Book review: The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions

 The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions. Eds. Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2022. 355 pps. ISBN: 9781496841353. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-LGBTQ-Comics-Studies-Reader

Reviewed by Christopher M. Roman

Queer comics have been receiving important scholarly attention for the last decade or so. With the recent entry in Keywords for Comics Studies (2021), essays in various comics studies collections, along with the issue of American Studies edited by Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz (2018), as well as book length studies of queer comics creators like Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse, queer comics studies has slowly amassed a scholarly weight. With Justin Hall’s edition of queer comics, No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (2021), Andrew Wheeler’s Shout Out (2019), and Matt Bors’ Be Gay Do Comics: Queer History, Memoir, and Satire (2020), queer comics have even been anthologized. Even Marvel and DC now publish yearly queer comics anthologies during Pride Month. An excellent addition to the queer comics discussion comes in the form of Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren’s The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions. This collection of essays is comprehensive and showcases scholars’ attention to the diversity of queer comics from manga to webtoons. As I outline below, this collection is mostly successful in its presentation of queer comics scholarly work and provides both a sense of where queer comics scholarship has been, and, more importantly paths for its future.

The collection is divided into four parts. After an insightful introduction written by Halsall and Warren, Part One contains essays that look at queer comics as a queer commons defined as a space where queer people can connect through shared political commitments. Queer comics instill this kind of shared citizenship through critique and subversion of heternormativity. Michelle Ann Abate’s “Rude Girls and Dangerous Women: Lesbian Comics from the 1990s” examines the rise of queer comics aimed at lesbians during the late twentieth century. As Abate argues, these comics gave rise to queer women’s community building and provided a space for critique and queer anger at the normative and oppressive politics of the time. Tesla Cariani’s “Condoms Not Coffins: 1950s-1990s American AIDS Comics as Collective Memory” looks at comics as a kind of queer archive as they represent the AIDS crisis and how it affected queer lives. Magaret Galvan’s “Of Anthologies and Activism: Building an LGBTQ+ Comics Community” compliments Cariani’s essays as this essay, too, examines comics dealing with AIDS. This essay, however, focuses on two comics anthologies, Strip AIDS and Strip AIDS USA, that functioned as social justice anthologies by bringing together queer comics creators often on the front lines of the AIDS crisis. Section One ends with an interview with queer comics scholar Ramzi Fawaz conducted by the editors. The interview is a wide-ranging discussion touching on queer comics, Marston and his creation Wonder Woman, how comics expand people’s ideas of the possibilities of queer relations, and even the comics superhero group the Fantastic Four. This is a great way to end this section of the collection as the thread running through this interview is how queer comics build community.

Part Two of the collection examines the global community of queer comics. The editors appeal to the accessibility of comics as a way to underscore the wide reach of comics. The editors bring together articles that look at the development of queer comics in Germany, France, and Japan. This is the shortest section of the collection which undermines the goal of this section: to show just how global queer comics are. However, with essays that only deal with three countries, this section of the collection would have been better served with essays that looked at more parts of the world. There is no mention of Central or South America or that of work from South Asia, for example, even though Bishakh Som’s work has received critical attention. In the Introduction to the section, the editors mention ArtQueerHabibi, a queer Middle Eastern artist who publishes on Instagram, but it would have been more representative to have included a few more essays that would have widened the global scope. In Susanne Hochreiter, Marina Rauchenbacher, and Katharina Serles’s “Queer Visualities-Queer Spaces: German Language LGBTQ+ Comics,” the writers provide a succinct essay recounting the transformation of queer comics in German-speaking countries after World War II. They trace queer comics as rising from feminist and lesbian media through its flourishing in the 1970s in gay lifestyle magazines to mainstream comics work in contemporary media. In Keiko Miyajima’s “XX, XY, and XXY: Genderqueer Bodies in Hagio Moto’s Science Fiction Manga,” Miyajima uncovers trans identities in Moto’s work. Moto’s work celebrates gender-fluidity and transformation. Continuing to look at manga, William S. Armour’s “An Exploration of the Birth of the Slave Through Ero-Pedagogy in Tagame Gengorah’s Pride,” explores sado-masochism in Tagame’s celebrated work. Armour argues that Pride can be read as a how-to book for those who may be interested in slave/master play. In Edmond (Edo) Ernest Dit Alban’s essay “Gay Fanzines as Contact Zones: Dokkun’s Adventures with ‘Barra’ Manga in between Japan and France,” Alban looks at the trans-cultural influence of Dokkun’s gay comics. Alban argues for examining the amateur comics section of LGBTQ+ comics for the ways they create community and queer spaces away from larger comics industry concerns and obstacles.

