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In the 1930s and 1940s Wonder Woman visually celebrated S-M practices and same-sex bonding between women, metaphorized through the image of the chained, shackled, or bound submissive in the late 1940s and early 1950s crime and horror comics presented what was arguably the most antisocial critique of postwar domestic life outside of noir cinema, spectacularizing forms of violence, gore, and criminality that radically upended the ideals of nuclear-family harmony and the sublimation of desire in material goods in the late 1950s Mad magazine elicited affective pleasure in the satiric critique of the nuclear family and its blatant refusal of the Cold War security state in the 1960s and 1970s Marvel Comics revitalized the superhero comic book by infusing its art with the visual politics of gay and women’s liberation while the artists who contributed to the Wimmen’s Comix anthology (1972–92) brought a radical sexual politics to the visual culture of comic books and from the 1960s to contemporary times, gay, lesbian, and queer culture has taken up comics as sites of sexual pleasure, such as in the graphic sex narratives of Tom of Finland and the cartoonists inspired by him, many of whom testify to beginning their cartooning by tracing and imaginatively redrawing the male figures they encountered in superhero comics. At every moment in their cultural history, comic books have been linked to queerness or to broader questions of sexuality and sexual identity in US society.
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The conceptual and historical intersections of queer theory (and sexuality more broadly) and comics culture, in both its visual and narrative production and its fan communities, are rife and rich. This alienation-at times even antagonism-evinces a failure of recognition in the current development of scholarship rather than a true gulf between the foundational questions and concepts of the two fields. In this logic, “Queer zines, yes! Superhero comics, no!” On the other, the prevailing assumption that mainstream comics (namely, the superhero genre) embody nationalistic, sexist, and homophobic ideologies has led many queer theorists to dismiss comics altogether or else to celebrate a limited sample of politically palatable alternative comics as exemplars of queer visual culture. On the one hand, classical comics studies’ tendency to analyze the formal codes of sequential art separately from social questions of sexual identity and embodied difference has often led to a disregard for a nuanced queer and intersectional critique of the comics medium. Despite this, comics studies and queer theory have remained surprisingly alienated from each other. Moreover, the medium has had a long history as a top reading choice among those “queer” subjects variously called sexual deviants, juvenile delinquents, dropouts, the working class, and minorities of all stripes. Whether one looks to the alternative mutant kinships of superhero stories (the epitome of queer world making), the ironic and socially negative narratives of independent comics (the epitome of queer antinormativity), or the social stigma that makes the medium marginal, juvenile, and outcast from “proper” art (the epitome of queer identity), comics are rife with the social and aesthetic cues commonly attached to queer life.