Things That Go Poof in Comics

Well, it seems that DC, or rather somebody at DC, finally listened to me and got Extraño out of the mothballs. Just when a blockbuster movie with Marvel's Doctor Strange is being launched, it would be awfully stupid to forget about his gay equivalent, wouldn't it? Except the new version of the character has ditched the flamboyant threads as well as the "Extraño" codename, now just using his given name of Gregorio de la Vega which makes him sound like a distant relative of Zorro. Also he's married to an as yet unseen man, has an adopted child and has gone a trifle badass, saying stuff like "no one's called me that (Extraño) in years… fewer lived" Honestly, just because the comic he now appears in, Midnight and Apollo,  is the embodiment of gay badass, does it mean the character has to be turned into an embarrassing 2010's stereotype? Comics newssites go all smug in calling the original Extraño an embarrassing stereotype and you know what? He might have been, but he was not half as embarrassing as the one he's now.

Just so you know - I don't only talk about comics with gay characters, I also make write and draw some. I have started serializing on my tumblr site a comic I originally did in French a few years ago, A Visit. The new version is in English and in color and you can read it here. The link will take you to the most recent page (11) from where you can access all the pages to date. Or you can just go to jpjcomicsandstories and read it from the start, which is the page below :

Bring Back Freedom Ring

Recently, Marvel Comics had yet another of their relaunches of their whole comics universes. This one was called Secret Wars and the idea was to re-start the Marvel Universe while keeping the elements that had proved to be worth keeping… and getting rid of those that one had best forget about. So really, there hasn't been that much change in the actual comics, given that there could have been. Apart from the fact that there no longer is a regularly published Fantastic Four title, everything is pretty much par for the course, with a bunch of Avengers, X-Men and Spider-Man titles. Which leads one to wonder what exactly the point of the whole operation was, apart from re-starting a bunch of titles with new number ones. I mean, Marvel could have used this opportunity to "correct" some of their most glaring errors of judgment. I'm thinking of one especially - the death of Freedom Ring.

If you've never heard of Freedom Ring, do not feel like you should have. The character had a pretty short life in the first place, being introduced as a new rookie superhero in Marvel Team-Up #20 (May 2006) and being summarily dispatched in Marvel Team-Up # 24 (August 2006). According to creator Robert Kirkman "Freedom Ring was always planned as an inexperienced hero who would get beaten up constantly and probably die. I wanted to comment on the fact that most superheroes get their powers and are okay at it... and that's not how life works." Which would have been okay, I guess, if not for the fact that Robert Kirkman, in an effort to diversify, had made Curtis Doyle, Freedom Ring's alter ego, a gay man. It was only after Kirkman had done good with his plan to kill the character that he realized, in no small part due to the outrage from LGBT comics fans, that doing away with a gay super-hero when there are so few of them was maybe not the smartest thing to do. He publicly acknowledged regretting killing the character (all details can be found on the Freedom Ring Wikipedia entry) and then… nothing happened. And it's been ten years.

Now, superhero universes, especially those from Marvel and DC, are known for not following the same rules as ours. Death is often a revolving door, a character who dies in a comic book being very likely to come back to life a few months or even a few years later. That is, except if said character is a minority character. If you're a superhero and you belong to a minority, then your death is much more likely to be for good. Just so the (straight) (white) editors can boast of how "realistic" their comics really are. In the first Civil War mini-series in 2007, the only casualty of the war between superheroes was black superhero Bill Foster, aka Goliath. At the moment, there is a second Civil War on and the first casualty is - guess who - another black superhero, James Rhodes aka War Machine. It's very unlikely that "Rhodey" will be brought back as his superhero identity is already slated to be taken by a woman (but it's not a racist decision because she's a black woman, you see).

So in such a context, it comes as absolutely no surprise that ten years after his infamous demise, Freedom Ring is still dead. There are two sorts of homophobic decisions in superhero comics - one is not having a superhero be gay, the other is sort of forgetting about him and hardly ever using him. Even though the Marvel wiki entry on homosexual characters lists quite a number, how many are regularly being used in comics? Northstar, Wiccan, Hulkling? Oh, and now Iceman is gay, it seems, which is great news but comes a little late for somebody like me who grew up in the 1970's with Iceman and all the other superheroes being as straight as can be.

But really, Marvel, instead of having a "big name" superhero turn out to be gay (well, more like a second-tier big name superhero, really), couldn't you make better use of existing gay characters? Or, in fact, make any use of them at all? Bringing back Freedom Ring (and many other neglected gay characters from your universe) would be a step in the right direction.