On Saturday, July 28th, Andy Mangels moderated the 20th "Gays in Comics" panel at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. The panel featured a wide variety of participants and a wide range of topics. On hand were Alison Bechdel, the writer/artist of the critical best-seller Fun Home and the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For"; Chuck Kim, a writer for the Heroes TV series and many DC Comics titles; Charles "Zan" Christensen, the co-founder of Prism Comics and writer of the upcoming The Mark of Aeacus; Alonso Duralde, pop culture critic, author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men, and former Advocate arts editor; and Megan Gedris, Queer Press Grant-winning artist of the Yu+Me webcomic. The secret sixth panelist was none other than DC Comics President Paul Levitz.

The entire panel and Q&A session have been transcribed by Charles "Zan" Christensen.

Andy Mangels: It's fantastic to see this room almost full again. Every year… this has been an interesting affair for twenty years now. When I first proposed the gays in comics panel to San Diego Comic-Con back in 1987, it was a big question mark: Would anyone show up?

And yet, as you may recall, they scheduled it to be at a theater. We were on a stage, proscenium lights and everything, in a 4000 seat theater complex, and I think they had about seven hundred people show up. It was… it was a mess.

Every year since then has been incredible. We have people in the room here, I think, probably are… is anybody under 20 at this point?

Yay, good for you. Thank you for being here. You weren't born when this panel got started.

[laughter]

Thank you, thank you.

We have a spectacular panel this year. Every year it's a great pleasure to try and [inaudible] pick out who the people should be to talk about the issues of gays in comics, whatever those issues are. And this year we have a really unique and very diverse panel of people whom I'm going to introduce right now and bring them all up on stage.

And coming up, this is Chuck Kim, who is coming up first. Chuck is a comics writer and most recently wrote the highest rated-episode of Heroes.

[applause]

Next we have Megan Gedris, who is the writer and artist of Yu+Me, the webcomic. She also won the Prism Press Grant.

[applause]

And we have Alonso Duralde. He is a past Arts Editor at the Advocate, where he wrote a lot of comics coverage, and he is the author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men.

[applause]

Next up is Charles "Zan" Christensen, who is one of the founders of Prism Comics, and he's doing a new book called The Mark of Aeacus.

[applause]

And we're making this gentleman's sign up really quickly; we said in the thing that we would probably have a special guest here, and his schedule did permit it so… this is one of the gentlemen who's been involved in comics and comics fandom for a very long time, and has been very instrumental in the production of many comics and creators in this room have gotten work from him and…

He is our token straight person for the year, and the other person that Roger's known the longest, and his [inaudible], Mr. Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics.

[applause]

Please note that Paul is the first major publisher to ever appear on this panel in 20 years.

[applause]

And finally, this is her first San Diego Comic-Con. Last night, she won an Eisner Award. I think she's won every award just about possible, except for the Pulitzer, and isn't that coming up?

Please welcome the author of Fun Home and "Dykes to Watch Out For," Alison Bechdel.

[applause]

And unless he's in the room and [inaudible] Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, I do not believe will be joining us today. Or if you're there, please speak up.

Okay, all right. So I can sit down…

…and immediately resume talking into a microphone.

[laughter]

So the first thing I'm going to do is ask each of the panelists to actually introduce themselves and tell you a little more about them, their work, their experience in the industry, and so forth. So…

Chuck Kim: Okay. My name is Chuck Kim and… I got my start… I basically decided to make my mom cry by not going to law school and instead get a job working at DC comics.

[inaudible]

And let's see… while I was there I was amazed because, starting out, when I was reading comic books you would never see gay characters. You might see, like, some guys sitting close but that was about as good as it gets.

But it was really cool because, then you had Vertigo comics [inaudible]

From there I decided to [inaudible] and moved to Los Angeles and this will be my second season of Heroes.

[applause]

Megan Gedris: My name is Megan Rose Gedris, and I got my start in webcomics, and my first one with lesbians… I actually started out doing comics about gay boys because I was in the closet and I thought, "Ooh, that'll thrown 'em off my trail."

I finally starting doing lesbian webcomics and I came up with one called "YU+Me", and I actually won the Prism grant last year, so that's online and just got published. And in addition to that, I came in second in Platinum Studios comic book challenge last year with my entry, "I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space."

[inaudible]

[applause]

Alonso Duralde: My name's Alonso Duralde. I am really not a comics professional in any way whatsoever.

