dirge writes about comics and comic history

In a media landscape that often ignored, caricatured, or pathologized queer people, underground comics offered readers the rare opportunity to encounter themselves reflected on the page. For many gay and lesbian readers in the 1970s and 1980s, these comics provided not only entertainment, but evidence that lives like theirs existed at all. Yet representation has never been politically neutral, and visibility alone does not guarantee inclusion. Early queer comics frequently centered a narrow image of acceptable gay identity: white, male, middle-class, attractive, and socially assimilable. While these “gay ghetto” comics helped establish a visible queer culture, they also reproduced hierarchies that excluded queer people who existed outside of the dominant gay habitus. In response, alternative and underground queer cartoonists developed a more confrontational body of work that rejected both heterosexual norms and the conformity emerging within mainstream gay culture itself. Through satire, autobiographical storytelling, and intersectional critique, artists such as Robert Kirby, Roberta Gregory, and Jennifer Camper used comics to challenge restrictive ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and community. Queer comics functioned not simply as representation, but as counterpublic spaces where marginalized queer people could critique dominant culture, construct alternative identities, and reclaim visibility on their own terms.

While the gay community is often seen as unified, people often don’t take into account the individual tastes and personalities of gay people. For every gay man who adores Lady Gaga or Madonna, there’s a gay man who only listens to Nine Inch Nails or Sublime, or a lesbian who loves synth music. In Sina Shamsavari’s essay Gay Ghetto Comics and the Alternative Gay Comics of Robert Kirby, Shamsavari writes about the ‘dominant gay habitus’, or the dominant gay culture/stereotype that overlooks and obscures less respectable or ‘marketable’ gay people - people of color, the poor, the fat, and the working class. Media depicting queer culture, including comics, often depicts visibly gay culture as it’s seen both within and outside of the queer community. As a whole, the media depends on ‘show don’t tell’, and so wields gay signifiers and stereotypes to remain recognizable. This isn’t to say that this is necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of gay people who can see themselves in the hairless gay Adonis type, the man who wears expensive cologne to the gym and gossips over fat-free lattes. But there are, as mentioned earlier, plenty of gay people who feel othered by this depiction. In his book Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner writes, “Counterpublics of sexuality and gender… are scenes of association and identity that transform the private life they mediate. Homosexuals can exist in isolation; but gay people or queers exist by virtue of the world they elaborate together, and a gay or queer identity is always fundamentally inflected by the nature of that world.” If there’s no place for you in the straight community, and no place for you in the gay community, where do you go? 

“Gay ghetto” is a term Shamsavari has come up with to encapsulate the early “gay Adonis” type of comics that were being published. The subgenre “participates in the construction of the dominant gay habitus, representing the gay community as relatively stable, unified and… how certain types of gay male bodies are represented as desirable and acceptable.” In 1993, Mark Fenster wrote in his essay Queer Punk Fanzines: Identity, Community, and the Articulation of Homosexuality and Hardcore that the dominant positions in gay communities are often held by “middle class adult homosexuals who are more assimilated within dominant economic and social structures”. “The gay habitus constructed through marketing and in gau publications serves to make visible such gay and lesbian individuals - that is, those who are otherwise empowered.” Shamsavari adds. Gay ghetto comics are an archive of this gay habitus, showing how they were deployed in the community to display an otherwise invisible sexuality. 

In the comic Chelsea Boys, Glen Hanson and Allen Neuwirth capture what later became known as the “clone look” - gay men who look and act the same, like the stereotype gay men are thought to be. This was done with affection, not malice, like the friendly teasing done from a close family member. Despite the otherness some characters might feel, like Nathan (the 42-year-old everyman of the strip), they’re still ultimately represented as ‘at home’ in their community. It’s a safe space you share with others, even if you happen to struggle with your looks or weight. This isn’t to say ‘short, dumpy’ characters like Nathan don’t feel inadequate compared to their handsomer, fitter companions. ‘Average’ characters are offered as an opposing character design to their more confident and fashionable friends, partners or roommates. Nathan feels inadequate compared to his blonde hunk roommate Sky, who embodies the qualities he both desires to have for himself and in a partner. You can see this phenomenon in Jerry Mills Poppers (1982) when character Yves tries to dye his hair blonde to be like his hunky friend Billy. He ultimately fails to ‘act blonde’, the punchline being Yves bemoaning that his friend Andre “forgot to dye my brain blond!” The lead character of the comic Troy is both fit and thin, but is often shown anxious that he isn’t fit or thin enough to attract a handsome sexual partner. The main character Troy’s friend Rigo gains weight further into the story, and promptly becomes undesirable to the many sexual partners he had before the weight gain. His lack of personal discipline is shown in his belly, which is a source of horror to both himself and other characters. Later in the strip, he works to lose all of his gained weight. 

These fears are examples of what gay critic Michaelangelo Signorile calls the “body fascism” of the gay scene. “The circuit party scene privileges … a certain kind of aesthetic and body, at least with the ephemera that’s used to advertise and promote it, and that’s the buff gay man who’s in his 30s,” writes Russell Westhaver on the topic, whose early 2000s research focused on gay men and circuit parties. This marginalizes the less ideal - the people who don’t party, those without rock hard abs, and those with no interest in the common ‘gay scene’ - while building up what the ‘gay man’ should look like. Some comic strips, such as Joe Phillips’ Adventures of a Joe Boy, ended with advertisements for clothing, actively shaping the fashion sense and taste ideals of the readers. It’s important to note again that these comics are still important, both culturally and historically. Chelsea Boys, Poppers, and Adventures of a Joe Boy helped thousands of gay men find representation in places they never had before. But it would be a disservice to not mention the disenfranchised that felt all the more left out. It is under this umbrella that alternative gay comics began to rise in the late 80s and early 90s. 

Robert Kirby is a large name in the underground queer comics not only for his own contributions (Private Club, Curbside), but for his work in the anthology scene. This work, specifically Boy Trouble (1994-2005), is described as helping to “galvanize a New Wave of gay male cartoonists… while also featuring more established creators,” by cartoonist Justin Hall. Kirby was inspired not only by the first four issues of Gay Comix (edited by Howard Cruse), but by the alternative punk scene - “by punks and upstarts and introverted alterna-people”. This is the very definition of the alternative underground comic scene, specifically the gay one. Even outside of his anthologies, Kirby’s work presents an alternative version of the gay community and habitus. In his work Private Club, he writes of the main character, “We were faggots, and proud of it, long before anybody invented queers.” Reading Private Club or any other early work by Kirby, one can see an alternative gay habitus being presented, one that exists even today as ‘alternative’ or ‘unpopular culture’. Kirby’s work and editorial influence did more than expand representation within gay comics; they helped cultivate a distinctly oppositional sensibility within queer underground culture. This sensibility would soon become more formally articulated through the emergence of “queercore,” a movement that similarly rejected both mainstream heterosexual norms and the increasingly assimilationist tendencies of gay culture itself. 

