlated
with intelligence, socio-economic class, and sexuality, affecting our mobility and autonomy in
professional and social spheres. This sliding racial scale takes form in Goth culture acutely. White
women with multiple piercings and who wear non-traditional hair colors, extensions, and vo-
luminous styles such as dreads and unruly tendrils may garner second looks among the general
populace, but it is celebrated within Goth culture as “oppositional, punk styling.” To the con-
trary, Afrogoth women with similar styles are rarely recognized as a personal or Goth subcultural
expression and conscious practice. Rather, it is deemed unprofessional in professional spheres and
thought of as pejoratively “ghetto” or uncouth and tawdry. At the experiential level, Militia Vox
resists this double standard through her appearance and performance, as her Afro curls go from
blonde-haired to green, to purple, to black, and then to burgundy, and her stage performance as
a Horrorist affirms she is confident in her Goth skin. Black Goth appearance is also one of the
core concerns of Pickens Rich’s advisee described at the onset of my discussion. For Dill and
the fellow depressed anarchist named Dean, style politics and the gender and sexual identities
perceived of masculine style choices are questions rather than affirmative answers. Style choices
can evoke, confuse, and refuse gender, racial, and sexual boundaries and, in so doing, Afrogoth
performances expose the lie, that is to say the fictions, of those binaristic categories altogether.
Militia Vox’s anthem “refuse your stereotype” places a finer, musical point on Pickens Rich’s
Gothic pen, and the clothing, hair, and temperament of everyday Black Goths is indicative of the
histories of people of African descent living in America, which collide with an interdisciplinary
and historically rich genre form.
Dining with Dana takes on the varied historical roots and interdisciplinarity of Goth style
as well. Questions of cultural appropriation and authenticity appear in a Dining with Dana
497
strip where Dill proclaims that Dave Vanian, lead singer for the Goth and punk rock group
The Damned, is after him for stealing his hairstyle. In haste, Dill remarks that he and Dana
must escape by traveling by time machine back to the 1980s, and after their time travel, the
final panel shows the two trapped in the 1880s. Dill apologizes with “Ooops, sorry, wrong
century.” “I’ll be damned,” responds Dana, thus signifying Vanian’s style as a borrowing
from and an adaption of another era as well, thereby obliterating discourses of style purity
(Figure 35.8).
In his ethnographic work on white Goth subculture, Joshua Gunn shares that the word
“dark” is a key signifier for how Goths articulate their lives, outlook, musical and style tastes.
“‘Dark’ is inclusive of an experience of social alienation caused by one’s intellectual, artis-
tic, or sexual traits in a mainstream context,” Gunn’s subjects share. Yet, Afrogoths, music
artist Militia Vox, Dining with Dana, and Dill Comics show their embracement of darkness
means re-projecting their racial blackness and redefining it through a mixture of style. They
navigate a doubling of racial detachment and racial remediation all at once. Already on the
margins as racialized subjects, their encirclement into being an “American outcast,” as Miltia
Vox sings, becomes a posture of power and defiance with intensified meaning. Afrogoths do
not have to pretend to exist within a dark world nor create a fictional world in which they
are outsiders; as racial Others they are already, to use M’s phrasing, “born out of darkness, but
exist to shed light.” Part of shedding this light requires a negotiation of what it means to exist
as dark in a white-dark subculture. Comparable to many predominantly white spaces that
make claims to inclusion, existing within the Goth subculture as really and diversely “Black,”
and not simply about feeling dark, is a struggle. As one Afrogoth remarked, the general attitude
in Goth subculture is, “Yeah, please be a part of our community. But please don’t bring any
of that real ‘Black stuff’ with you.”55
Goth in general is a spooky subculture, but what happens when the presumed Black
“spook” spooks the “white” spooks? Pickens Rich’s virtual work and M’s concerts are a
counter-public to online forums where Goths of color report the experience of constant
trolling (i.e., internet harassment) and bullying for being weird, not Black enough, or too
498
Black, something mirrored at Goth shows outside of the virtual realm. Jasmine, a Goth of
African descent, summarizes what it means to inhabit the cultural mixture of Afrogoth. She
(re)claims the idea of the “Black spook” the dominant culture is conditioned to fear through
Goth style and lifestyle by asserting:
[Goth] is for anyone who welcomes the dark and spooky as well as the light. I’m not act-
ing white; I’m acting Goth; in fact I’m not acting, I am Goth! It is true that the majority
of Goths are white, but that does not make it white. I am proud of my Gothiness and that
I differ from the mainstream, just as I am proud of my heritage and race.56
For Afrogoths style is metaphorically and materially a matter of Black death, but it is also a
matter of Afrogoth life. The Black undead for Afrogoths is a cultural sign and a warning –
an experience of painful and joyful mourning; it is a re-membering and resurrection of our
dead, and a musical and affective marker of the lives we have led. Considering comix and
music as an outlet for Afrogoth artistic expression is an illustration of cultural and historical
linking and delinking. Afrogoth sonic political platforms are articulations that carry po-
tential to culturally transform; Afrogoth identities defy stereotypes and transcend limiting
identity archetypes. Afrogoth is not the answer to the problem of Black death, nor is it a mel-
ancholic response in cultural isolation; it is a refraction of a historic and contemporary racial
mirror that encourages people of African descent to seek and craft spaces of subgroup partic-
ipation anew. There are politics in our pleasures, whether conscious or not. Here, I refer to
politics with a lowercase “p,” that is, not as debate, tactics, and vies for state power commonly
associated with politics with a capital “P.” Rather, I see Afrogoth making as a sonic political
platform that intervenes in debates about authentic blackness, engages in tactics and vies for
personal and communal autonomy as a means of emotional survival and creative expression.
Afrogoth lends an opportunity to think through real feelings of blackness through an even
darker glass. In an ongoing era where fabrications of scary blackness are consumed as fetish
in hip-hop music and real Black people in the public sphere are intensely and fatally feared,
the strategic deployment of anger, spooking, and haunting as an expository language, visual,
and aural form is emergent. To employ the words of Militia Vox in her original, Horrorist
musical anthem “I am She,” Afrogoth is a necessary “patchwork of art stitched with pride. A
woman’s design is ripe with secrets. So don’t deny what you refuse.”57
Notes
1 Calyn Pickens-Rich, “Ask Me,” Dining with Dana, accessed September 5, 2016, http://diningwith-
dana.net/post/113862341546/hey-dana-i-wanted-to-ask-you-how-did-your.
2 On the unfolding of this and other contemporary, Black social movements, see Marc Lamont Hill,
Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond (New York
City: Simon & Schuster Publishers, 2016). Also, see the richly argued and researched historical
context in which to understand the movement in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York City: The New Press, 2012).
3 Misogynoir refers to intracultural misogyny directed toward women of African descent.
Neo-lynching refers to the contemporary ways people of African descent are wrongfully murdered
by vigilantes and the state.
4 Karla Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Rituals (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2004).
5 Julia Round, Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2014), 12; 7.
6 Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby eds., “Introduction,” Goth: Undead Subculture (Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
499
500
501
at www.gothsofcolor.org. Angelfire is still located at: www.angelfire.com/. A Facebook cite for

Black Goths include BAAGoths, accessed October 10, 2016, www.facebook.com/BAAGoths/; a
Live Journal cite accessed October 10, 2016, is located at: http://lalolitas.livejournal.com/profile.
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36
Catherine Meurisse and
the gender of art
Margaret C. Flinn
Bart Beaty’s 2012 Comics versus Art is dedicated to the relationship between comics and the
art world. Beaty uses the case of comics “to demonstrate how, in an increasingly postmodern
world in which the distinction between high and low culture is often assumed to have been
eroded, outmoded biases continue to persist in the shaping of how we understand culture
broadly” (7). Across chapters that deal with multiple configurations between comics and art,
Beaty excavates both what he identifies as initial antagonisms between art and comics, and
a tendency toward lingering hostilities. Elsewhere, I have argued that these types of contin-
ued hostilities can be seen within the very narratives of a series of comics commissioned by
the Louvre museum and originally published in collaboration with Futuropolis (now with
Delcourt).1 The only constraint in the series is that the artists engage the museum’s collec-
tions, and the presence of antagonism between the media is ironic since one of the series’s
aims was to break down the separation between the comics and art worlds. While the Louvre
series continues to this day, it has taken a decided turn away from the strong Francophone
European “complete artist” or “graphic novel” character of the series’ first decade. Since
2014–2015, the albums in the series have been increasingly and almost exclusively aimed
at a youth or manga readership. Meanwhile, in 2014, Catherine Meurisse published the
inaugural volume of the Musée d’Orsay’s companion series, which has only reached four
volumes (through 2017), but throughout those has maintained the contours of the Louvre/
Futuropolis initial project.
Meurisse was an apt choice to launch the Orsay series. Born in 1980, the bédéiste 2 has had
a stellar career, ever since she was initially launched to national attention in 1997 for winning
the Grand Écureuil d’Or, a prize for student work at the Angoulême comics festival. After
pursuing studies in literature and illustration at the Université de Poitiers, the École Estienne,
and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Meurisse joined the editorial team of
Charlie Hebdo in 2005, working there for ten years, famously as the only woman member of
the permanent drawing staff.3 Meurisse left Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the January 7, 2015
terrorist attacks on the paper that left eight dead and four wounded. In parallel to her position
at Charlie Hebdo and other press drawing, Meurisse had been pursuing a successful career as
an illustrator of both adult and children’s books and of comics. In 2008 she published the first
of what is to date a bibliography of seven solo-authored bande dessinée albums.4 The Orsay
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commission was the fourth of these important solo works. Her first album, Mes hommes de
lettres: Petit précis de littérature française [“My Men of Letters: A Précis of French Literature”],
was touted by critics as being as accurate as a Lagarde et Michard—a classic French literature
anthology/textbook series somewhat akin to the Norton Anthologies for Anglo-American
literatures, except with a greater degree of pedagogical apparatus. The second, Savoir-vivre
ou mourir: comment devenir une femme du monde en 24h [“To Acquire Good Manners or Die
Trying: How to Become a Woman of the World in Twenty-Four Hours”], was freely adapted
from Meurisse’s experience attending the Baroness Nadine de Rothschild’s Académie du
savoir-vivre in Geneva. In the album, Catherine5 is inspired to attend the Académie by her
reading of Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), a novel that serves as a structuring
intertext for the BD protagonist’s aspirations to good conduct. If Meurisse’s penchant for the
bulwarks of French cultural capital was not already evident, her third album consolidated the
trajectory toward the Orsay commission. Le Pont des arts: Petites histoires de grandes amitiés entre
peintres et écrivains [“The Pont des Arts: Small Stories of Great Friendships between Painters
and Writers”] refers to the bridging between arts through the friendships of individual writ-
ers and painters, but it also names the footbridge that connects the Left and Right banks of
the Seine river in Paris, between the Louvre museum and the Institut de France, the learned
society that houses the Académie Française, arbiter of French language (and by extension
literature) since its foundation in 1635 by the Cardinal Richelieu. A short stroll to the west
along the Seine from the Institut is the Orsay Museum, subject of Moderne Olympia.
In Moderne Olympia, the title character of Édouard Manet’s 1863 “Olympia” is an aspiring
actress at the Orsay “moving picture studios.” The heroine becomes the bête noire of Vénus
(from Alexandre Cabanel’s “Birth of Venus,” celebrated in the salon of 1963), the movie star
about to be dethroned by aesthetic upheavals in the medium—Meurisse is activating topoi of
the Impressionist’s aesthetic revolution, but also radical transformations in the film industry
here articulated as the shift from studio to location shooting. Subsequent to Moderne Olym-
pia, Meurisse has published three further works: La Légèreté (“Lightness,” April 2016) which
chronicles her experiences during and after the January 7, 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo,
wherein literature but above all art help her surmount trauma;6 Scènes de la vie hormonale
(“Scenes of Hormonal Life,” October 2016), a series of vignettes about modern heterosexual
relationships; and Les Grands espaces (“The Great Outdoors,” 2018), a memoir of Catherine’s
young life and early experiences with art and nature.
What should be clear from this overview of the titles in Meurisse’s career as what in
French is referred to as a “complete artist” (one who both writes and draws her albums) is
the degree to which she has been intellectually influenced by and engages with canonical
French literature and painting. Her evident affection for French cultural heritage has obvi-
ously been a factor in the warm reception given her books in mainstream French press and
of course also with readers. This affection and recourse to literary and artistic intertext is
a cornerstone of Meurisse’s character as an auteure, as I will explain further in this chapter.
Her comfort and easy affection for the art produced by stereotypical “great/dead white men”
does not, however, prevent Meurisse from simultaneously engaging in systematic critique—
sometimes scathing—of the sexism (and racism) embedded in that literary and artistic tradi-
tion. Meurisse thus manages a skillful balancing act as a critically and commercially successful
bédéiste who appropriates very traditional and male-dominated “high art,” absorbing and reme-
diating it in feminist comics—without losing her broad appeal. In the pages that follow, I will
argue that Meurisse’s work does not appear to be subject to the antagonism between BD and
Art (or Literature) that has marked so many of the encounters between these realms. Instead,
her work builds upon the foundational encounter with art and literature as constitutive of her
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Meurisse and the gender of art
comics’ form as well as her self-(re)presentation as a bédéiste—a practice which is fundamen-

tally gendered and indeed feminist.
Art, Literature, and BD

As should be evident from the very brief plot summaries given above, even when Meurisse
is not crafting a narrative whose primary topic is literature or painting (such as Mes hommes
de lettres or Le Pont des arts), she mobilizes her reader’s knowledge of literature and art inter-
textually. Thus, we see passages of La Princesse de Clèves in Savoir-vivre ou mourir, where, for
instance, at the culmination of a list-like series of instructions, illustrated in single panels
(“NEVER speak with a cigarette in your lips”; “When a young man helps you on with your
coat, thank him with a smile and say “Thank you Jean-Ernest.”; “If you hitchhike, only ac-
cept a ride in a car driven by a woman.”; and so on [23]), the Baroness lands upon
Do not divorce. Divorce makes for second-hand children, and divorced women may be
sitting on a pile of money, but their phones never ring! Stay with your husband for life.
But if the inclination—what am I saying—if the desire takes you, it is perfectly possible
to have a lover. The important thing is never to admit it to your spouse. (23–24)
At this point, the panels stop depicting the Baroness instructing the pupils at the Académie
and instead show Catherine dressed as the Princesse de Clèves, weeping at the bedside of her
dying husband (Figure 36.1).
He says:
Why enlighten me as to the passion that you had for M. de Nemours. Why did you not
leave me in that tranquil blindness that so many husbands enjoy? I die without regret,
madam, since I could not have your heart and I can longer desire it. Farewell, madam!
One day you will regret a man who loved you with a true and legitimate passion. (24)
“You see what I mean…” asks the Baroness, in the page’s final panel, where the Prince de
Clèves utters the onomatopoeic, “couic,” indicating he has at last died, in a thought bubble
Figure 36.1 Catherine

Meurisse Savoir-vivre (Les Échappés, 2010)
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Margaret C. Flinn
above Catherine’s head. Excerpting the novel’s deathbed monologue as speech bubbles for
her panels, Meurisse goes to the heart of the Prince’s sentiment, mobilizing the reader’s
knowledge of the passage’s melodrama, but pathos descends to bathos as the Prince literally
and figuratively croaks while the Baroness comments, “You see what I mean.” We, the read-
ers, see what she means, because Meurisse has shown it to us. She tells a story and simultane-
ously comments upon it, limiting the seventeenth-century intertext to a narrative repository.
In La Légèreté, Meurisse depicts herself engaging in a nocturnal street art intervention,
stenciling images of her fallen Charlie colleagues on city walls, to great psychological healing
effect when just two days later, on November 23, 2015, the Bataclan attack stabs her like a
lightning bolt: she draws herself impaled and elevated upon a bolt from behind with a speech
bubble saying “It begins again” (86). For the next pages, she shows herself as retraumatized in
angry red/yellow images, first seeing the emergency vehicles on the street, feeling the “Sen-
sation of being legless, like January 7th. Panic, anesthesia, dissociation” (87), then in four
panels where she is on a psychoanalyst’s couch repeating the litany of “Je suis…” (Charlie,
Bataclan, Charonne, Bichat, Voltaire) that have taunted her, haunted her, and angered her as
a survivor, both in the streets and on social media. Again, the images are red-orange-yellow,
evoking the Mark Rothko painting at the book’s opening, but also Edvard Munch’s “The
Scream” (1893), that pops out of the gray blue walls with empty white walls that she men-
tally/metaphorically passes through like a ghost at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, while
she is physically waiting out the gunfire behind the metal grill of a store entryway. After the
dramatically triggering event of the Bataclan attacks, Meurisse represents herself in a pool of
water, reading Baudelaire and chatting with a frog. The palette shifts to blue green on white
for four pages, with just a tiny pool of blue visible on the first page (opposite the red-yellow-
orange of the therapist’s office). The next double page reveals Catherine to be floating in a
swampy pool (Figure 36.2).
She engages in a long conversation with the frog, who asks her what helped her after
the attacks of January 7: “Nothing,” she says at first, seeming like she will slip away below
the water and drown, but then she corrects herself to “No. Seeing. Seeing the ocean, trees, the
Figure 36.2 Catherine Meurisse La Légèreté (Dargaud, 2016)
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sky, a painting, light. In January several days after the massacre, I saw a sky raining gold on
the iridescent horizon, like in a painting of…of who is it again…” (90). Turner, or Rothko,
the frog supplies as suggestions, and Catherine continues, “I would like to be submerged
in beauty” (91). The frog reminds her of Stendhal’s response to his voyage to Italy in 1817,
and instead of slipping away, Catherine decides this is indeed what she needs and, on the
next page, swims to the edge of the pond as the frog hops away. In this four-page sequence
Meurisse is visually citing Sir John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia” (1851–1852): her position
in the water head and hands slightly raised, the surrounding vegetation, the greens of the
palette, and even the shadows of watercolor wash suggesting Catherine might be wearing
a dress like that of Shakespeare’s tragic character (though later in the sequence as the frog
prods her out of grief, it becomes evident she is nude). Meurisse uses Millais’s representation
of Shakespeare’s Ophelia to suggest the degree to which she is being dragged down by grief,
but contrasts Ophelia’s submersion (death by drowning) to the Stendhalian submersion in
beauty that she will choose, as this sequence concludes the book’s longer main section, to
Catherine’s voyage to Rome and stay at the Villa Medicis (home of the French Academy’s
artist residencies). This is the kind of citational and intertextual practice which is constitutive
of meaning in Meurisse’s work—for indeed the suggestion of possible drowning might be
present but nowhere near as strongly without the emphasis given through the intertext.
Moderne Olympia is perhaps the summum of this practice, where almost all of the char-
acters in the story are taken from works primarily in the Orsay collections. But because
Meurisse displaces the quarrels between the “Officiels” (characters from official Salon paint-
ings) and the “Refusés” (from the “Salon des Refusés” or “Salon of the Rejected”) into the
museum transformed as cinema studio and within a bande dessinée, her intertextual practice
is also fundamentally adaptive.7 She transforms both literary narrative and painterly source
texts, using them as building blocks in the creation of her own narrative, visual universe.
Both Ann Miller and Thierry Groensteen suggest this is what constitutes comics as an art: a
marriage between narrative and visual art forms.8 And of course, with the Ophelia sequence
of La Légèreté, Meurisse is building on a multi-linked intertextual chain, since Millais was
himself representing a character given form by Shakespeare, so Meurisse’s bande dessinée prac-
tice becomes a meta-formal reflection on the ways in which arts continually remediate visual
and narrative structures and tropes.
Art, museums, and subjectivity

