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Jun 20, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Pride Weekly Graphic Novel Number 70 - Ada Lee v.2, 2003

https://www.comics.org/issue/768841/

Try as I might, I cannot find any information on Ada Lee creator Jack Munroe. The only Jack Munroe I can find is a young UK queer activist who is far too young to have been the author of this naughty little piece of comics.
So if anyone has any information, I'm curious.

And, really, I'm curious as to where Mx. Munroe falls on the gender spectrum. Knowing if this comic was written by a male or a female-identifying person, and by a queer or a straight person, makes a big difference to our understanding. But, then again, so does not knowing. In fact, not knowing allows for a much more reader-inflected reading. As I noted in my previous post on Ada Lee, the comic is quite nicely sex positive, though the story in this volume pushes at some boundaries. Ada's girlfriend is kidnapped by a consortium of Ada's former lovers (and there's a lot!) who subsequently all proceed to have sex with the kidnapped woman. While that sounds very negative, there's a tenor to the story, one of brainwashed lesbian vigilantes, the Girls Against Lesbians who are Straight, or GALS, and the fact that sex is wielded like a martial art here that in some ways asks us to veer off into the ridiculous. The world of Ada Lee is a world in which your enemies are defeated once you have pleasured them into submission.

(I am, of course, aware of writing this as a man, so a female reading of this would be very different. I am, as I try to often, erring on the side of the optimistic, while remaining aware of the side of the pessimistic.)

If you've ever read Jim Mahfood's Grrl Scouts, Ada's adventures are that plus a healthy, whopping dose of explicit sex. And the relative anonymity of the author allows we readers to possibly re-contextualize the content of the book to a more positive perspective. Though having made the comparison with Mr. Mahfood's work, I can now see a definite relationship between the art styles as well. And they do share the initials J.M....

Onward!

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