The term “queercore” was first brought about by provocateurs G. B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce through their 1980s zine J.D.s. Frustrated with feeling alienated from the more “official” LGBT culture, and inspired by the alternative comics and zines of the early 80s, they sought to create their own. Alternative gay cartoons could be called ‘queercore’, with the way they rebelled against both heterosexual and homosexual culture. Artists weren’t as interested in the idea of affirming gay communities, or even the gay identity - many of them dedicated strips to critiquing conformist gay culture or sharing more personal stories. Their comics were satirical, pointed, and often included caricatures of the body fascist Adonis type. As Shamsavari describes them, the comics were “clearly motivate[d] by a desire to present a more substantive critique of gay culture than gay ghetto artists [did].” Alternative gay comics were marked with their hatred of body fascism, affirming the looks and bodies of various people outside of the more ‘typical’. While some only did partially, some completely rejected the music and style of the common gay habitus, embracing alternative fashion and subculture. Like gay ghetto comics, they were often set within queer spaces and communities, but from the view of someone who was an outsider even within those spaces. Chelsea Boys poked affectionate fun at the community from an insider perspective, while in an alternative comic, the teasing was much more pointed. 

My favorite example of this is Little Homer Sexual and His Long Suffering Gay Parents, a comic strip that follows the adventure of Homer Sexual as he rebels against his gay parents. The two of them represent the ‘body fascist’ type, both looking similar to each other and consistently talking and acting like the common gay stereotype. Homer Sexual rebels against his parents, a symbol of conformity, as a visible defiance of the ‘positive gay identity’ and complete rejection of the gay habitus. In one comic, his parents get him a copy of the comic ‘Bob and Rod’ (based off notable figure Bob Paris and Rod Jackson, both of whom gained prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a same-sex couple) in an effort to “help him become a little more ‘well-adjusted’.” To their delight, Homer Sexual leaves the house - is it to go to the gym? Or shop for clothes, or perhaps the newest Petshop Boys CD? No. And then, to their absolute horror, little Homer Sexual takes a can of spray paint to write “BOB AND ROD ARE FAGS” on the fence. This is an example of a less good-natured ribbing from the alternative gay scene, both reclaiming the slur ‘faggot’ while using it derogatorily against the’“in’ crowd of homosexuals. In many ways, both comics and lesbian art are examples of ‘unpopular culture’, and even more so were some of the lesbian comics in the alternative gay comic scene.The best example of this phenomenon is Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Butch: World’s Angriest Dyke!. In her essay about the topic, Yetta Howard writes that, for depictions of lesbians in the media, “the question of ‘legitimate’ representation has been less about necessarily gaining access to particular culture domains and more about the ways that it has been expressed in the domains to which it has gained access.” Roberta Gregory, much like other lesbians and feminists of the era, was growing disillusioned with the sanitized lesbian comics, the ones that worried about ‘good representation’ before anything else. Gregory wasn’t as interested in becoming a lesbian that others looked up to - she just wanted to make comics. Many lesbian spaces at the time were concerned about lesbian representation before anything else, denying the representation of lesbian identity politics in favor of simply showing lesbians existing. As with gay ghetto comics, it’s undeniable that this is important. But Gregory, as with Camper, did not think you should separate the politics entirely from the identity.

Bitchy Butch, the homosexual counterpart to her comic Bitchy Bitch, symbolized a social position that was difficult to identify with. It was a tongue in cheek critique of the community’s most rigid beliefs, a representation of a resentful version of the 1970s lesbian-feminism, displaced in a cultural landscape of queer fluidity. Butchy never really comes across as empowering or productive. She’s much more willing to “bitch” about things than try and change them. Bitchy Butch was also cathartic, a subtle nod to the exaggerated feelings of older lesbians who felt left behind by the movement, who felt they had no place in the new model of queer inclusiveness. She’s the characterization of queer hypocrisy, offensive and politically incorrect lesbianism. In some comics, Butchy calls the readers “jerks”, aligning her audience with the homophobia she observes in others. As Howard says, “Butch does not necessarily represent the notion that the world ought to be better than it is; instead she embodies the critique of a queer cultural moment that has already imagined itself as better. Even though Butch is often shown imagining things as worse as they are, ultimately what she signifies is the notion that inhabiting a sexually minor social position was better when LGBT identities were less accepted or unrecognized.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality can be used as another example of why queer comics from a non-white, non-cis, non-male perspective are important. In 1989, she described it as “an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic…, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex-based discrimination or race discrimination.” Imagine going to stand in an intersection that you told was for you, and it was empty of traffic or even cars. As you wait, a car comes along and hits you regardless - this is not a space for you, this is a space for the cars. How foolish you were to think you could stand there. But you entered the road to seek asylum from another intersection, and you were told you would be welcome there. Sometimes, you just have to split off and create your own road with traffic you control yourself. And that’s not to say it hasn’t been done, but instead of wondering where the pedestrians went, the cars get angered that they dare make a safe space for themselves — a space where the cars are excluded. And so repeats the phenomenon of Black women being hit at intersections, ad infinitum. We experience our identities through external interactions, and other people often harm us through these same interactions. Having your own space, or at the very least seeing your own representation, is the first step in metaphorically stopping cars from hitting people. Many queer artists actively responded to these exclusions through their work. Underground comics became one of the clearest examples of marginalized creators reclaiming the “intersection” for themselves, using humor, sexuality, and personal storytelling to depict identities that mainstream media ignored or misunderstood. Among these artists was Jennifer Camper.

Inspired by Wimmen’s Comix and Tits and Clits, Jennifer Camper started to draw what she felt. Like Roberta Gregory and Bitchy Butch, she mocked militant lesbian stereotypes while still managing to be clear about her own thoughts and beliefs. She joked about sex and kink, which helped normalize it in a time where queer sex was rarely discussed, and had a trademark sense of gallows humor. Some of her comics mocked societal expectations, and others told simple stories of queer people just living their life. In all of her comics, she was able to push her point through strong language and gallows humor. To continue the car analogy, Jennifer Camper is one of the lesbian artists who stepped forward to not only create her own road, but one where all pedestrians were safe and represented - in other words, she believed individuals could come together as a group to work to stop the traffic that would harm them. Camper identified as a “Lebanese-American Dyke”, and used this identity to help both inform her comics and represent a variety of other identities that she noticed were also poorly represented. “In all my comics, I'm exploring things like gender, race, class, and sexuality, and how they influence character and behavior.” she explained. “It's what those academic-types call ‘intersectionality.’ Stories about Arab American dykes, women factory workers, or older lesbian assassins are rare, so it gives me fresh territory. Most importantly, I'm trying to captivate both my readers and myself with juicy and compelling tales. “

Camper was one of the earliest contributors to both Gay Comix and the Lesbian Cartoonists’ Network, and she worked hard to build her community not just in real life, but in her comics, too. Her comics were a different type of reaction to the ghetto comics she would see at bookstores. Like other alternative comic artists of the time, she focused less on gay validation, and more on a topic of her own interest: how sexuality intersects with other artists and grassroot groups.  Her comics New Affinity Groups, Pride, and White Anxiety were all about fostering exchange in difference and bringing diverse communities together in dialogue. Tired of not seeing her  “own life and opinions portrayed in the arts and media”, she had to do it herself: “I was tired of seeing dykes shown as sad, downtrodden victims, who only have ever-so-gentle, white bread ‘lesbian tickle sex.’ I wanted to celebrate queer women having adventures, being sexy, dangerous, and victorious.” While the early gay and lesbian publications of the 70s and 80s often worked hand in hand, despite their differences, the late 80s and 90s began to see more of a schism, both in the world of publishing and sequential art. “Censorship existed with even these supposed radical editors,” she wrote in Rude Girls and Dangerous Women. “Feminists were afraid of being too lesbian; the dykes championed feminism but were leery of being too sexual or violent; the straight leftists celebrated sex and violence but where nervous about gays; and the gay boys weren’t interested in feminism. But by sneaking in between the party lines, I was able to get cartoons in print… My characters are mostly smart-assed, multi-racial, street smart, wild women. They ridicule their oppressors. They are proud and fearless. In my comics, dykes always get the last laugh.” Despite any censorship or difficulties she’s faced, she’s kept up the community building work since. Even now, years later, Camper does great things for the gay comics community. In 2015, she went on to found the two-day Queers & Comics Conference at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in New York City: “I wanted to celebrate and document our history… If we don't write our own history, it won't be preserved truthfully.”