If art, from both a pedagogical and satirical standpoint, is the main topic of Mes hommes de lettres,
Le Pont des arts, and Moderne Olympia, and is the explicit topic of many of Meurisse’s BD, it is
in her personal narratives that the deep importance of art and literature to her is made clear. In
La Légèreté, Catherine struggles to reconstruct herself, post-trauma, by travel. But not just any
travel, travel prescribed by her favorite artworks. First her friends take her to Cabourg, because
she needs the seaside. “Why Cabourg?” she asks them, and they reply, “Because Balbec! That’s
where Proust spend his vacations, and Proust is your favorite writer, let me remind you.” “Not
my writer, my full-time care giver!” (34) replies Catherine. The shift in status from writer
to caretaker explains the role Catherine accords to the literature in question—she uses it as a
manual or guidebook for life. Unfortunately, the wounds of her trauma go beyond what this
literary-geographical encounter can address, as a caption explains:
Normally, when I think of Proust, my epidermis, my head, and my heart all react, and
I immediately depart on a voyage into his work and into myself. Because to be a reader
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of Proust is to be a reader of one’s self, of one’s deepest self. This time, nothing happens.
I’m indifferent. My imagination is blocked. (35)
Here, “this time nothing happens” is given an indication of the degree to which Catherine’s
self has been damaged, and she continues to suffer from numbness alternating with more
dramatic symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
Despite Catherine’s trip to Cabourg not putting her clearly on the road to recovery,
language does play an important role for her. Subsequent to the trip, she sees her former
lover. He is a married man and their initial breakup had led to the insomnia/depression
that prevented Catherine from getting to work on time on January 7, the day of the Charlie
Hebdo attacks. For five pages (10–14), Catherine lays in bed imagining different scenarios of
confrontations with him, before finally dragging herself from bed at 10:15am. When the ex
reappears later in the book and hugs her, Catherine dissolves into tears (65). The expression
in French is “fondre en larmes,” to melt into tears, and Meurisse literalizes this metaphor by
drawing her legs as wiggly and rubbery, and eventually her entire body completely losing
shape and melting into a bluish puddle (Figure 36.3).
The wobbliness of the line in this drawing is hardly usual. While not going so far as the
Vuillemin’s strident and aggressive ligne crade, Meurisse does have a thick and uneven line that
shows a definite filiation with the work of Claire Bretécher (who provides the epigraph to
Savoir-vivre), and also lends itself very well to suggesting uncertainty in when her characters
confront emotionally difficult moments. In this context, though, I would also suggest this is
a kind of “dessin au féminin,” or “drawing in the feminine,” if we might imagine the bande
dessinée equivalent of the literary écriture feminine.9 The fluidity and indeed wobbliness comes
across as a symptom of what Meurisse navigates as a woman artist in the early twenty-first
century. While she has had a spectacularly successful career of a sort that simply was not pos-
sible for earlier generations, her persona of “Catherine” as represented in the albums is none-
theless assailed by the full panoply of confusions of “leaning in” and “having it all”—being a
fully sexual being yet being constantly thwarted by male partners’ narcissisms or weaknesses
(as she portrays with great humor in her send-up of heterosexual dating and sex in Scènes de
la vie homonale).
Catherine had gone into the encounter with her ex believing that this “embrace” is what
is missing from her life, but after the pair attend a theatrical adaptation of Ivan Goncharov’s

Meurisse La Légèreté (Dargaud, 2016)
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Oblomov (1859) put on by the Comédie Française, things take a decided turn. Catherine
interacts throughout this sequence both with the play and with the memories/ghosts of her
deceased Charlie Hebdo colleagues, the economist Barnard Maris and cartoonist Georges
Wolinski. Maris and Wolinski sit in the theater beside Catherine commenting on the play.
When Catherine and her lover exit, she wonders aloud why they are not together, and her
lover parrots the scene in the play where Oblamov renounces Olga, saying “I prefer a humble
and modest life to passion” (68 and 69). “No kidding,” (69) replies Catherine. Her lover re-
peats the logic he has used earlier in the BD to justify their separation: “I have a family, I can’t
destroy it. If I leave my family a part of myself will collapse” (70). Catherine takes up that
phrasing and rearticulates it as a position of self-affirmation and sufficiency: “Exactly, I know
about destruction. One of my families has just been destroyed. The more we are crazy… It’s
high time I rebuild myself, without that family… and without you…,” she says over the space
of three panels, moving from a position in lock step with her lover’s arm around her, to mov-
ing away from him with her back turned to him, to a final panel where he is not even visible.
This is an important turning point in the BD’s narrative and in Catherine’s trajectory, where
the novel/play offers a kind of mirror upon Catherine’s life, thus catalyzing her ability to
move forward, away both from the trauma of the attacks and from what was an emotionally
damaging relationship. She has been, in a sense, affectively trapped, because the damage the
relationship had wrought upon her had saved her life by preventing her from being present
in the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices at the time of the attacks. Thus, letting go of the grief
over the relationship is a necessary, but terrifying, step in letting go of grief over the attacks.
After this turning point, the stage is set for Catherine to work through her trauma—though
not without setbacks such as the triggering of the Bataclan attacks as I discussed above.
Meurisse represents that progress in subjective reconstruction as being fundamentally artic-
ulated through encounters with literature and painting.
Literature and art not only “saves” Catherine, in Les Grands espaces, a memoir of her
childhood, she shows how along with nature it played a key role in her initial development.
The book opens with the adult Catherine explaining she had long dreamed of having a
doorway in her Parisian apartment that would open directly onto country fields. When, on
book’s second page, she opens the door she has (in the previous panels) drawn upon a blank
wall of her apartment, it shows a field of sunflowers, and in the next panels, Catherine as a
young girl in the middle of that field. The young Catherine begins a recitation of Baudelaire’s
“Correspondences” (5), with verses adjusted ironically to speak of farming in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries (tractors, Monsanto, and round-up are interspersed in
the verses of Baudelaire’s famous sonnet of synesthesia). Meurisse thus introduces the reader
to the countryside where she grew up through a combination of her drawings and memo-
ries, but also through the lens of Baudelaire. We rapidly learn that her youthful experience
of the rundown farm here where her parents moved her and her sister Fanny at a young age
was mediated by literature and art. Inspired by Le Roman d’un enfant (1890), Pierre Loti’s
fictionalized account of his own childhood, Fanny and Catherine create a museum of the
“treasures” they find on the farm: fossilized shells, bits of sculpture, and eventually various
types of dung. Her parents narrate their various plantings as a living history originating not
only from cuttings of plants on their families’ respective gardens, but also from the gardens
of Proust, Montaigne, and Rabelais (33–34). Eventually the family visits the Louvre, and in
the BD’s most lengthy sequence (66–74), Catherine discovers her “grands espaces,” or “great
outdoors,” represented in the paintings of Corot, Fragonard, Watteau, and Poussin, while
her mother locates the carnations that Loti writes of in Le Roman d’un enfant in the Tuilieries
garden. These “wide open spaces” Catherine sees in the landscape paintings inspire the first
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Figure 36.4 Catherine Meurisse Les Grands espaces (Dargaud, 2018)
of only three double-page spreads in the book (68–69): a forest reverie inspired by “À l’orée
d’une forêt, un groupe d’arbres est clairé par les rayons du soleil” (“On the Edge of a Forest,
A Group of Trees are Lit by Rays of Sun”), a pastel by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Figure 36.4).
The double-page spread is immersive for the reader and the character—a tiny Catherine
leans up against the trunk of a tree, contemplating the forest. The remaining double-page
spreads are similarly dreamlike: in one (72–73), Catherine and Fanny look at a Caravaggio
hanging in the Louvre’s Grand Gallery, whose ceiling windows are overgrown with vegeta-
tion in imitation of the ruins of the gallery imagined by Hubert Robert in 1796; in the other,
the adult Catherine walks through the fields on the present-day farm (84–85). Meurisse thus
represents herself as a small part of the natural world, but not simply the natural world as she
experienced it in the countryside—the landscape takes on the power for her to lose herself in
it through its representation in the paintings she sees in the museum.
Meurisse’s politics of gender and art

In Meurisse’s memoir, her personally defined relationship to art and nature is of greater impor-
tance to her young self than sex—she dismisses a garden gnome’s insistence upon the connec-
tion between pollination and fornication (Grandes espaces 77–76), and puts off the drooling,
pubescent boys who have quite other things in mind as she talks to them about plants (Grands
espaces 77–78)—her gardening and drawing are of far greater interest to her. This behavior is
coherent with that of her older self ’s route back to solid mental health not through a renewal of a
love affair, but rather through her relationship to art. A relationship to art is thus embedded and
entwined in Meurisse’s self-affirmation. She has also consistently used her art to criticize sexism.
Meurisse’s collaboration with Julie Birmant on Drôles de femmes (“Funny women,” 2010),
for instance, is a frankly feminist project, interviewing successful women performers and
artists, while both Scènes de le vie hormonale and Savoir-vivre ou mourir constantly satirize sex-
ism. In fact, at the end of Savoir-vivre, when Catherine realizes that the Princesse de Clèves
finished her short but virtuous life in a convent, Catherine runs off as fast as she can, “took
the first train for Paris and decided to forget everything I had I just learned. My life would be
long and full of examples of initiable vice” (54). The protagonist thus claims a right to having
a sexuality that “great works of art” have all too often denied their women protagonists—
and indeed, the instruction at the Académie is quite frequently oriented toward controlling
510
Figure 36.5 Catherine Meurisse Scènes de la vie hormonale (Dargaud, 2016, 2018)
women’s sexuality, in appearance as well as acts (as in the example of discretion in taking an
extramarital lover, as discussed above). Scènes de la vie hormonale, made up of single-page (six
or eight panel) vignettes, consistently lambastes the irrational, selfish, and unfair behaviors of
men in heterosexual relationships. For instance, in “Mise à niveau” [“Leveling effect”] (16),
a man on a couch pauses in making love to his female partner, to break into a long discourse
on how much he loves and admires her and her strength, although her ego takes too much
place in their relationship (Figure 36.5).
In the first five panels, he speaks non-stop while she listens, speechless with surprise,
disbelief, and anger, as he concludes that really her unconscious labor has steamrolled him
and is the cause of his impotence. The woman at last speaks in the final panel, assuring him
with dripping irony that she’ll just take the time to park her heavy machinery, “and then
I’ll find someone dull to replace me, someone incapable of being your narcissistic rival.”
“Merci merci merci!” replies her partner, as if anyone in fact would line up a new girlfriend
for him, after he had accused her of diminishing him by her very existence—when clearly
the problem is all internal to his own mismanagement of his fragile but outsized ego. This
is of course extremely effective satire because it so closely adheres to the types of discourse
women confront both in heterosexual relationships and in the workplace, where their labor is
simultaneously misapprehended and taken for granted. As American cartoonist Liana Finck
has punchily expressed in a single panel she also currently sells as a t-shirt, “I don’t want your
last name. Can I have your sense of entitlement instead?”
Meurisse does not, however, wall off her feminist critical spirit from the work she has done
that is not primarily about women. Her books on literature and art, by sheer virtue of the fact that
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Margaret C. Flinn
they explore the canon, are overwhelmingly dominated by male figures. In books such as Mes
hommes de lettres and Le Pont des arts, complimented by critics for their historical accuracy, erudi-
tion, and pedagogical character, Meurisse consistently highlights the real or imagined role played
by secondary characters, such as an unnamed actress giving Corneille pushback on what consti-
tutes bienséance (Mes hommes 51), Mademoiselle Mars’s contestation of Hugo’s verses of Hernani
(Mes hommes 90-1), an offhanded remark of Madame Hanska to Balzac (Mes hommes 105), and
the realization of a young woman that she is in fact Madame Bovary (Mes hommes 115–117); Kiki
de Montparnasse creates the composition of one of Man Ray’s most famous photographs while
in fact refusing to be photographed and arguing with him about the representation of reality
(Pont des arts 80). In some cases, these small details bring to light the documented contributions
of women to the careers of “great men.” In others, such as the Bovary sequence, the characters
realization, “Mais… Emma Bovary, c’est moi!” is simply a send-up of the way in which male
artists instrumentalize either real or imagined women in the service of their own project—to the
degree of absurdity that one might perceive in Flaubert’s claim that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”
Meurisse’s imagination offers a great deal of humor based on feminist wish fulfillment,
like the episode in Le Pont des arts where Diderot mansplains her feelings to the subject of
Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s 1765 “A Girl with a Dead Canary.” Diderot half makes a pass at the
girl, who hauls off and slaps him with a massive “PAF!” after he tells her that she is not in fact
sad about her bird but rather about being dumped by her lover. Moderne Olympia of course
expands this strategy—Manet’s “Fifer” (1866) makes a racist joke and gets a vase of flowers
smashed over his head by Olympia’s black maidservant, thus giving the “mammy”-like figure
a level of agency that she certainly does not have when she is reduced to the darkened back-
ground of the painting (Figure 36.6).
Figure 36.6 Catherine Meurisse Moderne Olympia (Futuropolis, 2014)
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Meurisse also manages to foreground one of the obvious problems with the painting (and
indeed the whole genre), by leaving Olympia nude throughout the book, but building a run-
ning joke that she is “dressed” as long as she is wearing her slippers and black choker ribbon.
Instead of putting Olympia into a dress, which would quite literally cover up the problem of
the unequal ways in which nakedness has been distributed by gender over the course of art
history, Meurisse maintains the “authentic” costume, but by turning it into a running joke,
she does not accept the terms dictated by a male historical establishment.
In this context, of course, writers such as George Sand, Colette, and Simone de Beauvoir
will be of particular interest: in Mes hommes de lettres, a young woman in 1954, the coinci-
dence of Colette’s massive public funeral and the announcement of Simone de Beauvoir
winning the Goncourt Prize, is interpreted as a sign by a young woman that she needs to
leave the boyfriend who attended the funeral with her, but responds to her sad and laudatory
comments about Colette by dismissively responding that in addition to representing freedom
and audacity, Colette was a deviant—not only human, but vulgar (Figure 36.7).
The sequence ends with the young woman running joyously away from her ex (132). As
for Sand, Meurisse observes that her explicit refusal to rally to feminism does not preclude
her work from being engaged on the part of women’s right to divorce, education, and finan-
cial independence (Pont des arts 99). Sand is represented in both Mes hommes de lettres and
Le Pont des arts as being surrounded by men-children incapable of managing their jealousy
at her talent and productivity, while she calmly manages domestic as well as artistic labor. A
tiny, red-faced Alfred de Musset has a temper tantrum because he only manages to write ten

