Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them

by Colleen Doran

  Some of you reading this essay might not be as all-consumingly familiar with Kitty Pryde’s life in the ’80s as I am. She was a teenager, a member of the X-Men, living in the mansion-school-headquarters of the team. She had two best friends during this time frame: Illyana from the New Mutants team, and Rachel. Both were teenage girls, for a value of “teenage” that includes time travel, dimension-hopping, demonic aging, and alternate universes. This is, after all, superhero comics. Kitty was passionately devoted to each of them.

  This devotion took a variety of forms. In New Mutants #35, the New Mutants are all killed by the Beyonder. Kitty is not merely the only person who remembers the team ever existed; we find out in Uncanny X-Men #202 that she is also the inheritor of Illyana’s soul-sword and armor. This is due to the special bond the two girls share. The nature of said bond is never explained. One might think that Peter, Illyana’s fanatically protective older brother, might be the person who gets the sword and the memory. Nope. Those go to Kitty, the roommate.

  In New Mutants #36, Kitty gets injured, kidnapped, and strung up by a demon. To save her friend, Illyana reclaims her demon heritage and the soul-sword. Much teary cradling of each other while declaiming affection ensues.

  In all scenes of Rachel and Kitty – X-Men/Alpha Flight #1-2, Uncanny X-Men #188-207, most issues of Excalibur – the two young women touch each other. A lot. They stand closely, they link arms, they hold hands. When Kitty’s life is threatened in Uncanny X-Men #196, Rachel knows it through a hitherto-unmentioned psychic bond she has with Kitty. Rachel goes berserk and nearly murders a man for Kitty’s sake. The running gag in early issues of Excalibur is that any time Kitty gets injured in a fight, Rachel goes nuts, sacrificing everything to save her friend.

  These scenes were written under the Comics Code Authority. Structured to be much like the Hays and Breen codes governing movies, the CCA prohibited depictions of sexuality in comics:

  2. Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at or portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.

  [...]

  5. Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions.

  6. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested.

  7. Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden. [24]

  At the same time that Kitty and her roommates were declaring their soulbonds with each other, Scott Summers of the X-Men was married to Madeline Pryor. They were married, and their relationship was shown through hugging and the occasional kiss. Their most risqué moment, before it was revealed that Madeline was an evil clone programmed to steal Scott’s sperm to make a superchild, was on their honeymoon, where they cuddled while she was wearing a nightie and he was wearing shorts. Let it be made clear: Marvel treated all sexuality as something to be hidden away.

  As is so common in queer history, though, an ostensibly fair and even-handed treatment of sexuality in comics makes gay and lesbian relations invisible. The heterosexual pairings among the X-Men could kiss or hug, could call their time together a date. The queers could not. Moreover, there’s that “perversion” clause. Ego-dystonic homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1986. [25] New Mutants #36 was published in February 1986. When it was written, lesbianism was legally and medically a perversion. Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, the writer and artist of New Mutants at the time, could not say that Illyana came to the rescue of her some-time girlfriend Kitty who had been defeated by a demon with a penchant for classic bondage porn. But they could write it, and draw it, without ever acknowledging that is what they were doing. The relationship, the subtext, the highly sexualized imagery, all these things were presented not as queer kink but as friendship and heroism. The kind of relationship any high school girl might have with her best friends.

  I cannot in any way speak towards the intentions of Chris Claremont, the artists, editors, or anyone involved in the making of X-Men comics during the late 1980s. I don’t know what they meant to tell me. But I know what I saw. I saw romantic love presented as simple friendship. I saw heroism, a kind of knighthood and self-sacrifice, to be what any friendship should expect.