In the early 70s, many female artists and authors noted that the early movement seemed to be mostly men, with very little content by women or for women. Many stories containing women were overtly sexual or misogynistic. They sought to correct this problem by coming together to form Wimmen’s Comix in 1972. The debut issue was a 3 page story written by Trina Robins, called “Sandy Comes Out” - the first known comic that treated its subject, a lesbian, with respect. This upset future movement maker and teacher Mary Wings, who believed that, while the story was a good start, “Sandy Comes Out” misrepresented and even fetishized the process of coming out. Importantly, Trina Robins was a straight woman. There were no lesbian comics besides this three page story, let alone a lesbian comic written by a fellow lesbian. And Wings would decide to change this: soon after the release of Wimmen’s Comix #1, she would create and self-publish one of the most important stories of the early movement, Come Out Comix - the first U.S.-released lesbian-made comic, and one made with no straight audience in mind. It also stands out as the first queer comic publication that didn’t follow any NSFW themes (as the existing gay stories pre-dating Wings were often fetishistic). Come Out Comix shows Wings’ own experience coming out. Sara Century writes, “...the story revolves around Mary's personal coming out and how it manifested as a quest of self-discovery rather than being a whimsical trot through subcultures for a bored middle-class woman (as was generally portrayed in media of the time). Wings walks us through not just her own experience, but the way her old friends fail to respond to her heartfelt letters in which she came out to them. Taking us back to a time when coming out for some meant writing dozens of letters to family and friends, Come Out Comix is indispensable as a time capsule as well as a heartfelt personal story of queerness in a way that, at the time, had not ever been explored within the medium.” 

Mary Wings, legend that she is, continued to create heart-wrenchingly honest comics. Dyke Shorts followed the same themes Come Out Comix did, and the way Wings repeatedly pushed the envelope began to catch the attention of others. The California Art Council funded her story Are Your Highs Getting You Down?, which tackled the issue of drug addiction. Her comics went on to address themes such as artificial insemination, writing lesbians into history, and even discovering your parents’ homosexuality. Her growing popularity was controversial, and several times, her book shipments were seized at the Canadian border due to “inappropriate content”. In 1978, California Proposition 6 - otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative - began to be talked about, putting her teaching dreams into jeopardy. The Briggs Initiative intended to prevent gay people from working with children under the assumption they would be groomed and ‘recruited’ into the gay movement. Even this didn’t stop her - Wings went on to draw Sappho dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing at the viewer and saying “WE WANT YOU!” Gay and feminist magazines began to diversify, running queer-centric comic strips; The Advocate, America’s oldest LGBT-interest magazine, often featured gag cartoons reflecting the gay lifestyle. They published Joe Johnson’s comics featuring the first ongoing gay characters, Miss Thing and Big Dick. Cathartic Comics (1977) by Ruper Kinnard showcased the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé, the first continuing gay African American comic characters. Wimmen’s Comix published “Modern Romance” by Roberta Gregory, and her later comics “Naughty Bits” and “Bitchy Butch”. NSFW gay comic collections like Meatmen were sometimes found to grace the shelves, but an anthology of non-sexual gay comics wasn’t fully collected until Kitchen Press published Gay Comix in 1979.

Kitchen Sink Press was the publisher of Howard Cruse’s underground comic Barefootz, and also a huge part of the movement against the Comics Code Authority (read more: Censorship in Comics). Five years into its publication, the character Barefootz character Headrack came out as gay in the story “Gravy on Gay”. Cruse describes this moment as “an explosion of long-repressed liberationist fury” - and around this time, he finally came out himself. Denis Kitchen, founder of Kitchen Sink Press, approached Cruse to edit the anthology of gay artists that would later become Gay Comix. Mangel said, “Howard was at that point one of the few openly queer cartoonists in the underground scene… nobody in mainstream comics was out, but in underground comics, there was a handful. The assumption was that Howard would know everybody. Because of course all gays and lesbians know each other! It's funny because we joke about that but there is some truth to the concept. Many of us that were queer pioneers did know people because people would come to us and say, you know, I'm not ready to be out yet, but here I am." Cruse was out, but not publicly, not in print. He was worried that it would add to his woes. Despite concerns, he ultimately came to the conclusion that “it would be cowardly to decline the editor’s position for those reasons.” Both Kitchen and Cruse recognized that gay people were mostly seen as a caricature by the world, something that was reflected in many of the NSFW and gag comics of the time. Because of this, Cruse decided to focus on the humanity and day-to-day side of queer people. He was openly inspired by the women that came before him that had formed Wimmen’s Comix, saying in an editor’s note in issue #4 that “the personal style of the comic book storytelling in Gay Comix was pioneered by women who put together Wimmen’s Comix when underground comics were still young.” Gay Comix is also notable for being a major piece of literature that frames comics as an uncensored art form, something that could throw out expectations and usual stereotypes in favor of the range of human experience. “In this comic book,” he wrote in #1, “You’ll find work by lesbians, gay men, and bisexual human beings. The subject is Being Gay. Each artist speaks for himself or herself. No one speaks for any mythical “average” homosexual. No one is required to be “politically correct”,” referring to the (still ongoing) problem of restriction and identity policing among the community. Gay Comix #3 is especially noted for being the first comic to positively show a trans man living his life. It was also the first issue to feature notes from readers. At issue #5, Bob Ross, publisher of the Bay Area Reporter gay newspaper, took over publication. The themes in Gay Comix were ranged and various, including:

Coming out and settling down

Grief

The hope for a more tolerant future

Domestic partner life

Internalized homophobia

Exploration and experimentation

Activism 

Struggling with being in the closet

AIDs and safe sex

Relationships between gay men and lesbians, and gay people and their mothers

Anti-gay buzzwords used in marketing to covertly platform homophobia

Both the joys and pitfalls of being a lesbian couple

Gay bashing

The agony of a crush

Monogamy

Illegal love under an oppressive government

Lesbian safe sex  in the face of AIDS

Homophobic bosses

Pronouns

Young heartbreak

Gay Comix was many people’s first experience with a comic book that they could see themselves in. “Oh, man!” Alison Bechdel said of the first time she saw a copy. “You can do cartoons about your real own life as a gay person.”

