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 :

Reclaiming... Extraño

A long time ago, in the 1980s, there weren't that many gay superheroes. In fact, at the start of the decade, there weren't ANY gay superheroes or gay secondary characters in superhero stories. Northstar, who appeared first in X-Men and then in the Alpha Flight regular series, was the first superhero who was implied to be gay. And I do mean imply - you had to be able to read between the lines. The word "gay" was never used about him back then (he finally came out in a rather spectacularly bombastic fashion in 1992). So Northstar wasn't the first openly gay superhero. Extraño was.

At this point, I can hear most of you readers exclaiming "Who?". Extraño (real name : Gregorio De La Vega) was one of several characters who gained superpowers in the 1987-88 DC event series Millenium. He then became a member of the superhero team the New Guardians, who had their own comic for twelve issues (September 1988-September 1989). And then, he was never seen again, never used again in a DC comic, as far as I know.

Among the New Guardians, Extraño was the magician. In fact, his creator, writer Steve Englehart, who had in the past written the character Dr Strange, wanted him to be a gay Dr Strange, and the name "Extraño" is Spanish for Strange. Unfortunately, we'll never know how the character would have developed under Englehart, since the writer left after the second issue of New Guardians due to the publisher not living up to its promise of a free hand in his handling of "sex, drugs and politics". 

Gay comics fans of the times were generally not happy with Extraño because he was written as the then-stereotypical gay queen, and also because he was shown as being infected with the HIV virus. However, I would argue that Extraño had a lot of unused potential, like a lot of characters that were only used for a brief time - and there have been a lot of short-lived characters in mainstream comics. It seems that nowadays, in the post-New52 DC Universe, only LGBT characters who are as squeaky-clean as possible can exist, and preferably in an eternal state of celibacy. Gregorio De La Vega was definitely not squeaky clean - he was an outrageous queen from a South American country (Peru) and it was implied he had lived quite the busy gay life before becoming a superhero.

And he had a moustache.

Can any of the current wave of mainstream gay male characters say the same?