Queer Read: No Straight Lines edited by Justin Hall

No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics

edited by Justin Hall

5 Faerie Points

With announcements coming from big companies like DC and Marvel that they will feature prominent gay stories featured in important books like the gay marriage in Astonishing X-Men 51 it feels like a ripe time to have a collection of comics with a queer focus that paved the way for this. That is what this collection does. While it is obviously not an exhaustive list of the possible queer comics you could pick up that helped make current queer comics possible it is a good starting point. "No Straight Lines" collects shorter works instead of trying to place longer ones like "Stuck Rubber Baby" by Howard Cruse in its pages. In this collection this feels like the right choice because you get exposed to a wider variety of creators as a direct result of Hall's choice. 

There is a nice mixture of content here, as well. There are some stories that are heavily sexual in nature, while others are just about the ordinary life of a queer individual. It is nice to see this contrast because as a community we are very much like this. No one size fits all. We are a wide variety of individuals trying to live our best lives and this books showcases multiple facets of our queer identity. It will be easy to find yourself somewhere contained within the pages. 

As an individual that does not usually want to read sex in my comics (no I am not a prude just have a preference of where I want my smut hehe) I was shocked by how refreshing I felt the sex was dealt with here Yes, there are some graphic scenes of nudity and sex, but it feels right because any member of the queer community can see the truth in what was projected by these various creators. The sexual aspect doesn't take away from the story or dumb them down. In many cases it makes them seem more intelligent about who their audience was at the time they were created. Also the sex keeps them current, since sex will never go out of style.

If you are looking for something outside of your reading comfort this would be an excellent choice, especially if you love comic books. This book shows you that history of a community and how it got to the place where it is now. It is important, in my opinion, to have collections like this so we can recognize that comics did not always allow for the queer community to play in the same sandbox and a result people took to publishing their own stories about themselves. It is in those stories that one finds themselves reflected back not in mainstream books that feel they have to be PG for the wider audience. PG is okay to have (sex does not have to always happen in a Queer book), but the PG must be the choice of the creator of the book and serve the greater purpose. Queer comics sure has come a long way from the days of underground books published in basements and we are still only now coming out into the light. I hope we stay there and make some great comics for the next 40 years that will show how we came together as a community to show our real lives.