Issue #14 was the last magazine published under the title Gay Comix and not Gay Comics, a choice made by editor Andy Mangels in 1991 to separate it from the underground implication of “comix”. "At that time, I was the first out creator in mainstream comics to really push for LGBTQ creators. I wanted to make it completely gender-equal. This is long before we had the term non-binary. By making it gender-equal - at the time Wimmen's Comix was winding down - we were able to level the playing field. The second big change was: give people more money. So I was able to keep to a budget and everybody got raises. I upped the page count. And let's stop being in the underground. Let's make this mainstream. Let's distribute to comic book stores, not just LGBTQ bookstores. Get mainstream creators to contribute."

Mangels did this by approaching Todd McFarlane, creator and artist of Spawn - the #1 top-selling comic at the time. McFarlane put an inside cover advertising the anthology, but it was quickly pulled from the shelves. Retailers couldn’t possibly sell this to children - the blood and the violence was alright, but showing gay people existing would just be too far. McFarlane went to these retailers and stated, “You can return this issue for full credit, but you will never again be allowed to order Spawn.” This, threatening to directly attack green-filled pockets, successfully shut everyone up… And Spawn successfully advertised Gay Comics. 

In my personal opinion, it’s impossible to fully talk about the growth in societal acceptance without bringing up the underground comix movement, and especially Gay Comics (and the feminist publications that came before it). Who can tell how many gay people felt the same as Alison Bechdel, shocked that they could tell their own stories. Shocked, even, that others like them existed. I know I, for one, saw myself in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s comic Skim. It was a rush, realizing that I wasn’t the only one out there. There were people just like me, and not only were we living and thriving, we were able to tell stories about it. Stories that could be found on the shelves in places like rural Kentucky, giving queer people the hope that we could carry on and exist just like that, too. As Mangel said, “[Gay Comix] pushed forward not just an agenda of acceptance, but it also pushed forward the entire comics field when it came to understanding and servicing LGBTQ fans."

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SOURCES

Century, Sara. “Pride-Ographies: Mary Wings.” SYFY, September 9, 2024. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/pride-ographies-mary-wings.

Century, Sara. “Gay Comix History with Andy Mangels.” SYFY, September 9, 2024. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/gay-comix-history-with-andy-mangels.

Chute, Hillary. “The Rise of Queer Comics.” Paris Review, December 11, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/11/rise-queer-comics/.

The color green was frequently associated with gay men in the late 1800s, where Victorian men would pin green carnations onto their clothing to indicate their sexuality and identity. This started with Oscar Wilde in 1890, with the publication of The Portrait of Dorian Gray in a magazine called Lippincott’s Monthly. Throughout the book, hints are dropped about Dorian’s sexual encounters with other men through specific coding. Before his playwriting took off in the mid 1980s, Wilde’s entire career was dedicated to finding workarounds to explore gay themes. The color green in the Victorian age was manufactured with arsenic, leading people to associate the color with sickness, death, and the unnatural. Victorian society also still coupled gay people with rapists, murderers, and thieves - by taking a color so intertwined with the unnatural and ill, Wilde was reclaiming it. He used the color frequently in his works to denote someone unnatural, hinting at queerness. In his 1889 essay, Pen, Pencil and Poison (subtitled A Study in Green), Wilde wrote to describe Thomas Wainewright, “He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals”. 

Wilde later took his love of green a step further. In 1892, the author had the lead actor in Lady Windermere’s Fan pin a green carnation to his breast, and asked his young male admirers to wear them as well. When asked what the green carnation meant, Wilde replied, “Nothing whatsoever, but that is just what nobody will guess”. To Wilde, the green carnation was symbolic - a strange flower of an unnatural color, representing the unnatural and strange. In 1894, shortly before Wilde was sent to trial for “gross indecency,” Robert Hichens anonymously published the book The Green Carnation. The couple was based on Wilde and his partner Lord Alfred Bosie, and the book was used as evidence against him in his trial. Wilde was convicted of homosexuality and imprisoned for two years. He denied any involvement with the novel, but took full credit for the green carnation, stating: “...kindly allow me to contradict, in the most emphatic manner, the suggestion…that I am the author of 'The Green Carnation.' I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The Flower is a work of art. The book is not”.

Green is not the first color that the queer community has reclaimed from its darker origins. At the turn of the 20th century, despite the banning of homosexuality by the German Criminal Code in 1871, Germany had a thriving queer community. Berlin was well known for being the hot spot for queer people, hosting bars, cafes, and organizations alike. It was a hotspot for both artists and LGBT activists, and the start of many queer publications. As the Nazis rose to power, though, hostility against LGBT+ persons increased. While lesbians were persecuted as well, gay men were a main target due to their positions in power at the time. Queer people were seen as a detriment to the Aryan race, and in an effort to culturally purify Germany, thousands of queer people, mostly gay men, were arrested. In 1935 a new law was passed, allowing authorities to arrest people who were reported to have done anything from simply looking at each other to touching each other sexually. The authorities began keeping “pink lists” of those even rumored to be involved in affairs. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 100,000 men were arrested for breaking this law, and between 5,000 and 15,000 of them were sent to concentration camps. The Nazis forced Jewish people to identify themselves with yellow stars, while other prisoners had different color triangles - political prisoners wore red, Romani people wore brown, criminals wore green, immigrants wore blue, and gay men wore pink. 

The pink triangle population was a distinct group within the concentration camps, and was among the most abused. “There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste,” writes Pierre Seel, a gay Holocaust survivor. An estimated 60 percent of gay men were killed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. Those that survived emerged to a world that hated them, even more than before. Both East and West Germany upheld the anti-gay law, and many homosexuals remained incarcerated until the early 1970s - the law itself was not repealed until 1994. Data on the gay victims of the Holocaust started to be cited in 1977, in the same year that the first reference to the pink triangle appeared in TIME Magazine. The story was about gay-rights activists in Miami attaching the symbol to their clothes as a show of solidarity during protests against housing discrimination. A reader wrote in to clarify the reason behind the pink triangles - “Gay people wear the pink triangle today as a reminder of the past and a pledge that history will not repeat itself”. The fight against housing discrimination eventually failed, though the activists did succeed in bringing national attention to the pink triangle as a symbol of solidarity. In 1972, the first autobiography of a gay concentration camp survivor was published: The Men with the Pink Triangle. In 1973, Germany’s first post-war gay rights organization, Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin, reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of liberation. In 1986, six New York City activists created a poster with a bright pink upward-facing triangle with the words SILENCE = DEATH scrawled across it, meaning to call attention to the AIDs crisis that was decimating the gay population. The poster was later adopted by the organization ACT UP, and became a lasting symbol of the AIDs advocacy movement. The pink triangle has been visible during gay rights demonstrations worldwide, both a reminder of what gay men have survived and the pride that came after. 

