#LGBTQ graphic novels

[rockislandadultreads]

Queer Comics: Graphic Novels to Check Out

Pixels of You by: Ananth Hirsh (Co-writer), Yuko Ota (Co-writer), J.R. Doyle (Artist)

A human and human-presenting AI slowly become friends—and maybe more—in this moving YA graphic novel In a near future, augmentation and AI changed everything and nothing. Indira is a human girl who has been cybernetically augmented after a tragic accident, and Fawn is one of the first human-presenting AI. They have the same internship at a gallery, but neither thinks much of the other’s photography. But after a huge public blowout, their mentor gives them an work together on a project or leave her gallery forever. Grudgingly, the two begin to collaborate, and what comes out of it is astounding and revealing for both of them. Pixels of You is about the slow transformation of a rivalry to a friendship to something more as Indira and Fawn navigate each other, the world around them—and what it means to be an artist and a person.

The DC Book of Pride: A Celebration of DC's LGBTQIA+ Characters by: Jadzia Axelrod

Discover the rich history of DC’s LGBTQIA+ Superheroes in this inspiring gift-title featuring detailed character profiles and comic book artwork Celebrate Pride with DC’s LGBTQIA+ Superheroes. Written and curated by DC expert Jadzia Axelrod, The DC Book of Pride profiles more than 50 LGBTQIA+ characters in detail, including Harley Quinn, Superman, Nubia, Robin, Batwoman, Aqualad, Dreamer, Green Lantern, and many more. Discover their fascinating origins, amazing superpowers, and key storylines. This title is an indispensable and celebratory companion to the DC Pride comic books.

Spectacle #1 by: Megan Rose Gedris

Fan-favorite webcomic creator Megan Rose Gedris (Yu+Me Dream) crafts a compelling tale of magic, deception, and wonder in this stunningly illustrated comic about the bond between sisters. Pragmatic engineer Anna works as a psychic in the Samson Brothers Circus, but she doesn't believe in anything supernatural... until her twin sister Kat is murdered and comes back as a very demanding ghost. Sharing a room with her sister was hard, but now they're sharing a body while trying to identify the killer. But how can you solve a mystery when everyone around has their own shady secrets?

Blackwater by: Jeannette Arroyo, Ren Graham  

Riverdale meets Stranger Things in this debut queer YA graphic novel, developed from a hit webcomic. Set in the haunted town of Blackwater, Maine, two boys fall for each other as they dig for clues to a paranormal mystery. Tony Price is a popular high school track star and occasional delinquent aching for his dad’s attention and approval. Eli Hirsch is a quiet boy with a chronic autoimmune disorder that has ravaged his health and social life. What happens when these two become unlikely friends (and a whole lot more . . .) in the spooky town of Blackwater, Maine? Werewolf curses, unsavory interactions with the quarterback of the football team, a ghostly fisherman haunting the harbor, and tons of high school drama.

[geekyliteracy]

NEW ARC REVIEW!

A unique take on the exploration of sexuality with symbolism galore. Very dense but a thoughtful read.

[jesncin]

Happy National Coming Out Day! It's been about half a year since our middle grade graphic novel, Lunar Boy, released! Today we want to reflect on the concept of Coming Out, and how it's fictionalized in media.

Check out Lunar Boy wherever american graphic novels are sold, or check it out at a library! All the support means a lot with getting stories like this out there.

[arielries]

So excited to finally reveal the cover for my graphic novel Strange Bedfellows and announce that it's open for pre-orders! Releasing March 4th, 2025.

Oberon must choose between fantasy and reality when he develops the ability to conjure his dreams in real life--including the facsimile of the boy who got away.

To order it from a local seller and support a small business, you can do so through this link on bookshop.

It's also currently cheaper to order it here than major retailers!

you can also find it at major retailers here, though I always suggest ordering locally when you can!

These are just North American links so far--I will be following up when and where it will be available to order internationally shortly.