  In early 1992, I was re-reading my Excalibur comics, specifically Excalibur #24. Reading these pages again, in the new climate of the GLB-Union, my almost entirely not-heterosexual friends, and constant political awareness, something went “click” in my head. In this issue, Kitty has been separated from her Excalibur teammates. She is staying with a woman named Courtney Ross, an old friend of Captain Britain’s. (This is not actually Courtney, it is a villain, Sat-Yr-9, but Kitty doesn’t know that.) Courtney wakes Kitty with an offer to take Kitty out for her birthday, to cheer her up since all of her friends might be dead. Kitty initially declines, sulkily, until Courtney... well, until she seduces Kitty into saying yes.

  Panel 1: Kitty is facing Courtney over the cake as they both sit on the bed. Kitty is wearing pajamas, Courtney is wearing a white dress with a high flared collar and puffy sleeves. Courtney has some pink frosting on her finger. Her finger is in her mouth and she is sucking the frosting off.

  COURTNEY: So, there’s no need for lies between us, okay?

  KITTY: Okay.

  KITTY: But I’m afraid I haven’t a clue about what to do with today.

  Panel 2: Two-shot of Kitty and Courtney. On the left of the panel Kitty is sitting cross-legged in her pajamas, looking at Courtney. On the right, Courtney is leaning forward, her hand extended towards Kitty. She has frosting on her finger, still, the same finger she was just sucking. The frosting-laden finger is nearly touching Kitty’s mouth.

  COURTNEY: Actually, I have a few ideas.

  COURTNEY: If you’re willing.

  Panel 3: Kitty holds Courtney’s hand gently by the wrist. She is sucking on Courtney’s finger, her chin titled slightly down, eyes looking up and over their hands at Courtney’s face.

  KITTY: Lead on, Courtney, I’m all yours.

  Panel 4: Both women lean towards each other, their foreheads nearly touching, identical smiles on their faces. In this panel, we cannot see their eyes, just the smiles.

  COURTNEY: I’m so glad.

  The two proceed to then spend the day together, with Courtney buying Kitty a sports car, exotic dinners in foreign locales, and expensive sexy clothes. Every scene they share speaks of excess, seduction, hinted debauchery, and the possibility of corruption. [26]

  I re-read this scene over and over again. I knew, now, in 1992, what this looked like. This looked like Spin-the-Bottle or Truth-or-Dare, it looked like the drunk and stoned random kissing games people played in the dorms on a weekend night. It looked like a challenge thrown down and accepted. I stared at the art. Courtney or Sat-Yr-9 or whoever was seducing Kitty Pryde. And Kitty was saying yes.

  I went through my back issues, flushed and slightly sick, my heart racing. There in the pages of the comics I loved, the characters I loved were... were very possibly loving each other. Every year, Macalester held GLB visibility week, when students chalked the sidewalks with the names of famous queers. My first year I had blinked at some of the names in astonishment, confused. Eleanor Roosevelt? Seriously? And I’d gone to look up some of the evidence. I’d learned, as a consequence, about GLBT invisibility, how queer relationships are unacknowledged in history. I read up on Hollywood’s part in the conspiracy, about the Celluloid Closet. I’d done, in short, what the GLBUnion wanted people to do during queer visibility week – I learned about gay history.

  My comics had invisible queers.

  What did this mean for me?

  I went on a walk around the campus, chain smoking cigarettes in the light spring rain. I could feel something happening inside my head, and I didn’t like it one little bit. I got back to my dorm room and sat on my bunk and stared at the posters lining my walls. The thing unfolding in my mind was taking shape. Kitty and Rachel, Kitty
and ‘Yana, they were best friends. I tried to mold my best friendships on their model. The love they felt for each other, the passion, this was how I felt towards my closest female friends. If Kitty Pryde wasn’t straight, if her love for her friends was instead sexual, then... then what did that make me?

  A dozen half-remembered conversations floated through my thoughts, mixed with images of comics, images of my life, whirling around. Tears started to form in my eyes, and I flushed bright red in the privacy of my dorm room. Kitty Pryde wasn’t straight. She likely never had been. I... was not straight. I likely never had been. Moreover, it was probably perfectly obvious to dozens of people in my life that I was a complete idiot. A complete, closeted, idiot.