The 1970s was one of the most prolific and creative periods in LGBT+ history. The Gay Liberation Movement began in the 1960s with the goal of fighting extreme discrimination by being visible, out, and proud (Anderson). During demonstrations, visual symbols became an important part of the language of queer rights activism. Sociologist Nathan Joseph describes these symbols as “subtle cues of strategic importance… giving them greater visibility for all to see”. While the inverted pink triangle was being used as a reclaimed marker of empowerment and solidarity, Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay politician, argued that a new symbol was needed - specifically one created and developed within the community. Milk and his friend Artie Bressen, Jr. approached the artist Gilbert Baker to create this symbol. Baker writes about this in his memoir, Rainbow Warrior, stating  “Artie began to press me to come up with a new symbol for what he called ‘the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom’… At this point, the pink triangle was the symbol for the gay movement… It functioned as a Nazi tool of oppression. We all felt that we needed something that was positive, that celebrated our love”. Baker looked at existing flags, from the American flag with its stars and stripes to represent the colonies breaking away from England, and the vertical red, white and blue tricolor of the French Revolution. “...Both flags owed their beginnings to a riot, a rebellion, or revolution. I thought a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power”. Baker dyed and sewed the flag himself with eight stripes: pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit. The pink was later removed after he approached San Francisco’s Paramount Flag Company for mass production, as the hot pink color he used was not commercially available. Use of the flag increased dramatically with Harvey Milk’s assassination on November 27, 1968, after which San Francisco’s Pride Parade Committee officially endorsed it. The committee removed the indigo stripe so that the colors would be divided evenly along the parade route, with three colors on each side of the street. Since 1979 this six color version has been popular, with indigo and turquoise replaced with blue. This flag is now by far the most popular symbol of the queer community, bright with the colors that represent us. In Baker’s own words, “A Rainbow Flag was a conscious choice, natural and necessary. The rainbow came from earliest recorded history as a symbol of hope. In the Book of Genesis, it appeared as proof of a covenant between God and all living creatures. It was also found in Chinese, Egyptian and Native American history. A Rainbow Flag would be our modern alternative to the pink triangle. Now the rioters who claimed their freedom at the Stonewall Bar in 1969 would have their own symbol of liberation”..

The rainbow flag currently appears on pin badges, company logos, and stickers and patches adorning water bottles and car bumpers. The rainbow has become so synonymous with the gay community that, from 2015 to 2020, the White House lit up with it every night for the month of Pride. Pink triangles are still used for symbols of queer resistance and resilience, and if you go to a Pride parade or protest, you will most certainly see at least one. Green carnations, though still a lesser known symbol, are still used often in the gay male community. The Achillean flag, a flag made for gay men, has a green carnation in the center of it. Colorful symbols continue to be a key component of LGBT+ codes, identity, and language. These artifacts symbolize hardship and the strength the community has to get through it. We take the things meant to hurt us and turn them into symbols of resistance and queer joy. We continue on, despite the world pushing back at our existence. The queer community, and our wonderful, colorful symbols of existence, are here to stay.

--

SOURCES

Baker, Gilbert. RAINBOW WARRIOR : My Life in Color. Chicago Review, 2020.

Beckson, Karl. "Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol. 43 no. 4, 2000, p. 387-397. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/367465.

Coyle, McKenna. “Celebrating Pride with Flowers.” The William & Lynda Steere Herbarium, 17 Apr. 2019, sweetgum.nybg.org/science/the-hand-lens/explore/narratives-details/?irn=7272.

Giardina, Henry. “Green Is the Gayest Color.” INTO, INTO, 4 Aug. 2021, www.intomore.com/culture/green-gayest-color/.

Joseph, Alex. “Reclaiming the Pink Triangle: LGBT+ People and the Holocaust.” Holocaust Centre North, 24 Feb. 2021, holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/blog/reclaiming-the-pink-triangle/.

Rogger, Basil, et al. Protest : The Aesthetics of Resistance. Lars Müller Publishers, 2018.

Slater, Meg. “The Rainbow Flag: A Borderless Design.” National Gallery of Victoria, 16 Mar. 2023, www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-rainbow-flag-a-borderless-design/.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich.” Encyclopedia.ushmm.org, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 28 May 2021, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gay-men-under-the-nazi-regime.

Waxman, Olivia. “How the Nazi Regime’s Pink Triangle Symbol Was Repurposed for LGBTQ Pride.” Time, 31 May 2018, time.com/5295476/gay-pride-pink-triangle-history/.

William Moulton Marston, inventor of the lie detector and creator of Wonder Woman, was born in 1893. Along with these accomplishments, he was also a psychologist, writer, author, teacher, and a life-long firm believer in suicide. Throughout his entire life, Marston had his end planned - he would go to college, become a success, and if not, he would kill himself. He likely would have, too, as early as his History I class. He had to learn facts he wasn’t interested in learning, and if this was to be the rest of his life, wouldn’t it just be easier to exit early? Thankfully, he was saved from this fate by the most interesting class that shaped his later years, taught by George Palmer, the faculty sponsor for Harvard Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and a firm believer in equal rights for women since before the early death of his wife. Now, he approached each day with her and her beliefs in mind. “A man is a rational being in a sensuous physical body,” he wrote. “Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked.” It was with Palmer that Marston went to hear Emmeline Pankhurst speak.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) was a British political activist. Pankhurst has since been criticized for her tactics in protest, but her work is recognized as a large part in helping women gain the right to vote in Great Britain and Ireland. She was well known for chaining herself to Buckingham Palace for protest, and spoke of it at her events and rallies. Palmer and the Harvard Men’s League had invited her to do just this at Harvard, but Harvard quickly shot them down. They didn’t accept women as students, let alone to speak in any sort of authority. Instead, she spoke at a church down the block. Over 5,000 attended, crowding the small building. Palmer never forgot Emmeline Pankhurst, or her shackles - we can see this reflected in Wonder Woman’s mighty braces, and the way that she only loses her strength when chained up or tied by a man. Picturing and talking about women chained up and enslaved was later ubiquitous in feminist literature. The words of Margaret Sanger reflected this thought at the time: “Women have chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal.” 

It is important at this point to discuss where feminism was in the early 1900s. As a term, feminism wasn’t in major use before 1910. The feminism movement is different from the 19th century women’s movement in that all feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists. The suffragists had a single political goal - gaining the right to vote - while feminism’s demand for equality was broader. Feminists wanted to separate sex from reproduction, and for a woman to gain control over her own body, regardless of what the church and state may say. Something that the suffragists and the feminists had in common, however, was their shared love of the Amazons. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection led to a wave of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women had control of their own lives and bodies. Some suffragists thought an ancient matriarchy (a matriarchate) existed before the patriarchy, spurred on by male archaeologists. By 1911, an Amazon was a female rebel who went to college instead of staying at home. 

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Another thing Marston is known for (outside of Wonder Woman and the lie detector) is  his polyamorous relationship with Elizabeth Holloway, who he invented the polygraph with, and Olive Byrne, daughter of Ethel Byrne. Sisters Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger believed in socialism, feminism, and free love. Together, they worked for the Socialist Party Women’s Committee, the Industrial Workers of the World, and worked on The Masses, a socialist commentary publication. They were a part of the Heterodoxy - a woman-only feminist debate group that provided a forum for the development of more radical conceptions of feminism. All of the feminist writers and theorists of this time period would gather in Greenwich Village with other women of diverse background and status to discuss their experiences. Heterodoxy is largely credited in the origins of American feminism. (Sidebar: As of 2025, the United States is ranked 42nd in the world on gender equality, according to the Global Gender Gap report.[5])

There are several stories written by other members of the Heterodoxy that could be credited for inspiring the character and background of Wonder Woman. These original stories quickly became the “stock feminist plots” of the 1910s. 

Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Angel Island begins with five men shipwrecking on an island inhabited by “super-humanly beautiful” winged women. The men, overwhelmed with lust, capture the women and clip their wings to subdue them. The women are left helpless by this, as they’ve never used their feet before, always relying on their wings. The strongest of the women leads the others in a fight for freedom to reclaim their autonomy. When the strongest learns to walk, she “walk[s] with the splendid, swinging gait of an Amazon.” 

Child of the Amazons and Other Poems by Max Eastman

This poetry collection, published in 1913, was written by an editor for two early socialist magazines, The Masses (with Ethen Byrne and Margeret Sanger) and The Liberator. The titular poem follows an Amazon who falls in love with a man, against the law of her people. This is echoed very clearly in the relationship between Wonder Woman and love interest Steve Trevor. (Interestly, the Justice League cartoon from the early 2000s deleted Steve Trevor from Wonder Woman’s backstory entirely.) 

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore

Herland is a feminist utopia novel published in 1915. The book is about an isolated society run by and composed of entirely women, who have only daughters through parthenogenesis. The women practiced what Gilmore called “voluntary motherhood” - a theory that later Margaret Sanger credits with the original idea of birth control. 

“You see they were mothers, not in the sense of helpless, involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin and die, fighting horribly with one another… but in the sense of conscious Makers of People.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, pg. 205

One could say that Marston’s origin story for Woman Woman is taken from Herland. Three men crash land onto the isle of this feminist utopia, and a young woman from the island falls in love with one of them and returns to his world. When Steve Trevor lands on the shores of Paradise Island, the goddess Athena commands, “You must send with him your strongest Amazon to America, the last citadel of democracy and equal rights for women… [to help] wage war for freedom, democracy, and equal rights for women.” 

–

In 1912, Sanger published a twelve part series in the New York Call, titled “What Every Girl Should Know”. The paper covered sexual attraction, masturbation, intercourse, venereal disease, and child birth. It was quickly banned by the US Post Office on grounds of obscenity. Sanger angrily went on to publish  The Woman Rebel, an eight-page feminist monthly paper, in which she first coined the term “birth control”. While Sanger fled to England to avoid charges, her husband was arrested for distributing her pamphlet Family Limitation, all fifteen pages of frank instructions on how to use birth control. In the hearing, where he was declared guilty the judge told him frankly, “If some persons would go around urging Christian women to bear children, instead of wasting their time on women’s suffrage, this city and society would be better off.” In 1916, Sanger finally returned to face court for The Woman Rebel, representing herself.  When the court learned of her five year old daughter, several months passed, they dropped the charges. They were unwilling to charge a grieving mother, wary of it helping her cause. Sanger was immediately out on the streets, determined to get arrested once again. 

And so in October 1916, Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger rented a Brooklyn storefront and shared an advertisement in multiple languages - they were giving out pessaries and condoms. Ten days later, they were arrested. Byrne was found guilty on January 8th, 1917, and taught the female prisoners in the van with her about birth control on her way to prison. Inspired by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, Byrne quickly decided to go on a hunger strike. “I will eat nothing until I am released.” She told the papers, “It does not matter if I starve or not, so long as my plight calls attention to the archaic laws which would prevent us from telling the truth about the facts of life. The fight is to go on.” Byrne compared her fate to that of the women who die during abortions, and her supporters compared her fight to the fight for voter’s rights. In reply to questions about her sister, Sanger said, “I didn’t advise her to undertake this hunger strike, but I certainly wouldn’t tell her to end it now.” Days into the strike, Byrne became the first woman prisoner in US history to be force fed. Afterwards, Sanger finally revealed Byrne’s children to the world - one of which was Olive Byrne, future polygamist partner to Marston and Holloway. Finally, despite her statements, Sanger finally convinced the governor to release her sister by promising that she would make sure Byrne never broke the law again. “For the movement Margaret Sanger wanted to lead, Ethel Byrne was too radical,” Olive Byrne later said. While Ethel Byrne became a martyr, Margaret Sanger went on to start The Birth Control Review, and hired Lou Rogers as art director. 

One cannot talk about women who inspired Wonder Woman without mentioning Anne Lucasta Rogers - largely known as Lou Rogers. Rogers was a member of the Heterodoxy, and a feminist cartoonist whose art was famous for always depicting the struggle of women’s rights. “I think that the cartoon should aim to arouse men and women to the realization that the ideals of the movement are human progress,” she told the New York Tribune. In a later publication, Women’s Journal said she was “the only woman artist to devote all of her time to feminism”. And they were right - she was published in The Call, the New York Tribune, Woman Citizen, The Suffragist, and more. From 1912-1917, she illustrated a regular page in the magazine JUDY. These illustrations often depicted a woman breaking free of chains or binds, symbolizing the freedom of women. She worked closely with Harry G. Peter, a staff artist that often filled in for her. Much later, he would go on to illustrate the Wonder Woman comics.

Meanwhile, Margaret Sanger started writing a book called Voluntary Motherhood. At this point, she had broken off from both her sister and the socialist movement as a whole, recognizing that she had to avoid scandal for the betterment of the birth control movement. Olive Byrne said of her mother, “You have to comply a little bit to get anywhere, and my mother wouldn’t comply with anybody for anything.” In 1917, a judge ruled that she could no longer distribute birth control. To circumvent this, she allied with doctors, especially those with an interest in the growing medical literature on the importance of female pleasure. Voluntary Motherhood became Women and the New Race - a book which would later be the exact philosophy of Wonder Woman. Olive Byrne later gave a copy to Joye Hummel when she was hired on as a writer for Wonder Woman, saying, “Read this and you’ll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.”

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SOURCES:

Beeson, Alicia Matheny. “Visioning Stronger Women in Irwin’s Angel Island and Marston’s Wonder Woman.” CEA Critic 81, no. 3 (2019): 217–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26848823.

“Herland (Novel).” Wikipedia, March 26, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herland_(novel).Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random  House LLC, 2015.

Censorship arising from a moral panic has been a constant presence throughout the history of comics, despite their popularity. An anti-comics editorial by Sterling North in The Chicago Daily News from 1940 reads, “Badly drawn, badly written and badly printed—a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems… Their crude blacks and reds spoil the child’s natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories.” This was reprinted and distributed throughout the US, despite the fact that 25% of printed materials sent to soldiers on the frontlines of World War II were comics. Comic books became the scapegoat for Cold War era anxieties like juvenile delinquency, “deviant sexuality”, non-traditional gender roles, and Communism (among many others). 

Seduction of the Innocent was written by Fredric Wertham in 1952, based on his experiences with at-risk youth. Wertham, unlike the article writers and outcriers of the previous years, was well known for his contributions to society. He was an unsung hero of the early civil rights movement; he brought the first psychiatric clinic to Harlem, where he served patients free of charge, and conducted research into the effect of racial segregation on children's mental health. This research, and his testimony about it, played a crucial role in the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case that ended segregation. It was at his Harlem clinic that he started to form connections between juvenile delinquency and comics. Reading comics was the one thing that all of his young clients had in common, and Wertham believed that comics were either the root cause of their problems, or a part of a larger issue. Comic books opened the door to bad things, not only introducing new ideas but normalizing and rationalizing them. Parents who let their kids read comics were neglecting them. After all, children wouldn’t need to read escapist fantasies if they had a good home life.