Meurisse Mes hommes de lettres (Sarbacane, 2012)
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Margaret C. Flinn
Figure 36.8 Catherine Meurisse Le Pont des Arts (Sarbacane, 2008)
verses to George’s “half-volume” (Mes Hommes 97), while Chopin needs her to wrap him
in his scarf (Pont des arts 22). Meanwhile, Sand wipes Chopin’s sneeze off of the wall in one
panel, and two panels later she hustles her son off to the studio with Delacroix (who has been
teaching him drawing), saying “OK, we’re on our way to the studio right? I have a novel to
write tonight” (Pont des arts 26) (Figure 36.8).
While the books’ satirical tone means that any character can appear at least somewhat ridic-
ulous, an exceptional women writer like Sand is celebrated not just because she is unusual, but
because she is dramatically (and impossibly) more capable than any of her male counterparts.
While the satirical nature of many of her books may allow readers of a more conservative
bent to disregard the critical position of those texts, I would suggest that the coherence in the
relationship that Meurisse establishes between art, politics, and self across her oeuvre (from
the more impersonal and humorous texts to the more earnest and self-probing memoirs) al-
lows characterization of the bédéiste as an engaged auteure. In every one of Meurisse’s books,
the gender and sexuality of her protagonists (be they representations of herself or some other)
is something that has to be actively navigated and negotiated. Her ability to stake out a crit-
ical territory within mainstream BD culture has resulted in a body of work that is sensitive
to historical nuance, does not discard art of value only because of its dominant provenance,
but seeks to complicate and nuance the cultural understanding of that art by considering
the way in which it is the product not only of “great men.” Instead, she systematically calls
attention to historically “minor” voices. Simultaneously, she enacts an intertextual comics
practice that puts literature and painting in the service of bande dessinée. Given the historically
“lesser” cultural status of comics, this is another contestation and critical position, but one
that Meurisse stakes out in an affirmative manner—demonstrating what comics can be with-
out entering into a zero-sum game, caught in antagonisms between “high” and “low” art.
Notes
2 “Bande dessinée,” or “BD,” is the French-language term for comic books, while “bédéiste” is a comics
artist who works in this specific cultural context and publishing tradition. Like the Japanese words
“manga” and “mangaka,” these are not simply translations of the English terms “comics,” “comics
books,” “comics artist,” “cartoonist,” “graphic novel,” or “graphic novelist.” I use BD, bédéiste etc.
514
in the original in order to avoid confusing American comics/graphic novel debates with the textual
and artist object of the Franco-Belgian tradition. Translation of BD titles and all dialogue within this
chapter are my own.
4 The hard cover album close to A4 size is the standard format of French-language comics in Europe.
5 I will use “Catherine” to refer to Meurisse’s representation of herself in her autobiographical/doc-
umentary texts, while Meurisse refers to the artist.
Works Cited
Beaty, Bart. Comics versus Art. University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Birmant, Julie and Catherine Meurisse. Drôles de femmes. Dargaud, 2010.
Cayat, Elsa. Noël, ça fait vraiment chier! Sur le divan de Charlie Hebdo. Illustrations, Catherine Meurisse.
Preface, Alice Ferney. Éditions Les Échappée/Charlie Hebdo, 2015.
Childress, Kirby. “Traumatisme et recherche d’identité: La Légèreté de Catherine Meurisse.” French
Review 92:4 (May 2019). 131–142.
Ciment, Gilles. “Femmes dans la bande dessinée: Des pionnières à l’affaire d’Angoulême.” Bulletin des
Bibliothèques de France 11 (February 2017). http://bbf.enssib.fr/matieres-a-penser/femmes-dans-la-
bande-dessinee_67374 Consulted, 22 June 2019.
Flinn, Margaret C. “High Comics Art: The Louvre and the Bande Dessinée.” European Comic Art 6:2
(Autumn 2013). 69–94.
Groensteen, Thierry. Un objet culturel non-identifié. Éditions de l’An 2, 2006.
———. Bande dessinée et narration: système de la bande dessinée 2. Presses universitaires de France, 2011.
Meurisse, Catherine. Mes Hommes de lettres. Sarbacane, 2008.
———. Le Pont des arts. Sarbacane, 2012.
———. Moderne Olympia. Musée d’Orsay/Futuropolis, 2014.
———. Savoir-vivre ou mourir: comment devenir une femme du monde en 24h. Éditions Les Échappés/Char-
lie Hebdo, 2010. Re-edited in expanded edition, 2014.
———. La Légèreté. Dargaud, 2016.
———. Scènes de la vie hormonale. Dargaud, 2016.
———. Les Grands espaces. Dargaud, 2018.
Miller, Ann. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip. Intellect 2017.
Milquet, Sophie and Chris Reyns-Chikuma. “La bande dessinée au féminin: 12,4% écouter l’autre voix de
la BD.” Alternative Francophone 1:9 (2016). 1–4. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/af
515
37
My life with toys
An academic Esai into the
queer multipurposing of toys as
interrupted by the author’s life
Jonathan Alexandratos
In My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries, Elizabeth Chin interrogates her relation to cer-
tain items of material culture that have become fixed points in her personal history. To Chin,
a product’s intended use, set forth on its package by its manufacturer, is often delightfully
separate from said product’s actual use. As Chin writes, “After all, just because the packaging
on the Barbie doll says ‘for ages 3 to 5’ doesn’t mean that the doll will be played with by only
three- to five-year-olds, or even that those who play with them will use the doll and her
accessories as intended by the manufacturer” (Chin 9). Chin uses this to suggest that con-
suming material goods does not only have to be a representation of Capitalistic oppression,
in which the consumer gives in to a system that employs slave labor in order to provide deep
discounts on luxury items. Indeed, Chin does not deny this is reality. She knows that the fac-
tory in which Barbie is produced looks nothing like the average American household where
Barbie is bought. However, Chin argues that one must hold this truth alongside the fact that
Barbie, through her diverse interactions with many different consumers, can hold an infin-
itude of personal significances, and those unique importances cannot be quietly dismissed
while one resists the political and social implications of consumerism.
To neglect Chin’s thesis would be to ignore the work of artists like Dare Wright, whose
1957 children’s book The Lonely Doll uses toy photography to tell the story of Edith, a doll
who is routinely isolated until she meets a family of stuffed bears. Wright’s language is sparse,
instead relying on her photographs to tell the story. The Lonely Doll went on to launch a
series of similarly structured books for kids featuring Edith the doll. While one understands
that the toys in Wright’s books are products, the author imbues them with personified poses,
personalities, and body language. Furthermore, when one understands Wright’s own lonely
childhood, it becomes easy to see Edith’s character as the author’s. This makes the reader, by
default, apply the pronoun “she” to Edith, as the author does, instead of “it,” which would,
in this case, reflect the inanimacy of the toy. The Lonely Doll is even dedicated to Wright’s
mother, Edie, “who introduced me to Edith and the Bears.” That dedication alone informs
readers that the toys in this story function as autonomous beings, life forms that one is “in-
troduced” to, as opposed to items that one has purchased. When toys transition from bought
516
Queer multipurposing of toys
goods to living characters, their role in a greater Capitalist system that oppresses human
workers in pursuit of profit becomes obscured. Chin might posit that that serves a variety of
nefarious purposes, but with one of the more positive ones being the value that these toys can
then hold for those who play with them.
Though Rebecca Bengal titled her New Yorker article on The Lonely Doll “The Creepiest
Children’s Book,” she recognizes that Wright’s “cult classic” has become “beloved especially
among a generation of women artists” (Bengal). Bengal then goes on to discuss how this demo-
graphic has further found their own meanings in Wright’s work. This implies a cascade effect,
in which a consumer, Wright, initially divorces a toy from its manufacturer’s stated usage in
order to imagine her own text, and then others use that text to further spin off their own work.
This adds to Chin’s point because it illustrates how a doll, cleverly separated from its printed-
on-box guidelines, can be responsible for not just one novel usage, but many, with those further
meanings being presented in ways the original consumer could have surely not predicted.
Some of those spawned universes are Queer,1 and they take on special significance to the
Queer consumers who craft them. Just as toys and toy stories are essentially limitless, so are
Queer identities. Using Susan Stryker’s definition of Queerness, one is able to open up the word
to be an umbrella term that fits virtually all identities that exist beyond cisheteronormativity
(Philosophy Talk). To this end, Chin cites Erica Rand’s work in Barbie’s Queer Accessories, which
presents numerous Queer contexts for Barbie. By using Barbie to simulate Queer sex, enact kink,
or perform genders different from her coding, Rand indicates how such play can reflect the con-
sumer’s identities acted out within the relatively safe space of individual play. And, of course, this
is nothing new. Setting aside the fact that Barbie herself descended from the German sex doll Bild
Lilli, consumers of myriad toys have steadfastly taken to YouTube to unleash upload after upload
of videos exploring how, say, their Halo action figures might have a bisexual threesome.2 These
videos, Rand and Chin might argue, are extensions of the Queer toy usage-finding on which
some consumers embark in order to better locate their own selves within the array of named and
unnamed social, political, gender, and sexual identities. Bearing this in mind, play in which a
consumer creates Queer scenarios for toys that were not explicitly packaged for such use can rep-
resent the user’s initial foray into identity questioning that elevates the role of both the player and
the toy. The toy, while still operating as a mass-produced item, is also at least partly an avatar for
the self, and the self is making some attempt to test the waters and boundaries of its own desires.
This synthesis means, at least for the moment, both toy and consumer are, in some ways, Queer.
Given the many ways Queer relationships are globally threatened, this ideal, in which Queerness
can be safely explored, only adds weight to Chin’s notion that toys take on meaning when their
usage extends past manufacturer intention.
This form of toy usage has been the primary way I’ve come to understand my own Queer-
ness. In June 2019, I presented my solo show, Toys 101: The Last Class, in the So-Fi Festival
in New York City. The So-Fi Festival presents theatrical shows during a two-week stretch
that are low tech, high concept, and often quite personal. When I was planning my show
nearly a year prior, I began not so much with questions of toys and identity, but pedagogy.
I wanted to know whether a lesson plan could be theatrical. In other words, if one replaces
a traditional script with a lesson plan, which acts more as an outline, I hypothesized that the
outcome could be just as theatrical so long as the character of the “teacher” was engaging
enough and the space was safe enough for optional audience participation. A lot of the solo
theater work I had seen frustrated me because of the firm separation between storyteller and
audience. When the pendulum swung the other way, and audience participation was more or
less demanded, the event turned into another kind of nightmare, one where the audience was
forced to merge with a performance that did not necessarily make them feel welcome. One
517
Figure 37.1 A postcard for TOYS 101: The Last Class. Courtesy of Jonathan Alexandratos
theater company, Three Day Hangover, built a reputation on immersive work that spent a lot
of time building a collaborative, safe space where audiences could freely put in as much or as
little involvement as they wished. Creating modern, humorous versions of classic stories (of-
ten with drinking games), Three Day Hangover shows honored introverts, the disabled, and
the shy as well as the more boisterous members of their audience. By making performances
where most if not all felt seen and secure, the actors got great, natural interactions from the
audience at each of their shows I attended (Figure 37.1).
I wanted my show to do that, too. Since this type of space-building is already incorpo-
rated into my pedagogy, making my show an immersive “class” felt like the natural way to
go. For the past seven years, I have taught groups of community college pre-matriculated
freshmen in a developmental English class. My job is to prepare them for introductory-level
English. My student body often enters my classroom discouraged. They have often been told,
from various sources, that their intellectual ability is somehow less than, and many believe
this to be true. As a result, the idea that their classroom contributions could possibly be worth
something is abstract to them. I typically spend my first month of the semester reversing this
by focusing on team-building through writing prompts and the sharing of personal and cre-
ative writing, including, when appropriate, my own. No sharing is mandatory, which helps
students emerge when they are ready. Because I encourage but do not push their participa-
tion, student engagement comes from within each individual in the room according to their
own free will. Later in the semester, students have revealed to me that their past experiences
in school have served to rob them of agency, requiring that they perform when their teachers
demand. They have been stuck in those solo shows I referenced earlier, where an overzealous
performer shoves their audience into compliance at the expense of genuine engagement. My
classes aim to return that agency to the student and honor the individual and diverse skills
each brings to the table. That also means, of course, making space for the places students are
not. If a student is not in a place to share responses to certain prompts, that simply gets to be
okay. Seeing repeated positive results from this in class, and feeling a similar vibe myself at
Three Day Hangover shows, I was convinced this sort of environment could live in a theater.
Since most audiences are not in search of a developmental English class when they buy
tickets to a show, I knew I had to change my topic, though. Virtually all of my recent creative
and academic work revolves around toys, but I did not want to just lecture on that. I wanted to
do something closer to Dare Wright’s project: create a story with toys that is reflective of the
518
self. Why someone chooses to talk about a subject is almost always more interesting to me than
what they have to say about the subject itself. At this point, in 2018, with Toys 101: The Last
Class still a year ahead of me, I came out as Non-Binary, most publicly via an article I wrote for
Tor.com linking my understanding of my own gender to my experience with play and cosplay
(Alexandratos). Toys and costumes had been, and continue to be, my way of inserting myself
into imagined, Queer worlds of my own design, springing off of established, pop culture
texts. For instance, in the Transformers spin-off Beast Machines, the transforming robo-bat Night
Scream is not explicitly Non-Binary; however, because of variances in his gender and sexual
representation across the U.S. and Japanese versions of the show,3 Night Scream is absolutely
Non-Binary when I imagine stories featuring his action figure. A number of my Trans and
Non-Binary friends report similar play. The geek texts we love, often texts of the 1970s, 1980s,
and 1990s, do not contain explicitly Trans and Non-Binary characters, so it is necessary we
use head canon and toys to create them out of our fandom. Moreover, a la Dare Wright and
more so the experiences Erica Rand writes about, the queering of toys makes space not only for
that Queerness to exist in various source material, but also for that Queerness to exist within
ourselves. Imagining Night Scream transforming between Non-Binary bot and Non-Binary
bat to kill evil Vehicons delights the fan in me, but imagining myself to be Night Scream em-
powers an identity trying to find its footing within myself.
Unpacking my current toys in this way made me think about my life with toys. The first
toy I ever remember getting was the Crimson Guard Immortal action figure from G.I. Joe:
A Real American Hero. It was from that weird era of Joe, 1992, when the show more or less
ran with anything that stuck to the wall. Metal-Head’s grandmother thinks he’s Cobra’s
actual commander, so when she visits, the low-level lackey must pretend to be in charge
while skirting around the terrorist organization’s actual boss.4 Sure, sounds like an episode
worth making to me. My dad took me to the Kay Bee Toys in West Town Mall, Knoxville,
Tennessee’s “good mall,” and let me pick out anything I wanted, within reason. This was
the first time I felt a rush of agency from the man who told me, among other things, that
Santa was just a drunk in a costume and I should never believe in him. It was a new level of
unconditional warmth packaged in the things I loved most, toys. I ran up and down the aisles
in search of the perfect pick. Excited though I was, the barrier between the boys and girls
offerings felt so rigid it was as if there was really no choice at all. Of course I was meant to sift
through pegs of Joes and Transformers and intergalactic warriors. Indeed I wouldn’t want an
11.5-inch-tall woman with brushable hair and assorted outfits. There is no way I would have
been conscious of this gender divide at the time, but, looking back on it now, I struggle with
why I was so afraid to even look in the general direction of a Barbie.
When I look at my Crimson Guard Immortal action figure now, and I own several thanks
to eBay, I’m comforted by its gender ambiguity. At first glance, it’s a coded-male toy, but
they’re covered head-to-toe in what appears to be rather puffy armor. There’s a helmet that
totally obscures a face. It could be anyone under there. There could exist, under all that
crimson and silver, a Non-Binary soldier who happens to be part of an international terrorist
organization but who hates it because, hey, they’re not evil, they just want to make enough
money to open their cake pop stand in the park and sell cake pops to families and kids of all
different identities and… Sorry. You can probably tell I’ve thought a lot about this since, so
much so that it bursts into this scholarly chapter on Queer toys. I’ve thought a lot about it
since, but the truth is that none of this would have been on my mind at the time. I was six in
1992, and I’m sure I just thought the Crimson Guard Immortal’s helmet was cool.
My Queer experience is always searching for an origin story. I feel a certain pressure to
point to my earliest memory and say, “See! I knew who I was even then!” That would be
519
dishonest of me, though. My identity does not work like that. I came out as Non-Binary
when I was 32 after crying over the memoirs of Trans and Non-Binary folx for years, all the
while wondering why these stories are impacting me so much, why I feel such a connection
to them, and where they were all my life. But taking to heart Elizabeth Chin’s revolutionary
explosion of toys’ intended uses, my Non-Binary present self wonders if I can take my earliest
memory, which involves this Crimson Guard Immortal action figure, and strip not just the
toy of its intended use but the memory. It makes me feel happy to take this memory out of
its box, ignore its instructions which tell me it is only for matter-of-fact use, and layer atop
it meaning that inserts my gender identity into my bones right when I wish it was there. It
delights me to put my vulnerable body inside that silver, puffy, plastic padding and proclaim
that it now protects me. I have to hold that happiness, though, along with my six-year-old
self reminding me that it is not based in childhood.
When I thought about that story, and the journey it inspired through toys and play, I knew
I wanted to start Toys 101: The Last Class there. I wanted to teach people not just about toys
but about myself through toys. In a way, this is what toymakers have been doing for decades.
When Mattel wanted to fill the void left behind by the end of Kenner’s Star Wars (or, their
mid-1980s hiatus), they asked a team of people to create a hit action figure. Roger Sweet,
a designer on that team, began to draw what this new toy might look like. He reflected on
who he was as a child: scrawny, thin, small. Sweet then took that image and sketched who he
wanted to be, a muscular man who, ahem, “had the power.” From there, He-Man emerged
(Oppenheimer). Because He-Man has roots in his designer’s past, that means the toy contains
not just the tale of Prince Adam, but a real-world message about Roger Sweet. Sweet was able
to infuse this into the product prior to the toy’s release, but it is exactly what I tried to mimic
with my Crimson Guard Immortal after the toy went on sale. Sweet wanted He-Man to sur-
round and protect him. I wanted the same, later in life if not when I was six, from my action
figure. Toy history and our personal relationship to toys are not separate, but two aspects of
a product that are in conversation with one another. Therefore, it became important to me
that Toys 101: The Last Class advocates not the removal of the personal or the historical, but
the discussion between the two.
Heidi Schreck does a stunning job of this in her show What the Constitution Means to Me.
Though Schreck works not with toys but with American history, she uses the same basic
principle that Elizabeth Chin set forth: the separation of the intended use from the actual
use. Instead of delivering a lecture on the history of the U.S. Constitution as a document
intended for governing, Schreck offers “a very personal love story about a teenage girl’s bad
romance with the Constitution” (Fierberg). Often, Shreck becomes emotional in the show
recounting her own evolution as a woman, and how the Constitution, and those who have
legally interpreted it, politicize that existence. In this way, Schreck “plays” with the Consti-
tution, making it a character in her own fantasy and her own history, all while recognizing it
also exists beyond the context she gives it. What the Constitution Means to Me taught me that
toys, like the Constitution and any manufactured text, do not have to be just one thing, or
even one thing at a time. A text can be a node in a network with many synapses plugged in to
other nodes, all informing readings of said text simultaneously. These texts do not need to be
governed by either/or conditions, but instead can be a “non-binary” collection of meanings.
Schreck’s use of history made me consider toy stories beyond Roger Sweet’s and mine. She
made me think about the true footprint of toys, which is of course global. Western toy his-
tory texts are often privileged in the sense that they can, and indeed frequently are expected
to, examine a toy without acknowledgment of the people who made it. By this, I do not
mean the toy executives who designed the item, or the CEOs who authorized production.
520
Those characters, the Alan Hassenfelds and the Jill Barads, appear in our toy narratives all
the time. I mean the East Asian factory workers who have the job of assembling, painting,
and boxing the toys. These are people Western consumers often cannot name because said
consumers do not know them. A year after I fell in love with my Crimson Guard Immortal,
in 1993, the Kader Toy Factory in Thailand burned down. It was the largest factory fire to
date, killing 188 people and injuring some 500 more (Symonds). The dead were burned alive
in a building with no fire extinguishers or fire escapes, and where, like in New York City’s
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, management locked exits to prevent employees from
taking breaks. After the disaster, photographs were taken of the Bart Simpson toys the factory
was producing for sale in the West. The juxtaposition is striking: unstuffed plushes of a well-
known cartoon bad boy lying flaccid atop the charred remains of their factory. This means
that, while my I was enraptured by my G.I. Joes, people who were less rich and less white
were dying for my privilege of carefree play. The very fact that I can stand in front of an
audience and wax metaphorical about my toy collection transmits this privilege. Like Chin
notes, embracing the emotional meaning of one’s toys does not mean one has to forget the
blight toy production has caused in East Asian regions. The idea is, at the very least, to make
space for both. So, drawing on Chin and Schreck for inspiration, I decided Toys 101: The
Last Class had to be about my place in a bigger picture that, sometimes, cannot be reconciled.
There was little I could do about the Kader Toy Factory fire as a seven-year-old, but I can use
my expertise now to make sure others know it happened.
In 2016, I tried this out at Denver Comic Con. While giving a talk on action figures,
I went into detail about the work that has been done to catalogue the stories of workers
who make toys in Chinese factories. Two sources, Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls and Lotta
Ekelund and Kristina Bjurling’s documentary Santa’s Workshop: Inside China’s Slave Labor
Toy Factories, are key to this conversation. They smuggle out employee narratives of abu-
sive working conditions, low or no pay, and environmental catastrophe. Nearly as soon
as I started talking about this, an audience member protested by interrupting my talk and
demanding I talk about toys. Needless to say, I was, but I was not reinforcing his idea of toy
making as a joyous exercise in creating take-home versions of our heroes. It upset him to
think about the set of fingerprints that touched his action figures before his. In a way, he had
the same issue I do. He could not make the stories of factory employee abuse and death fit
with his boundless delight. Our responses to this dilemma, however, were different. While
this audience member elected to do all he could to preserve his whitewashed view, I chose
to try my best to pass the stories on and admit, yes, they will ungracefully disrupt my own
joy, and perhaps they should.
When creating a theatrical piece meant to tell toy stories of any kind, it will become
obvious that there is no shortage of tales to tell, especially when one wants to be as all-
encompassing as I do. Pedagogy helped me understand how to transmit the knowledge, but I
still needed to solve how to make this theatrical. There, I wrote out a series of fictional given
circumstances that would offer stakes for presenting this information to my audience at the
time they are receiving it. As a result, Toys 101: The Last Class would center on a closeted
Queer teacher, played by me, on their last day of a school year at a conservative high school.
Reflecting on their years of suppression of their own story and the stories of their students,
the teacher decides to abandon the curriculum and teach from the heart. This means com-
ing out to their students as a Non-Binary person who uses they/them pronouns. Of course,
since said teacher is also a toy geek, doing this through toys is the most natural way to go.
Along the way, the hope is that the students, played by the audience, will elect to share some
of themselves, making the real curriculum the lives of everyone in the room (Figure 37.2).
521
Figure 37.2 Photo from Jonathan Alexandratos’s TOYS 101: The Last Class. Photo credit: Nate
Gebhard
In an attempt to make an immersive, theatrical class, I wrote up a syllabus. It con-

