from left: Abby Denson, Alison Bechdel, Ariel Schrag
When it came time for questions from the audience at the gay comics panel at New York Comic-Con, I mentioned the effort to ban Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home from a public library in Missouri because of its sexual content and wondered if the other panelists had experienced similar problems with their work. Abby Denson, the creator of Tough Love: High School Confidential, talked about how she and her publisher had made a concerted effort to get the gay teen romance into as many libraries as possible, while Ariel Schrag revealed that the graphic memoirs of how her sexual identity unfolded during her high school years had been seized and burned by Saudi customs officials. “But everything is, you know,” quipped Jose Villarrubia, who later downplayed the idea that the workof queer comics creators is always influenced by their sexuality, joking, “It’s not like I do gay coloring.” (Denson chimed in, “Nobody asks J.K. Rowling why she isn’t a boy wizard.”) He also observed that creating comics simply because of a perceived need to have queer-positive characters out there was a recipe for failure, and that truly effective characters emerged from a pure love of storytelling.
Earlier in the weekend, I took part in a panel on blogging about comics with Heidi MacDonald, Chris Butcher, and Johanna Draper Carlson (photo swiped from Chris Mautner of Newsarama. It was a pretty good time: My three colleagues are among the most authoritative commentators in the field, so I was glad to learn what I could from them, and I got to talk a little bit about reporting on comics news for a non-comics audience (and about finding the GalleyCat voice). And, as it turned out, about 90% of the audience had blogs of their own, so I’m hoping to see our Technorati stock improve…
Having learned from my experiences at last year’s Comic-Con, I made a point of avoiding the major panels from Marvel and DC Comics, which are essentially PR-driven exhibitions that the comics fan site Newsarama can cover sufficiently, which means I missed the big presentation with Stephen King where Marvel editor-in-chief said that “publishing the Dark Tower comic book has been the coming out party for the comic book industry, noting that this project will be able to reach far out into the mainstream, and show that comics are a serious art form, and ‘an art form to be reckoned with.’ The Dark Tower coming to comics, Quesada said—”not just Marvel, but comics, is a great honor, and a very special occasion for the industry.”
Even comics fans think that’s overstating the case just a bit. “I guess this means we’re forgetting that just in the last year or so, Fun Home was named Time‘s Book Of The Year and that American Born Chinese was both nominated for a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature as well as winning the ALA’s Michael L. Printz award,” Kevin Church commented. Shop owner Mike Sterling further deflated the hype: “It’ll sell well for a while, and it’s not a bad comic, so I can’t complain about that,” Sterling observes. “But it’s not going to make everyone start taking the medium ‘seriously.’ Like I said before, it’ll get non-comic-reading King fans in the door to buy Dark Tower (and only Dark Tower)…at least for a while, until they get tired of trying to keep up with a comic on a monthly basis (or whatever publishing schedule it finally ends up being on).”