The Panels
Make Mine Mythology!
The Blurb:
Amazons! Hercules! Loki! Lore Olympus! Comics are full of characters from various mythologies. But comics also have their own timey-wimey (no, wait wrong fandom – twisty- wisty) internal mythologies. Come explore the ways comics and mythology reflect each other – moving between written and oral (or visual) traditions; later retellings introducing retcons that are beloved, hated and/or just make it messy; and the recent focus on re-centering female and LGBTQIA characters, writers, and perspectives.
This panel is geared to be informative and highly interactive – let’s get our classics and comics geek on!
The Overview:
This panel starts from the premise that the Venn Diagram of comic book readers and classicists/mythologists is a circle. I dove into how comics and mythology are similar ways of storytelling and the ways people have read, listened to, and watched them throughout history. I talked about preservation efforts for classics literature by Middle Eastern scholars in history – which is important work that does not get talked about and appreciated enough.
I also took some potshots at some of the film and television interpretations of comics and mythology, while praising which ones Got It Right. This panel included a fun section called “Your Fave Is Problematic” for both mythological and comics characters.
I went into detail about how both mythology and comic books have fallen victim to retcons and some of the reasons why this happens.
I also talked about the phenomenon of fridging, a term which was coined due to comic books. In case you don’t know, fridging refers to the death, depowering, crippling, sexual assault, turning evil, torture of female-presenting characters specifically to motivate and/or serve the male hero’s storyline – or, in some cases, because the woman was getting too powerful for (men’s) comfort. Gail Simone (who is not a bear) coined the phrase. Fridging is, unfortunately, something that is widely found in both comic books and mythology. As a bit of a palate cleanser and way to show there is hope, I discussed some ways that the role of female-presenting characters and writers in comics and mythology are leaping forward and stepping into the spotlight. A named this section “Emma Frost Would Like a Word” in my outline.
I also touched on the history of queer characters in comics and mythology, and the trials and tribulations of getting them onto the page and keeping them there. This including discussion of queer writers and the refocusing of the narrative on queer characters. And, yes, my outline called this section, “You Can’t Spell Subtext Without…”
To wrap it up, I discussed hills I will die on:
Artemis is asexual.
Bearded Piotr Rasputin/Colossus is the BEST Piotr Rasputin/Colossus
Medusa deserved better.
Where You May Have Seen It:
Emerald City Comic Con 2022
Salt Lake FanX 2023
Always Here –
LGBTQIA Characters in Comics & Mythology
The Blurb:
Comics and mythology are having a Golden Age representing LGBTQIA characters. But LGBTQIA characters are not “new” to these genres. In comics, they have been (sparingly) explicit on the page or (more often) queer-coded and/or slyly referred to as queer (looking at you, Claremont). In mythology, LGBTQIA characters were here, then erased, and are being put back on the page, no longer having to be read through a queer lens. LGBTQIA stories are older than you think, so come join in on an interactive, informative and, above all, entertaining trip through the history of LGBTQIA characters in genres we have always called our own! We’re back in the narrative!!
The Overview:
When I first conceived of this panel in late 2022/early 2023, we were in a heyday of queer representation in comics – both on the page and behind the scenes – and in mythology, with various retellings of famous tales putting the queer aspects of characters back on the page. But as the U.S. tumbled toward another election, the rhetoric against LGBTQIA people became sharper and we started losing protections left and right. By the time I presented the panel in 2023, it had been a hard couple of months for queers and it continued to get more difficult. This panel grew directly out of the section in Make Mine Mythology that talked about LGBTQIA characters in comics and mythology, and I made a concerted effort to make this panel about queer joy and to remind everyone – including us – that we have always been a part of these tales we hold dear. And we always will be.
To that end, this panel begins with a fun game where I ask the audience to put up one hand and then lower it when I hit the century from which the oldest on-the-page trans story they know about comes from. Spoiler alert: for the purposes of this panel, it’s 1st century CE (or 1st century BCE depending on when exactly you date it – Ovid’s life straddled the switch from BCE to CE). The tale is Iphis and Ianthe and it is a trans story with a happy ending. Which, if you know anything about mythology, is novel in and of itself. Now, there is another tale Ovid tells us, which he heard first from Acusilaus, that is a trans story, but that one (Caene/Caeneus) is not about queer joy, so I didn’t include it here. You can message me if you want to know about that one and/or where to find it in Ovid.