In some ways, it’s hard to deny much of Wertham’s indictment. Comics were then, as they are now, written for all ages and genres. Many parents, however, thought that all comics were kid friendly and didn’t supervise their reading habits. Horror comics had begun to feature Grand Guignol depictions of severed heads and limbs, graphic shootings and stabbings. The violence was heavily flavored with sex, and nonwhites were depicted as subhuman. Some contained detailed plans for committing crimes. But these were comics written for adults, not  children, and the examples Wertham selected were chosen specifically for shock-value. But horror comics weren’t the only focus of Wertham’s rage. Superhero comics, which were the most popular among children, surely contributed to children’s emotional problems. Superman, for instance, promoted bullying. At the time, Superman was nigh undefeatable. The more “super” he was, the more issues sold. This was the crux of the problem, Wertham argued. Superman attacked people and never faced consequences, and was immune to pain. In fact, he was applauded and considered a hero for his violent efforts. Even though Seduction of the Innocent had more pages dedicated to Superman, Wertham’s lambasting of Batman is what most people think of when they hear of his work.

In the chapter “I Want to be a Sex Maniac!” Wertham writes about how Bruce Wayne and his young ward, Dick Grayson, are not only in an age-inappropriate homosexual relationship, but grooming other young children as well. Bruce Wayne, for one, was rich. He lived in a mega-mansion and had everything he could ever dream of provided for him. Several interviewed kids stated that they wanted to be rich like Bruce. Hearing this, Wertham compared money to an aphrodisiac - "It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together" (p. 190). Not only was Batman rich, but his house was well decorated. His butler Alfred served lavish meals, and kept Wayne manor filled with flowers. There were no women in the home, meaning that the inhabitants must be homosexual. The underlying assumption was that these were sexually active characters and since they weren’t married, they would seek each other out instead. Ironically enough, Robin had been a boy because the creators didn’t want their moral crusader living alone with an adolescent girl - surely they had no idea that this decision would result in this. While Wertham’s “Bruce” complaints were rooted entirely in stereotypes, he also had problems with their nightly crime-fighting activities. Danger is stimulating, Wertham argued, calling dangerous Batman stories “erotic sexual fantasies”. Batman and Robin spent many comic issues caged or tied up while the other tried to save him; This, supposedly, was meant to make Robin more devoted to and dependent on Batman than anyone else on earth - a common grooming technique. "Like the girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive …. They constantly rescue each other from violent attacks by an unending number of enemies. The feeling is conveyed that we men must stick together because there are so many villainous creatures who have to be exterminated. They lurk not only under every bed but also behind every star in the sky" (p. 190-1). In short, Batman selected a poor child to entice with wealth and fun, seducing him afterwards. Wertham’s comments changed the trajectory of Batman stories, writers introducing female companion after female companion to pair up romantically with the stars. In short, Wertham charged Batman with sexual misconduct, and in response DC filled the books with romance between same-sex teams to the point he seemed sexually insatiable. It wasn’t until the 90s that the dynamics were changed to be more like that of a family (A Bat Fam, if you will) - after almost half a century. 

In 1954, thanks to Wertham’s efforts, comics were put on trial by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. The trial was meant to decide whether the medium needed government regulation or not. Over the next two days, the committee heard from child psychologists, comic book publishers and artists. Wertham testified before the court, where senators gave him the opportunity to address a satirical propaganda piece published in EC’s Haunt of Fear, “Are You a Red Dupe?” In response, Wertham only said, “This is from comic books. I have really paid no attention to this.” Bill Gaines, the publisher of EC Comics and co-founder of Mad Magazine, had chosen to testify of his own violation and was called up directly after. Gaines was 32, filled with righteous indignation, undergoing amphetamine withdrawal, and on diet pills that made him very fatigued by the time he made it to stand. In short, he absolutely crashed and burned. “I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them. Some may not like them. That is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid,” he said on the stand. The next morning, the headline of the New York Times read “NO HARM IN HORROR, COMICS ISSUER SAYS”. 

The comic industry was quickly backed into a corner, faced with an angry public and the threat of government regulation. To avoid this, the Comic Magazine Association of America was created , which instituted the Comics Code Authority - a code that censored comics for years to come. All comics were brought down to the level of a young child overnight. While the CCA had no official control over what one could or could not publish, distributors refused to carry any comic that didn’t have the approval seal. Publishers didn’t want to take a chance on them, and horror, crime, science fiction, and other genres appealing to older readers were wiped out for a generation. Samples of content banned may read as familiar to current events: 

Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.

If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.

Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation.

In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated.

No comic magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title.

All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.

All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure.

Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable.

Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.

Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.

Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals.

The CCA led to almost 60 years of self-censorship, decimating the comics industry. Artists and writers now had to lie about their profession, as admitting one worked on comics was viewed as deviant in the same way being a fringe pornographer is. The number of published titles  dropped from 650 in 1954 to 250 in 1956, putting more than 800 working creators out of a job. 1960s reprints of earlier pre-Code stories redrew panels to replace previous art - redrawing necklines to remove cleavage, making scary faces more ‘normal’, and whiting out any sort of weapon. Comics were reduced to tame romances, funny animals, extensions of TV/movie brands, and most famously, dopey superheroes. The Silver Age of comic books lasted from 1956 to 1970, and is known as silly and inoffensive as the artists and writers had no choice. Blood couldn’t be shown, villains couldn’t kill, cops couldn’t be corrupt, and there was no drug use or murder allowed. Even so, cape comics dominated as others were killed off, and this emphasis on superheroes led to a monopoly of cape comic publishing that exists in America even today. Unfortunately, the dumbed-down nature of comics drove the public perception of comics to dip even further. In many states, the restrictions and commercial rejection of the Code were still not enough. Over 100 titles were banned in multiple states, and ordinances to regulate comics passed in dozens of cities. By 1955, bills on comic books had been passed in the legislative bodies of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. Legislation was proposed and either shot down or not acted upon in Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, and Wisconsin. One law in New York banned the use of the words ‘crime’, ‘terror’, ‘sex’ or ‘horror’ in comic book titles and prohibit the publication or the distribution of lurid comics, defined as those ‘devoted to or principally made up of pictures or accounts of methods of crime, or illicit sex, horror, terror, physical torture, brutality, or physical violence’. Any sale of’inappropriate’ comics were only to those above 18, punishable by one year in jail, a $500 fine, or both. The Senate Subcommittee hearings, the Comics Code, and the subsequent flurry of laws regulating the sale of comics combined to form the most brutal era of censorship arising from moral panic that American pop culture has ever known.

In many ways, the censorship ruins the story. For example, in the above War of the Worlds comic example, the original ends with the husband shooting his wife and then himself to protect them from the alien invasion. The second, censored comic shows the two simply running away. Which, in your opinion, is the stronger story?

