By Ani Bundel
Since the Marriage Equality Act became the law of the land, queer rights have taken on a new visibility in America, extending what was once viewed as a binary “Gay vs Straight” into a deeply diverse LGBTQ+ world. As with so many social revolutions, comics have been at the forefront of reflecting that shift in society, even if the on-screen adaptations have not. With that in mind, Prism Comics brought the “Transgender and Nonbinary Stories in Comics: Past, Present, and Future” panel to San Diego Comic Con 2023 to discuss the history of these comics and where their future lies.
Moderator Tara Madison Avery (We’re Still Here) lead a large panel, including Sonya Saturday (J.K. Rowling and the Ungrateful Fans), Maddie Jacobus (The Out Side), A. C. Esguerra (Eighty Days), Kristen Enos (Berserker), Gaia WXYZ (We Belong), and The Beat’s own Rebecca Oliver Kaplan, who is a Prism Comics Board Member, through the conversation.
Jacobus (they/them) started, talking about how drawing comics can be great for self-actualization, and then looking back over the decade of webcomics covering their transition seeing patterns in the writing and the stories. Jacobus’ story was a positive one, with hope for the future that body modification is becoming more accepted. That thread wove through a bunch of the panelist’s stories. WXYZ (they/them) also uses their artistry to work though their struggles. The panels shown of their artwork, which are science fiction stories set in their own worldbuild, the gooniverse, featured them in conversation with their body in a dimension that was made up of her body.
As the first comic art professor at Berkeley, they just bring their passion for this medium, and show up for their students as much as they can. Esguerra (they/them) is also a science fiction writer, whose debut graphic novel, Eighty Days, is an epic set in an alternate universe of Earth in the 1930s, and populated with queer characters. “I wasn’t interested in telling the same old story about a sad straight white man,” they joked. “I wanted to do one about a sad gay Asian one!” Inspired by a mix of Ghibli and Casablanca, they were drawn to the drama of the era. They also showed the panel a comics page where they came out as non-binary, admitting they worked through the experience on the page.
Saturday (she/her) got a lot of laughs in introducing her book, J.K. Rowling and the Ungrateful Fans, which is a satire, but not of Harry Potter. Instead, Saturday used Shel Silverstein‘s The Giving Tree, “the book about a tree who got turned into a book,” to tell the story about the writer and her fans. Her more serious book, The Greatest Thing You’ve Ever Seen In Your Life, tackles her childhood in a very religious community in Florida interpolated with her adult life first before and after their transition, including their time in the porn industry. Unlike most of the panel, she was less positive, talking about not being able to go home to Florida due to the anti-trans laws.
Enos is an oldhead who came out in the 1980s, and identifies more traditionally as a lesbian. However, she reminded the crowd that even though the alphabet of queer identities might not have been in use at the time, they were all there. She writes comics that feature transgender and nonbinary characters, who works as an IT specialist to the gender care services department. Her real-life experiences and her background in activism help inform her stories as is her drive to educate LGBTQ+ youth on the recent history of the movement, from the AIDS crisis to today.
As a journalist, Kaplan (she/he) talked about how it really does fall to those who cover comics to step up and find these stories to put in front of people. “It’s up to us to cover them.” As someone who identifies as bi-gender, she noted that it’s hard to find comics with that sort of representation, but that when companies do take steps towards recognizing trans and non-binary stories, it’s something to celebrate. That note of hope suggested that perhaps the future is up to us, should we choose to work to change it. The arc of the universe can bend towards justice, but we all need to jump up and down on it, and these comics are just getting started.
Miss any of our earlier SDCC ’23 coverage? Find it all here!
