Underground Comix and the Rise of the Queer Comics Movement
Back in the early days of comics and sequential art, queerness was used to disparage comics, an accusation thrown at them to show how “wrong” and “unhealthy” they were for the public to consume. Seduction of the Innocent remains one of the more famous writings about sequential art, mostly for its pages dedicated to Batman and Robin’s relationship, or Wonder Woman’s inherent ‘manliness’. In 1954, the Comics Code Authority banned ‘sex perversion or any inference to the same”, among others, in a clear bid to ban queer relationships.
Underground Comix is a movement that reinvented comics, using them not just as a medium for storytelling but for self expression as well. It was a movement fueled by the energy seeping from left-wing counterculture, and the newfound desire to not only platform, but emphasize disenfranchised voices. For this era of comic history, it’s important to note that being openly gay was a career-ending move - particularly in the male-dominated sphere of comics. Coming out meant losing friends, family, and potentially, even your life. This makes the work done by queer artists of this time that much more empowering.
In the early 70s, many female artists and authors noted that the early movement seemed to be mostly men, with very little content by women or for women. Many stories containing women were overtly sexual or misogynistic. They sought to correct this problem by coming together to form Wimmen’s Comix in 1972. The debut issue was a 3 page story written by Trina Robins, called “Sandy Comes Out” - the first known comic that treated its subject, a lesbian, with respect. This upset future movement maker and teacher Mary Wings, who believed that, while the story was a good start, “Sandy Comes Out” misrepresented and even fetishized the process of coming out. Importantly, Trina Robins was a straight woman. There were no lesbian comics besides this three page story, let alone a lesbian comic written by a fellow lesbian. And Wings would decide to change this: soon after the release of Wimmen’s Comix #1, she would create and self-publish one of the most important stories of the early movement, Come Out Comix - the first U.S.-released lesbian-made comic, and one made with no straight audience in mind. It also stands out as the first queer comic publication that didn’t follow any NSFW themes (as the existing gay stories pre-dating Wings were often fetishistic). Come Out Comix shows Wings’ own experience coming out. Sara Century writes, “...the story revolves around Mary's personal coming out and how it manifested as a quest of self-discovery rather than being a whimsical trot through subcultures for a bored middle-class woman (as was generally portrayed in media of the time). Wings walks us through not just her own experience, but the way her old friends fail to respond to her heartfelt letters in which she came out to them. Taking us back to a time when coming out for some meant writing dozens of letters to family and friends, Come Out Comix is indispensable as a time capsule as well as a heartfelt personal story of queerness in a way that, at the time, had not ever been explored within the medium.”
Mary Wings, legend that she is, continued to create heart-wrenchingly honest comics. Dyke Shorts followed the same themes Come Out Comix did, and the way Wings repeatedly pushed the envelope began to catch the attention of others. The California Art Council funded her story Are Your Highs Getting You Down?, which tackled the issue of drug addiction. Her comics went on to address themes such as artificial insemination, writing lesbians into history, and even discovering your parents’ homosexuality. Her growing popularity was controversial, and several times, her book shipments were seized at the Canadian border due to “inappropriate content”. In 1978, California Proposition 6 - otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative - began to be talked about, putting her teaching dreams into jeopardy. The Briggs Initiative intended to prevent gay people from working with children under the assumption they would be groomed and ‘recruited’ into the gay movement. Even this didn’t stop her - Wings went on to draw Sappho dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing at the viewer and saying “WE WANT YOU!” Gay and feminist magazines began to diversify, running queer-centric comic strips; The Advocate, America’s oldest LGBT-interest magazine, often featured gag cartoons reflecting the gay lifestyle. They published Joe Johnson’s comics featuring the first ongoing gay characters, Miss Thing and Big Dick. Cathartic Comics (1977) by Ruper Kinnard showcased the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé, the first continuing gay African American comic characters. Wimmen’s Comix published “Modern Romance” by Roberta Gregory, and her later comics “Naughty Bits” and “Bitchy Butch”. NSFW gay comic collections like Meatmen were sometimes found to grace the shelves, but an anthology of non-sexual gay comics wasn’t fully collected until Kitchen Press published Gay Comix in 1979.