Before today the closest I have really gotten to this whole thing of comic books is buying 40 dollars a week worth of them like everybody else.

I started reading comics as a kid and then kind of stopped a while and then in college somebody dangled Watchmen and Ambush Bug in front of me and it was all over.

As Andy mentioned, I was Arts and Entertainment Editor at The Advocate for 6 years and I was hell-bent on getting a lot more comics coverage, which is to say any comics coverage, in The Advocate. And I think I pulled it off, with Alison and then Chuck and Andy wrote lots of great stuff for us. And so I guess now I'm sort of a free-floating kind of pop culture critic. Most recently I wrote the book 101 Must-see Movies for Gay Men.

And my husband will happily sell you one after this is thing is over, and I will sign it for you.

[applause]

Charles "Zan" Christensen: Hi, I'm Zan. I got involved in… I think my first convention was 1998 or 1999, I can't remember which, and I was presented with this sixteen page, photocopied Out in Comics booklet that Andy had put together, with highlighter pink triangles on every front cover… you know, putting in the effort.

And I was blown away. It was something that I didn't expect to see at the convention. And so I really wanted to help out; I worked on a few issues of the Out in Comics book, and that actually was the project that Prism grew out of. And so… it's all Andy's fault.

So we founded Prism Comics in 2003, and I was President for two years, and then took some time off to work on my own project, which is a mythological, erotical, horror-fying comic book called The Mark of Aeacus which is coming out in September from Class Comics.

[applause]

Paul Levitz: Hello, I am in the traditional Jewish role of a persecuted minority.

[laughter]

Roger is a very old friend, and somehow between him and Patty they figured out some reason I should be here that I'm not entirely aware of.

But I've been a comics fan pretty much all my life, for those of you who don't know, I did an early fanzine which was called Etcetera, and later the Comics Reader, one of the first sort of indie guides to the comic book world in the early 1970s.

Came out to San Diego and… first time at a convention here in 1974 I think… and now most years since.

I'm not particularly wise in the issues that are being discussed here or historically knowledgable or claiming too much more virtue than generally being oblivious. But I'm told that oblivious neutrality is better than some of what goes on in the world, and I'll stick to that as my best claim to righteousness.

[applause]

Alison Bechdel: I'm Alison Bechdel and I draw the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" which I've been doing for almost 25 years, next year will be my 25th anniversary.

[applause]

I have to say I feel sort of like an imposter being here at Comic-Con because my career has sort of taken place in a different sphere than in the comics world proper and this industry, so I'm very excited, I feel like these trajectories are meeting and I'm very happy to be here at this moment. And I just want to make a small tribute to Howard Cruse…

[applause]

When I was just out of college and failed to get into any graduate art programs, I moved to New York City and I was just dicking around looking at temp jobs and I went to the gay bookstore and found this comic book called Gay Comics that Howard had edited, and here were people doing comics, which is something I kind of liked to do, I was kind of interested in doing funny drawings, but they were writing about their lives as gay people, and so it really made me realize, "I could do this." And so I did. And so I wanted to acknowledge that that really [inaudible] that Howard has made my career possible.

[applause]

AM: And besides being one of the gay gadflies in the industry, I have been writing comics now since the late 80s as well as in the fanzine field and at this point I have 15 novels published, as well as numerous nonfiction books. Three of them are USA Today bestsellers, although I have yet to be courted to write a book for a major company because I'm a bestselling author. But… I'll get on the New York Times list and then they'll want me.

The last few years I've been working for a DVD company doing a lot of special features on programs like He-Man and She-Ra and Isis and it's been an interesting time for me working on these projects because one of the things that I promised early on was that I would try to maintain diversity in all my work, not just in representing people of all different ages and colors and races and things like that, but also in representing people of different sexual orientations.

I was very proud several years ago to introduce the first major gay characters into the Star Trek franchise, now almost every book has gay characters. When I told some stories about that to one of the Star Wars authors last year, she says, "Well, are there any gay characters in Star Wars?" and I said, "Not yet there aren't." And she says, "Well, I'll fix that."

And so last month a Star Wars book came out in which a major character in the book mythos was revealed to be gay, and it's a major, really tough butch character.

I discovered that in doing this for so many years, that often times it's not a question of, "Is it appropriate to put gay or lesbian, or bi or trans characters into something," it's a question of "Are the creators asking themselves to do so; are they even thinking about us?"

