The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader

Alison Halsall is associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto, Canada. She is editor of White Rose and the Red, and her work has been published in such edited volumes and journals as Cultural and Creative Industries of Childhood and Youth; Graphic Perspectives on Health and Embodiment; and INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. She specializes in Victorian and modernist literatures, with a particular emphasis on visual cultures, which includes the study of paintings and illustrations, contemporary film, comics, and graphic narratives. Jonathan Warren is associate professor and former chair in the English Department at York University. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and his work has been published in such journals as the Henry James Review, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and the American Century. A specialist in literary modernism and its precursors, including especially American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he has taught York's massively popular undergraduate and graduate courses in comics since inventing them two decades ago.

This collection is well-worth a cover to cover read. Each author explores a different aspect of queer comics both in terms of queer history, as well as in terms of queer theory. It is exciting to see this anthology in the world and its influence on queer comics scholars will be profound.--Christopher M. Roman "International Journal of Comic Art blog" [Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren] feature an impressive diversity of perspectives. . . . Smart and wide-ranging, this is a worthy contribution to the history of comics.-- "Publishers Weekly" Halsall and Warren's comprehensive Reader invites scholars of comics, queerness, and childhoods to imagine diversity anew and to visualize, whether in cartoons or in the imagination, the future of LGBTQ+ comics.--James Joshua Coleman "The Lion and the Unicorn" The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader is a major intervention in comics studies. The essays extend the context of LGBTQ+ comics beyond 'comix, ' beyond the underground or alternative, where they have historically been understood. They show how comics are integral to LGBTQ+ cultures, how they work to create those cultures in addition to representing them, and how comics themselves as a form instantiate queerness. This is a forward-looking volume that maps the state of the field while also pointing towards exciting new directions.--Janine Utell, author of The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In