Pre-ordering makes a huge difference to a book's success. Enough pre-orders can mean a book ends up on a best-sellers in its week of release, which is huge for visibility!

If you don't have the financial means to preorder, you can still help by sharing with your friends or requesting the book at your local library. Most libraries have online request forms these days, making the process super easy.

I put a lot of love and hard work into this book, I can't wait to share it with you all.

[saccharind]

from Prokaryote Season by Leo Fox

[theartofknightjj]

Happy Halloween and HAPPY 10 YEARS since I drew these two for the very first time!! 🎃💚💜

I drew the first characters of Les Normaux exactly 10 years ago today during a livestream. They were just 3 sets of monster couples drawn spontaniously for fun! I could’ve never ever imagined where that night would lead me 10 years later.

It feels crazy yet poetic that so soon these two will have their own /published/ book in bookstores. What a way to celebrate 🥹✨

But ofcourse I had to also come on here and embarras myself by posting my oooold art so I could redraw them! So here are 2024, 2014 and a bonus 2017 redraw of the boys. (Will be redrawing Ronnie and Drew later dw!!)

Thank you all for loving them for this long. So excited for this next chapter in their story!! 🐰✨

[crookedsmilesnovel]

Crooked Smiles is a 2-part LGBTQIA+ supernatural horror romance series written by H.L. Holmwood, largely presented as novels, which will include insert comic pages within chapters.

Supplementary zines— a mixture of prose and comic— will be published alongside to expand on characters and plot points; the artwork for these is being created by the amazingly talented Kit Buss / @anemonetea

Set in Victorian London, the series follows Kostya, a working class werewolf, and Ivan, a back-alley vampire doctor, as they battle a threat to both themselves and to the unsuspecting humans living alongside their kind.

Kostya is a cocky northern bloke with a chip on his shoulder. Ivan is a bookish, introspective Czech smartarse with lofty goals. Both characters are queer and have physical disabilities.

Be sure to follow for more updates as the project progresses! Volume 1 Kickstarter to be announced...

[supertaliart]

Hey! If you like my fandom comics and illustrations, you might like my graphic novel, M is for Monster. It's a Frankenstein-inspired story with non-binary and queer characters that plays with the "came back wrong" trope. It's available to order or buy from bookstores and a lot of libraries!

[theorahsart]

Hello, apparently it's Banned Books Week and I wanted to say something about it.

It's makes me sad that my book has become one of MANY to be banned in libraries. It doesn't affect me much personally or financially, but its scary/worrying because Ive been watching this ripple effect over the last few years, it's a reflection of increasingly visibly hateful attitudes in recent years, and we're starting to see similar protests against books and libraries here in the UK, along with the transphobic and queerphobic violence against those trying to stop these bans.

Pls help to stem misinformation. Pls go to protests. And support authors of banned books/share their books with teens and kids who might no longer have access to them!

[sirkai]

There's less than 3 DAYS remaining to back Early Bird on Kickstarter!

This older-man centric LGBTQ graphic novel is fully funded with every stretch goal reached. Early Bird Vol. 1 will be available digitally and in print, with rewards for the book beginning at only $14USD!

[riotkittiesarchive]

from Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

[geekyliteracy]

There’s only one more graphic novel from Kay O’Neill and I will have read all of their work. This is a funny and sweet children’s graphic novel, but it is extremely fast paced that it feels like I’m missing pages while reading.

3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

[aelin9]

pretty pretty ✨

Marble Queen by Anna Kopp and Gabrielle Kari

[keezybees]

Character-designing the 55-year-old woman of my dreams

(from Hello Sunshine)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

[jesncin]

LUNAR BOY HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE HARVEY AWARDS!

We're in the "Best Children's Book" category and couldn't be more honored to be among incredible books! If you're a professional in the comics industry in any way (and this includes comic book retailers or librarians) you're eligible to vote for the Harveys! It would be amazing if the first queer Indonesian graphic novel could win this category. Otherwise, keep spreading the good word about Lunar Boy!