  I looked across the room at Rogue, smiling at me from the Jim Lee poster. She looked so cocky, so confident. She also looked really hot, goofy hair notwithstanding. I wiped my eyes and said it. I looked Rogue in the eye and managed a whisper. “I think I’m gay.” She kept smiling.

  How was it I had missed this? I looked at the X-Men poster again and tried to examine the admiration I held for the figures on it. When I looked at Rogue, what did I imagine? What thoughts crossed my mind? What did I want to say or do? Do with, or for, or to... Oh. Okay, yes, Sigrid, you really, really ought to have realized your sexual orientation before this point. Why didn’t I? What had stopped me?

  The artist for Excalibur #24, Alan Davis, said in his online forum that, “although I knew Chris had some plan for Sat-Yr-9 to corrupt Kitty and that the various Cross-time versions of Saturnyne were attracted to Kitty, I had no idea what, if any, the goal of this relationship was to be. I just played it as a lesbian affair.” [27] Davis knew something about Claremont’s intentions that I did not know, and drew what he thought a lesbian relationship, with willing participation from both parties, would look like. Kudos to him, it looked rather a lot like the same-sex flirting I saw monthly at the GLBUnion dances – licking of the fingers, et cetera. What I did not know is that Claremont included this sort of girl-on-girl sensuality in all of his comics, hiding it from the CCA as heterosexual female friendship. It wasn’t until 1992 and Davis’s fairly blatant art that I got the hint; actual straight women maybe don’t feel this way about their friends. It was entirely possible, I realized slowly, that finger sucking and licking was not a strictly heterosexual activity among friends.

  Rogue didn’t judge me. Neither did my friend Scott, who I called in a not entirely coherent manner to come get me. Scott drove around for hours while we talked about comic books, and Northstar, and whether Nightcrawler (an X-Man who was also a devout Catholic) was also gay, and the gay Catholic monks that Scott had slept with. When I finally managed to squeak out that I might not be straight, Scott lit a cigarette and suggested we go get coffee at a local family restaurant. He politely ignored me, singing along with the radio, while I lit my own cigarette and finished crying.

  From December 2002 to May 2003, Marvel published a mini-series called Mekanix. In this series, Kitty Pryde comes out. Claremont finally has her almost kissing Xi’an Coy Manh, a fellow former X-Man who is an out lesbian. Kitty’s bisexuality seems to only exist in Claremont’s mind – no other writer of her since has done anything with this. But I’m okay with that.

  I could wish that Kitty talked about it more, or occasionally ogled a woman. But it’s fine with me that she dated Peter Rasputin. It’s fine with me that she put all romance on the back burner to focus on saving planets, riding through space in bullets, snarking with Emma Frost, and trying to not die. I have my Mekanix and my Excalibur. I know that Kitty was struggling with her identity and her sexual orientation all through her high school years as she and her roommates fell in and out of love with each other. I know she came out in college, and that the coming out was a surprise to her. I know in my heart that she told Rogue, and that Rogue shrugged and didn’t care.

  I can blame Claremont – and I do – for my not coming out earlier than I did. But I also have to credit him for slipping queers into my comics when the CCA forbade it. When I did finally come out to myself, the X-Men didn’t judge me. They accepted this new form of oddball difference the same way they’d always accepted me with open hands and an invitation to be a hero once more.

  [24] Comics Code Authority 1954 – www.comicartville.com/comicscode.htm

  [25] psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_mental_health.html

  [26] scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/411719.html

  [27] www.alandavis-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=59#wrap

  The Captain in the Capitol: Invoking the Superhero in Daily Life

  Jennifer Margret Smith is a graduate student in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies superhero comics alongside a host of other media. She has written comic reviews for Best Shots at Newsarama and interned at Marvel Comics in the X-Men editorial department, and she blogs at fantasticfangirls.org. She may be the only Princeton alumnus with fond memories of the thesis-writing process. Captain America remains her inspiration.