tained readings on both toys and gender. Among them were Sandra Cisneros’ short story
“Barbie-Q,” which does wonders to illustrate how thinking about representation in toys
becomes thinking about one’s sense of belonging (or lack thereof ) in the world. It also con-
tained broader readings like an excerpt from Jacob Tobia’s “Coming-of-Gender” memoir
Sissy, in which the author talks about the importance of finding vocabulary to declare one’s
self. For me, toys helped provide that vocabulary in the way Erica Rand presents: Queerness,
enacted through play with toys, becomes an enactment of personal identity. The syllabus also
asked the audience to do three writing prompts:
1 After opening the bag stapled to the syllabus, tell me the story of the toy you received.
(Each syllabus came with a little plastic dinosaur that the audience member could keep.)
2 Tell me the most important story of your life.
3 Insert the character from Writing Prompt #1 into the story you wrote for Writing
Prompt #2.
I have used these prompts in my classes, and so I know they tend to illicit interesting re-
sponses. Also, when done in this order, they let us laugh before we cry. The toy dinosaur sto-
ries are almost always humorous, often hinting at poignancy without getting too emotional
just yet. They let writers test the room to see if others will be receptive to their voice. I, in the
teacher role, try to encourage positive reception of each writer’s words. We all clap for them.
This is not a place to be critical, only to embrace whatever a writer volunteers, if they vol-
unteer at all. Setting up this tone helps others speak out during the second writing prompt.
For this prompt, I’ve heard stories of marriages broken off, unwanted pregnancies, suicide
attempts, crushing poverty, and overcoming an array of adversity. Prompt 2 does not cease
to inspire. By the time we do each prompt in Toys 101: The Last Class (early on for Prompt 1,
and Prompt 2 happens around the middle of the hour-long show), the audience has seen me
do pretty much the same prompts, only spoken aloud. They have seen me make a story for
the Crimson Guard Immortal. They have seen me start to question my own gender identity
for the first time. It is clearly important to me that I do not ask anything of others that I will
not offer myself. My hope is that that will create a space where we’re all trying to assess our
manufacturer’s intentions, and our in-practice uses.
522
We do not have time to do Prompt 3. That becomes homework. I ask the audience to
do it on their own after I explain why they all received tiny plastic dinosaurs for Prompt 1.
Much of the final half of Toys 101: The Last Class is about what happens when your self-
proclaimed manufacturers discover you are not abiding by their instructions. Often, they are
not very happy. They try to hurt you into compliance. They become your trolls. In the early
1990s, Trolls, the dolls with the long, fuzzy hair and the jewel in the belly, were thought to
be a sure-fire hit. They were marketed toward girls and boys. Companies were investing in
Troll doll spin-offs left and right. Everyone thought Trolls were here to stay. However, one
unstoppable force killed the Troll doll in 1993. They were the stars of the blockbuster hit Ju-
rassic Park. Dinosaurs. Once Kenner’s “JP”-branded Tyrannosaurus Rexes and Velociraptors
hit shelves, Trolls sent on their way toward extinction. If toy history offers us anything, it
is that dinosaurs have been factually proven to kill Trolls. By equipping my audience with
dinosaurs, the hope is that they will do likewise to any personal big-T or little-t trolls each
member may encounter (Figure 37.3).
The reward of Toys 101: The Last Class stems from Elizabeth Chin’s claim that has been
threaded through this chapter: toys, like anything manufactured, can hold more meaning
than that which it was assigned. By involving gender, we allow ourselves to understand one
way that people work essentially the same way. One is assigned an identity at birth, but that
persona may not accurately describe the self it is supposed to name. It is not Barbie’s in-
structions that make her an interesting text; it is what people have done with her once she’s
removed (or not removed) from her package. I see this liberation as akin to the way people
will question their own identities as assigned by parents, teachers, bosses, colleagues, friends,
and other external sources. While Barbie cannot do her soul-searching on her own, we can
do it for her, and, in so doing, find ourselvves. There is a notion that our interactions with
toys, like the conceit in Toys 101: The Last Class, must end. There will come a day when we
graduate to more adult interests. My hope is that I, echoing Chin, Rand, and Wright, make
the case for reading the toy manufacturer’s guideline “For Ages 3–5” as just another label
that is better when ignored.
Figure 37.3 Photo from Jonathan Alexandratos’s TOYS 101: The Last Class. Photo credit: Nate
Gebhard
523
Notes
Works Cited
Alexandratos, Jonathan. “How Geek Culture Made Me Realize I Am Non-Binary.” Tor.com, 19 June
2018, www.tor.com/2018/06/19/how-geek-culture-made-me-realize-i-am-non-binary/
Bengal, Rebecca. “The Creepiest Children’s Book.” The New Yorker, 26 September 2017.
Chin, Elizabeth. My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries. Duke University Press, 2016.
Fierberg, Ruthie. “Why Heidi Schreck Stopped the Very First Performance of What the Constitution Means to
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547
Index
Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
Aaron, Jason 319 All Star Comics #8 312

Abate, Michelle Ann 6 All Star Comics #11 21
Abouet, Marguerite 206 Allen, Barry 23
Abrams, Stacey 155 Allen, Paula Gunn 120, 121
“accidental” autobiography 136 Alpha Flight’s Puck 25
Acid Rain (Aguilera) 4, 404, 410, 410–412, 411 Alternative Comics (Hatfield) 110, 116
acrobatic heroes 24, 25 Alternative Press Expo (APE) 190
Action Comics 19 Alvitre, Weshoyot 122, 127
Action Comics #1 45 Amanat, Sana 294, 300, 317
action potential 185 Amazing Spider-Man #16 24, 24
Adam Hughes’ pinup from Marvel Swimsuit The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows
#3 99 (2016-current) 85, 88, 88
Adam Strange 23 Amazons 276–279
Adèle Blanc-Sec series 203 American Born Chinese (Yang) 143
Adler, Lilith 222–223 American civilization 17
adult masculinity 355 American culture 35, 78, 81
adult model of innocent childhood 170 American frontier 16
adult sexuality in children 169 American Historical Association 15
advertisement narrative 60 American imaginary 156
advertising-language research 54 American Literature 6, 182
aesthetics of comics 381 American male identity 20
affect and configuration conception 233 American masculinity model 16
Affect Theory 232–233 American subconscious association 46
affective spectatorship 463 American superhero 15, 17, 18, 154
African-American female Avenger 293 “Americanness” 153
“Africanness,” fantasy of 29 Amnesty International report 119
Afrogoths 484–488; style politics 496–499 “Amores Clandestinos: Discursos, Practicas
Afropunks 485, 500n12 y Escenarios de la Homosexualidad
Aguilera, Yaritza 4; Acid Rain 404, 410, Masculina, Chile 1990–2005” (Barrientos
410–412, 411 and Garrido) 412
Ah Nana! (magazine) 9, 202 Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois (Töpffer) 196
Ahmed, Maaheen 7, 478 “amplification through simplification” 91
Ahmed, Sara 28–30, 35, 40, 473, 474 Anan, Nobuko 445, 448
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art 420 Anarcoma (Luque) 228–229
Aja, David 25 Anatomy of the Superhero Film (Dudenhoeffer) 90
Aldama, Frederick Luis 109, 150 Andaluchinas por el mundo 137, 142
Alexander, Erika 492 Andalusian feminism 8
Aliadas (Allies) painting 146 Andolfo, Mirka 313
Alias (MAX/Marvel 2001–4) 315 Andy Gump 51
Alice in Wonderland 216 Andy Gump Has an Unusual Piece 50
All-American Cowboy stance 262 Angela della Morte 2012 (Sanz) 4
548
Index
Angoulême-Festival scandal 208 Bachelard, Gaston 476

“angry Black woman” 154–157 back matter of comics 332
“Animal Comics Boom” 258 “backwards” and “accidental”
animal sex 261–270 incursion 134
Animal Studies 259 “Bad Girls” 91, 94, 95
“animetaphoric” comics 257, 258; Bair, Michael 92
Animal Studies 259; anthropomorphic Bajac-Carter, Maja 6
juxtaposition 260; cartoon animal 259; Baker, Josephine 207
funny animal abuse 261–270; “little graphic Baker, Steve 260
machines” 259 Ballester, Rodrigo Muñoz 5
animetaphoric revolt 261–270 bande dessinée (BD) 3, 196, 474, 503–504,
Anka, Kris 102 514n2, 515n8; alternative and sexualities in
anthropomorphic juxtaposition 260 205–208; art, literature, and 505–507;
anti-Black racism 129 forgotten girls and women 197–198; and new
anti-Black racist ideology 114 sexualities 203–205; no girls and no women
anti-Communism 16 allowed 198–200; real alternative comics
anti-racism 135 203–205; sexual liberation 200–202; woman
anti-Trump Women’s Marches 329 to male perspectives 202–203
Anzaldua, Gloria 115 Banks, Tyra 95
Aphrodite 276, 277 Bannerman, Helen 33
April’s appearance 357 Bara, Agata: Ogród 375
Archaeology of Knowledge 242 Barad, Jill 521
“archive of feelings” 395–397 Barbarella (Forest) 200, 201
Archiwum historii mówionej (Archive of Oral Barbie 516, 523; Queer sex 517
History) 378 Barbie Culture (Rogers) 138, 139
Are You My Mother? (Bechdel) 190 Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Rand) 517
Argentina’s Dirty War 4 Baresh, Paul 481n1
Ariel and Sol Rojas Lizana’s Historias Clandestinas Barker, Meg-John 5
404, 404 Barks, Carl 258
Armstrong, Billie Joel 110, 113 Barney Google 260
Armstrong, Robert 262 Barrientos, Claudio 410, 412
articulation 500n8 Barrier, Michael 270n1
Arya 312 Barros, María José 4
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Barry, Erin 7, 42
Freedom through Radical Resistance Barry, Lynda 2, 5, 182
(Simpson) 120 Bastien, Angelica Jade 336
Asian-American comics 143 Batgirl 310, 312
Asian-American woman 339n1 Batman 19
L’Association 3, 5 Batman: Harley Quinn (Dini) 84
Association Artemisia 207 Batman rings 78
Astiberri Editorial 135 Batman romance 79, 80
Astro Boy 445 Batman TV series 6
Atkins, Anna 247–248 Batmobile 19
The Atlantic 158 Batwoman 310
attention-getting features 60 Baudelaire, Charles 469
audience 352 Bauhaus 484; “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
Austin, Allan W. 25n1 485, 500n9
Austin, J. L. 367 BBC News 155
Australian comic strips 57 Beano (magazine) 37, 37
autobiographical comic 134 Beast Machines: Transformers 519, 524n3
“auxiliary compliance outpost” 329 “The Beast of the Full Moon” 177
Avengers 288–290 Beaty, Bart 503
The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest de Beauvoir, Simone 229, 278, 368, 513
Heroes 300 Bechdel, Alison 5, 10, 111, 182, 190, 365–368,
L’Avenir perdu (1992) 203 372, 373
Awkward (Schrag) 181, 182, 184, 191 Bechdel, Bruce 370
Aya de Yopougon (Abouet and Oubrerie) 206 Becla, Gabriela 375, 377
549
Index
Becoming Unbecoming (Una) 426, 427 Black female citizen-subject in comics

bédéiste 503–505, 514n2 153–154
“begets transformation” 162–163 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
Bendis, Brian Michael 315 and the Politics of Empowerment (Collins) 113
Beneke, Timothy 355 Black Ice Witch 485, 487, 488, 490
Bengal, Rebecca: “The Creepiest Children’s Black Lives Matter Movement (2014) 484, 493
Book” 517 Black Rock Coalition 496
Benito, Cristina 137 Black sonic-political platforms 486–491
Bennett, Margueritte 316 black “visual alien” 31
Bentham, in One Piece 437–438 Black women 96, 152, 156
Berger, John 92, 270n2, 400 Black Women in Sequence: Reinking Comics,
Bergson, Henri 233 Graphic Novels, and Anime (Whaley) 6
The Berkeley Barb 261 Blackberries (Kemble) 37
Bermello Isusi, Mikel 9 The Blacker the Ink ( Jennings) 115
Bernstein, Robin 30, 32, 33 blackface in British comics 37–40
Berry, Jess 57 Blackman, W. Haden 316
BeruBara 441, 453; aesthetics of 449 Blackstone, Madison 131n7
Betty: The Helen Betty Osborne Story (Robertson) Blain, Nancy Marie 110
122–124, 124 Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude (Maroh) 5, 9
Between Men (Sedgwick) 44 Blood 375–376, 381, 383, 387–388
Bhadury, Poushali 6 blood: history and Polish comic 376–379;
Bibby, Michael 484 menstrual 383; as reality with symbolic
Bible moralisée in Vienna 222 function 383; ties 383–388
biblical origin story 217 bloodlessness 379–381
biblical themes: functions 217 Blue (Nananan) 5
Biemann, Ursula 461 “Blue Helmet” 347–349
Big League Laffs (Himes) 264 “Blue Helmet Part 2” 347
Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (Hergé) 198 Blutsbande (Braun) 388
Bike Boy (1981) 5 Boden, Anna 301, 307, 314
Bild Lilli doll 517 bodily displays 97
Birmant, Julie 510 body odour (‘B.O.’) 62, 63
Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical body transformation 115
Perception (Foucault) 240 Bond Stockton, Katharine 170, 174
bishōnen 447 Bongco, Mila 57
Bishop, Mardia 178 Boom-Boom’s erotic display 93
Bitch Planet (DeConnick) 10, 149, 151; “angry Boondocks (McGruder) 39
Black woman” 154–157; anti-feminist Boone, Daniel 18
setting of 332; Black female citizen-subject Bordo, Susan 97
in comics 153–154; community-building in Boris the Bear (Richardson) 270
338; components of back matter 333–339; “Born Out of Darkness” 489–490
correctional program officer 154; expectation boy-boy romance comics 4
332; fandom 331; feminist spirit of 335; “boy crisis” 355
historical lettercol 332–333; issues of 153; “braid” (tréssage), idea of 471, 474–475
Kamau’s plea deal in 152; Marian Collins Bramlett, Frank 56
murder 152; prison population on 152; Brant, Jennifer 119
social media savvy community 331–332; Braun, Christina von 388
transformative rage 157–165; women – Black Braxton, Tamar 155
bodies 330 Braxton Family Values 155
Bizarre Sex 261, 265 Breccia, Patricia 3
Bjurling, Kristina 521 Bretécher, Claire 9, 202, 508
Black, William 31, 32 Brieva, Miguel 229
black-and-white vignette 130 Brightman, Anne E. 354
“Black Boys and Black Girls in Comics” 7 British comics, black children in 37
black boys and girls: fetishization and British youth violence 341
denigration of 31; stereotypes of 28–29 Bromley, Peter 264
black children 30–35; in British comics 37 Los Bros Hernandez 5
Black comics 115 Brown, Alan 293
Black death 484, 499 Brown, Jeffrey A. 6, 7, 17, 20, 95
550
Index
Bruce Banner (Hulk) 23 Chapman, Rowena 97