And so, being gay myself, of course I always think about us, and so I always try and reflect that in my work. Even the documentaries I did for DVD I would interview gay fans and include that.

So speaking of which, we have on our panel a range of not only ages but types of things: we have a comic strip artist, a publisher, an activist and writer, an entertainment writer, a webcomic and manga person, a comic writer and TV person and a novelist and comic person, so it's a pretty wide range, it's not just all… we aren't all artists or aren't all writers or things like that, and this being the 20th year, I thought it was interesting to reflect on what has changed.

Megan, being the youngest has perhaps seen less change or more change in the last few years than perhaps some of the oldest.

But as I was talking with Paul Levitz the other day, I had completely by happenstance, and for research on one of the books I was doing, had picked up an old Comic Reader from 1972 that was edited by Paul. You remember this one?

PL: Indeed.

AM: In which he was discussing Duffy Vohland, who had finally been hired as a professional inker. And I said to Paul that Duffy was one of the first people that we've been able to identify as a gay artist, and when Duffy passed away several years ago, that became more publicly known, but even prior to that, we can't even… even the comics scholars cannot identify anybody who may or may not have been gay prior to that. That's 30, 35 years ago, it wasn't that we didn't exist… it's that, there was nothing to come out to. So there has been a major shift over the last 20 years and even prior to that.

So I wanted to have the panelists address that, each of you, what's changed in the last 20 years in your eyes, what's changed maybe prior to that, and how do you think that will reflect on the future. Whoever wants to go first…

AD: Okay, I'll take a stab. One thing that I was trying to think about, you know, what I was going to have to contribute here and I think that what's happening with gays and popular culture is not that far off with what's happening with comics and popular culture in that nobody would cop to being a comics reader, and I think that comics were sort of generally looked at as kind of embarrassing and now because they figured out a way to make money off of us, both comics and queers are palatable to the larger entertainment sphere, that could be a reach, I don't know.

But I think that part of it that there's a comfort level, in that… as far as gay visibility, all the effort that's been going into making ourselves known politically, making ourselves known in entertainment, and I think with comics it's become a thing where there's something that's going on, there's a democratization of the culture where highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow all kind of blurs together. And so you can read comics and read Proust and not have to be embarrassed by either of them, you know.

So I think that they each have their own kind of closet that's being shattered and part of why that's working is because they're finding a way to make it palatable and profitable for a mainstream audience.

Discuss.

AB: That's really very apt, Alsonso. I think that clearly, my career bears that whole theory out very well.

You know I started out completely as an outsider in every way, not only doing cartoons, which is not like a terribly glamorous pursuit twenty-five years ago, but by doing cartoons about this not very glamorous subculture, but strangely, over the past quarter century, both things became more marketable and more palatable and now I'm like, "everyone thinks I'm really cool."

MG: As I said, I work in webcomics, and I've noticed that with webcomics you don't have an editor, and you don't have a publisher. If you want to do it, you can do it. And nobody can tell you, based on the content or the art at all, what you can't do, and I think with that, I have seen a lot of webcomics featuring GL characters because there's no one to tell you that you can't. And I think it's really opened up a lot of diverse stories, not even just in GL fields but with every kind of story that you could possibly imagine, you can do that in webcomics and nobody can stop you.

CK: I guess, for 20 years I mean I just remember as a kid like one of my favorite comics, as I'm sure it was for a lot of people in here, was the X-Men because you know you had people who had super powers and they weren't really well-liked so they could keep it in the closet kind of and I just remember I was sort of astounded growing up that it's like okay, there's 55 X-Men now and not one gay one yet?

It's like only in the past few years that there's finally been gay X-Men, and you see mainstream characters now being able to… there's role models for us. For us who grew up reading comics and these characters were people who we wanted to be like growing up, we finally had examples of people who were like us.

And I just think that's amazing.

ZAN: I think a lot of it is that our demands have increased. Our self-confidence has risen to the point of … you know, whereas, in 1985 when I was reading X-Men and New Mutants comics and there was this great allegory that was talking about hiding, and being different, and being a good person who has good things to offer but being shunned, that allegory, that was very strong and very powerful to me and it helped me in a lot of ways, and now I'm older and I want more.

