Comics’ Long History of Marginality

Artistic revolutions and reclamations have happened in nearly every medium and every time period. The Harlem Renaissance, the Beatniks, and even the birth of MTV were all countercultural reactions to oppression of various kinds, with artists reinventing creative mediums to birth political engagement. 

The forms these movements focused on aided in such potential. Television and film offer widespread popularity that lend themselves to mobilization. Theater provides spatial and temporal liminality that allows viewers to consider new ways of being. Literature, poetry, music, and visual arts give creators the flexibility to expand ideas of what’s possible.

Among these creative forms, though, comics offer a unique — even seemingly contradictory — blend of these various potentialities: temporal liminality, yet images set in time. Sequentiality, yet the ability to move the eye across the page as desired. Visual cues, yet active and kinetic margins filled with potential.

So if we’re going to look at the intersections of creative mediums, queerness, and marginality, comics are a great place to start.

Comics have historically been a much-maligned and marginalized medium themselves. The rise of crime and horror comics in the 1940s produced a cultural anxiety about the medium, largely in the all-too-common “save the children” vein. Psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham advocated for a “regulation or banning of comic books” in an effort to care for the wellbeing of child readers — or so he claimed. His call to action reflected a larger post-WWII cultural regression in which the country collectively sought to tighten its once-loosening set of cultural norms.

What became of Wertham’s complaints? His 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, combined with his testimony at the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, eventually led to the Comics Code Authority (CCA). While most publishers have since abandoned the CCA, it was originally a self-regulatory body (à la McCarthyism) that put strict guardrails around what content was allowed in comic books. It was not unlike the crackdown on violent video games, R-rated movies, or other mediums that “corrupt” our children.

Here’s a snippet of what Wertham had to say: “The comic books, in intent and effect, are demoralizing the morals of youth. They are sexually aggressive in an abnormal way. They make violence alluring and cruelty heroic. They are not educating but stultifying.”

Based heavily in Wertham’s disparaging take on comics, the CCA was fundamentally concerned with perpetuating a traditional moral code, specifically when it came to sex and sexuality. In fact, the code’s “Marriage and Sex” section explicitly prohibited humorous depictions of divorce, sexual “abnormalities,” and sexual “perversions,” all while demanding a “respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior.”

Importantly, Wertham and the CCA were preoccupied (almost obsessively so) with the vampire as a perverse and corrupting figure. This is critical because the vampire has taken its place as a symbolic queer figure among mythic creatures, starting with one of the first vampires, Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla, a lesbian-coded figure who seduced young women. Since then, vampires of all genders have evoked a specifically amorphous, alluring sexuality that very often threatens the status quo.

Speaking of the lesbian vampire trope specifically, Paulina Palmer says this: “Her shape-changing abilities can be read as denoting her refusal to become entrapped in the conventional domestic role, while her erotic relations with women represent a challenge to the institution of marriage and the control men seek to exert on female sexuality. Transgressive sexuality is a key feature of the lesbian vampire’s representation.”

This transgressive sexuality is central to the figure, and for Wertham, that simply wouldn’t do. The fact that Wertham’s and the CCA’s concerns centered on the “abnormal and unhealthy” sexual desires caused by comics creatures like the vampire only lent to a prevailing notion of the day: If we don’t watch out, comics will turn our kids into “sexual deviants.”

The Queerness of Comics

So it was that in the middle of the century, comics took their place in the margins of popular media. 

But out of that marginality came a reclamation through which the countercultural Underground Comix movement was born in the 1960s. The so-called “sexual deviants” of the underground came out in full swing. Mary Wings, Lee Marrs, Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory — the era was full of queer artists who didn’t just tolerate, but embraced, marginalization as a generative position. 

While the CCA was still effectively regulating comics from more mainstream publishers, for example, these underground artists used their marginal position to depict images like women lying naked in bed together, hairy armpits out for the world to see. Or a person birthing a child surrounded by community and stating, “Here’s a squirt for Sappho!” Or a lesbian lamenting her lack of long-lasting love.

This kind of work was a direct response to the oppression of the time.

Reproduction of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth.

Cover of the 2019 edition of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla, Lanternfish Press.

This kind of work was a direct response to the oppression of the time — oppression that unfortunately hasn’t changed much in the past 50-plus years. In a letter to Tee Corinne, an artist and creator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ comics collection “The Yellow Binder,” Mary Wings states, “when I did Come Out Comix it was actually a response to another woman who published what I felt was an anti-gay coming-out story and I got really ticked at men who were ripping off all women and dykes in their macho porno comic strip. I did Come Out Comix because SOMEBODY had to do it!”

Wings and other underground artists hand-drew copies of their work or bribed folks to use company printers to clone their illustrations, then stood on the street corners of New York and San Francisco passing out deeply political, super queer art to passersby. It was a magical moment that was amplified by a magical core element of the comics medium: the margins or gaps that grace the pages of any good comic book. 

