A review by shipyrds
No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics by Justin Hall
emotional
3.5
I enjoyed the comics contained here, but found the accompanying text (and the organization) somewhat frustrating. First off, the book is divided into three sections: "Comics Come Out: Gay Gag Strips, Underground Comix, and Lesbian Literati," "File Under Queer: Comix to Comics, Punk Zines, and Art During the Plague," and "A New Millennium: Trans Creators, Webcomics, and Stepping Out of the Ghetto." Categorizing queer comics is hard, as any zine librarian will tell you, and mapping the trajectory of queer comics is even harder, because it resembles spaghetti more than any sort of linear timeline. And I do have to make allowances for the fact that the book came out in 2013. But I found it deeply frustrating that trans comics went into the sort of "third wave" section. I'm not a comics scholar, but given that I'm running across casual mentions of transition in Dykes to Watch Out For strips from 1996, I feel pretty confident that transition and trans narratives were around before 2000- and the anthology actually includes comics about drag and transition from the 90s in the section. It's a weird choice.
It's also weird that there's very little discussion of the role of race in the comics, beyond the inclusion of a few Black artists and a comic by Margaret Cho. But the comics by white artists are often full of Orientalist or racialized imagery, in the way that white artists have often used the specter of the nebulous East as a symbol of erotic freedom, but only as a setting devoid of any actual Asian people. I don't mean to say that the comics shouldn't be included-Orientalism is a big part of queer history and queer comics history in particular! But presenting the comics without comment does the reader a disservice.
In general, I'd really like more discussion of the comics! Aside from the opening essay, there's no accompanying text at all-nothing to tell us who the artists are, or, more critically in an anthology dealing with a community, who they're responding to. So the comics feel devoid of context.
Tl;dr: I wound up using this anthology as a starting point to find comics to read independently, rather than as any kind of critical framework. But maybe that's on me for expecting something the book is not.
It's also weird that there's very little discussion of the role of race in the comics, beyond the inclusion of a few Black artists and a comic by Margaret Cho. But the comics by white artists are often full of Orientalist or racialized imagery, in the way that white artists have often used the specter of the nebulous East as a symbol of erotic freedom, but only as a setting devoid of any actual Asian people. I don't mean to say that the comics shouldn't be included-Orientalism is a big part of queer history and queer comics history in particular! But presenting the comics without comment does the reader a disservice.
In general, I'd really like more discussion of the comics! Aside from the opening essay, there's no accompanying text at all-nothing to tell us who the artists are, or, more critically in an anthology dealing with a community, who they're responding to. So the comics feel devoid of context.
Tl;dr: I wound up using this anthology as a starting point to find comics to read independently, rather than as any kind of critical framework. But maybe that's on me for expecting something the book is not.