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The Life and Times of America Chavez was a comic book series eventually published in trade form. Written by Gabby Rivera, queer Latinx young adult literature author, this iteration of Marvel Comic's Miss America (America Chavez) possesses an awareness and authenticity of Latinx culture and lesbian identity that was nothing less than revolutionary. Joe Quinones's artwork, rich in color, spirit, and pride, underscored the need for Latinx voices (both visual and verbal) to tell our stories. In this essay, I provide both a scholarly view of AMERICA as a superhero tale and illuminate the experience of reading her as a Latina lesbian.

Cyberzone is a fitting place to start any discussion around Black lesbian identity in comics, as it is the first comic book that this researcher could find which features a Black lesbian female lead superheroine. Cyberzone was self-published by Jimmie Robinson in 1994 and later re-vamped into a mini-comic series called Amanda and Gunn with Image Comics. First, this article deconstructs Cyberzone through the lens of Cultural Prism Theory (CPT). Second, this article situates Cyberzone within the framework of CPT to address Cyberzone's place within the comic book ecosystem. Finally, this essay offers a close reading of Cyberzone, issues #1-#4, against the backdrop of the intersectional framework Black Queer Identity Matrix. During this process, the researcher demonstrates how Cyberzone is a powerful site of resistant cultural commentary.

This essay considers Diane DiMassa's 1990s comic book series Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist alongside the recent rise and visibility of White supremacist movements following the 2016 United States election. While Hothead's acts of queer revenge primarily target White heterosexual cismen, several issues feature Hothead taking aim at neo-Nazis and the KKK. Exploring the way in which Hothead's relationship to debility and capacity is mediated by her gender, sexuality, and race, the essay argues that a biopolitical approach, including the recent scholarly turn to the non-human, can provide a useful framework for approaching interlocking systems of violence and oppression that go beyond traditional intersectional models of resistance.

This article seeks to recuperate four previously unexamined early newspaper comic strip characters that could lay the groundwork for queer comic studies. The titular characters in Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye (1905), Sanjak in Terry and the Pirates (1939) by Milton Caniff, and Hank O'Hair in Brenda Starr, Reporter (1940) by Dale Messick are analyzed through close readings, supporting archival material, and interviews. The article also theorizes the identification of the creator of Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye as George O. Frink, and offers an overview of LGBTQ comics holdings at institutions in North America.

This essay provides a brief overview of some recent Indian and Bangladeshi comics and graphic novels, whether print-based or online, which feature queer female characters. The essay contextualizes these texts with respect to the anti-LGBTQ+ legal climate in South Asian countries, but also places them within a larger trajectory of literary representations of queer (female) love in the Indian subcontinent. The texts under examination range from print graphic novels and indie comics anthologies in India to comic strips brought out by queer activists working for LGBTQ+education and advocacy in Bangladesh. Taken together, they offer diverse portrayals of female-centric love and desire that challenge hetero-patriarchal representations of desi women.

This essay serves as a close reading of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's 1950s descriptions and critiques of female comics characters. I draw on archival sources as well as relevant texts in the study of gender and sexuality. Additionally, I integrate ideas from two of his close associates, folklorist Gershon Legman and psychiatrist Hilde Mosse, whose contributions to Seduction of the Innocent are woven-often invisibly-throughout that text. The character of Wonder Woman serves as a touchstone, but other provocative female figures that Wertham found objectionable in mid-twentieth-century comics accompany her. My goal is to illuminate Wertham's understanding of what he viewed as the "regressive formula of perversity" enacted through women's representations in comics, particularly those female characters who played active roles. Although not all of these concerns are tied to lesbian identity, they do all touch on broader notions of queerness vis-a-vis deviant sexual and gender expression.

Representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) characters in comics for an all-ages readership have emerged in the United States in the early twenty-first century. This essay examines the narrative constructions of same-sex relationships between female characters in two all-ages speculative fiction comics, Princess Princess Ever After by Katie O'Neill, and Lumberjanes, created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, and Brooke Allen.