In comics, an artist creates fragments of a visual narrative, often in the form of panel images. These are mere snippets of a story, and it’s up to the reader to stitch the fragments together to form the narrative itself. Scott McCloud demonstrates it best in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (even if he is simultaneously accusing us of murder): McCloud presents two panels for the reader, one depicting an axe being raised behind a terrified person, and the next zooming out to a scream ringing out across the cityscape. McCloud writes, “I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime. Each of you committing it in your own style.”

Here’s the magic of the medium: The creative momentum lies within the margins, the empty space between images — rather than in the images themselves. In comics, the reader holds the narrative possibility in their hands and co-creates the story alongside the artist.

We use the process of closure to weave together two disparate images, closing the gap to form a narrative that makes sense to us. Closure is the reason why each reader can take away something different from the narrative based on their own imagination. When we read comics, we perform closure in a number of ways: between two images, between two pages, between the visual and textual divide, between the real and fantastical, between the tangible and implied, and even between various codes of significance (icons, colors, artistic style, font, typography, etc.). 

The concept of closure, as explained by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.

The margins are everywhere. They allow for innovation and imagination, albeit imagination anchored in visual cues from the artist. For example, a spread splash page — an image that reaches wall-to-wall of the recto and verso pages of a comic — could be a visual cue for the reader to pause and immerse themselves in the depths of the scene. Multiple small panels aligned in an organized grid, on the other hand, creates a staccato reading experience that may convey time passing quickly. A pop of color on a black-and-white page could draw the eye, indicating a crucial metaphor or clue to the narrative.

Consider page 2 of A.K. Summers’ memoir Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, for example.

At the top of this page, the author’s avatar, Teek, holds a subway car railing, which also functions as a margin between two panels. The spatial concerns of Teek’s queer pregnant body — one that she notes offers both a bodily dissonance and the ability to pass as “just another fat guy on the subway” — are both separated and connected by the margins. As a structural element typically meant to denote two distinct times and spaces, the margins here muddy that distinction, highlighting the fact that Teek’s body exists both as a whole and a fragment, in both the “straight world” and the queer one, in both one and many temporal moments and spaces. 

Two (or three? or four?) panels from A.K. Summers’ Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag. Reproduced with permission from Soft Skull Press. 

These tensions and convergences give Teek the power to reorient her gender performativity — and give the reader of Pregnant Butch a rich opportunity to consider these queer logics. The margins here make the narrative bigger than the sum of its parts: In its preservation of queer pregnancy, with the margins blurring how Teek moves through space and time, Pregnant Butch is as much an archive as it is a memoir. It validates stories of female masculinity and queer reproduction that are typically left untold.

But here’s the important caveat: This is just my reading, as both the writer of this essay and a big fan of Summers’ work. The beauty of comics is that the artist gives readers a glimpse of something anchored in both the narrative context and the reader’s imagination, so every reading offers the potential for something unique. As “silent accomplices,” we’re given an opportunity to consider unseen spaces and times. And for queer folks, that’s life.

The Margins as a Tool of Power

Queer communities have always lived in the margins. With no scripts for how to live or love, we’ve built our various and varied cultures from our collective imaginations. We’ve been pushed to develop a creative adaptability to survive. It’s the double-sided coin of what J. Jack Halberstam has called a “queer time and place,” an in-between position and a liminal temporality that both oppresses and empowers a people. 

Like other queer theorists, Halberstam claims that queerness can open up new narratives and histories that have otherwise been neglected or erased. Queer space refers not only to the bounded places we create for our communities, but also to the process of creating and sustaining those places in the face of conservative notions of public respectability. In Halberstam’s words, it “refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engaged and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.”

Queer space is about inhabitation as much as it is about spatial boundaries. It’s what makes a gay bar so powerful: You can get drinks with friends anywhere, but there’s something special about being surrounded by other queer folks in a dimly lit, safe, probably grungy space. The bar becomes the marginal space in which we can imagine, create, and inhabit something uniquely our own.

Queer time, on the other hand, can help us form new temporal logics that don’t rely on heteronormative reproduction for meaning. At the center of an imagined futurity, Halberstam argues, is the transgender body — a symbol and embodiment of a possible queer utopia, exemplifying the “potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child-rearing.” (Summers would likely amend that statement to traditional conventions of family.)

Interestingly, Halberstam situates queer time and space within marginality with this bold rallying statement: “The project of subcultural historiography demands that we look at the silences, the gaps, and the ruptures in the spaces of performance, and that we use them to tell disorderly narratives.”

---

---

The “gaps” Halberstam refers to make comics the perfect example (though not the only one) of what queer time and space can look like. Their inherently fragmented nature creates gaps that inspire innovation, while their staticness and sequentiality lend toward a strange interplay of various timelines. 

Consider how you actually read a comic book, for example. When you open a comic book, you see the whole page, taking in — even subconsciously — the whole narrative, however briefly. But then you likely follow each panel as it leads through each specific moment within the larger narrative. Since fragments imply time in a comic book, you’re simultaneously seeing the long- and the short-term timeline of the story. Time, in comics, is a weird iteration of the margins that allows you to go at your own pace or even create your own timeline.

