The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader

The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader , edited by Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren, is the first book of its kind, celebrating today’s best scholarship about LGBTQ+ comics from around the world. From before the field’s clear emergence in the mid-20 th -century underground and alternative comics scenes to today, the collection treats all modes of LGBTQ+ comics—including panel, strip, comic book, graphic novel, anthology, graphic memoir, and online forms—their diverse queer readerships, the LGBTQ+ history they make visible, the LGBTQ+ distribution networks their availability implies or seeks, the coded queer intelligence they deploy, and the community-sustaining energy and optimism they conjure. The Reader ’s sustained, theoretically rigorous considerations engage LGBTQ+ comics’ social, economic, historical, cultural, ethical, affective, aesthetic, erotic, and pedagogical aspects, attending to certain inevitable LGBTQ+ touchstones, including pride, coming out, chosen families, justice, sexual health, gender, risk, and liberation. The Reader features contributors from all over the world, taking up the specific localities of LGBTQ+ comics accordingly and reflecting on multiple localities comparatively, transnationally, translocally, and transculturally. The Reader ’s multiple voices engage, address, and question the possibilities of LGBTQ+ comics from various scholarly and critical positions, multiple geographical vantage points, and across a range of queer experiences. In addition to an expansive general introduction and four section introductions by the editors, the Reader showcases 18 chapters that explore a range of approaches to LGBTQ+ comics, all richly illustrated—queer history, gender and sexuality theory, memory studies, graphic medicine, genre studies, biography, and more—and speak to the diversity of publishing forms and media that shape LGBTQ+ comics and their reading communities.