Brulotte, Ronda L. 137 Charles Moulton see Marston, William Moulton
Bucky O’Hare (Hama and Golden) 270 Charlie Mensuel (1969) 200
Bugs Bunny 31 Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield 230–232, 235, 331
Bukatman, Scott 19, 25n2, 90 Chemaly, Soraya 154, 157, 163
Bumpo, Natty 18 Chen, Mel Y. 267
Burke, Liam 312 Chevely, Lyn 1
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 16 Chevli, Lyn 267
Burundarena, Maitena 3, 4 Chiba, Testuya 445
Buster Brown 33, 36 Chicago, Judy 216
“butch aesthetic” 113 Child Loving 170
Butler, Judith 90, 120, 229, 230, 355, 368, 413; child reader 169
“shared precariousness” 464 children: in adult media 169;
Butler, Steven 92 classification of 170; comics theory 353;
Byrne, Olive 274–275, 313 sexual subject 169
A Child’s Life and Other Stories (Gloeckner) 459
Cabello, Cristeva 406, 416 Chilean comics see contemporary Queer
Cadden, Mike 358 Chilean comics
Cagney, James 49 Chin, Elizabeth 517, 520, 521, 523; My Life with
California-Baja California border 44 Things: The Consumer Diaries 516
Calzonzin [sic] inspector (film) 67 Chinese-Andalusian cultural heritages 8
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 397 Chinese-Andalusian feminism 137, 141
Camper, Jennifer 6 Chinese-Andalusian woman 135
Cancer Vixen (2006) 241 “Chinese Connie” 50
Candy 446 Chinese immigrant entrepreneurial
Capitalistic oppression 516 family 139
Capt. Marvel Jr. 46 Chinese migration 137
Captain America invitations 78 Chinese-Spanish girl-turned woman 141
Captain Marvel 285, 292, 295 Chinese-Spanish women 135
Captain Marvel (2019) 9, 297–300, 302, 314 chinko 422
“Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” 2 Chomichuk, GMB 125
Cardinal Richelieu 504 Chon Prieto 68, 74
Cardo, Valentina 315 Christian Right in Florida 112
Caroccio Maldonado, Jennifer 8 Christian themes 216
Carol Corps 294, 301, 331 Christianity 217
Carol Danvers 285; in comics and animated Christin, Pierre 203
series 297–301; creation of 297; evolution as Chute, Hillary L. 2, 3, 6, 128, 131n4, 145, 182,
feminist character 301–303; faces of misogyny 190, 345, 394, 396, 400
in 303–305; single female hero 298; version Ciaciuch, Łukasz 375
of 305–307 “The Ciguapa” 117
Carpenter, Alexander 500n9 A Cinderella Story (2004) 155
Carrington, André 6 Cisneros, Sandra: “Barbie-Q” 522
Carrión, Jorge 69 Civil Rights movement 3, 191
Cart, Michael 186 Civil War II 295
cartoon animal 259 Cixous, Helene 213, 214, 226n4
cartoon strip 54 Claremont, Chris 287, 288, 290, 298, 299
cartooning language 57 Claveloux, Nicole 3
Cartooning for Suffrage (Shepphard) 6 “clone culture,” aesthetics of 99
Casanova, Vicente 4 “CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS” 110
Castillo, Alejandra 406 “clothes imbalance” 189
The Castle of Otranto (Walpole) 484 Clough, Patricia C. 233
Cavallaro, Dani 453 Clueless (1995) 155
censorship 419–420 Co jest czarne, co białe, a co jest bez sensu (What is
“central core” imagery 216 black, what is white and what is pointless), 379
Cerebus the Aardvark 270 Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native
Cestac, Florence 3, 203 Women reports 119
Cham (1818–1879) 196 Cocca, Carolyn 6, 320
Chang, Leslie T. 521 Cochet, Marina 228
551
Index
Cockrum, Dave 288, 298 Connell, R.W. 15, 83, 84

‘Code for Advertising Matters’ 55 “construction” of Apollo 356
Cohen, Jacq 481n1 consumer culture 33
Cohn, Neil 234 consumer/producer dynamic 320–323
Coleman, Janine 83 “consummatory” 25
Colette 513 Contemporary Applications of Ancient Medical
Colgan, Lee Scott 123 Wisdom (Willberg) 241
‘Colgate Dental Cream combats bad breath’ 59, contemporary erotic illustrations 45
59–63 contemporary Queer Chilean comics 404; Acid
Collado, Adrian Alejandro 138 Rain (Aguilera) 410, 410–412, 411; Gay
“Collector’s Editions” 85 Gigante (Ebensperger) 403, 403, 413–416, 414;
Collins, Patricia Hill 113 Hambre Prístina (Rapimán) 406–409, 408, 409
Columbus, Christopher 437 Conway, Gerry 285, 318
Come Out Comix 1972 (Wings) 2 Coochy Cooty 262
comic book adventures 79 Coogan, Peter 20
Comic Book Code Authority 91 Cooper, Brittney 154, 157, 163, 165
comic book narrative 1 Cooper, Fenimore 25
A Comic of Her Own: Women Writing, Reading and Cooper, Valerie 94, 95
Embodying through Comics (Brown and Louck) 6 “corporeal narratology” theory 90
comic-strip advertising: advertising-language correctional program officer (CPO) 154, 158, 161
research 54; artefacts, analysis of 58–63; Coughlan, David 78, 82
cartooning language 57; Colgate comic “Covet” 490–491
strip 59–61; complex semiotic process 57; The Cream of Tank Girl (Hewlett and
graphic storytelling form 54; implicature 55; Martin) 342
language of comics 56; liquor and tobacco Creamy Mami 453
advertising 55; narrative storytelling 56–57; Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams 136, 137
panel-to-panel transition 58; personal-care Crépax, Guido 201
products 59; picture-based ecology 56; Crime Does Not Pay 178
presupposition 54; product advertisements Crimson Guard Immortal 519–522
57; promotional language 54; script of comics Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods
56; selling proposition 55; speechbubble (Smith and Duncan) 56
dialogue 58; stylistic norms of comics 58; Critical Comics Studies 241
thematic information 54; ‘universals of sales criticism of fourth-wave feminism 145
psychology’ 55; writing system 57 “critique of feminism” 287
Comics Alliance website 102 Crumb, R. 262, 263
Comics Code, 1954 352 Cruse, Howard 3, 190
Comics Code Authority (CCA) 79, 80, 279, 280 Cuban American comic biography 113
Comics Codes of 1948 and 1954 55–56, 63 Cuban culture 112
comics-language research 56 cultural fantasy 20
Comics Magazine Association of America cultural “in-betweenness” 137
(CMAA) 353 Cunningham, Landra 305
comics narrative theory 9 CUNY Feminist Press 113
comics narratology 233–235 A Cup of Water under My Bed (Hernandez) 111, 113
Comics & Sequential Art (Eisner) 234 The Cure 484
Comics Studies Society 241 Curie, Marie 249–251
comics theory 222 Curie, Pierre 249–251
“comics traffic in stereotypes and fixity” 115 Curry, Tim 438
Comics versus Art (Beaty) 503 Curtis, Neal 315
ComicsGate 330 Cutey Bunny (Quagmire) 270
Comix Collective 188 Cvetkovich, Ann: “archive of feelings” 396;
Comixology 319, 330, 337 sympathetic witness 392
communicate selling propositions 58 Czaja, Justyna 377
Compendiosa: totius Anatomie delineatio 246
competing gazes 250–252 DaCosta, Yaya 155
‘complex semiotic significance’ 354 Dan O’Neill’s Comics and Stories (O’Neill) 262
condoms 74, 75 Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg
CONES (Coodinadora Nacional de Estudiantes Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence
Secundarios) 405 (Simpson) 121
552
Index
Danee, Court 306 dolls, in La Tristeza 466–467

Daniels, Les 258 don Lucas Estornino 68, 71
Daredevil 19, 25 Donahue, James J. 8, 16
Dark Knight 83 Donald Duck 267
The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan) 7 Donato, Michelle 25n1
Dash, Stacey 155 Double Bill 1991 (Gregory) 3
“Daughter Elements” 250 Doucet, Julie 182, 203
Davis, Betty 489 “down girl” 303
Davis, Rocio G. 7 Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Dawes, Laina 487 (Manne) 302
DC Comics 91 Doyle, Ming 319
DC’s Extended Universe 310 Dragon Ball 430–434, 431–433, 439, 441
DC’s Justice Society of America 21 Dragon Ball Super 429, 432
De aborto, sexo y otros pecados (Rius) 66 Dragon Ball Super: Broly 433
De Landro, Valentine 10, 149, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods 432
149, 152, 329, 332, 334, 337, 339 Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection of F 433
“The Dead Will Return” 176 Drôles de femmes 510
DeConnick, Kelly Sue 10, 149, 149, 152, 292, Dudenhoeffer, Larrie 90
293, 295, 300, 301, 307, 314, 319, 329, Duggan, Anne E. 444
330–334, 336, 337, 339 “Dumb Animals” 258
Deer, Sarah 120 Dumm, Edwina 267
Deer Woman: An Anthology (LaPensée) 122, 127, Dutton, Kenneth R. 98
128, 129 Dworkin, Shari L. 99
“Deer Woman: A Vignette” (LaPensée) 128 Dyke Shorts 1976 (Wings) 2
Definition (Schrag) 181, 182, 184, 191 Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel) 365–366,
DeKoven, Marianne 345 366, 374n2
Deleuze, Gilles 233 dynamic “counterpublic” 188
Dell Comics 258 Dynamite Damsels 1976 (Gregory) 2
Demy, Jacques 444
Department of Justice database 130 Earp, Wyatt 18
“Derby Disaster” 264 East German Women’s Movement 215, 224
derogatory stereotypes 28, 32 East Village Other and Screw 261
desire and identity relationship 368 Eastman, Kevin 270
“destabilize racialist logic” 143 Ebensperger, Gabriel 4; Gay Gigante 403, 403,
Detective Comics #30 22 404, 413–416, 414
Devineni, Ram 5 Ebony White 31, 39
Dexter Soy 314 L’Écho des savanes (magazine) 3, 200, 202
Dhaliwal, Aminder 5 Echo-Hawk, Abigail 130
Di Giovine, Michael A. 137 Eco, Umberto 79
Diamond, Aidan 114 écriture féminine/feminine writing
The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Gloeckner) 459 (Cixous) 214
Dill Comics 485, 492–493, 493, 498 Edelman, Lee 183, 367
Dini, Paul 84 “edible identity” 137
Dining with Dana 483, 485, 493–498, Editorial Meridiano 68, 69
495, 498 Einstein, Albert 249, 250
The Dinner Party (Chicago) 216 Eisler, Ken 67, 70
Dirks, Rudolph 197 Eisner, Will 31, 57, 234, 241–243
Dirty Plotte (Drawn and Quarterly) 182, 203 Ekelund, Lotta 521
discovery 159 Ellis, Grace 353, 356
Disidentifications (Munoz) 110 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 342
“disidentify” 112 Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her
dismissive body language 160 Superpower (Cooper) 157
Disneyland Memorial Orgy 262 emotions concept 28
Ditko, Steve 24, 24 empathy 464
Dixon, Anna 248 empirical gaze, functions of 243
DIY punk culture 114 Emporio Ivankov (“Iva”), in One
Dodge, Chris 374n1 Piece 438
Doherty, Thomas 54 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) 368
553
Index
erotic story 45 “Fight AIDS Not Gays” 365

eroticism 92 Finch, Meredith 313
Estamos todas bien (Penya) 10 Finck, Leanne 6
Estern, James 261 Finck, Liana 511
Esthétique et filature (Tanxxx) 207 Fire 446
The Eternaut 390 First Nations communities 119
Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction Fischer, Carl 404
in Comics (Polak) 121, 234 Fish Police (Moncuse) 270
“Ethnoracial Queer and Feminist Space Clearing Flash Gordon in On a Lark (Gordon) 46
Gestures” 8 ‘flashes of imagery’ 394
Ettinger, Bracha 241 Fleck, Ryan 314
European literary tradition 139 Flenniken, Shary 264, 267
Evans, Kate 136 Flinn, Margaret C. 11
Everyday Sexism Project 143 Flo, in Tiempo Argentino (Burundarena) 3
exaggeration 114 Florida Marlins 114
“excess of representation” 141 Fluide glacial (1975) 200
exoticism 96 A fond le slip—In the panties 205
“extradiegetic voiceover narration” 113 Fontana, Shea 313
Forceville, Charles 56
face of comics 295 Ford, Tanisha 497
Facebook 319, 320 Forest, Jean-Claude 200
Factory Girls (Chang) 521 Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing
The Faerie Queene (Spenser) 57 and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in
fairytale scripts, knowledge of 354 Canada (Brant) 119
Faith Herbert 316 Forton, Louis 197
Falardeau, Mira 208 fotonovelas rojas 460
Fall of Man 222, 224 Foucault, Michel 240, 242, 367
La Famille Fenouillard (1889–1893) 197 Fraction, Matt 25
family album 397–400 fragmentation 469
Fantastic Four 287 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 510
Farinella, Matteo 244 frame-by-frame depictions 56
Farmer, Joyce 1, 267 Franco, Francisco 5
“fat bat” 485, 488, 495 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 31
Fawaz, Ramzi 6, 17, 18, 182, 373 Franklin III, Morris E. 333
Fawn, Jackie 128 Franquin 198
Feinberg, Karen 267 “Freaked and Othered Bodies in Comics” 114
female action heroes 341 Fredrik Byrn Køhler 459
female demographic 318 Freeman, Matthew 331
“ female fights back!” 285–288 #FreeTheNipple 419
“female fury” 285–288 French comics 196, 201
female ‘inconsistency’ 2 French feminist theory 226n4
female stereotype 29 French Tennis Federation 155
female superheroes 91, 297, 310; overview of 312 Friedman, Andrea 170
feminine 298; knowledge 221 Friedrich, Mike 263
femininity, definition of 225n3 “Friendship to the Max!” 353
Feminismo Andaluz project 146, 147 Frieze Art Fair (2015) 420
feminist: biblical revisionism 224; comic Fripounet et Marisette (1943–1945) 197
tradition 5; “feministic” approach 331; “From ‘Accidental’ Autobiography to Comics
graphic art 213; graphic expression 216, 225; Activism,” (Nagtegaal) 8
literature 205; movements 274, 297; sci-fi From Girls to Grrlz (Robbins) 6
comic 151 “From Kiddie Lit to Kiddie Porn: The
“The Feminist Critique of Art History” 216 Sexualization of Children’s Literature”
Fernandez, Kelly 109, 117 (Tribunella) 169
Ferris, Emil 5, 11, 481n1; My Favorite Thing Is La Frontera/Borderlands (Anzaldua) 115
Monsters 469–481 frontier hero, ideology of 16–17
Feuchtenberger, Anke 9, 213–226 frontier myth 16; wilderness and civilization 18
fictional system 150 Frost Fight 295
“Fifteen Million Merits” 157 “Fuck Gender” 365
554
Index
Fujioka, Haruhi 4 “girl wave” of comics 182

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel) 111, “A Girl with a Dead Canary” 512
182, 190, 365, 368; desire and identity Glenn, Cerise 305
relationship 368; gay cis-male experience Gloeckner, Phoebe 11, 182; A Child’s Life
and identity 367; literary allusions 366; and Other Stories 459; The Diary of a
queer community 366; queer feminist Teenage Girl 459; I Live Here 461,
politics and identity 367; sexual odyssey, 463–464, 465; La Tristeza 459–467; medical
intertextual progression 373; textuality and illustration 461
subjectivity 367 Goetzinger, Annie 203
Funimation Productions LLC 434 Gójska, Aga 386; Więzi (Ties) 383–384,
Funny Animal comics 9, 257–260 384, 385
Furr, Lucy 496 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson 464
Futuropolis 503 Golden, Michael 270
Golden and Silver Age comics 85
Gaiman, Neil 280 Goldman, Anne 18, 19
Galván, Ana 228 Gomez, Marga 111
Galvan, Margaret 6 Goncharov, Ivan: Oblomov 508–509
Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–19) 311, 311 Gonzalez, Sanchez 67
“gamma bomb” 23 Goodlad, Lauren M. E. 484
Garcia, Enrique 6 Goodrum, Michael 79–81
Garden of Eden 217, 224 Goodwin, Archie 287, 298
Gardner, Jared 1, 33, 37–38, 143, “goody-two-shoes” persona 45
190, 353 Gordon, Flash 46
Gardner, Jeanne Emerson 80, 171, 175 Gorman-Murray, Andrew 81
Garrido, Juan Carlos 410, 412 Goscinny, René 198
Gasc, Emma 135 Goths 484
Gateward, Frances 115 de Gouges, Olympes 207
gay cis-male experience and identity 367 Gould, Helen 305
Gay Comix 1980 (Gregory) 2 Gouma-Peterson, Thalia 216
“Gay Cuban Girl” identity 113 Graff, Kaitlin A. 60–61
Gay Gigante (Ebensperger) 4, 403, 403, 404, “grammar” of Sequential Art 57
413–416, 414 The Grand Hotel Abyss (Prior and Rubin) 228
“Gay & Lesbian Catholic Martyrs” 365 grandmothers: as ‘media’ of historical
“gay vague” 99 information 392; recollecting memories
Gaydos, Michael 315 390–400; testimonies 393
Gazpacho agridulce: una autobiografía Les Grands espaces (Meurisse) 504, 509–510, 510
chino-andaluza 8, 134, 139; discrimination Granville, J.J. 270n2
and disempowerment 137; single- and “graphic alterity” 33
multi-panel comics 135; Spanish graphic expression 215
culture 135 Graphic Medicine 241
Gebbie, Melinda 267, 268 graphic memoir 112, 117
Geezil in Gimme Back 49 graphic narratives 119, 121, 131, 241, 464
gender expectations 329 graphic non-fiction 115
“gender fluidity” 4 “graphic novels” 205
gender performativity 355 Graphic Policy 330
gender presentation 188, 189 Graphic Reproduction ( Johnson) 241
General Blue, in Dragon Ball 431–432 “graphic self ” 7
Georges, Nicole J. 5 graphic storytelling 57, 60; form 54
German unification 215 Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary
Gerrits, Andre 388n1 Comics (Chute) 2, 6, 128
“The Ghost Ship” from Crypt of Terror number “The Great Fight” 35
19 (1950) 172, 172–174 Green Arrow and Black Canary series
G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero 519 (2007–2010) 86
Gianola, Gabriel 83 Green Day 113, 115
Gibbons, Dave 25 Green Lantern story 82
Gibbons, Sarah 317 Greene, Nicki 487
Giménez, Carlos: Paracuellos 390 Gregg, Melissa 232
girl comics in “albums” (books) 198 Gregory, Roberta 2, 182
555
Index
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste: “A Girl with a Dead The Heart of Thomas 446