I want my real story. I don't want something that pretends to speak to me and speak to everybody else who feels something else, whether it's racial or religious or whatever, I want stories about my real life, and I feel kind of like, angry and uppity, and… [roars]

…and I think that you need to have people who are not willing to be satisfied in order to get to a place where people can just be comfortable and relax, you know. So I think, Alison's panel the other day which was great, she was talking about how DTWOF kind of carved out a space for Fun Home, in that Dykes to Watch Out For was pushing and pushing and pushing, and being very unapologetic and having a real political agenda, and then Fun Home just wants to exist in a space where it's not going to be harassed, and picked apart, and just allowed to be a real human story, and I think that that's true.

PL: I think you have to somewhat step out of your own cultural issue here and look at it in the context of where comics as a whole were 20 years ago. You really at the moment then, that for the first time comics in America were emerging from a period of complete homogenization.

There were no characters who had religions. There were no characters who had meaningful ethnic backgrounds, statistically speaking. There were no characters who had possibly controversial points of view. Everything was being treated for many many years in American comics as being "safe." And safe meant there was nothing anyone could possibly argue about.

You were about 15 years, 18 years past the point where American comics first allowed characters of color into the books. Begrudgingly, slowly, with great concern that they would receive no distribution in the southern half of the country as a result. And the evolution was not specific to the issue of gay characters or gay issues, but evolution that said were going to talk about things. It's about 20 years since Alan's run on Swamp Thing, which was the first sort of mainstream title that took the Code off , and it was really radical because he was doing a story about women's menstrual cycles. And the moon. And that was a scary topic for comics to be handling at that time.

We've grown so much as a medium.

Partly because of the sort of cross-connection between the underground world and the overground world, encouraging the underground, defying the convictions. Partly because of the retreat to the comics shop which took comics away from the places with the greatest diversity of political pressure possible. In a sense, comics became much less diverse for a period of time. When you look at the mid 80s It's probably the moment at which comics began their march into liberality. The comics shop was an environment that meant we were basically writing and drawing for our friends, or people like us.

People like us were not defined to be straight, or gay, white, or of color, but someone made a political cartoon joke at some point during the Clinton administration, something about being to the left of Big Bird on the political spectrum. And by and large the American mainstream comic tradition began to move into that at that time.

That march enabled people to begin to move to territory that before had either been expressly forbidden or simply ignored as a matter of safety. I think for the large companies, it was very much a process of individual writers and artists beginning to want to tell tales, it was sometimes process of characters telling their stories.

I'm credited/accused with an early treatment of what might be a relationship between two women in the Legion of Super-Heroes. And I can't quite tell you as the writer whether they had one or not, or whether I intended it or not. That was how the characters started to write themselves, and if that's what you read into it, and that worked for you, God bless you, and if you didn't read that into it, and it wasn't there. that's just fine, too. I'm not, frankly, sure what was going on there. At some point the characters [inaudible]

As you live through those next 20 years, and everything that was done to change the broad culture made topics that were previously forbidden commonplace, made overt or routine racism, sexism, genderism, whatever you want to define it as, a little more unacceptable in our society, that begins to slip back onto the writing community and the art community and they begin doing more things feeling more comfortable in the mainstream of the culture and the work evolves.

Some of those are leaps of great courage, Howard's work on Stuck Rubber Baby, was I think one of the things that we first published that was a strong piece of work on the subject, on point, about someone's life who was prepared to stand up and say this is my life and I want to tell a story that is about my life because someone out there wants to hear it. A lot of it was just sort of, "Oh, I guess there's other kinds of folks out there and maybe that means I can have a different kind of character somewhere in here. And it's kind of a slow march with all of that.

But it was a very different world, certainly, 20 years ago, and in this regard certainly a healthier one today. I don't know if I'd yet class us as healthy, but healthier.

AB: I'm struck by something, listening to you say this about the difference between working inside the system and working outside the system because I very much have been working outside this whole industry and system because there wasn't any way for me to be part of it in the early 80s. But I have to say now I have this newfound respect for people who have done the work over the years in the system, you know, writing these gay characters, working from within. It's very…

I couldn't have done it but I'm glad you did it.

AD: I think a lot of it boils down to… this is the conversation that this panel seems to be having every year about our representation and our… and I think a lot of us do it… are we waiting for DC and Marvel, basically, to start acknowledging that this stuff is happening or are we looking to forge our own paths. And tell our own stories and support the people that are doing that stuff. And you know, if DC and Marvel want to throw something in occasionally, great, but I don't know if the whole bar of this needs to be set on that. It's sort of like waiting for Hollywood studios or the three major networks, and what are they doing as opposed to what's happening independently, what's happening on cable , what's happening in other media.

