Last night I attended a talk by my colleague, Robert Howes, at Bristol City Library. It was titled “From Scandal to Domesticity: Cartoon Images of Homosexuality”. Basically the idea was to trace the changing public attitudes towards LGBT people through cartoons. Robert was very entertaining, but his focus was mainly on single-panel political cartoons. He doesn’t know a lot about comic strips, or books. He did manage to find Spandex though.
Anyway, this has given me an idea for next year’s LGBT History Month: “To the Batbed, Robin! — A History of LGBT Superheroes”. Thankfully I have a whole year to work on it. I have my talk at Microcon to worry about first.
Talking of which, I’ll probably be quiet for the next few days as I’ll be traveling or at the convention.
[Coughs meaningfully in the direction of a certain Exhibit Hall coming to a convention near you.]
Bonus points if you have the original of the Spandex panel that has me in it. 😉
Hey Captain,
I’m not sure how much use I could be but if you want any info about LGBT characters in comics then I’m pretty sure I can help, though somewhat ironically I won’t be much use with superheroes.
But both sound interesting, certainly.