  On March 9, 2011, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker rammed through a controversial piece of anti-union legislation in the absence of Democratic senators who had crossed state lines to prevent that very thing from happening. Wisconsin union members and their allies, who had been protesting the bill for weeks, stormed the Capitol building in Madison once more, pounding on the doors when they were denied access and slipping in whenever a door was opened for even a moment. Once inside, they made their way up several flights of stairs with their chants and their signs to stage a sit-in, hoping that their distance from the doors would prevent their removal should the police attempt to clear the building. “Tell me what democracy looks like!”, they yelled, stomping on the floor to keep the beat. “This is what democracy looks like!”

  I was among the multitude who stormed the Capitol that night. As a first year graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I’d become moderately involved in the protests – more involved than some, though not nearly as involved as those who slept on the cold marble floors of the Capitol for days on end. When I heard the news of the bill passing, I didn’t even hesitate to board the next bus and make my way down to the Capitol to join the protestors. I had no sign, no friends to join me, no real plans except to follow the crowd. But March 9th was a Wednesday, and as a result there were two things I did have: a Captain America T-shirt on my back, and a pile of brand new comic books in my backpack. Sitting in solidarity with my fellow union members on the second floor of the Capitol rotunda, my back against a stately pillar, I flipped through my comics and drew strength, as I had for weeks, from the crusaders for justice who populated those panels and pages.

  I was not a comic book fan growing up. I never tied a towel around my neck and jumped off a table in simulated flight, and I never deflected imaginary bullets with my mother’s costume bracelets. The closest I came to an interest in superheroes as a child was a fixation on the 1990s X-Men cartoon, and I do vividly remember standing in front of electric fans, letting my hair blow around me and pretending to command the winds and rains like Storm. But for the most part, I didn’t participate in the time-honored childhood practice of pretending to be the heroes of the page or screen, saving lives and possessing more strength than a frail, youthful form could ever in reality hold.

  But I did, eventually, discover comics. In the summer of 2006, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I borrowed hundreds of comic books from a friend and began my trek down the path of comic book fandom, a path that would quite literally change my life. I started with the X-Men, my old childhood pals, and moved on from there to the Avengers, the Marvel Universe, and eventually the DC Universe. I fell in love with the medium, with the shared universes, and with the talent of the hundreds of creators whose work I was absorbing. But most of all, I fell in love with the characters.

  College was not an easy time for me. I was shy and awkward, and I wasn’t sure how to make friends. Everyone I felt close to was back in my home to
wn, and my classmates were strangers who stayed up late into the night drinking and blasting music while I diligently read the novels for that week’s English lectures. I’d always been a good student, studious and conscientious, and I was happy with the progress of my college education, but the college social world left something to be desired.

  It was during one of these fits of malaise during my junior year of college that I discovered Dan Slott’s She-Hulk. On the first page of the first issue, protagonist Jennifer Walters – a heroine who shares my first name – sits in her law school dorm room amid piles of books, studying with earplugs as the sounds of a raucous party and Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” pound through her walls. On the next page, we see her law school graduation, and the lonely picture her father takes of her, diploma in hand, while her classmates gather in large, celebratory groups for their own photos.

  Reading that comic represented a moment of painful recognition for the lonely college student I was. Yet this was merely the introduction, the flashback to a time in Jennifer Walters’s past. Soon enough, she would receive a blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce Banner and become the She-Hulk, a beautiful 6’7” green superhero with an immensity of physical strength matched only by her outgoing, confident personality. She’d still be a lawyer, but she’d be a lawyer with friends and a sense of purpose – a lawyer who could beat up bad guys, party with celebrities, and face down any criticisms that came her way. During one storyline, she would even go undercover using the name “Jennifer Smith” – my own (albeit very common) first and last name. She was, the comic quickly revealed, the wish-fulfillment I’d been waiting for, the equivalent of Spider-Man for the awkward girl nerd.