This special issue explores the intersection of queer theory and comics studies. The contributors provide new theories of how comics represent and reconceptualize queer sexuality, desire, intimacy, and eroticism, while also investigating how the comic strip, as a hand-drawn form, queers literary production and demands innovative methods of analysis from the fields of literary, visual, and cultural studies. 

Contributors examine the relationships among reader, creator, and community across a range of comics production, including mainstream superhero comics, independent LGBTQ comics, and avant-garde and experimental feminist narratives. They also address queer forms of identification elicited by the classic X-Men character Rogue, the lesbian grassroots publishing networks that helped shape Alison Bechdel’s oeuvre, and the production of black queer fantasy in the Black Panther comic book series, among other topics. 

Contributors andré carrington, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Yetta Howard, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Kate McCullough, Darieck Scott, Jessica Q. Stark, Shelley Streeby, Rebecca Wanzo

Darieck Scott is Associate Professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination.

Ramzi Fawaz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.