Check It Out! My Comix On Queer Coding In Horror Is Available As A PDF! It Has A Digital Exclusive: A

Check it out! My comix on queer coding in horror is available as a PDF! It has a digital exclusive: A recommendation list with brief reviews of 20+ horror movies!

LINK

Queer Code – hard copy $5!

So… this was originally gonna be a few pages explaining “queer coding” but the further I got in it, the more I had to say, so I chopped up the first few panels I made, rearranged them and added like 6 more pages.

When I heard they were making a tv version of “Preacher,” I decided to give the comics a read. I’d read some of Garth Ennis’ other stuff back in high school and I always heard him put up there with Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore.

By the end of the first arc in “Preacher,” I basically had to will-power my way through the rest of the comic because I wanted to know how it ended. Despite having read the whole damn thing only a few months ago, I can barely remember any of it, except for how utterly aggravated the whole thing made me. The most POSITIVE depiction of a queer character in the whole series is of a self-loathing gay cop who can only have sex with other men when they’re beating and humiliating him. THAT’S THE MOST POSITIVE DEPICTION OF A QUEER CHARACTER.

And then I recently read some contemporary manga

“Soil” – One canon queer character. A gay man who is a serial child molester.

“One Punch-Man” – One canon queer character. A gay man who is basically a walking prison rape joke.

“I Am a Hero” – One canon queer character. A transgender man who is repeatedly misgendered and insulted and ultimately dies. But he’s not a rapist or a murderer, so yay representation?

I’ll admit, this comic is coming from a place of anger and disappointment. That the Big Names in Serious Graphic Novels (some of which I really enjoy and really influenced me) still have so much homophobic/transphobic content. That a lot of contemporary comics haven’t progressed much further. I don’t expect every queer character to be a hero, but when you have a mere handful of queer characters and the majority of them die or are villains, it’s a problem. I’d rather see a body horror metaphor for queerness than see another shitty canon queer trope.

Shout out to my fellow queer comic book makers. Even if you’re just xeroxing comics in the campus computer lab and giving them to friends, you are doing good work.

And if Garth Ennis wants to argue that “Preacher” isn’t homophobic, I am ready to throw down in the alley behind my apartment. And by “throw down,” I mean “debate.”

My Etsy: LINK / My Society6: LINK / My Ko-Fi: LINK