This year, I told myself, I was going to read for pleasure. I spent most of 2024 engaged in a research project, reading a lot of abstruse theory and depressing news stories about transphobia, and I could not cram any more facts about gender into my head without giving myself an aneurysm. I knew 2025 was going to be a terrible year, with a high toll of human death and suffering, and I wanted to carve out a place for joy, so that I could do my work without suffocating. I figured I would study up for my other gig —I sometimes write comics—and just read a whole lot of comic books. Simple, right?

Nothing in this world is simple. Nothing is free of politics, or of queerness, and comics have been political and queer since the beginning.

Most people’s first association with the term “comic books” is mainstream superhero comics, of the type put out by DC and Marvel, which are a notoriously escapist medium. Superheroes have never been apolitical—Superman, the world’s most powerful immigrant, was created by two Jewish immigrants in 1938 as a reaction to the rise of Nazism; the X-Men were created in the 1960s as an allegory for the civil rights movement—but they are, explicitly, power fantasies. They exist to tell stories about good overcoming evil, or (subtextually) marginalized people overcoming their oppressors. Unlike our world, they come with a built-in guarantee of justice, which is a large part of the appeal.

Yet those comics represent only a fraction of the work being made—and in queer comics, particularly, there is a long history of work that is autobiographical, realistic, organic, grounded and explicitly radical. In the 1980s and ’90s, underground comics like Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist or Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For were upfront and enraged about the realities of queer life at a time when mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch us. Rather than encoding the realities of queer oppression in an allegory, so as to sway straight hearts and minds, they spoke directly to and from the community. In the present-day culture war on trans people, independent and small-press comics like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer or the web-based Haus of Decline still spark a large share of the conversation.