The first of its kind, The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader, co-edited by Professors Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren, honours work that emerged from and was influenced by the underground and alternative comix movements of the mid-1960s to become what is still an underrepresented sub-genre in comics scholarship: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) comics, their provocative current iterations and their future directions. It traces the connections of LGBTQ+ comics from the panel, the strip, the comic book, the graphic novel, the anthology and the graphic memoir to the many different kinds of queer readership they imagine, the LGBTQ+ history they make visible, the often fragile LGBTQ+ distribution networks their availability implies or seeks, the coded queer intelligence they deploy, and the community-sustaining energy and optimism they conjure.
The volume’s collection of comics criticism brings together important critical voices that speak to the range and diversity of queer texts, creators and approaches in this growing field.