I’m curious how many of the “gay romances” were written with gay men as the intended audience or if (as I suspect) most were written by women with women as the intended audience. Especially since it is the focus.
It’d be nice to have gay characters with the “roundedness” and creativity of straight protagonists (who get to be wizards, or fight as rebels in dystopian futures, or bring down Galactic Empires, or explore space) but was as undeniably gay as those are straight (fetishists aside who will deny anything for their fetish).
I totally looked this up after you said this. Actually the 3 comics focused on gay male relationships in the above comic were all written by men, although 1 was then drawn by a woman. I’m unsure about the intended audience. I see your point though; that does happen a lot. There were an additional 3 comics that had gay male main characters and 2 of those were written by woman and the third’s gender was unknown.
I included a short list of comics with well-rounded (in my opinion) gay main characters that do things. (They get to fight as rebels, explore and fight in space, road trip, and be attacked by government agencies respectively.)Artifice: “Smart Guy-on-Guy Sci Fi” (In space! With shootouts!)
Goodbye Chains : “Colin Lord is a cheerful Boston Communist, and Banquo White is a cranky half-Mexican with no philosophy beyond hedonism. Somehow they have become partners in crime, spreading a reign of terror and dialectical materialism across the plains of Colorado. Follow their adventures with explosives and ladies—and, possibly, men.”Robots and Racks : “Being a story about girls flying around in space.”
The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal : “In the span of a single day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his conservative parents, promptly gets disowned, goes on a bender… and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.
TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he’d be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well… TJ has his own reasons.
The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.”Love is In the Blood : “When government agencies come to archaeologist Laila McCarthy for assistance, they are unaware her knowledge of dangerous relics was gained first-hand. But ancient enemies remember her as Sumerian demon Lamashtu and the first vampire.”
I’ve seen Artifice around but never read it, never realised it’s MCs were gay. I’ll have to take a look.
I actually looked at Goodbye Chains in the past but from my fuzzy memory I don’t have much positive to say about its treatment of the gay MCs (or their lesbian twinned counterparts) or the half Mexican character (and his lesbian counterpart). I am surprised the author is male… but maybe I shouldn’t be. It’s not like that eliminates problems inherently. Also, I may need to re-read it as it might’ve been when I was reading it rather than what I was reading that ave me the trouble.
I’ll take a look at the others as well as they are completely new to me. Thanks for the recs… and the interesting tumblr.
I can’t say much about Goodbye Chains or the rest as far as quality goes. Tj and Amal is the only one I have read completely through. Also, these aren’t all done by authors that are the same gender as their characters. Goodbye chains is actually done by women. These are just ones that I know have fairly main non-heteronormative characters that are not romance comics. Thank you for the reblogs and comments.
About the Study: Overview
This was a research project that looked over the 25 latest installments of 100 web comics and studied the characters that appeared within.
A character was defined as:
- Named. A title used as a name was accepted. For example, Captain was considered a name. My captain was not.
- Appeared in more than one installment.
- Spoke.
The webcomics had to fit the following parameters:
- Published exclusively or originally on the web.
- Currently updating as of mid-April, 2012 at least twice a month.
- Fifty pages already published.
- Primarily human cast.
- Cast stayed largely consistent update to update.
- No stick figures or such heavily stylized figures that were impossible to tell apart.
How the webcomics were chosen:
- A list of 500 webcomics that fit the parameters was pulled from http://thewebcomiclist.com and friends’ recommendations.
- From those 500, 100 were pulled using an online list randomizer (http://www.random.org/lists/). The top 100 after scrambling the list several times were the ones used.
- This was meant to provide as random of a sampling of webcomics as possible, based on the principle of simple random sampling without replacement, in the hope that this would provide a more accurate representative sample than consciously choosing based on a personal idea of the breakdown of webcomics.
- List of webcomics in the study
Characters were studied to find:
Breakdown of the sexuality of the 225 characters that had a sexuality in evidence.
Finding sexuality in webcomics is outlined here.
About the Study: Sexuality
Sexuality in these comics were discovered however possible. Of the 624 characters in the study, only 225 had a sexuality in evidence. Sexuality of characters was discovered using the character pages that so many webcomics have, and the content of the comics. Any mention of sexuality was used as well as any romantic or sexual content shown.
