Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics 2008
Prism Comics: Your LGBT Guide to Comics 2008 has finally arrived in stores! As ever, the Guide looks back on the GLBTQ (or whatever order/nature of the acronym you prefer) comic events/characters of 2007 as well as offers some original articles and comics. Edited by the oh-so-adorable Jonathan Riggs with a wrap-around cover by a man I’ve never heard of before but am terribly taken by, Jackademus
My contribution is called “Gods and Gays”, which Jonathan was able to focus into a survey of “how gay readers view the theology of comics”, rather than the daunting “compleat history of God in comics and what the gays think of Him” I had originally envisioned. The article, redacted and superbly accessorized with appropriate comic panels, looks better than I had imagined (and I imagined it being great to start with), but, sadly, is shorter than the 10,000+ word monster I handed in. So, for those who are interested, I’ve put the uncut version here. Other articles to check out are PKA’s “A Queer Comic Report Card”, MK Czerwiec’s “Night Nurse”, Andrea Speed’s “Gay, Straight or Drawn That Way?”, Mike Buzzelli’s “A Tale of Two Gay X-Men, Briefly”, Brian Andersen’s “High School Dance Confidential” and “The Insidious Dr. Gray Matter Answers your Stupid Questions”. There’re also over 100 pages of comic book art which should give readers months and months’ worth of reading material once they track the full books down.
Good news aside, more than any other year, there’s something a little “off” about the Guide this year. Nothing horrible, mind you, but there seems to be within its pages a call for something more than what the Guide has been up so far. The two articles that exemplify this are “Love & Literature” by Edward Beekman-Myers and “Transgender Day of Remembrance” by Jenn Dolari. In the former, there is the briefest mention of Cyclops and J. K. Rowling (since when has she been doing comics?), but overall, the article homilizes about attaining true love and literary success by being a trooper and making lemonade out of lemons. I was hard-pressed to figure out (and actually never did) why this was included because, as far as I know, Prism isn’t in the advice-to-the-lovelorn business. In the latter, there is less made of the comics project Dolari created to expand awareness of transgendered issues than the issues themselves. Again, neither of these were horrible, but their tangentialness to comics leaves me to believe that there is a desire to look at the broader picture of “the lives of gays who read comics” rather than just “gays in comics” - something I’ve taken to calling “the Prism/PK dichotomy”. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in next year’s Guide.
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