Canary” 512 heavy-handed approach 73
Grice, Karly Marie 6, 10 Heer, Jeet 39
Griffin, Rick 262 hegemonic masculinity 15; in American
Griffith, Bill 262 society and culture 17; bolster ideas of 81;
Groensteen, Thierry 240, 242, 259, 467, 471, comic book depictions of 17; as cultural
474, 507, 515n8 ideal 83; discussion of 82; female/feminine,
Grosz, Elizabeth 90 subordination of 21; identity formation
grotesque imagination 114 process 19; masculine behavior, definitions of
Groult, Benoite 207 16; nigh-frenzied masculinity 21; “normative”
“grown up”/mature authorial voice 192 function of 15–16; representation of 17;
Grudzień, Jacek 375 statistical sense 84; ultimate fantasy of 81
Guardians of the Galaxy 295 Helford, Elyce Rae 342, 345
Guattari, Felix 233 Henderson, Danielle 335, 338
Gunn, Joshua 498 Henderson, Scott B. 123, 125
Gustave Doré (1832–1883) 196 Hendrix, Nona 489
Gutiérrez, Camila 416 Hera 282
gutter 379 Hercules 276
Here (McGuire) 471, 474
Hagio, Moto 446, 448 Hergé 198
Hajdu, David 179, 353 Hernandez, Daisy 111
Hall, Carter 23 Hernandez, Gilbert 6
Hall, Justin 5 Hernandez, Joseline 155
Hama, Larry 270 The Hernandez Brothers (Garcia) 6
Hambre Prístina (Rapimán) 4, 404, 406–409, “heroic fiction” 16
408, 409 Heroines of Comic Books and Literature
Hamilton, Patrick L. 7 (Bajac-Carter) 6
Hammershidt, R.W. 83 Herriman, George 258, 260
Handler, Ruth 139 Herschel, Sir John 247
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” (2014) 493 Hesford, Wendy 463
Hank Pym 23 heteronormative society 230
Hanna-Barbera’s Huckleberry Hound 258 heterosexual adolescents 111
Hans and Fritz Meet a Hootchie heterosexual male, ideology of 70
Cootchie 46–47 heterosexuality 80, 110
Hara-kiri (1960) 200 Hewlett, Jamie 10, 341, 342, 347, 348
Haraway, Donna J. 267 Hickey, Walt 319
“Hardcore Lady-Types” 355 “high art,” conventions of 216
Hardy, Hannah 178 “High School Comics Chronicles” 182,
Hargreaves, Allison 120, 131n7 184, 190
“harlequin jim crow” 29 Hill, Anita 280
harmless pickaninny 30 Himes, Jim 264
Harper, Mary Catherine 116 Hinds, Harold 66–69
Harper, Stephen 120 Hinojosa Lobos, Hugo 416
Harris, Kamala 155 Hintz, Carrie 354
Harris, Marla 206 Hippolyta 276, 277, 281
Harrison, Richard 91, 103n1 Hirosegawa, Susumu 4
Harrison’s pinup of Captain America 98, 99 Hirsch, Marianne 391, 395, 396, 399, 474;
Harvey, PJ: “Rid of Me” 489 ‘flashes of imagery’ 394; postmemory 392,
Harzewski, Stephanie 93 393, 472
Haslem, Wendy 90, 91 Hispanic graphic narratives 390–392;
Hassenfeld, Alan 521 archive of feelings 395–397; family
Hatfield, Charles 110, 116, 350, 352 album 397–400; idiom of witness 396;
Hauser, Ewa 388n2 inherited memories 392–394; “unfolding of
Hawkeye 25 evidence” 400
Hawkeye: Kate Bishop 25 Historias Clandestinas 404, 404
Hawkeye Initiative 320, 321 historical comics 379
Hayton, Christopher J. 94 Historical Comic Strip Festival 377
He Didn’t Speak French 46 “historical situation” 230
556
Index
“The History of Queer Young Adult I.D. (Rios) 228–229; affect and formation
Literature” 186 232–233; gender identity 237; gender
History of Sexuality (Foucault) 367 roles, gender performance 229–232;
Ho, J.D. 4 ImageComics 230
Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften 215 ideational gateways of comics 56
Hodson, Christina 317 Identity Crisis (Meltzer) 83
Hoffmann, Heinrich 33, 216 idiom of caricature 28
The Hole of Tank Girl (Hewlett and Martin) 342 Igarashi, Megumi (Rokudenashiko) 418; My Body
Holloway, Elizabeth 274 Is Obscene? Why Are Only Lady Parts Taboo?
Holloway, Karla: “Black death” 484 425; What Is Obscenity? The Story of a Good for
Hollywood cinema 92 Nothing Artist and Her Pussy 421–428
Holocaust experience 54 Igarashi, Yumiko 446
Mes hommes de lettres: Petit précis de littérature Ikeda, Riyoko 4, 10, 441
française 504, 507, 512, 513, 513 Image Comics 20, 92, 149
“homographesis,” conceptualization of 367 “I’m Trapped in Here!” 9
homophobic dominant society 114 ImageText (Brown and Louck) 6
homosexual tension 44 “imaginary” marriage stories 79
homosexuality 71, 72, 171, 188, 367 In ‘t Veld, Laurika 466
homosociality 44 “inconsumable” 79
Honey Room 419, 425 The Incredible Hulk 102
Horlicks cartoon-strip story 57 indigenous cultural forms 121
horror comics 169; contemporary sexual indigenous women 119, 132n12
subjectivities 178–179; madwoman 176–178; individualism 19–20
monster 176–178; moral panics and sexual Infinitum: Time Travel Noir (Chomichuk) 125
innocence 169–171; moral panic surrounding “Influencers” fighting 136
comics 169; newlywed hero 171–174; Informe Meteoro 407
seductress 176–178; sexual scripts of 171; inherited memories 392–394
villain 174–176 initial model 250
“Horror in the Night” 177 innocent bodies 425–426
Houser, Jody 316 innovative webcomics 5
“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Insect Fear 261
Noses?”: Women and Jewish American International Women’s Day 144
Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs interracial heterosexual intercourse 48
(Oksman) 6 “Interrogating Restrictive Frames” 7
How to Do Things with Words (Austin) 367 “intersectionality” (interseccionalidad) 136
How to Murder Your Wife (1965) 82 Los Intersticios 115
Howard, Sheena C. 6, 153, 165 “invasion” of American comics 200
Howson, Alexandra 231 Invisible Girl 310
Hughes, Glenn Martin 432 Iskwé 122, 124, 125
Hughes’ pinup starring Wasp 99 Islamic Revolution 3
Hugo Hercules 20 It Ain’t Me, Babe (Rudahl) 1
Hulk 19, 23 Itsuki 435–436
human emotions 276
Hummel, Joye 313, 326n1 Jackson II, Ronald L. 153, 165
“The Hungry Grave” 176, 177 Jacobs, Will 23
Hutcheon, Linda 515n7 Jad ą husarze od pracy (Workers Hussar
hyperkineticism 24, 25 driving) 381
hypermasculine embodiment 356 ‘jaggedness’ versus ‘roundness’ 56
hypermasculinization of male 90 James, Etta 489
hyper-muscled appearance 45 Jan Duursema’s pinup from Marvel
hypersexualization of female 90 Swimsuit #4 102
hypocrisy 421–425 Japan 4; censorship in 419–420; Kanamara
Matsuri 421; LGBTQ literary tradition in
“I am a lesbian” 368, 370 429; obscenity in 418–419
I Live Here (Gloeckner) 461, 463–464, 465 Japanese pornography 419, 420
ice witch see Black Ice Witch Jean Grey 287, 288
Iceman (Marvel Comics): performativity, Jeffery, Scott 90
continuity, and queer visibility 525–545 Jenkins, Patty 313
557
Index
Jennings, John 115, 492 Kincaid, James 170

Jessica Jones (Netflix 2015–19) 314–316, 315 kind of penetration 45
Jesus 217 King, Neal 95
Jewish Traditional Prayer Book 223 King, Regina 155
Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical King Features Syndicates comics 46
Encyclopedia (Lesses) 223–224 Kirby, Jack 22, 23, 24
Jim Crow 29 Kirshner, Lauren 463
Jim Lee’s pinup of Storm from Marvel Illustrated Kirshner, Mia 463
#1 96, 96 Kishimoto, Masashi 430
Jimenez, Laura M. 6 Kitahara, Minori 418
Jochen Enterprises 213 Kitt, Eartha 6
Joe, G.I. 178, 259 Klein, Calvin 99
Joe Quesada’s pinup of Namor 100 “kollege of karnal knowledge” 264
Johnson, Jenell 241 Kominsky, Aline 1, 2, 6, 267
Johnson, Michael K. 16 Kopalnia Wujek (Coal Mine Wujek) 381
Joker and Harley relationship 84 Korzenie (Roots) 384, 385, 386
Joliot, Frederic 250 Krahelska, Krystyna 378
Joliot-Curie, Irene 249, 251 Krazy Kat (newspaper) 258
Jones, Gerard 23 Krystyna Krahelska, Warszawska Syrenka (Krystyna
Jones, Grace 489 Krahelska, the Warsaw Siren) 378, 379
Journal (Neaud) 5 Krztoń, Anna 384, 385, 386
Journal of the American Medical Association Ksi ądz Jerzy Popiełuszko (The Priest Jerzy
( JAMA) 56 Popieluszko) 379–380
The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Kubo, Tite 430
(Wright) 329 Kunstfigur 225
Juan Calzónzin 68, 74 Kupczynska, Kalina 10
Juárez 460–461 Kurtman, Harvey 261
Judas Priest 490 Kurumada, Masami 442
Judeo-Christian 151 Kwa, Shiamin 11
Judeo-Christian religion 222, 224
Jusko, Joe 92 LA Free Press 261
Justice League 83 Labanyi, Jo 390
juvenile delinquency 169 Lacanian model 241
Lackaff, Derek 17, 22
Kader Toy Factory fire 521 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 419, 425
Kaepernick, Colin 155 Lady Oscar 444
Kagami, Ken 420 Laflen, Angela 109
Kalhor, Medhi 3 “laicisation” (secularization) 200
Kamala Khan 25 Laird, Peter 270
Kamau Kogo 152, 157 Lakota woman 128–129
Kaminsky, Amy 393 Landsberg, Alison 474; prosthetic memory 472
Kanamara Matsuri, Japan 421 Lane, Riki 231
Kashtan, Aaron 368 Langevin, Paul 249, 251
Kassner, Paul 262 language of comics 56
The Katzenjammer Kids (Dirks) 33, 47, 197 LaPensée, Elizabeth 122, 127, 128
Kaywell, Joan F. 186 Lapham, David 316
Kefauver, Carey Estes 169 Larrondo, Nicole 416
Kemble, E. W. 37 Larson, Hope 317, 319
Kennedy, John F. 16 The Last Supper (da Vinci) 216
Kenner’s Star Wars 520 Latin America 3
Kevin Nowlan’s pinup of Wolverine 97, 97 Latinx comics 109
Kevin Wada’s pinup of Ghost Rider/Robbie Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (Aldama)
Reyes 103 7, 150
“Kikass Komix” 190 Lavell-Harvard, D. Memee 119
Kiki de Montparnasse 512 Layton, Bob 289
Kim, June 5 Leavitt, Jeannie 314
Kimba the White Lion 445 Lee, Jim 20, 92, 96, 100
558
Index
Lee, Patrick J. 189–190 McCaughey, Martha 95

Lee, Stan 22–24 McCloud, Scott 56, 91, 115, 222, 233, 234,
Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo) 128 241–243, 344, 373, 379, 381, 394
Leerssen, Joep 388n1 McConey and Dungeon series 260
LeFauve, Meg 314 McCormick, Katharine 278
Lefevre, Pascal 7, 57 McCullough, Kate 6, 370
Legend of Wonder Woman (Busiek) 313 MacDonald, Heidi 326n5
La Légèreté (Meurisse) 504, 506, 506–508, 508 MacFarlane, Elizabeth 90, 91
“legible, visual drawn” bodies 2 McFarlane, Todd 100, 318
Leialoha, Steve 96 McGruder, Aaron 39, 39
Lepore, Jill 43 McGuire, Richard: Here 471, 474
“Le$bian Investment Bankers” 365 McGurk, Caitlin 6
lesbian relationship 187 Machismo, feminismo, homosexualismo (Rius) 66
Lesses, Rebecca 223 Macko, Ash 260
lettercols function 333 MacLaren, Michelle 313
Levinas 467 McLelland, Mark 447
Lewis, Zachary Michael 10 McNally, Victoria 319
LGBT community 280 McRobbie, Angela 94, 170
LGBTQ representation: in shōnen manga 429–439 Madea (films) 155
LGBTQ+ rights movements 336 Mademoiselle Mars 512
Libicki, Miriam 6 “The Maestro’s Hand” 174+175, 175
Liefeld, Rob 20, 20, 21, 92, 93, 93, 100 Maguire, Emma 182, 183
“Life Out Loud in the Closet” 8 Mahon, Maureen 487, 496
‘Lifebuoy soap: she wasn’t lovable’ 61–63, 62 mainstream media 155
Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Bramlett) 56 male and female homosexuality 72
liquor and tobacco advertising 55 male anxiety 44
Lisa DeTora 9 male-dominated comic book 318
Liss, Andrea 467 male-dominated institutions 202
literary allusions 366 male erotic culture 43
Little Black Sambo (Bannerman) 33 male homosociality 44
Little Red Riding Hood 352–354 male-male platonic relationships 44
Liu, Marjorie 319 male perspectives 202
Locks, Adam 100 male superhero 20
Lois Lane series 80, 81 Malen Splendor 407
London, Bobby 262 “Mama” (Fawn) 128
London, Jack 16 Mamá Zhou 137–139, 141, 142
The Lonely Doll (Wright) 516 “mammy” 29
Lonely Nights Comics (Seda) 1 “Man Cave” concept 84
“The Long Night” 311 “The Man That Was a Thing” (Stowe) 30
Lopez, Maria Wolf 130 Manara, Milo 201
Lorde, Audre 154, 156, 163, 165 Mandryka, Nikita 3
Losfeld, Eric 200 Manet, Édouard 504; “Fifer” 512
Lotay, Tula 319 manga 4
Loti, Pierre 510 mangaka (comic artists) 429
Lotman, Yuri 311, 323–325 manko 421–424, 426
Lou Harrison’s pinup of Captain America 98 Manne, Kate 302
Louck, Melissa 6 Manning, Heidi 25n1
Louvre museum 503, 504 Manuel (Ballester) 5
Love, Courtney 341 Mapplethorpe 419–420
Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta 155 Marian Collins murder 152
Love Is Love 228 Marian La Luna 219–222, 225
Lovecraft, H.P. 16 “Marian La Luna und der Gottvater” 216–225
Low, David 354 Marie Antoinette (Queen of France) 442–444,
Lucchesi, Annita 130 449, 450, 452
Lumberjanes comics series 5, 353, 354, 357, 358 Marie Duval Project 208
Luque, Nazario 228 Mario, Kaneda 439
Lynch, Jay 264 Maris, Barnard 509
559
Index
Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) 119 Menstrual Movement 419

Maroh, Julie 5, 9 Mercer, Kobena 497
Marouan, Maha 491 Mercero, Antonio 228
marriage: Batman rings 78; Captain America “metamorphosis” 96
invitations 78; and heterosexuality 80; Spider- Meurisse, Catherine 11, 503; bande dessinée
Man decorations 78; in superhero comics 503–507; as bédéiste 503–505; at Charlie Hebdo
78; superhero-themed weddings 78; tuxedo 503; “complete artist” 504; Les Grands espaces
approach 78 504, 509–510, 510; La Légèreté 504, 506,
“Marriage, Domesticity and Superheroes (For 506–508, 508; Mes hommes de lettres 504, 507,
Better or Worse)” (Brown) 7 512, 513, 513; Moderne Olympia 504, 507, 512,
Marrs, Lee 1 512; politics of gender and art 510–514; Le
Marston, William Moulton 274, 312 Pont des arts 504, 507, 512–514, 514; Savoir-
Martin, Alan C. 10, 341, 342, 347, 348 vivre ou mourir 504–506, 505, 510; Scènes de la
Martin, Michelle 33 vie hormonale 504, 510–511, 511
Martin, Susanna 135 Mexican comic series 66
Marvel 23 Mexican models of masculinity 67
Marvel, film version of 17 Mexican modern art 72
Marvel Cinematic Universe 310, 313 Mexico Olympic games 70
Marvel’s Iceman: performativity, continuity, and MGM’s Barney Bear 258
queer visibility 525–545 Michelinie, David 289
Marvel Rising 295 Mickey Mouse 31, 243, 261, 263
Marvel Studios 297 Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates (O’Neill) 262
Marvel Swimsuit Special (1991–1995) 8, 91; Mickey Rat series 262
eroticism 92; female nipples and male Mignola, Mike 92
packages 91; “men act and women appear” 92; Migrados (blog) 135
normalizing tendencies 92–96; subversion, Millais, John Everett: “Ophelia” 507
possibilities for 97–103 Millee, Kathryn L. 326n3
Marvel Universe 1990 102 Miller, Ann 507, 515n8
Mary, spiral-haired protagonist 217 Miller, Rachel R. 8
Mary Lou 446 Minaj, Nicki 155
“masculine” 298 Mis supermachos (Rius) 68–69
masculine behavior, definitions of 16 mise en scène, analytical technique of 57
masculinity: and geopolitics 70; Mexican Misemer, Leah 188
models of 67 misogynoir 499n3
Massumi, Brian 233 Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
Mathews, Patricia 216 (2005) 155
“matrixial gaze” 241 Miss Ophelia 30
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman) 54, 392, Miss Whitney 154, 158, 160, 161
467, 471, 479–480 “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in
Mayo Feminista 404–406, 416 Canada” 123–124
“Me Worry” Kid 33 Mitzvah 223, 223
Means-Coleman, Robin 485 Miyuki 434–435
Meatmen Comics 1986 (Gregory) 2 Mizuno, Hideko 446
media-specificity and materiality 368 Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de
Meg LeFauve (IMDb) 301 Cleves 504, 507
“melancholy subject” 117 “Mode of Address: It’s a Film Thing” 342
Melo, Adriana 319 Modern Age of comics 85
Mélody (Rancourt) 203 modern feminist critics 275
Meltzer, Brad 83 Modern Fiction Studies 345
Memorial Foundation Act 122 modern woman 313
Memorias de la Tierra (Brieva) 229 Moderne Olympia 504, 507, 512, 512
memory 473; affiliative structures of 472; Mohamed, Deena 5
inherited 392–394; intergenerational transfer Molly Stark Wood functions 21
of 391, 400; points of 395, 396; postmemory Moncion, Laura 471
392, 393, 472; prosthetic 393, 472; social 386; Moncuse, Steve 270
transmission of 469; of trauma 396 Le Monde 3
“men act and women appear” 92 monstrosity 477
menstrual blood 383 Monte Cassino 377
560
Index
Montellier, Chantal 3, 203 “mythical imperative” 376, 383

