#medhurst

"Mix tapes 002" by Medhurst

Remember: Queer readers didn’t see any vestige of themselves represented in the mass media of this era, let alone its comic books. And when queer audiences don’t see ourselves in a given work, we look deeper, parsing every exchange for the faintest hint of something we recognize. This is why, as a visual medium filled with silent cues like body language and background detail, superhero comics have proven a particularly fertile vector for gay readings over the years. Images can assert layers of unspoken meanings that mere words can never conjure. That panel of a be-toweled Bruce and Dick lounging together in their solarium, for example, would not carry the potent homoerotic charge it does, were the same scene simply described in boring ol’ prose. 

interestingly, the joker doesn’t appear in Joel Shumacher’s 1997 campy resurrection of Batman & Robin. 

“If the word ‘camp’ is applied at all to the eighties’ Batman, it is a label for the Joker. This sly displacement is the cleverest method yet devised of preserving the Bat-heterosexuality. The play that the texts regularly make with the concept of Batman and the Joker as mirror images now takes a new twist. The Joker is Batman’s ‘bad twin,’ and part of that badness is, increasingly, an implied homosexuality” (Medhurst 344). 

Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America. Inc. Adopted on October 26, 1954, the enforcement of this Code is the basis for the comic magazine industry's program of self-regulation.