Kitchen Sink Press was the publisher of Howard Cruse’s underground comic Barefootz, and also a huge part of the movement against the Comics Code Authority (read more: Censorship in Comics). Five years into its publication, the character Barefootz character Headrack came out as gay in the story “Gravy on Gay”. Cruse describes this moment as “an explosion of long-repressed liberationist fury” - and around this time, he finally came out himself. Denis Kitchen, founder of Kitchen Sink Press, approached Cruse to edit the anthology of gay artists that would later become Gay Comix. Mangel said, “Howard was at that point one of the few openly queer cartoonists in the underground scene… nobody in mainstream comics was out, but in underground comics, there was a handful. The assumption was that Howard would know everybody. Because of course all gays and lesbians know each other! It's funny because we joke about that but there is some truth to the concept. Many of us that were queer pioneers did know people because people would come to us and say, you know, I'm not ready to be out yet, but here I am." Cruse was out, but not publicly, not in print. He was worried that it would add to his woes. Despite concerns, he ultimately came to the conclusion that “it would be cowardly to decline the editor’s position for those reasons.” Both Kitchen and Cruse recognized that gay people were mostly seen as a caricature by the world, something that was reflected in many of the NSFW and gag comics of the time. Because of this, Cruse decided to focus on the humanity and day-to-day side of queer people. He was openly inspired by the women that came before him that had formed Wimmen’s Comix, saying in an editor’s note in issue #4 that “the personal style of the comic book storytelling in Gay Comix was pioneered by women who put together Wimmen’s Comix when underground comics were still young.” Gay Comix is also notable for being a major piece of literature that frames comics as an uncensored art form, something that could throw out expectations and usual stereotypes in favor of the range of human experience. “In this comic book,” he wrote in #1, “You’ll find work by lesbians, gay men, and bisexual human beings. The subject is Being Gay. Each artist speaks for himself or herself. No one speaks for any mythical “average” homosexual. No one is required to be “politically correct”,” referring to the (still ongoing) problem of restriction and identity policing among the community. Gay Comix #3 is especially noted for being the first comic to positively show a trans man living his life. It was also the first issue to feature notes from readers. At issue #5, Bob Ross, publisher of the Bay Area Reporter gay newspaper, took over publication. The themes in Gay Comix were ranged and various, including:
Coming out and settling down
Grief
The hope for a more tolerant future
Domestic partner life
Internalized homophobia
Exploration and experimentation
Activism
Struggling with being in the closet
AIDs and safe sex
Relationships between gay men and lesbians, and gay people and their mothers
Anti-gay buzzwords used in marketing to covertly platform homophobia
Both the joys and pitfalls of being a lesbian couple
Gay bashing
The agony of a crush
Monogamy
Illegal love under an oppressive government
Lesbian safe sex in the face of AIDS
Homophobic bosses
Pronouns
Young heartbreak
Gay Comix was many people’s first experience with a comic book that they could see themselves in. “Oh, man!” Alison Bechdel said of the first time she saw a copy. “You can do cartoons about your real own life as a gay person.”
Issue #14 was the last magazine published under the title Gay Comix and not Gay Comics, a choice made by editor Andy Mangels in 1991 to separate it from the underground implication of “comix”. "At that time, I was the first out creator in mainstream comics to really push for LGBTQ creators. I wanted to make it completely gender-equal. This is long before we had the term non-binary. By making it gender-equal - at the time Wimmen's Comix was winding down - we were able to level the playing field. The second big change was: give people more money. So I was able to keep to a budget and everybody got raises. I upped the page count. And let's stop being in the underground. Let's make this mainstream. Let's distribute to comic book stores, not just LGBTQ bookstores. Get mainstream creators to contribute."
Mangels did this by approaching Todd McFarlane, creator and artist of Spawn - the #1 top-selling comic at the time. McFarlane put an inside cover advertising the anthology, but it was quickly pulled from the shelves. Retailers couldn’t possibly sell this to children - the blood and the violence was alright, but showing gay people existing would just be too far. McFarlane went to these retailers and stated, “You can return this issue for full credit, but you will never again be allowed to order Spawn.” This, threatening to directly attack green-filled pockets, successfully shut everyone up… And Spawn successfully advertised Gay Comics.
In my personal opinion, it’s impossible to fully talk about the growth in societal acceptance without bringing up the underground comix movement, and especially Gay Comics (and the feminist publications that came before it). Who can tell how many gay people felt the same as Alison Bechdel, shocked that they could tell their own stories. Shocked, even, that others like them existed. I know I, for one, saw myself in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s comic Skim. It was a rush, realizing that I wasn’t the only one out there. There were people just like me, and not only were we living and thriving, we were able to tell stories about it. Stories that could be found on the shelves in places like rural Kentucky, giving queer people the hope that we could carry on and exist just like that, too. As Mangel said, “[Gay Comix] pushed forward not just an agenda of acceptance, but it also pushed forward the entire comics field when it came to understanding and servicing LGBTQ fans."
-
SOURCES
Century, Sara. “Pride-Ographies: Mary Wings.” SYFY, September 9, 2024. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/pride-ographies-mary-wings.
Century, Sara. “Gay Comix History with Andy Mangels.” SYFY, September 9, 2024. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/gay-comix-history-with-andy-mangels.
Chute, Hillary. “The Rise of Queer Comics.” Paris Review, December 11, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/11/rise-queer-comics/.
“Gay Comix.” Wikipedia, January 23, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Comix.