Monteys, Albert 228 mythical narrative logic 79
de Montparnasse, Kiki 207
Moodian, Pat 1 Nagtegaal, Jennifer 8
Moore, Alan 25 “naive conception” of misogyny 302, 303
Moore, Alexandra Schultheis 464 Nananan, Kiriko 5
Moorhead, Joanna 248 narrativization of food 137
Mora, Sergio de la 70 Naruto 441
Mora, Victor 203 Natacha series (1965/1970) 200, 201
moral panic surrounding comics 169 national human rights crisis 119
Morales, Rags 83 National Lampoon (magazine) 267
Morowe Panny (Groovy Girls) 378 National Public Radio 245, 246
Moscoso, Victor 2, 263 “nationwide data crisis” 130
Mothers Against Meth Alliance Native American 119
(MAMA) 128, 132n13 Native Realities press 128
Mount Olympus 281 Natividad Rosales, Jose 68
Mouse Guard (Peterson) 260 natural language, grammatical patterns of 57
MOVILH (Movement for Homosexual Naughty Bits 182
Integration and Liberation) 412 Ndalianis, Angela 9
Mr. and Mrs. X #6 (2018) 86, 87 NdegeOcello, MeShell 496
Mr. Fantastic 19, 22 Neal, Mark Anthony 492
“Ms. Gazzalina Tindent” 267 Neale, Steve 92
Ms. Marvel 285, 310; Avengers and crossover Néaud, Fabrice 5, 9, 204, 204
events 291–292; Captain Marvel, 2012– Neil the Horse (Saba) 270
present 292–295; Carol Danvers in Nel, Philip 33
1980s–1990s 288–290; face of comics 295; neo-lynching 499n3
female fights back 285–288 Nettleton, Pamela Hill 84
Ms. Marvel 5, 297, 330 Neuman, Alfred E. 33, 261
Multicultural Comics 135 “new autonomous woman” 48
multiculturalist activism 208 “new hybrid identity” 137
Mulvey, Laura 92, 97, 241, 242, 250, 344 The New Mutants (Fawaz) 6
Munch, Edvard: “The Scream” 506 New Themyscira 281
El mundo a tus pies (Nadar) 228 New Warriors in Marvel Swimsuit #4 93
Muñoz, José Esteban 110, 112, 117, 370, 374n5 New Warriors’ Speedball 25
Murphy, Peter 485, 500n9 The New York Journal 33, 34
Muslim women 5 New York Public Library (NYPL) 244
Mutterkuchen (Feuchtenberger) 213, 213, 214; New York Public Library online exhibition
graphic narrative 217, 222; Marian La Luna in 245–247, 250
219, 220; vaginal themes of 216 New York Times 159, 266
My Brother’s Husband (Tagame) 4 The New York World 33
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Ferris) 469–472; Newell, Mindy 313
“because inside of Missy that part is in a niche economic activity 138
coffin” 479, 479; “Frankenstein” 478, 478; Nietzche, Friedrich 356
Karen’s queerness 473; “Look at her!” 470, Night King 311, 312
470; looking back and looking up 474–475; Night Scream 518, 524n3
monstrosity 477; “people upstairs” 472–474; Nihon Shoki 429
postmemorial artifacts 472–474; space, Nijdam, Elizabeth “Biz” 9
memory, and queered family in 469–481; Nine Inch Nails 484, 490
Spiegelman’s work in 479–480; touching the Nishitani, Yoshiko 446
past 478–481; varieties of reproduction in Nitschowa, Ludwika 378
471–473, 475, 476, 481; verticality and act Noisome (Casanova) 4
of looking up 475–478, 476; visual narrative Nolan, Christopher 7
in 471 non-black feminists 157
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Kwa) 11 “non-compliance” women 151–152
My Kingdom for a Horse 47 “non-compliant” 331
My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries nonfictional representations 131
(Chin) 516 non-Indigenous women 119
“The Myth of Superman” (Eco) 79 non-traditional comics 329, 330
561
Index
“non-traditional” demographic of comics panel-by-panel depiction 57

readers 329 panel-to-panel transition 58
Noomin, Diane 1 Panthea (1976) 2
normative ideology 16 Paola, Power 3
Not just for Children (Hinds and Tatum) 66 Papá Zhou 137, 140
Notas al pie (Vollenweider) 4, 10 Paracuellos 390
Le Nouvel Obs (magazine) 202 Part of It (Schrag) 192
la nouvelle bande dessinée (French comics) 3 El Paso 461
November Gymnasium 446 passive-female/active-male stereotypes 140
Nowlan, Kevin 92, 97 Patell, Cyrus R. K. 19
Nunez, Breena 109, 117 “pattern of practice” 15
Nyberg, Amy Kiste 55 Patty Jo 39
Nye, Joseph 28 “Peaches and Daddy Browning” story 47, 48
Pedri, Nancy 397
Obama, Michelle 155 Peeters, Benoit 196
Oblomov (Goncharov) 508–509 Pellegrin, Annick 7
Obomsawin, Diane 5 Penyas, Ana 10, 390–391; Estamos todas bien
obscenity, historical precedents 418–419 390; graphic narratives 391–392; and Maruja
Oda, Eiichiro 10, 429, 430; One Piece 437, (grandmother) 390, 393, 393, 394, 394, 396
437–439 Peppard, Anna F. 8
Odilie et les crocodiles (Montellier) 3, 203 Pérez, George 94, 289, 290
Odyssean allusion 372 Perez, Pere 316
The Odyssey 373 Perez’s pinup of She-Hulk 98
Ogród (Bara) 375–376 Pérez Márquez, Bárbara 4
Okazaki, Minoru 432 performativity theory 368
Oksman, Tahneer 6 Perlman, Nicole 301, 314
Oldbuck by Rodolphe Töpffer 196 Perry, Tyler 155
Omar, Ilhan 155 Persepolis (Satrapi) 3, 205, 426–427
O’Neill, Dan 262, 263 Peters, Margery 267
O’Neill, Katie 5 Peterson, David 260
On Loving Women (Obomsawin) 5 Le Petit Chaperone Rouge (Hatfield and
One Piece 429, 437, 437–439 Sanders) 352
Oniisama E (Ikeda) 4 Petty, Lori 341
“Ophelia” (Millais’ painting) 507 “phenomenology of imagination” 476
“optimum joy” 193 photographs 397–400
The Order of Belfry (Perez and Barros) 4 Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Orenstein, Peggy 178, 356 (Atkins) 247, 247, 248
“The Origin of the World” 383 Piatti-Farnell, Lorna 10
Orme, Jessie 39 Picasso, Pablo 428
“orphan works” 43 pickaninny 29–31; prototype of 31; stereotype of
Orsay commission 503–504 30; watermelon eating and whitening 31–33;
orthodoxy of academia 56 Yellow Kid 33–35
Ortiz, Álvaro 228 Pickens Rich, Calyn 483, 486; Afropunk 485,
Osborne, Helen Betty 122 500n12; comic illustration 484; Dill Comics
Osborne, Ozzy 491 485, 492–493, 493, 498; Dining with Dana
Ostrowska, El żbieta 377 483, 485, 493–498, 495, 498; undead comix
Otokosuki 432 485, 491–496
Ottaviani, Jim 244 Picoult, Jodi 313
Oubrerie, Clément 206 picture-based ecology 56
Ouran High School Host Club (Fujioka) 4 Les Pieds nickelés (Forton) 197
out loud in the closet 110–113 Pikara Online Magazine 135, 136, 136, 143, 144
Outcault, Richard 28, 32, 35, 36, 36 Pillow Talk (1959) 82
The Outline 159 Pilote (magazine) 202
Pim Pam Poum 197
El País (newspaper) 135 Pinchon, Emile 197
Palmer, Carole 243, 244 Pincus, Gregory 278
Palmer, Lorrie 17 Pinkett Smith, Jada 487
Pandora’s Box 1 “pinnacle of femininity” 356
562
Index
Pixel Project 119 La Princesse de Cleves (Mme de Lafayette) 504

Plastic Man 19 “printemps” (Spring) in comics 203
playful comics form 35 Prior, Marcos 228
“Plea deal compounds” (Sweeney) 8 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (Spiegelman) 480
Plencner, Joshua 326n3 Priya Shakti (Devineni) 5
Pocahontas 123 product advertisements 57
pocket-sized pornography 42–51; male erotic Product Authority (Geis) 60
culture 43; Tijuana Bibles 42 prosthetic memory 393, 472
“Pocket Sized Pornography” (Barry) 7 Prough, Jennifer S. 6, 449
Poharec, Lauranne 114 psyche-magnitron 286, 287, 297
points of memory 395; photographs as 399 psychiatric issue 72
Polak, Kate 121, 125, 126, 234 psychologists warning comics 352
Polish comics 376–379 public and private spaces 81
politics of gender and art 510–514 public-facing feminisms: back matter of
politics of sympathy 463, 464 comics refers 332–333; Bitch Planet fandom
Pollitt, Katha 199 331–332
polonium and radium 249 Puchol, Jeanne 3
Le Pont des arts: Petites histoires de grandes Pulitzer Prize committee 54
amitiés entre peintres et écrivains 504, 507, Punday, Daniel 90
512–514, 514 Puryear, Tony 492
Popeye 20 Pustz, Matthew J. 332
Popeye comics 49
Pore Lil Mose (Outcault) 28, 35–37 Qahera (Mohamed) 5
“porn chic” fashion 178 Quagmire, Joshua 270
porn/erotica pinup tradition 322 Quan Zhou Wu 134–138, 139, 140–147
“porn” fashions 178 quantum atomic behavior model 240
Portacio, Whilce 92 “quantum gaze” 242
Portman, Natalie 317 Queer 517, 524n1
post-autobiographical comics 140 queer comics 6, 182, 333, 365
“post classical” era of bodybuilding 100 queer community 366
post-colonial materiality 357 queer feminist politics and identity 367
postfeminism 342 queer gesture theory 115
The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, queer girlhood 182; coming-of-age story 183; life
Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human writing 183–189; queer proximity 190; queer
( Jeffery) 90 sexuality 188; “working out” of 194
Postindustrial American society 17 queer multipurposing of toys 516–523
postmemory 392, 393, 400 “queer reparative temporal vision” 370
post-Rius Supermachos 69 “queer textuality” 367
poststructural constructivist approach 358 queer theory 6
Poteat, Tania 235 queer visibility: Iceman and 525–545
Potential (Schrag) 182, 183–189, 185, 186, 192 Queer YA novels 187
“potential,” concept 182 Queering the Chilean Way (Fischer) 404
potty-mouthed woman 341 Queerness, Stryker’s definition of 517
power, dictionary definition of 28 Quesada, Joe 100
Power, Natsu Onoda 444, 447 Quinones, Joe 117
Powers, Madelon 44
Powstanie 44 (Uprising 44) 377 race- and gender-based violence 121
Pozna ński Czerwiec 1956 (Poznan June 1956) 379 “Radioactive: An Exhibition at the New York
“The Pranks of Peanut” in Beano 37–38, 38 Public Library” 244
pre-adolescent girls 178 Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love
Press Enter to Continue (Galván) 228, 229 and Fallout (Redniss) 9, 240, 243, 244
Pressley, Ayanna 155 Radoń, Adam 375
prevailing theory 83 Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) 69 (Chemaly) 157
“Pride and Prejudice” (1987) 365 Raggedy Ann 31
Primer plato: familia feliz agripicante 140 Rambeau, Monica 292
primordial mother 381, 383 Rancourt, Sylvie 203
Princess Knight 445, 447 Rand, Erica 519, 522; Barbie’s Queer Accessories 517
563
Index
rape 120 Robertson, David Alexander 122, 124, 124, 125,

“The Rape of Ms. Marvel” 289 126, 128
Rapimán, Melina 4; Chile’s comic production Robertson-Dworet, Geneva 301, 314
406–407; Hambre Prístina 404, 406–409, 408, Robinson, Karen 178
409; Pan 409, 414 Robinson, Lillian S. 6
Rawick, George 51n2 Robles-Llana, Paloma 137
Ray Palmer (The Atom) 23 The Rocky Horror Picture Show 438
“Reactionary Comics” 267 Rodríguez, Juana Maria 110, 115
Reagan, Ronald 16 Rodriguez, Spain 2
Real, Lacanian 241 Roe v. Wade 282
“Real Men Choose Vasectomy” Roediger, David 51n2
(Pellegrin) 7 Rogers, Mary F. 138
The Realist (Kassner) 262 Rokudenashiko see Igarashi, Megumi
real-world problems 153 (Rokudenashiko)
receptive anal sex concept 50 Rolfe, John 123
Redniss, Lauren 9, 240 Rolling Stone (magazine) 113
Regalado, Aldo J. 16–20 Le Roman d’un enfant (Loti) 510
Regeneration Through Violence (Slotkin) 25 “roman graphique” 203
Rehin, George F. 29 romance comics 171
religious format 217 romantic comedies 82
Renaissance circular paintings 217 romantic storylines 79
Renear, Allen 243, 244 Romita Jr., John 92, 286
“representational intersectionality” 140 Roof, Judith 178
reproduction, treatment of 73 Rooks, Nowlie 497
“respectability politics” 156, 157 Roosevelt, Theodore 16
“Restrictive Forms” 7 The Rose of Versailles (Ikeda) 10, 441, 443, 447,
Revolutionary Girl Utena 453 450, 451; André 449; animated version 444;
Reyes, Carlos 413 ‘Beru-Boom’ 444; cultural significance of
Reyes Magos (Biblical Magi) 138, 139 441–442; fan feedback 443, 444; features of
Reynolds, Richard 93 452; gender identities and girls’ storytelling
Reyns-Chikuma, C(h)ris 8 448–452; gender representation in 445, 446;
Rezeanu, Catalina-lonela 81 narrative and characterisation of 453–454;
Reznor, Trent 485, 490 Oscar François de Jarjayes 442–443, 445, 448,
Rhode, Jason 318 450–452; Oscar’s revolution and its legacies
Rich, Julz 128 453–454; queer politics in 451; “realistic
Richard, Nelly 413, 414 graphics of scenery and props” 449; Rosalie
Richards, Terry 1 Lamorlière 452; success of 444; Tazarazuka
Richardson, Mike 270 Revue of 444
Richardson, Niall 101 Rosen, Phillip 400
Richardson, Sarah 90, 91 Rosenberg, Melissa 315
Rif kind, Candida 244 Rosie Lee 39
rights of women 278 Rosół (Chicken Broth) 386–387, 387
Rios, Emma 228 Ross, Betty 122, 126
“‘rippling’ effect of emotions” 29 Rossello, Mireille 38
Rius 7, 66–76 Rothko, Mark 506
Rivera, Diego 476 Rothschild, Nadine de 504
Rivera, Gabby 109, 117 Round, Julia 484
Rivière, Jacqueline 197 Roux, Jean-Paul 388n4, 388n5
RJ Casey 481n1 Royal, Derek Parker 134–135
Road, Cristy C. 8, 109; body transformation Rubicek, Dorothy 275
115; Christian Right in Florida 112; DIY Rubin, David 228
punk culture 114; graphic memoir 112, 113; “Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters
grotesque imagination 114; out loud in the Stomp the Fags” 2
closet 110–113; Spit and Passion 111, 112, 114; Rudahl, Sharon 1
voice-over narration 112, 113 Rude, Mey Valdivia 336
Robbins, Trina 1, 2, 6, 208, 313 “Rupert and the Castaway” story 38
Roberts, Jude 6 Rusek, Adam 388n3
Robertson, Darick 93 Rys, Rachel 400
564
Index
Saba, Arn 270 self-publication method 203

Sacco, Joe 119, 463 selling proposition 55
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in semiotic theoretical perspectives 240
American Indian Traditions (Allen) 120 Sendak, Maurice 171
Sado-Masochism 79 The Sensational She-Hulk (1989–1994) 94
sadomasochistic sexual play 45 “El Sentido del Silencio” (“The Meaning of
Saguisag, Lara 33, 35, 36, 258 Silence”) 407–409
Sailor Moon 453 Sentinel of Liberty 98
Saint Seyia 442 Sepulveda, Juan 228
Saito, Chiho 453 Sex and the Single Girl (1963) 82
Sáiz López, Amelia 137, 139 “sex perversion” 353
Sakai, Stan 270 “sexual abnormalities” 353
Sales, Michael 17 Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina
San Garabato, inhabitants of 71, 74 Longings (Rodriguez) 110
Sand, George 513, 514 sexual innocence 169–171
Sanders, Joe Sutliff 352 sexual liberation 200–202
The Sandman (Gaiman) 280 ‘sexual mode of communication’ 60
Sanger, Margaret 275, 278 “sexual perversions” 66, 72, 74
Santa’s Workshop: Inside China’s Slave Labor Toy sexual politics 171
Factories 521 sexual relationships 171
Santori, Matt 112 sexual revolution 80
Sanz, Salvador 4 sexual subjectivity 178, 179
Satrapi, Marjane 3, 182; Persepolis 426–427 sexual violence 42, 44, 47, 120
Saturday Review 170 Sfar, Joann 260
Savage Land 95 Shamoon, Deborah 448
Savoir-vivre ou mourir: comment devenir une femme Shane, Tristan 92
du monde en 24h 504–506, 505 “shared precariousness” 464
Sawyer, Maggie 316 She-Hulk’s body 94
Sawyer, Regine 492 Shelton, Gilbert 2, 262
Scènes de la vie hormonale (Meurisse) 504, Shepphard, Alice 6
510–511, 511 Sherlock Holmes 325
Schafer, Jeanine 295 Shinobu Sensui 435–436
Scheele, Julia 5 shōjo manga 441; aesthetics of 446; and
Schenker, Brett 318 ‘Beru-Boom’ 442–445; diverse readership
Scherr, Rebecca 11 442; narrative of 442; in 1970s 445–448;
Schildt, Kristen 496 primary characters of 442; “24 nen gumi”
Schodt, Frederick 441 445–446
Schrag, Ariel 8, 181, 185, 186 shōnen 441, 442
Schreck, Heidi 520, 521 shōnen-ai 446, 448
Schwartz, Julius 23 shōnen manga: LGBTQ representation in
Schwartzapfel, Beth 159 429–439
“Science Comics’s Super Powers” 244 Shooter, Jim 289, 299, 316
Scooby-Doo 260 shunga 420
Scott, Darieck 6, 182, 373 Shuster, Joe 45
Scott, Mairghread 317 Siegel, Howard P. 326n1
Scott, Nicola 313 “The Significance of the Frontier in American
Scott, Suzanne 320 History” (Turner) 15
“The Scream” 506 de Silva, Constance 7
script of comics 56 Silver Age of comics 79, 81, 279
Sea Wolf (London) 16 Silveresti, Mark 92
Seal of Approval (Nyberg) 55 Silverheels, Jay 267
The Second Sex (de Beauvoir) 278, 368 Silvia Albert Sopale 136
Seda, Dori 1 Sim, Dave 270
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 44, 368 Simon & Schuster 182
Seduction of the Innocent (Wertham) 79, 169, 352 Simondon, Gilbert 233
“The Seeing Eye of Graphic Biography” 244 Simone, Gail 82, 317, 319
Seigworth, Greggory 233 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 120,
seinen komikku (adult comics) 4 121, 131
565
Index
“simultaneous mobilization” 240–241, 243 The Spirit (1948) 39