The amazing thing about art is that it perseveres, and that’s what comics did, too. From the 1960s counterculture arose. Underground Comics was formed, a movement full of adults who had been children when the Code went into effect and remembered the abrupt changes to what they were reading. Underground Comics were characterized by an emphasis on creating work that explored topical and taboo subject matter without restriction, often from an authorial point of view. The first recognizable Underground Comic was God Nose (Snot Reel), published in 1963 by Zap Comix. Zap Comix was the gold standard of Underground Comics, established by Robert Crumb, whose work inspired and defined the Underground Comics movement. Zap Comics used unique and individualized styles to speak about class, sexuality, politics, and economics, often in a rude, vulgar, or sexually explicit way. These were self published, and didn’t pass by the desks of the CCA at all before arriving on shelves. They were sold in bookstores, art galleries, record stores, and headshops around the United States. As the movement grew, however, the crackdown began. Bookstores were busted and shut down for selling them, and galleries developing art shows or displaying work by cartoonists that participated in the movement were busted for displaying obscene material. In California, an employee of a small bookstore was arrested for selling Zap Comix No. 3. Before, publishers were the main target. Now that there was a workaround, censorship began at a retail level. 

In June 1963, the United States Supreme Court officially put the decision on what was and wasn’t considered obscene in the hands of each individual state. The three prong Obscenity Test was as follows: 

whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law; and

whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

This gave local jurisdictions the ability to determine what was appropriate and, to avoid the headache and legal trouble, many businesses pulled content from shelves preemptively. Thus, the Underground Comics movement was relegated to under-the-table trading at conventions and coffee shops. 

The tipping point came in December 1986. The month before, two officers in Lansing, Illinois bought 15 comics from manager Michael Correa of the comic book store Friendly Frank’s after “monitoring places youths congregate”. Come December, six officers came back to raid it, seizing various titles and dragging Correa off in handcuffs to face charges of display of obscene materials. Marc H. Greenberg writes about this day in his book Comics, Courts and Controversy: A Case Study of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

“The arresting officer, Sergeant Jack Hoestra, told the Gary Post-Tribune that, in addition to the legal charges of obscenity, he noticed a “satanic influence” in many of the shop’s comics.  He told the paper: “Oh yes, there was absolutely a lot of satanic influence in the comics there. … If you know what you’re looking for, you can see the satanic influence all over.  Three-quarters of the rock groups today show satanic influence, and it’s all over the television.”

Soon after the raid and arrest, Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press met with retailers at a comic book convention in Minnesota. Together, they decided to aid Friendly Frank’s owner Frank Mangiaracina in defending his employee. Publishers and retailers worked with famous artists to set up a portfolio to raise money for Correa’s defense. Artists included Sergio Aragones, Hilary Barta, Reed Waller, Steve Bissette, Bob Burden, Richard Corben, Robert Crumb, Howard Cruse, Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Mitch O’Connell, Don Simpson, and Eric Vincent. Together, they raised $20,000 and placed it in a bank account called “Comic Book Legal Defense Fund”. The trial was held in June of 1988, before the fund was complete, and Correa was found guilty and fined $750, along with one year of court supervision. Afterwards, Kitchen recruited Bertonn Joeseph, co-founder of the Media Coalition, Playboy Foundation and First Amendment pioneer to take up the case. Upon retrial, they won, and the remaining funds were set aside to create a permanent organization to protect comics: the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF still exists today, though a majority of their work is done unseen as they fend off cases before they go to court. The CBLDF works to protect comics, fight unconstitutional legislation, and perform advocacy work. In recent years, the CBLDF has been helping libraries by providing access to resources and writing letters of support in cases where comics are challenged. 

It would be nice if this was the end of the constant fight against censorship, but the fight continues. Since 2021, comics have been among the top books banned in America. In the 2024-2025 school year, 601 comics were listed out of 6,719 total restrictions and bans, making up 9% of the total. Of this selection, manga and manwha account for 40% of bans. The focus on east-Asian publications shouldn’t be surprising, with the current anti-Asian, anti-immigrant sentiments in America today. Lists of the most frequently banned authors in America always include the mangakas Yusei Matsui, of Assassination Classroom (54 books banned) and Atsushi Ohkubo of Soul Eater (45 books banned). If their manga were one-shots and not a series, Matsui would be the most banned author in the US, and Ohkubo would be the second. Both would have their manga banned twice as much as the number one most banned book in American schools. When the Department of Defense Education issued orders to ban 596 titles from military schools worldwide, 10% of those were comic books. 

The top 5 comics banned in 2024-2025 are Heartstopper, This One Summer, Lumberjanes, Soul Eater, and Fairy Tale - one queer story, one story about being a young girl, one story about women, and two manga. Currently, three new titles are up on the chopping block - Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, a story about growing up and falling in love with food and eating. Brazen: Rebel Ladies who Rocked the World, a biography about women throughout history. Lighter Than My Shadow, a memoir about growing up with an eating disorder and working towards recovery. All three are nonfiction stories written by women. Outside of original work, comic adaptations of narrative works are often among the most banned, sometimes without their source materials being banned alongside them. The fight to get a novel banned can be quickly won, but comics are banned at a higher and faster rate. 28 comic adaptations were banned over the 2024-2025 school year, including 1984: The Graphic Novel, adapted by Fido Nesti, Ann Frank’s Diary, adapted by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, The Lottery, adapted by Paul Duffield, and The Odyssey, adapted by Gareth Hinds. Queer comics, especially nonfiction, make frequent ban targets - comics like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erica Moen and Matthew Nolan, and The Stonewall Riots: Making a Stand for LGBTQ Rights by Archi Bongiovanna and A. Andrews are often on the chopping block. Book censorship is often done with little attention to the actual work, and with comic books being so quick and easy to ban, random stuff is often caught in it: Amelia Earhart: Legendary Aviator by Jameson Anderson and Rod Whigham, The Great American Dust Bowl: A Graphic Novel by Dan Brown, The Hardy Boys Graphic Novels by Scott Lobdell, all books in the Learn to Draw Manga series by Richard Jones and Jorge Santillan, and A Tour of Your Digestive System by Molly Koplin and Chris M. Jones, among others. Comics are thriving as a format, growing in numbers and accolades, and are thus a massive target to those eager to hinder access to information.

In the years following World War II, comic books became a focal point for a broader cultural push toward censorship. Waves of comic book burnings, along with anti-comic campaigns that even prompted police raids, revealed how readily extreme measures could be framed as acts of moral responsibility. Destroying books was recast as a defense of American values - family, faith, and patriotism. Organizations not typically associated with authoritarian tactics, such as the Boy Scouts, the American Legion Auxiliary, and 4-H Clubs, embraced these efforts for both symbolic and practical reasons. Public reaction was largely supportive or indifferent; many Americans saw no contradiction between suppressing comics and upholding the freedoms they valued. Although public burnings have faded, the underlying appeal of censorship, and its alignment with the goals of well-meaning citizens, remains much the same as it was in the 1950s. A glance at today’s headlines shows that this troubling pattern in both comics history and American culture is far from over.

SO, WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT COMIC BOOK CENSORSHIP?

READ MORE:

Tales from the Code: How Much Did Things Change After the Enactment of the Comics Code of 1954?

Banned Comics: The Case Files