F looking for ICBM

Happy birthday Tove Jansson!

Queer author and artist Tove Jansson was born on 9 August 1914 in Helsinki, Finland. She's best known for creating Moomins - the cute little hippo like creatures in the picture above. Tove first started drawing Moomins in anti-fascist cartoons in the late 1930s when she worked for the magazine Garm - you can see one peering around the side of the 'M'.

Tove went on to incorporate Moomins into 14 children’s books and a long-running comic strip. Many of her characters were based off people in her life, including two of her female partners.

Every time I look in the mirror I look for dead bodies𖤐⭒๋࣭ ⭑

Actually sounds like a good night.

Harley Quinn #67 by Elliott Kalan, Carlos Olivares and Marissa Louise. Variant covers by (1) Stjepan Šejić, (2) Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, (3) David Nakayama and (4) Derrick Chew. Out in October.

And 'a male writer fetishizing a WLW pairing'? What does that even mean? Which writer? The hints were there from the second these two met, they just couldn't make them explicit. Harley had all of two speaking appearances before 'Harley & Ivy' happened. Over the years many writers - male and female - iterated on the subtext that was there from the jump and that gets us here.

For decades, DC was scared to lean into it more. The Bruce Timm pin-ups were the most we had - teasing at the possibility, acknowledging the tension was there, but never going all the way. And compared to a lot of other shit that was going on with women in comics in the 90s and early 00s, it was pretty tasteful!

WLW pairings becoming canon wasn't a thing back then. We ate up all the subtext. The day Harlivy became canon was a huge deal - a sign that the winds were shifting and mainstream comics were finally, maybe, slowly becoming comfortable showing queer relationships on the page. The reason it happened was because the subtext had been slipped in so often over the years that eventually someone said 'okay, can we stop hinting and just do it already?'