Part Three collects essays that explore different kinds of queer selfhood as represented in various queer comics. The editors celebrate the diversity of expression found in queer comics and highlight how queer representation is always in process. In the first selection of this section the editors include an interview with Justin Hall, editor of the landmark queer comics anthology, No Straight Lines, conducted by Hillary Chute. The interview recounts Hall’s career in comics, his work as a professor of comics, and his journey in bringing together No Straight Lines, as well as discussions of important queer comic creators like Howard Cruse, Brad Rader, and Dianne DiMassa. The second essay works in conjunction with Hall’s interview as Matthew Cheney’s essay, “Activism and Solidarity in the Comics of Howard Cruse,” also celebrates the work of a pioneer in queer underground comics. Cheney’s essay looks at the importance of Cruse’s comics as a form of activism for the queer community. Alison Halsall’s “Canadian LGBTQ+ Comics: Intersections of Queerness, Race, and Spirituality” turns to the diversity of Canadian queer comics as they address the vastly different socio-political contexts found across the country. In “BLK Cartoons: Black Lesbian Identity in Comics,” Sheena C. Howard examines single-panel comics published in BLK Magazine, a magazine aimed at the black, queer community during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these single-panel comics, Howard finds a celebration of Black lesbians that reflect the deep and complex lives of these Black women that were not represented in other media. In Lara Hedberg and Rebecca Hutton’s “Goldie Vance: Queer Girl Detective,” the authors write about Hope Larson and Brittany Willard’s comic/graphic novel Goldie Vance for its representation of a Black, queer female detective who queers traditional expectations of gender roles for girls. This section ends with selections of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For.

In Part Four, the editors bring together essays that examine how queer comics both make queerness visible as well as how queer comics constitute a scene, shared histories, customs, and community. In Jonathan Warren’s “Reading Comics Queerly,” Warren looks at how comics, though they may not at first glance represent queerness, become queer through readerly attachment and decoding of subtext. In remus jackson’s “Better a Man Than Dead?: Radical (Trans)Masculinities in Comic-Zines,” jackson looks at self-published and DIY comics for the ways they build queer community. jackson take as his subject trans-autobiographical comics that challenge cis-masculinity. The editors next include an interview with Jennifer Camper that they conducted in which they discuss Camper’s queer-community building work and her influential queer comics. In “Conceiving the Inconceivable: Graphic Medicine, Queer Motherhood, and A.K. Summer’s Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag,” Sathyara Venkatesan and Chinmay Murali examine comics that queer motherhood, arguing that motherhood itself is a queer practice. Finally, Lin Young’s “Pixel Fantasies and Futures: Narrative ‘De-othering’ in Queer Web Comics,” turns to webcomics for ways these queer comics leave behind the queer struggle with heteronormativity to explore queerness as optimistic futurity.

This collection is well-worth a cover to cover read. Each author explores a different aspect of queer comics both in terms of queer history, as well as in terms of queer theory. It is exciting to see this anthology in the world and its influence on queer comics scholars will be profound.

             

Book Review - The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth by Andrew Kunka

Andrew J. Kunka. The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 196 pp. $29.95, $69.95. < https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-life-and-comics-of-howard-cruse/9781978818859>

 

Reviewed by Christopher Roman

Kent State University

 

 

Critics agree that Howard Cruse is an important figure in the wider field of comics, and especially so in the history of underground and queer comics. Yet there are only a few articles devoted to Cruse's works (my quick MLA search put that number at eight, though I am sure there are more to be found in the wider world of the internet). Andrew J. Kunka's book, The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse, comes at a critical time, published two years after the 25^th Anniversary Edition of Stuck Rubber Baby and three years after Cruse's death in November 2019. As Kunka writes in his preface, his plan was to have an extensive interview with Cruse published in this collection. However, Cruse had died before interviews could happen. Kunka, though, had generous support from Cruse's husband, Ed Sedarbaum, who was able to supply page scans for this collection. Kunka's ability to connect with so many people who were fans and supporters of Cruse make this collection essential to the study of his short-form comics.