I then went over how old our source materials – in comics and mythology are – and then posited three key reasons for why, with thousands of years of collective material, it has taken so long to get where we are with queer representation in comics and mythology: Revision, Restriction, and Relegation.
Revisions, or retcons as they are more familiarly known in comics, are kind of like, “Woah, how’d that get in there? Let’s just get rid of that.” In the panel, I talked about one character who has been revised in both comics and mythology: Heracles/Hercules. For clarity, we’ll refer to the comics character as “Hercules” and they mythological one as “Heracles”. Hercules is on the page queer as of 2010. In 2015, Axel Alonso, then Editor in Chief (EIC) of Marvel, tried to roll Hercules’ bisexuality back in his own run on Hercules’ series. That ended poorly for Alonso, as he got massive pushback both from fans and from other Marvel writers, artists, and staff. During his own run on Guardians of the Galaxy, Al Ewing firmly re-established Hercules’ bisexuality. He is still on the page queer and still in a relationship with NohVarr. I chose Hercules because it shows that even as we are progressing, there have been attempts even in the 21st century to revise/retcon queer characters. It is also important to note that Al Ewing himself is bisexual. With regard to mythical Heracles, in short, Heracles is a complicated character and his myths are messy. His wives (except his divine half-sister wife) meet terrible ends for the furtherance of his narrative, as do his children. His male lovers also often meet terrible ends, but those stories have been intentionally downplayed, to the extent that they have been revised into friends or teachers or “just some guy”. However, this isn’t a case of the stories being erased, they are more un- emphasized, allowing them to fade into the background. Heracles’ lover Hylas became just a fellow sailor on the Argos. Iolaus became his charioteer and squire – and later retconned into a nephew. Admetus was just a hunting buddy – on a hunt with a trans character and a (not explicit but come on) lesbian – making the hunt for the Caledonian Boar possibly the queerest hunting party ever. Heracles’ bisexuality is, at best, a footnote to most people’s knowledge. And while I have mixed feelings about Phoenicia Rogerson’s Herc, I do like that time was given to these men in that book.
Restriction is a form of erasing queers entirely, not just attempting to shuttle them to the side. On the classics end, a lot of the restriction comes from who had access to the materials, and who translated it for consumption: a white male of a certain age, class, and sexuality. This is not to say queer translators did not exist, but they knew what was expected by society and if they wanted to get published, they knew what they couldn’t put on the page. For my money, there are two key players in Restriction in the comics: the Comics Code Authority (“CCA”) and Jim Shooter at Marvel. The CCA was established in 1954 and was based loosely on the motion picture industry’s Hays code. Some CCA highlights pertinent to the discussion of LGBTQIA characters in comics are 1) “Illicit sexual relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed sexual abnormalities are unacceptable” and 2) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” So… basically, characters can’t be queer. Jim Shooter, during his time as EIC for Marvel (1976-1987), Jim Shooter had a strict “Gay and Lesbian Characters Do Not Exist in Marvel” policy. Marvel abandoned the CCA in 2001 after an issue of X-Force was rejected (probably for violent content and not queerness) and DC abandoned it in 2011. And once the Big Two abandon something, it’s usually dead in the water.
So how do we get around the CCA and Shooter? We Queer Code the hell out of it. For instance, Northstar is heavily queer coded from the get-to and writers tried to get him out of the closet for decades. But it wasn’t until Bobbie Chase (a female editor) and Christian Cooper (a Black queer assistant editor) were in charge of him that he finally came out. In classics, several translators refer to Patroclus as Achilles’ “best friend” or “cousin” instead of his lover. But, even if you read these older translations, they have left in place some of the deeply romantic and devoted language used to describe the relationship.
On the subject of Queer Coding, we need to take a moment to shout out Marvel’s holy trinity of Queer Coders – Chris Claremont, Ann Nocenti, and Fabian Nicieza. All of them were either in The Scene or knew people in The Scene. They knew gays, lesbians, and transgender people; they knew people in the kink scene; and importantly, they knew people who were dying for being queer. Nicieza gave us the Legacy Virus storyline, which was a barely-veiled AIDS analogy. Two of Claremont’s heavily Queer Coded ladies, Karma and Kitty Pryde, came out decades after he created them. Karma as a lesbian in 2003 and Kitty as bisexual in 2020.
