#queercomix

So, hey! First time I’ve ever done a proper review of something. 

The Pride is an independent, Kickstarter-funded comic written by Joe Glass, with lettering by Mike Stock and a whole host of artists that you can see listed in the image above. I’d run them all down here but that would turn this opener into a full-on run-on sentence. 

The Pride, as you could probably guess, is a story about an LGBT superhero team coming together (Led by the perfectly-named and Superman-esque Fabman) both to do some good in the world and to combat the image of LGBT+ superheroes. As a bisexual man, I am all about this. There’s going to be spoilers underneath the cut, so if you don’t want to read those, my TL;DR is Please buy this book and these comics, support them so that the series can grow and improve even more! 

As with a lot of independent superhero comics, there are a lot of ersatz and expy characters (for those not obsessed with TV Tropes, that means they’re very similar analogues to preexisting properties) so that you can get acclimated to them more quickly and we can move forward with the story. There’s Wolf, the brooding, no-powers, hypercompetent rich badass; Muscle Mary, formerly a Queen of an island of utopian warrior women who wears a lot of red and gold and has super strength; Twink, who can cover his body in an indestructible metal that imbibes him with super strength; you get the idea. But just because some of these characters are familiar doesn’t mean they’re uninteresting or uninspired. Each one is fully realized and unique, with their own voice and characteristics. 

The plot is fairly standard, but still fun thanks to all of the quirks and intricacies of the characters and their interactions with one another. Fabman doesn’t appreciate how the media portrays gay superheroes, he assembles his team, there’s growing pains, there’s pushback from the rest of the superhero community, there’s drama and drama and suspense and sadness, they fight an evil homophobic Southern pastor who wants to build a machine that will bend all the superheroes in the world to his control so he can use them as his army and kill all the gay superhumans, and they win. 

The volume also comes with some additional issues after the main story called The Pride Adventures that mostly take place after the end of the initial story, including a two-issue story about the team fighting a vigilante named Outrage, a mech-wearing vigilante who murders homophobes to honor the memory and name of his dead boyfriend, who had also used the same superhero name. And it’s actually really interesting as the team debates whether or not they should stop him or if his actions are wrong. Obviously, they do, and in the end, they’re able to make Outrage see the error of his ways and how his actions are harming the legacy of the man he loved. But still, it’s a ride! 

All of the characters represent different facets of the different levels of the LGBT experience; Fabman is out and proud of it and doesn’t really care who he upsets living his life. Wolf is a Camp Straight man still bitter from the backlash in his professional life after his homosexuality became public, resulting in him getting fired from the story’s Justice League equivalent. Twink was sent to the equivalent of a Conversion Therapy camp as a child and is estranged because of it. Bear (who’s a big ol’ anthropomorphic bear man and just the BEST) is an older gay man who came out after he got married and who had a son with his former wife. He’s also HIV positive and is used to help educate readers on the modern truth of HIV and dispel certain myths. Angel is a pansexual drag queen Frost is a Trans woman and White Trash is a Manly Gay whose strength and invulnerability are tied to his self-confidence, but who dealt with an abusive father and gets tattoos as a sort of therapy to work through those ugly memories. They’re all wonderful characters and I really hope the series will continue and we’ll get to see more of them. 

It’s also great, as weird as it may sound, that the members of The Pride don’t get along perfectly all the time. Some creators try to paint the LGBTQ+ community as one big happy family and that’s disingenuous. I’m not trying to say we’re not all in this together, but there’s still discrimination even inside our rainbow flag and I like that that’s actually represented. Fabman and Angel actually argue in the team’s first meeting about the importance of explicitly mentioning the “T” in LGBT (although given that Angel’s a drag queen and not a trans man, I don’t know if that’s better or worse). Frost is worried at one point about how Muscle Mary will feel about her being a trans woman. Bear faces discrimination and hostility for being HIV positive. There’s layers. It’s like a good party dip. 

Now, The Pride isn’t a perfect comic. It’s a little pricey at around £30 (and that’s BEFORE shipping, especially outside the UK), but right now it’s  £15 and for ten issues plus a lot of character art and creators’ notes, I think it’s a great deal. It does have a few issues, mechanical and otherwise, and I think it’d be unfair to use a soft hand in reviewing it. There are a fair few grammatical and punctuational errors and more mix-ups of their/they’re/there than I’d feel comfortable with seeing in a professional publication, but those aren’t the end of the world. I also feel like there’s a bit of underrepresentation in the book, with the majority of the team (Twink, Fabman, Wolf, White Trash, Bear, Frost, and Muscle Mary) being gay or lesbian. Angel is a pansexual man, as I already mentioned, but bisexuality and pansexuality aren’t the same thing (anyone who says otherwise is just trying to start an argument) and it’s worrying that the only example of a nonbinary, potentially aroace individual is the Martian Manhunter stand-in. Also, some of the names are a little... iffy. Twink is called Twink because... he’s a Twink. It’s a pun on the fact that Colossus is a big, burly, shiny metal dude. Bear... is a giant bear and a big, burly gay man. And I’m not super sure about how I feel about the Wonder Woman character taking the same name as a slur for a muscular gay man. 

Like I said, it’s not perfect. But when all that we get a lot of times in comics is stuff like... 

This... or.... 

THIS.. 

It’s such an important book and it should be rewarded for taking a big step forward with success and invested readership so that it can continue to grow and evolve and get better!