            The eight critical works that I mentioned above focus on Cruse's masterpiece Stuck Rubber Baby, and rightfully so. Stuck Rubber Baby is a premier graphic novel grappling with tough issues of racism and queer life in the Civil Rights-era South. It serves as not only an important historical graphic novel, but provides insight into the intersections of black and gay Southern life pre-Stonewall. Yet, what Kunka has managed to do in his critical anthology is open up Cruse's work beyond Stuck Rubber Baby to account for Cruse's short-form work which is not as often discussed or anthologized except for his short comic "Billy Goes Out" (see, for example, Justin Hall's collection No Straight Lines [2012]). Cruse created many more comics with an impressive range of themes and styles, apparently all of which Kunka accounts for in this book.

            As Kunka mentions in his brief Introduction, short form comics do not often get critical attention, and even when collected, do not stay in print very long compared to 'graphic novels.' Cruse's collections, Wendel All Together (1985), Dancin' Nekkid with the Angels (1987) and The Other Side of Howard Cruse (2012) are all out of print. Cruse even self-published From Headrack to Claude (2009), another of his short form comics collections, in order to keep those comics circulating. Kunka's book serves as a foundation to further work on Cruse's extensive short form comics. This book fills in the missing critical background on Cruse's life and his work that display his range of creativity, innovation, and humor, as well as his connections to the nascent worlds of underground and queer comics creators.

            Chapter one is a critical biography of his life. Kunka recounts Cruse's early life in Birmingham, Alabama, and his importance to underground comics as a young cartoonist. After creating gay-themed Christmas cards, Cruse ventured out into queer comic books, a path that had been paved by lesbian comics creators in the '70s such as Mary Wings, Lee Marrs, and Roberta Gregory. He worked with Kitchen Sink Press to establish Gay Comix in September 1980. Gay Comix was profoundly influential as it not only provided a forum for queer comics creators, but also influenced future queer cartoonists, some of whom became much better known than him, such as Alison Bechdel. Cruse's push to have a forum for queer creators to focus on queer culture and relationships could be considered a breath of fresh air in an underground comix world rife with misogyny, racism, and homophobia.

            The remaining chapters are a thematic look at Cruse's work, with full page art samples (some in color). Kunka's critical commentary leads each chapter, and then he discusses the stories with historical context and more specific critical prose. Chapter two focuses on "Autobiographical Fiction/Fictional Autobiography." Cruse's approach to autobiographical comics undermined what are now traditional genre conventions as accepted in memoirs. While there may be a character named Howard in these short form comics, there is sometimes a twist into a fantastical, or humorous reveal, which questions the stories' claims to objective truth. Kunka includes such autobiographical comics in this section as "Jerry Mack," "The Guide," and "Then There Was Claude." Each of these comics plays with autobiographical genre while showcasing Cruse's array of drawing and storytelling styles.

            Chapter three focuses on work that can be classified as "Commentary and Satire." Cruse's comics regularly commented on the politics of his time. Kunka links Cruse's more overtly social and cultural commentary works to political and educational comics. In the selections provided in this chapter, Cruse addresses issues surrounding the AIDS crisis, gay activism and queer culture, the news media, and death. This section includes "Billy Goes Out," Cruse's masterclass of a short form comic, where he uses time shifts and a drawing style to seamlessly tell a story of 1980s cruising culture. Another humorous story is "Dirty Old Lovers" in which Cruse comments on the treatment of older gay men in a gay community obsessed with youth, and a media that wants to present gay men as respectable.

            Chapter four addresses Cruse's "Parody" work. Cruse's style can be thought of as cute, a derivation of the long-lasting bigfoot style. In these works he uses his "cute" style to borrow characters from early comic strips such as Lulu, Casper, and Nancy to poke humorous fun at consumer culture, the dark side of children's comics, and the sexuality hidden therein. This chapter also includes an essay Cruse wrote on the importance of parody where he likens his parody to political cartooning, but aimed at the art world.

In all of these chapters, Kunka balances narrative analysis with comics analysis, pointing out where Cruse uses panel borders unconventionally, or how his work with stippling and cross-hatching was groundbreaking. Kunka's commentary balances Cruse's storytelling with his drawing work, showing how Cruse was the complete package, a true cartoonist. Kunka's work and critical commentary is an essential read for those interested not only in Howard Cruse, but in how his work impacted a generation of artists, especially in how important Cruse was to helping create the genre of queer comics. 

 

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.