Once the CCA was dead, Marvel started having queer characters come out rather quickly in storytelling time, but most were rather new characters – America Chavez, Anole, and Karolina Dean, to name a few. Over in DC, Jonathan Kent and Aqualad came out relatively quickly after their introductions. It is important to note that Batwoman (Kate Kane) was queer out of the gate and she debuted five years before DC abandoned the CCA.
Relegation is what I like to call “Queers in the Dark and After Dark”. Marvel and DC both launched lines that were targeted to the more “adult” or “darker” stories. Marvel gave us The Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins in 1992, which was a horror title and included Marvel’s first lesbian. Although the word “lesbian” is not used, but it is quite clear she is a lesbian – she lives with her lover so this might be the first canon “Oh they were Roommates” in Marvel comics. It is notable that she was created by a Black, gay writer (Christian Cooper). On the DC side, they launched Vertigo in 1993 and we have queer characters because it’s an “adult” imprint. To be fair, John Constantine was queer on the page in 1992, but Hellblazer was moved to Vertigo when it launched in 1993, so I’m calling it a push. Constantine has remained queer through the present, including (famously) 2020’s Justice League: Dark Apokolips War, when he identified King Shark as his ex-lover. Vertigo is also the line under which The Sandman, notorious for its queer rep, was published. Wildstorm Comics in Stormwatch published The Authority, which gave us Apollo and Midnighter before DC absorbed it. Midnighter and Apollo first appear in. However, they are not on-the-page gay and in a relationship until The Authority #8 in 2009. They were the Batman/Superman analogue in Wildstorm before they were a DC property, so make of that what you will.
Finally, Marvel had an unspoken tendency of “You can be gay, but you have to do crime”. And Mystique took that personally. Mystique was created 1978 (Cockrum) and Destiny in 1981 (Claremont & Byrne). Claremont always wrote them as a couple, and several later writers followed that lead. But it wasn’t until 2019 that Mystique was allowed to call Destiny her wife; and they used their wedding in 2023 as a cover for a heist. Royalty, truly.
And then, of course, I launched into a speed round of queer characters in mythology: Orestes & Pylades, Loki, Iphis & Ianthe, Enkidu & Gilgamesh. This was followed by a speed round of queer characters in comics: Bobby Drake, Mystique (specifically as a trans and/or gender fluid), Connor Hawke, Wonder Woman, Rachel Summers & Betsy Braddock, Pyro, Poison Ivy, Daken Akihiro, Escapade. I also hit upon The Sandman specifically: The Corinthian, Desire, Wanda, Hal, Foxglove, Hazel and Jenny. And for the non-capes and spandex fans: Wicked + Divine, The Old Guard, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Hex Americana, Liebstrasse (historical fiction), Brooms (BIPOC 1930s magical fantasy) & Washington’s Gay General (graphic novel biography).
The panel begins its wrap up with “Not canonically queer (yet) but big queer vibes”. This included Black Tom Cassidy & Juggernaut, Namor & Quicksilver, Emma Frost, Magik, Roberto DaCosta (Sunspot), Ultimate Spider-Man’s Peter Parker, The Summers-Logan thing, Dionysus, Athena, Artemis, and finally how the history of the X-Men is Charles Xavier and Magneto making their relationship everybody’s problem.
I moved on to shouting out some of the queer creators working in comics right now: Vita Ayala, Leah Williams, Seanan McGuire, Grant Morrison, Charlie Jane Anders, Al Ewing, Kieron Gillen, Tini Howard, Steve Orlando, Steve Foxe. And with some of the translators working in mythology who are re-establishing the queer characters and narratives: Emily Wilson (The Odyssey & The Iliad), Caroline Alexander (The Iliad), Maria Dehvana Headley (Beowulf), Shadi Bartsch (The Aeneid), Anne Carson (sooo many plays), Stephanie McCarter (Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles).
And I closed with my favorite bit: The Hills I Will Die On. Artemis is asexual; I will die mad they canceled Leah Williams’ X-Factor, which was the queerest thing Marvel ever published; and Nightcrawler, Logan, and Colossus were a throuple during their early run (and probably got back together in the Krakoa Era). You can’t tell me Fastball Special isn’t code and LET’S TALK ABOUT ESAD RIBIC’S COVER for Wolverine #6. There is NO HETERO explanation for that art and Ribic will tell you “Nobody at Marvel noticed!”
Where You May Have Seen It:
Emerald City Comic Con 2023
Salt Lake FanX 2024
