Today’s superheroes are bursting out of the closet faster than a speeding bullet. Evelyn Hartogh investigates.
DC Comics made headlines in 2005 when they introduced an HIV-positive superheroine, Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy/Mia Dearden. A year later they sparked a media frenzy with the re-introduction of Batwoman as a lipstick lesbian.
In DC Comics Covergirls, author Louise Simonson reveals a very queer and feminist history alongside the stunning images of the many heroines – and villainesses – who have dominated and seduced comic book readers since the 1930s. This easy-to-read coffee table book is packed with gorgeous cover art and oodles of gay characters.
Meet lesbian Renee Montoya, a Gotham City police officer who was so popular in the 1992 animated Batman series she won a promotion to Homicide Detective and then Lieutenant.
According to Simonson, Montoya is now “one of the most visibly homosexual and realistically portrayed woman in comics”.
Montoya’s ex-girlfriend is none other than the new lesbian Batwoman. This new gay identity is rather ironic since the original 1956 Batwoman was created as a ‘beard’ for Batman.
The Golden Age of Comics ended in 1954 when Dr. Frederic Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that Batman and Robin and Wonder Woman were homosexuals. After Wertham appeared before the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, many comic companies folded under public pressure.
The survivors banded together to form the self-policing Comics Code Authority and banned sexually suggestive images. The new Silver Age of Comics saw Batman comics straightened up with female love interests Batwoman and Batgirl brought in for the dynamic duo. Those dangerously independent women Lois Lane and Wonder Woman became obsessed with getting married.
This was a far cry from the comics written in the 1940s by Wonder Woman’s creator William Moulten Marston. Marston, who invented the lie detector, “had a fascination with compulsion and submission as symbolised by bondage”. All of the stories he wrote “contained a scene where Wonder Woman was bound in some way … [and he] gave the Amazon princess her own implement of bondage – the magical golden lasso”.
In 1968, towards the end of the Silver Age, “Wonder Woman abandoned her Amazon powers … [and] dressed like television’s Avengers icon Emma Peel”. This re-invention offended Gloria Steinem, who “put the heroine back in her classic costume on the cover of the first Ms. Magazine in July 1972 … [and] lobbied for Wonder Woman’s return as a super heroine”.
A year later, DC restored both the Amazon’s powers and her iconic costume.
Meanwhile, Lois Lane was “influenced by late-1960s-era Women’s Liberation … [and in the cover art] Lois literally ripped the ‘Girl Friend’ from the logo of the Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane” comic.
The more independent women that emerged during the late 1960s further evolved after the Comics Code was rewritten in 1971.
In this era, the original Batgirl was “shot by the Joker and paralysed in the 1988 graphic novel, The Killing Joke, … [which] ended Barbara Gordon’s career as Batgirl, though from her wheelchair, she continues her crime-fighting vocation as the all-knowing computer-wiz Oracle, director of the female super-heroine team Birds of Prey … [and is] DC Comics … most prominent disabled woman”.
DC imprints such as Vertigo continued the diversity in 2005 with lesbianism as an “important plot component in Y: The Last Man”. This comic envisioned a world with only a single man left alive on Earth and was “a witty action-packed examination of gender roles” in which “ultra-feminist groups, male impersonators … battle it out in a deeply developed political landscape that plays all preconceptions of femininity against each other”.
DC Comics Covergirls by Louise Simonson is published by Pan MacMillan.
DC Comics made headlines in 2005 when they introduced an HIV-positive superheroine, Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy/Mia Dearden. A year later they sparked a media frenzy with the re-introduction of Batwoman as a lipstick lesbian. 
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