Mainstream American Comic Books
Mainstream comics have historically excluded gay characters, with superhero comics in particular and the publishing houses Marvel and DC, the two largest publishers in the genre, and were criticized for their lack of inclusivity. Transgender characters have likewise been under-represented, although the common storyline of a superhero having their sex changed by magical or technological means has been regarded as an oblique reference to transgender and transsexual issues. British comics author Neil Gaiman has said that he included transgender characters in his works, such as Sandman, in response to the lack of realistic representation of such people in comics. Queer theory analyses have noted that LGBT characters in mainstream comic books are often shown as assimilated into heterosexual society, whereas in alternative comics the diversity and uniqueness of LGBT culture is at the forefront. Mainstream comics have also been labelled as "heteronormative", in comparison to "intergrationist" alternative comics.
Read more about this topic: LGBT Characters In Comics
Famous quotes containing the words mainstream, american, comic and/or books:
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.”
—Paul Fussell (b. 1924)
“The study of tools as well as of books should have a place in the public schools. Tools, machinery, and the implements of the farm should be made familiar to every boy, and suitable industrial education should be furnished for every girl.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)