Does your local gay and lesbian newspaper carry Alison Bechdel’s “Dykes To Watch Out For”? Probably so -- that strip has great market penetration (but only of a non-patriarchal nature, Mo! <grin>) -- unless you don’t even have a paper in your area. But what about Tim Barela’s “Leonard & Larry”? Probably not, since it is only available in Frontiers Newsmagazine in San Francisco and Los Angeles, although your local queer bookstore might have copies for sale at a couple bucks a shot.
For a great many people, the one or two strips carried by the local newspaper are the only ones they ever see; they might see a single example of one or two others when they travel. But as it turns out, there is actually an incredibly wide variety of queer newspaper strips -- and single panel cartoons, and editorial cartoons, and comics done for AIDS newsletters -- available on the World Wide Web. (But you wouldn’t know it from the dozen or so items listed by Yahoo!) So I’ve taken the opportunity to gather together all the links to queer comic strips, panels, cartoons, creators, and comic book-related web sites that I could find, and present them here in one location, including a representative graphic and a couple lines of description (in most cases).
There is an online mailing list dedicated to discussing queercomix. Click here for more info.
If there are any online queercomix which I am
missing, please let me
know.
(Last update: June 17, 1999)
A Note about the Word “Queer”
While the standard definitions for the word “queer” -- abnormal, worthless, or insane -- led to its use as a derogatory term in times past, in the 80s and 90s, its power has been reclaimed and redefined by a generation of activists to define themselves as an inclusive group: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, transgender,... (The “laundry list” keeps growing: S&M/fetish, questioning, supportive straights, and their pets...um, make that “and their companion animals”. We wouldn’t want to be un-PC, after all.) So rather than a negative term, “queercomix” is a branding term to encompass this entire set of comics material with queer themes and characters, usually (but not always!) by queer creators.
A Note about the Idea of “Reclaiming Power”
You don’t believe that the negative power of a word or symbol can be refashioned into something to inspire pride? What, you never heard of the symbol the Nazi’s used to identify male homosexuals in the concentration camps, the pink triangle?