Sinclair, Amanda 124 Spit and Passion (Road) 8, 109
single- and multi-panel comics 135, 143 Spitzer, Leo 391, 395, 396
Sinott, Joe 92 The Spleen of Paris (Baudelaire) 469
Siouxsie and the Banshees 484 “split personality” 287, 291, 298
Sipe, Lawrence 354 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue 92, 95
Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story Squarriors (Witter) 260
(Tobia) 522 “stage manager” 35
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Lorde) Stamper, Christine N. 6
154, 165 Star Trek: The Original Series 16
“The Sisters of Barrow” 267 state-wide tobacco prevention 56
Situating the Feminist Gaze 241 Stef kova, Lale 4
Six Novels in Woodcut (Ward) 383 Stelfreeze, Brian 94, 95
Skim (Tamaki) 5 Stepanuik, Casey 112
skin-tight superhero costume 91 “stereotype and fixity” 91
Slave Labor Graphics 181, 183 Steve Trevor 277, 280
Slotkin, Elissa 19, 21 Stevenson, Noelle 353
Slotkin, Richard 25 Stewart, Cameron 317
“Smack Boy” 190 “Stinky the Pig” short story 264
Smith, James 270 Stitches (2009) 241
Smith, John 123, 267 “Stolen Sisters” 132n14
Smurfette principle in 1991 199, 199 Storm’s depiction 96
Snider, Dee 488 Struwwelpeter story 33, 216, 217
social construction 229 Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy,
“social justice warriors” 294, 332 and the Cultural Production of Sh ōjo Manga
social media movements 143 (Prough) 6
social media savvy community 331 Strickland, Carol 289
societal hypocrisy 421–425 Strömquist, Liv 383
sociocultural issues 146 Stryker, Susan: Queerness, definition of 517
So-Fi Festival 517 Stuck Rubber Baby (Cruse) 3, 190
soft hate 28–29, 35, 40 study of cartooning 56
Sol de noche, in Hum® 3 Stworzenie (The Creation) 381–383, 382
Son Goku, in Dragon Ball 430–431 stylistic diversity 92
Son of Satan 92 stylistic norms of comics 58
“Son of Zoro” mimics 347, 348, 350 “El Sueno de Aleli” (“Aleli’s Dream”) 407
Sonnet, Esther 345, 347 Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story (Robertson)
Sonntag, Ned 264 126–127, 127
Sosnowska, Beata 10, 375–376; Blood 375–376, Sunday Funnies poster 262
381, 383, 387–388; Stworzenie (The Creation) Super Hero Squad 300
381–383, 382 Superadas 1998–2003 (Burundarena) 4
Spain’s culture of comics 134 Superboy in Big Bet 46
Spanish-born artist of Chinese Supergirl (CBS) 314
descent 136 Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality,
Spanish graphic narratives 228 Transformation 90
Spanowicz, Aleksandra 375 superheroes: masculinity, descriptions of 17;
Spark Plug 260 semiosphere 323–325; subconscious moral
speech-bubble dialogue 58, 59 authority of 46
“speechifying” of sexuality 367 Superheroes: The Never-Ending Battle 318
Spenser, Edmund 57 superhero-themed weddings 78
Spider-Man 19, 20, 24, 78, 243, 274 Los superlocos (The Supercrazies) 66
Spider-Woman 321, 322 Los supermachos (Rius) 7, 66–68; gender and
Spider-Woman Jessica Drew 292 sexuality outside of 69; good and real Mexican
Spiegelman, Art 54, 260; Maus 392, man 75–76; heavy-handed approach 73;
467, 471, 479–480; “Prisoner on the historical overview 67–69; and homosexuality
Hell Planet” 480; “Secret of Wordless 71–72; issue 27 71; issue 69 73; issue 481
Narratives” 383 72; issue 713 73; machos‚ machistas 69–70;
Spinning (Walden) 191 masculinity in Mexico 67, 71; reproduction and
Spinoza, Baruch 232, 235 birth control 73–75; screen adaptations of 67
566
Index
The Supermales see Los supermachos (Rius) 45; mediating sexual tension 44; receptive
Superman 18–20, 45, 243 anal sex concept 50; sadomasochistic sexual
Superman 429 play 45
Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane (1958–1974) Tiley, Carol 6
80, 81 Tim Hanley 333
Los supersabios (The Superwise) 66 Tintin (magazine) 199
superwomen 323–325 Tintin character 198
Superwomen (Cocca) 6, 86 Titeuf series 204, 205
Supreme Intelligence 301, 302 Tits & Clits (Farmer and Chevely) 1
Susan Storm 287 Tkaczyk, Witold 375
Sweeney, Katlin Marisol 8 Tobasco Publishing Company 44
Sweet, Roger 520 Tobia, Jacob: Sissy 522
sympathetic spectatorship 462 Togashi, Yoshihiro 10, 429; Yū Yū Hakusho
sympathetic witness 392 434–437, 435, 436
“symphony of anger” 163, 165 Tok Tok (magazine) 5
Szmigelski, Shannon 190 Toku, Masami 441
Tomecki, Zbigniew 377
Tagame, Gengoroh 4 Töpffer, Rodolphe 196
Takahashi, Rumiko 439 Topsy 30–31
Takano, Ryudai 420 Torchy Brown 39
Takeuchi, Naoko 439 Toriyama, Akira 10, 429; Dragon Ball 430–434,
Talalay, Rachel 341, 351n8 431–433
Tales to Astonish #44 21–22 toy photography 516
Tales from the Crypt and Vault Toys 101: The Last Class 517–523, 518, 522, 523
of Horror 169 “traditional and contemporary American Indian
Tamaki, Jillian 5 literature” 121
Tamaki, Mariko 5 traditional comic narrative 74
Tank Girl 10, 341–347, 344 traditional comics ethos of completionism 330
Tanxxx 207 “Translating Masculinity” 7
Tardi, Jacques 203 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil 221
Tarr, Babs 317, 319 Tribuna Feminina Comix 407
Tasker, Yvonne 342 Tribunella, Eric L. 169, 354
Tatum, Charles 66–69 La Tristeza (Gloeckner) 11; bodily precarity
Taylor, Tosha 84 in 460; disorientation and distancing
tea advertisement ‘No wonder Dick doesn’t call’ effect 464; dolls and dioramas in
58, 58, 59 466–467; ethical strategies in 459–467;
Tebeosfera (Spanish journal) 7 first page of 459; frames of 460; “gaps”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 270 464–467; graphic representations of sexual
Ten Little Pickaninnies 32 violence 460; impossibility of closure
“Terror Ride” from Tales from the Crypt number 467; layering effect 466; map of Juarez
21 (1950) 172–174, 173 461–462; photographic faces in 467;
Terry and the Pirates in Some Chinese Joys 50 politics of sympathy 463; sympathetic
Tezuka, Osamu 430, 445 spectatorship 462; text-image relationship
thematic and archival/material studies 241 460, 467
A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon) 515n7 Troll doll 523
These Truths (Lepore) 43 Trondheim, Lewis 260
Thomas, George 9 The True Amazon (Thompson) 283
Thompson, Jill 282, 313, 319 Trump, Donald 322
Thor: Love and Thunder 5, 317, 319 Tumblr 135, 137
Thrash, Maggie 5 Turner, Frederick Jackson 7, 15; as “American”
Three Day Hangover 518 to masculinity 16; delineation of Americans
threshold potential 185 23; hegemonic definition 24; normative
Tijuana Bibles 7, 42, 262; contemporary erotic ideology 16; “The Significance of the Frontier
illustrations 45; distribution of 46; “goody- in American History” 15
two-shoes” persona 45; homosociality of 44; Turner, Tina: “We Don’t Need Another
hyper-muscled appearance 45; interracial Hero” 489
heterosexual intercourse in 48; ironic tuxedo approach 78
humour indicative 46; kind of penetration TV on the Radio (TVOR) 485
567
Index
“twilight quality” 246 El violeta (Cochet and Sepulveda) 228

Twisted Sisters (Noomin) 1 La Virgen de la Cariad 111
Twitter 313–314, 334 The Virginian (Wister) 16, 21
Tysell, Helen 56 virginity 183, 221
visual ethnography 48
Ugly Betty (2006–2010) 155 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Ultimates 295 (Mulvey) 241, 344
Una’s Becoming Unbecoming 426, 427 visual-verbal tool 110
Uncanny X-Men 288–289 Vives, Gloria 135
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 29–31; cultural vivid color scheme 150, 151
derivations of 31 Vizenor, Gerald 120, 121
Uncle Willie 51 Voelker-Morris, Julie 82
undead comix 485, 491–496, 500n13 Voelker-Morris, Robert 82
underground comics movement 9 voice-over narration 112, 113
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (McCloud) Vollenweider, Nacha 3, 10; grandmother’s
115, 233, 379 recount of the past 395, 395–396; graphic
“Unit Two: The Gene” 189 narratives 391–392; Notas al pie 390–391; use
United States: “animetaphoric” comics 257, of photography 398, 398–399, 399
258; culture 112; economy and society Vox (magazine) 315
156–157; “harlequin jim crow” 29; prison Vox, Militia 485–491, 487; Black Ice Witch
industrial complex 152; Riot Grrrl culture 485, 487, 488, 490; “Born Out of Darkness”
and music 341; state-wide tobacco prevention 489–490; “Covet” 490–491; musical clarity
56; superhero body 153; traditional social 489; music tracks 488; performances of 489;
structures of 82; U.S. imaginary 165; sonic-political platform 491
US-Mexico relations 70 voyeurism 79
‘universals of sales psychology’ 55 “vulnerable viewers” 170
Universe! (Monteys) 228
Universe of the Mind: The Semiotics of Culture W imieniu Polski Walczącej. Kaminos 44 (In the
(Lotman) 323 name of Fighting Poland. Kaminos 44) 379
unusual color scheme 150 Wachs, Faye Linda 99
upright-walking monkey 221 Wacker, Steve 292, 317
Urban Indian Heath Institute 130 Wada, Kevin 102
Urcaregui, Maite 10 Walden, Tillie 5, 191
Usagi Yojimbo 270 Waller, Reed 265
“utopian longings” 115 Walley-Jean, J. Celeste 154, 156
Wally Wood 262
value of page turn 354 Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto 484
“Van Hesling’s Curse” 488 Walt Disney’s Donald Duck 258
Vanian, Dave 498 Walter Lantz’s Andy Panda 258
variety of sexual preferences 72 The Wandering Uterus (Willberg) 241
vasectomy 74 Wannamaker, Annette 355, 356
Vault of Horror issues 171, 176 Wanzo, Rebecca 6, 153, 165
Velez, Ivan Jr. 5 Ward, Lynd 383
verbal subsystem 150 Warhol, Robyn 111, 400
verbal-visual maneuvers 115 Warner Brothers 49; Bugs Bunny 258
Vibe/Marvel 19 Warsaw Uprising 377, 378
victims of violence 120, 330 Wart-Hog, Wonder 262
“La vida banana” (The Banana Life) 143 Washington, Martha 154
da Vinci, Leonardo 216 Watchmen 25
Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature/ Waters, Maxine 155
Activism/Resistance (Hargreaves) 120 Waterson, Bill 258
Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in Watsuki, Nobuhiro 439
Canada 119 Watters, Shannon 353
violence against women 126–127 “weaponization” of femininity 95
“violencia, sexo” (violence, sex) 66 ‘weave the fabric of a new world—and a new society’
violent juvenile delinquency 79 (Washington) 154
violent performance of male sexuality 46 webcomics, production of 143
Violet and Meiko approach 159, 160, 165 wedding photography 78
568
Index
“Wedding Special” Batman #50 83 Wonder Woman 9, 310, 312; Hummel, Joye 313;
“Werewolf Concerto” 177 woman creator of 313
Wertham, Fredric 79, 169, 179n4, 352, 353 Wonder Woman’s origin story: All Star Comics #8
Western art 98 274; February 1987 280–282; female agency
Western audiences 119 277; interpretations of 274; May 1958 278–280,
Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth 6, 11, 96, 154 279; Sensation Comics #1 274; The True Amazon,
What the Constitution Means to Me (Schreck’s October 2016 282–283; Wonder Woman #1 276,
play) 520 What Is Obscenity? The Story 278; in World War II, July 1942 275
of a Good for Nothing Artist and Her Pussy wonder women 78, 79
(Igarashi) 418, 422–425; censorship in Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes
423; community 426–428; innocent bodies (Robinson) 6
425–426; societal hypocrisy and power Woodward, Miguel Alberte 228
dynamics 421–425 “The Word Warriors” 121
Whedon, Joss 313, 317 work of Crumb (Comic book series) 2
Wheeler, Andrew 102 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago 15
Wheelwright, Philip 25 Wright, Bradford 16, 17
Whelehan, Imelda 93, 345, 347 Wright, Dare 518, 519; “cult classic” 517;
“White patriarchal universalism” 153 The Lonely Doll 516
Whitehead, Anne 233 Wright, David N. 329, 330
Whitlock, Gillian 374n3 writing system, cartoon storytelling 57
Who Is Ana Mendieta 113 Wróbel, Olga: Rosół (Chicken Broth)
Wicked Evolution 487, 488 386–387, 387
Więzi (Ties) 383–384, 384, 385 Wyzwolenie? 1945 (Liberation? 1945) 379
Wigranskys, David Pace 170, 179
“Wild Man of Bornegro” 32 X-Force from Marvel Illustrated #1 93, 93
Will I See? (Iskwé) 122, 124, 125, 126 X-Man Colossus 99
Willberg, Kriota 241 X-Men 287, 299
Williams, Esther 48 X-Men 287, 288
Williams, Kimberlé 136 X-Men’s Nightcrawler 25
Williams, Rachel Marie-Crane 154
Williams, Robert 262 Yang, Gene Luen 119, 143, 357
Williams, Vanessa 155 “Yankee Doodle Dandy” 365
Williams III, J.H. 316 yaoi, boy-boy romance comics 4
Willmott, Glenn 257, 260 Yellow Dog 261
Wilson, G. Willow 317, 319 Yellow Kid comic 32, 33–35
Wilson, S. Clay 2 Yezbick, Daniel F. 9
Wimmen’s Comix (Robbins) 1 Yoffe, Emily 158
Wings, Mary 2 Your Brain on Latino Comics
Wister, Owen 16 (Aldama) 7, 109
Witek, Joseph 270n1 YouTube 312, 320
Witter, Ashley 260 Yū Hakusho 429, 434–437, 435, 436
Wolinski, Georges 509 Yusuke Urameshi 434–435
Woman World (Dhaliwal) 5
women: empowerment 276; socio- Zap Comics story 262
patriarchal conceptions 343; suffrage Zapata, Emilio 476
movement 274 Zerán, Faride 405
“Women in Refrigerators” 82 Zhou, Quan 8
“women and womenidentified women” 335 Zip Coon 29
569

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Routledge Companion to Gender

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The Routledge Companion

to Gender and Sexuality

Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama

ISBN: 978-0-367-20941-4 (hbk)

List of illustrations xii

Gender and sexuality in comics: the told, untold stories 1

1 Translating masculinity: the significance of the frontier in American

2 Black boys and black girls in comics: an affective and historical

3 Pocket-sized pornography: representations of sexual violence and

4 The comic strip in advertising: persuasion, gender, sexuality 54

5 Real men choose vasectomy: questioning and redefining

6 Marriage, domesticity and superheroes (for better or worse) 78

8 Life out loud in the closet: the grotesque as Latinx imagination in

9 Graphic (narrative) presentations of violence against Indigenous

13.1 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997 185

15.1 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, cover 213

15.7 Feuchtenberger, cover, On the Issues 5.1 (Winter 1996) 219

15.11 Lilith Adler, Foundation, 1996 222

19.3 Wonder Woman #98 (1958) 279

20.4 Joe Quinones. Captain Marvel #17 (2013) 294

22.1 Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–19). © HBO 311

22.5 Spider-Woman #1, 2014. © Marvel. https://imgur.com/gallery/FmE7mJz 321

29.1 Gabriel Ebensperger’s Gay Gigante (2015) 403

29.4 Melina Rapimán’s Hambre Prístina (2014) 408

34.4 “Frankenstein.” My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1. Seattle: Fantagraphics,

35.5 Dill Comics, a webcomic (courtesy of Calyn Pickens Rich) 493

Maaheen Ahmed is an associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University

Jonathan Alexandratos (they/them) teaches developmental English at Queensborough

Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers

Constance de Silva is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Monash University Australia. Her

James J. Donahue is Associate Professor in English & Communication at SUNY Potsdam,

Karly Marie Grice is an assistant professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Patrick L. Hamilton is an associate professor of English at Misericordia University in Dal-

Jennifer Nagtegaal is a PhD student in Hispanic Studies at the University of British

Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is Assistant Professor in German Studies in the Department of

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is Professor of Popular Culture at Auckland University of Technol-

C(h)ris Reyns-Chikuma is a professor at University of Alberta, Canada. He studies and

Rebecca Scherr is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Literature, Area

Daniel F. Yezbick is Professor of English and Communications at STLCC-Wildwood,

Frederick Luis Aldama

Thus, what Americans—or, more specifically, American men—“are” in Turner’s conception

Figure 1.3 Panel

only one. Acrobatic heroes—and thus examples of similar hyperkineticism—abound: Dare-

Minstrelsy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Pickaninny

Robin Bernstein describes the pickaninny as a stereotype whose “ juvenile status,

Seemingly ‘timeless’ tropes: watermelon eating and whitening

One pickaninny when with Faultless Starch she’s done

The Yellow Kid and Pickaninnies

“Wait till we git to Africa” the boy says.

Pore Lil Mose

Blackface in British comics: Peanut in the Beano and the ‘coons’

Figure 2.3 Header of first Beano cover (July 30, 1938)

Figure 2.4 “The Pranks of Peanut” in Beano (July 29, 1939)

Moving beyond without forgetting

• Thematic information, which is found in socio-cultural shared knowledge of the real

• Implicature, which is a cognitive trajectory of meaning-making, whereby a person can

These elements are designed to cooperate as a mechanism to achieve a persuasive connection

Narrative storytelling as language

In Eisner’s claim of cartoon storytelling as a writing system, it appears that an obsolete

Mise en scène in comics concerns the representation of a scene by a specific organization

Comic-strip advertising: analysis of three artefacts

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Longmans, 1957.

Los supermachos: a historical overview

Los Supermachos empezaron a ser burdamente falsificados—en el dibujo y en el contenido—,

Figure 13.1 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997

Figure 13.2 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997

Figure 13.3 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997

Figure 13.4 Potential, Ariel Schrag, 1997

Figure 14.3 1950, Schtroumpfette (Smurfette) by Peyo (Dupuis)

Figure 14.5 1962, Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest (Humanoids)

Figure 14.8 1990, Journal by Fabrice Néaud (Ego comme x)

Figure 14.10 2005, Aya, by Abouet and Oubrerie (Gallimard)

Figure 14.11 2016, Culottées (Brazen Rebells) by Pénélope Bagieu (Gallimard)

Figure 15.1 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, cover

Figure 15.2 Feuchtenberger, Mutterkuchen, title page

Figure 15.7 Feuchtenberger, cover, On the Issues 5.1 (Winter 1996)