Because I think it gets a little exhausting to just want to see ourselves in the big glitzy expensive stuff, but we lose sight of so much other interesting things that are going on that are not designed to go to this giant mainstream homogenized audience.

AM: I'm going to ask each of you specific questions about your work and about this topic, so I'll start down at this end. Chuck, outside of comics, Heroes is the biggest thing you've probably worked on, and Heroes is a show that had sort of a gay character, which there's a little controversy about that. I'm sure if somebody else doesn't ask that somebody else will ask. But I hear that there's also hope that there's more gay characters coming up. Do you want to address the issue of… and I should say too, point out, other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and some minor characters on Babylon 5 I think, I'm stretching to think if there's any others, this is the first time that, other than Buffy, that a show aimed at our audience is even acknowledging gays and lesbians.

CK: Okay, so, for those of you who don't know, on Heroes we have a character called Claire, she's a cheerleader, and she started out as, you know, she's the most popular girl and she tells one person her secret, who is sort of this sort of outcast kid, and we… from the beginning the character was always written to be gay, and eventually he would be coming out, and part of… one of the things that gets her to sort of, embrace her powers is that he would come out of the closet to her.

Not that he's been keeping it a secret, but it's like… the other cheerleaders would sort of taunt him by calling him all sorts of gay slurs or whatever, and the thing was, is… we, the writers always wanted him to be gay, NBC always wanted him to be gay, but I guess… lack of communication or whatever, even though we thought it was pretty clear, the actor didn't really get it.

When he actually did read the script and everything like that, there was a but of a shuffle there and I think in our defense, we did, we sort of adjusted the dialogue a little, we didn't actually have him say "I am gay", which was actually typewritten in there but, we basically said, you know, "I like being different", and that is sort of what makes me, me. So we hoped that at least the implication was there and we hoped later to actually have him come out. But because this particular actor was already tied to another pilot which was then made into a series, he wasn't really available to us any more. So unfortunately we could really resolve the issue.

But it's not because the network said no, and it's not because the studio said no, the writers all really wanted it to happen, and frankly we were all pissed when it didn't happen… You know, that's that situation.

We start out this season, we have a lot of characters, they're each getting their own storylines, and there was talk of Claire having a friend but due to another sort of acting snafu, not because of her fault, it looks like she may be disappearing. Anyway, without revealing anything, it doesn't look like it's going to happen for right now but, we also recognize that this is really disappointing to the gay people on the show, to the gay viewers, so when we do do it, it's going to be done right and it will be good.

So for right now it's a little hazy, but when it does happen, it will be done in a really good way.

AM: Megan, as somebody who does both webcomics and manga, you aren't doing Yaoi because Yaoi is boy love, you're doing, what is lesbian manga called?

MG: Yuri.

AM: Yuri, okay. So you're doing webcomics and Yuri. Do you want to talk about what some of the acceptance levels are going on there, because manga is so strong in the market right now, and so forth, are you finding it significantly easier to get attention and are your sales reflective of that and so forth?

MG: I think it's a lot easier getting Yaoi across because there's whole companies devoted to translating Yaoi and only a few companies have just now started more lesbian manga, which there is a whole lot of out there, but I've always felt a little frustrated, that I'm sort of a minority within a minority. We're starting to see more and more gay male things but I was getting frustrated at the lack of gay female things, which was why I started drawing lesbian manga to begin with.

I don't know that the manga style has anything to do with any sort of popularity I might have because , it's been getting less and less stylistically manga lately and no backlash for that, but…

I don't know what it is that for some reason there's a lot of companies really interested in publishing gay male stories than lesbian stories.

AD: I'm just curious, is it that straight women read the gay stuff but straight dudes don't read the lesbian stuff? Well I know that's a big audience…

MG: You know, you'd think!

I do know a lot of straight females who do read… actually I know a lot of gay females who read Yaoi which boggles my mind a little bit. There's some really hardcore stuff that they're translating, too!

I know, also, straight men who will read my… I have a lot of straight male fans, but you know…

I don't know what it is. Because you'd think, you know, straight males supposedly are the biggest readers of comics, and from what I hear through the grapevine, straight men like lesbians.

[laughter]

I was hoping to try and cash in on that a little.

ZAN: They like straight women who pretend to be lesbians for pay.

AM: Thank you Megan.

[applause]

Continues in Part II.