Heather Antos, IDW’s head of licensing and one of the more reliably combative progressive voices in the comics industry, went after John Byrne this week for “transphobic” remarks on his personal blog. The attack landed the same week Byrne’s Amazing Spider-Man #1000 cover controversy was resolved, his Elsewhen volume is on shelves, and his legacy was being discussed in broadly positive terms across the fan community.
Whatever Byrne’s specific blog comments were on trans issues, his overall record on gay representation in comics is the opposite of what Antos claims. Byrne created Northstar, Marvel’s first openly gay superhero, in 1979. He was explicit about his reasoning: “There needs to be Gays in comics because there are Gays in real life. No other reason. Same reason, in fact, that there are Blacks in comics. Asians in comics. Women and children in comics! The population of the fictional world should represent the real world. That’s why I created Northstar — I felt the Marvel Universe needed a Gay superhero (even if I would never be allowed to say it in so many words in the comics themselves), and I felt that I should create one, rather than retrofitting an existing character.”
That last phrase of “rather than retrofitting an existing character” is the distinction that the current comics industry has spent a decade refusing to honor.
