No straight lines Four decades of queer comics

A comics creator who knows how to milk the fusion of, and tension between, word and image can place us deep inside a character's head with an immediacy and sensuousness prose writers envy. In comics, style informs substance - physically shapes it to alter our perceptions in intimate ways. Mood and tone don't emerge over the course of paragraphs and chapters; they're evident at first glance, infused into the arrangement of panels, thickness of lines and density of detail. We read books; we feel comics. For decades, artists have availed themselves of this empathie power to tell deeply personal stories. The underground comix scene of the 1960s and '70s chronicled a generation's obsessions (sex, drugs, music, Freaking Out the Normals) even as it parodied and dismissed the lantern jaws and tidy morality plays of superhero comics. Readers who got the jokes came away with a sense that there were others who saw the world as they did. For queer creators and their readers, the comics that grew out of the burgeoning gay liberation movement played a similar role, even if the attitude these comics displayed toward the Normals was more layered. Lesbians and gay men were fighting for visibility, and the respect and rights that proceed from it. Thus comics depicting the political struggles of representation (We're here!) and the personal struggles of coming out (We're queer!) quietly but effectively advanced an argument the country is still getting used to. The recent anthology "No Straigh Lines" offers an impressively diverse sample of those funny, fractious, occasionally outrageous comics and the ones that came after. The editor, Justin Hall, arranges his selections in a loose chronology more beholden to themes than dates. Thus, in a section devoted to queer identity, we find a cheeky parody of gothic melodrama ("My Deadly Darling Dyke," by Lee Marrs) alongside a tale of the domestic life of two middle-aged leather daddies ("Leonard and Larry," by Tim Barela) that feels weirdly, even transgressively, quaint. Another section concentrates on political activism and the AIDS crisis, opening with the striking image of a 370-foot-tall H.I.V.-positive David Wojnarowicz pummeling a cathedral to dust with his fists. The comics that follow bear a similarly high acid content, from the dubiously righteous fury of Roberta Gregory's "Bitchy Butch, the World's Angriest Dyke," to Craig Bostick's allusive vignettes of love among the skate punks. The book closes with a look at the next generation of queer comics: Joey Alison Sayers's cartoonishly cute transgendered character comes out to her parents, while Kris Dresen's wordless "In Common" explores the first-date fumblings of two women destined to share a life, or at least a U-Haul, together. Hall mixes gag strips, one-panels and short stories with excerpts from longer works. As ever, the anthology format isn't kind to excerpted material, which lacks the wit and snap seen elsewhere in the collection. The decision to restrict selections to the Western world is disappointing but understandable; Hall notes that "the subject of Eastern queer comics, particularly the material in Japanese manga, is too vast and requires its own book." Here's hoping he gets to make it, because with "No Straight Lines" he has produced a useful, combative and frequently moving chronicle of a culture in perpetual transition; to read it is to watch as an insular demimonde transforms itself, in painful fits and joyful starts, and steps out into a wider monde. Glen Weldon is a panelist on NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour" podcast and the author of the forthcoming "Superman: The Unauthorized Biography."

The challenge for any editor compiling an anthology of representative works from queer comics over a 40-year period rests on deciding who the volume is aimed at-the LGBT audience or a much wider one? Editor Hall guns for the latter, but without softening the edges that define the genre, and he's quite successful. The majority of the works are autobiographical and lean toward humor, though serious topics are addressed-AIDS, coming-out trauma, discrimination-it's all in here, as well as some cultural info less known outside the gay community, like Robert Kirby and D. Travis Scott's explanation of the codes and etiquette for sex cruising at a porn shop. Among the stand-outs are Mary Wings's tale of a lesbian in the 1920s; Howard Cruse's story about a young gay man remembering the homophobia of his recently deceased uncle; Eric Orner's memoir of a night in Tel Aviv; Dan Savage's remembrance of his first time in drag as a child; and Eric Shanower's eerie fable of teenage experimentation. All of these hit on concerns and experiences that cut to the heart of the human soul, not just the gay one. The section of Allison Bechdel's work presents the standard for queer comics nowadays, offering humor and observations that draw an outside audience right into the culture. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.