📕Comic Review - Marvel Voices: Pride🕸
This year to celebrate pride month, both DC and Marvel published special oversized comics filled with anthology stories promoting their queer characters. We here at LGBTQIA+ Space have read both, and thought it would be fun to share our thoughts on the issues - are they just Pride cash grabs, or promises at a more inclusive future? Let's find out!
Marvel Voices: Pride was released on the 23rd of June, and is part of the Voices series where Marvel showcases minority characters. This book holds 15 stories in its 48 pages, pulling comic talent from all over to manage it. There were only 3 stories I didn’t enjoy, but 1 is the first story, Introduction, written by Luciano Vecchio. It tells the history of queer characters in Marvel Comics, but makes the weird choice to do so from an in universe lens. What could have been a fun recap of the distance covered with LGBTQIA+ representation turns into a revisionist mess, and a wobbly start.
Three more of the stories felt like ads, but being an ad doesn't mean the story has to be bad: The second story in the book, The Vows by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung, brings back the original Young Avengers creative team to write the wedding vows of two of their characters. It’s only one page but still a lovely read, and a reminder that last year a gay wedding played a key part in a major comic event is great… It’s a shame that on the other side of the double is a full page ad for said event.
There are two other stories that I want to draw attention to, the first being Totally Invulnerable by Crystal Frasier and Jethro Morales. This is the tale of a cosplayer that gets mistaken for She-Hulk by a villain, and explores how the idea of comic characters can help people grow more confident in their day to day lives. Grounded in the cosplay community, it really seems to understand the subjects it’s exploring, and was the most emotionally effective story in the book for me.
Next we have Colossus by Kieron Gillen and Jen Hickman. Gillen is another past Young Avengers writer coming back to the characters, in this case Prodigy and Speed. The two share a conversation about knowing when to label their sexuality, and how to know if the label fits. This story gains bonus points for brimming up how the X-Men were used for minority stand-ins for so long, and pushing that it’s time to move past that trope.
This book has some other great moments (Mystique throwing Moriarty off a train for her girlfriend, a conversation about superpowers and consent, an extract from Alpha Flight 106 - the ground-breaking classic marvel issue in which Northstar comes out - to end the issue) and the pace of the shorts helps a lot; even if you’re on a story you’re not enjoying, it will be over before you know it. The middle of the book has a timeline of major LGBTQIA+ events in Marvel comics, which is interesting to read, and while there are ads throughout the book they highlight the fact that gay characters aren’t only brought out for special issues - they are all over the Marvel universe.
I think this book is friendly to newcomers - it does a successful job using characters with years of backstory and talking about LGBTQIA+ identity and issues excluding anyone. Marvel Voices: Pride gets our recommendation for long-time comic readers and newcomers!
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