Where Form and Politics Meet

What does this all mean for the queer and trans folks just trying to make it through each day? It’s a call to action to use our relegation to the margins to embrace creativity and possibility, to envision a new time and space, and then to work to manifest it. Art, in all its various forms, enables vulnerability alongside resistance. It allows for intimacy, connection, critical thinking, energy exchange, joy, anger, and possibility. It can heal wounds and cause them. It offers the potential for interrogation, self-love, and community.

When queer communities are bombarded with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and the very real threat of continued violence — as they are today — art provides a way to both cope and fight back. It’s why the history of queer comics and comix is full of political engagement and why queer artists today are reinventing the form yet again for political engagement. Just look at Sasha Velour’s work as an example.

In 2017, drag queen Sasha Velour won season 9 of the hit reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, marking a turning point for the show by validating a particularly cerebral kind of drag. Velour’s style is at once experimental, visceral, cartoonish, illustrative, political, silly, and performative. It’s a charged commentary on identity.

But Velour is also an accomplished comics artist, with a gender studies and arts education from the Center for Cartoon Studies. When taken together, her combination of live performance and innovative comics muddies the idea of comics as a static and material art form. In fact, her piece “What Now” was originally a performance piece that she then transformed into “comics poetry” in 2015 for INK BRICK, no. 4.

In the self-portrait featured in that piece, Velour draws herself with her signature monstrousness: long, sharp talons, a contorted body, and a furrowed brow. Her body isn’t simply drawn within marginal space. Rather, it is the marginal space. She’s only made legible by the surrounding color, made possible by the margins that form the body she actively chooses to inhabit. In this way, Velour embraces the margins as a place of becoming and uses what we typically see as emptiness as a form of self-narrativization. The margin — the gap, the emptiness, the negative space — ends up being a place to create herself in her own image. 

For Velour, the marginal space also offers an opportunity to grapple with the relationship between queer embodiment and family. Velour dedicates the comic to her late mother, stating “I want to be my mother’s drag queen.” It’s a declaration that stakes a personal and familial claim in gender performativity, and Velour uses her drag and her marginal embodiment as a way of understanding her loss.

Sasha Velour’s self-portrait character, who originally appeared in INK BRICK no. 4. Reproduced with permission from Sasha Velour.

Throughout “What Now” — the performance and the comic — Velour plays with the idea of “putting on” gender. She says, “I learned that it can be empowering to wear your mother’s dress. Or power suit. At first, I was worried that it was a little Norman Bates psycho, but then I just embraced it and now I’m a murderer.” Loss, becoming, monstrosity, performativity, marginalization — it’s all wrapped up in a complex web of queerness for Velour.

It’s no wonder she chose comics and drag as her mediums for expressing this complexity. 

Making It Up as We Go

W.J.T. Mitchell, an academic who’s built a career analyzing humans’ relationships to pictures and seeing, once said something I just can’t forget: “Vision is (as we say) a ‘cultural construction,’ that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by nature; that therefore it might have a history related in some yet-to-be-determined way with the history of arts, technologies, media, and social practices of display and spectatorship; and (finally) that it is deeply involved with human societies, with theethics and politics, aesthetics and epistemology of seeing and being seen.”

Every time I walk into a gay bar or see two women kissing on a street corner, I’m reminded of Mitchell’s thoughts here, that what some see as deviant or abnormal or simply different, I and others in the queer community often see as empowering, enriching, and energizing. If seeing itself is wrought with the baggage of social construction — just as the images, dialogue, and margins of a comic book are — then we all have the power to change that meaning. We can construct what we see and how we fill the margins in different ways.

And if Mitchell is correct that vision itself is a construct, then what we don’t see becomes just as important as what we do. Readers can become “silent accomplices” who envision a better, more just world. We can imagine the possibilities of the margins, the gutter, the gaps, and combine that with our anchoring in reality as a tool for change.

What do queer folks do with our marginalization in a literal sense? How do we actualize the potential of the margins? I’m not sure, exactly. But I know it happens. I see it every time queer folks gather, or choose their family, or provide allyship for other marginalized groups. I feel it every time I see my wife. I’m called to it when I flip through the pages of one of the many queer-authored comics out today, or when I imagine new possibilities in the margins of comics that are decidedly not queer.

Just as the comics margins allow us to imagine a resonant narrative, in this politically fraught moment in which our very right to live and love is under constant attack, the marginal space offers us something we very much need: hope.  

When queer communities are bombarded with anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and the very real threat of continued violence — as they are today — art provides a way to both cope and fight back.

SEE ALSO: J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, 2005 • Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, HarperCollins, 1993 • W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005 • Paulina Palmer, Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fiction, Cassell, 1999 • A.K. Summers, Pregnant Butch: Nine Long Months Spent in Drag, Soft Skull Press, 2014 • Sasha Velour, The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, 2024 • Mary Wings, Come Out Comix (1974)and Dyke Shorts (1978), Self-published.

Ash Holland is a writer, editor, and comics scholar who lives in Portland, Maine, with her wife, pup, and orange cat. She currently writes and edits for various education and environmental conservation nonprofits. Ash is also the owner of The Lucky Fox Bookshop, a pop-up bookstore that curates collections of queer fiction for communities across New England. theluckyfoxbookshop.com

---

perhaps you would also like…