by Darieck Scott
Fantasy
What you read and see on the page is often fantastic, and the structure of the storytelling comics engage is fundamentally informed by fantasy. In comics, anything can happen: Visitors from other planets fire lasers from their retinas and lift buildings with their bare hands. Invincible, beautiful warriors are shaped from clay, and nerdy scientists are transformed into green-skinned behemoths and balletic pugilists who swing from New York City skyscrapers. Civilizations are abundant throughout the universe, and not one but many other-than-human races share the earth with us—mutants, water-breathing Atlanteans, Eternals, Deviants, gods old and new, immortal Amazons, mole people. Beagles lead rich, linguistically mediated fantasy lives; cats plot world domination; raccoons perform spectacular burglaries; impossibly gorgeous and overendowed women and men enjoy endless orgasms; space gods rove the universe eating planets; robots build their own families and establish their own polities; and businessmen and magicians travel into alternate dimensions unbound by euclidean geometries and walk on winding pathways of crayon-smudged color. Due to comics’ serial production—generally appearing as ongoing stories paced by intervals, whether daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly—action and occurrence are elongated, elaborated, as well as condensed and abbreviated. Time moves backward as well as forward, as the story happens not once but as many times as it’s read, and the sequence may be read in or out of order, whether in linear narrative or in jarring non sequitur, perceived at a page-length glance or panel by panel. Whatever was seen to “happen” in the story before is revised, rewritten, redone, and undone.
Queer
There’s something queer about comics. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from proper art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached to queer life. Moreover, the medium has had a long history as a top reading choice among those “queer” subjects variously called sexual deviants, juvenile delinquents, dropouts, the working class, and minorities of all stripes. Despite this, comics studies and queer theory have remained surprisingly alienated from one another. On the one hand, comics studies’ tendency to analyze the formal codes of sequential art separately from social questions of sexual identity and embodied difference has often led to a disregard for a nuanced queer and intersectional critique of the comics medium. On the other, the prevailing assumption that mainstream comics (i.e., the superhero genre) embody nationalistic, sexist, and homophobic ideologies has led many queer theorists to dismiss comics altogether or else to celebrate a limited sample of politically palatable alternative comics as exemplars of queer visual culture. In this logic, “Queer zines yes! Superhero comics no!”