The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1942: The Age of the Sentry #3, January 2009

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Today's featured creator, Colleen Coover, won my heart with her amazing, amazing girlie porno series Small Favors. As I was looking for comics to read to celebrate my LGBTQ+ family, I was delighted to come upon her name and this excellent faux-history romp with the Sentry.

For a moment when I was reading the second story, illustrated by Ms. Coover and written by her partner Paul Tobin, I was a little mystified as to why the story was so, so straight. On the one hand, it's definitely because it's a mainstream superhero comic from about 10 years ago, when they weren't quite ready to have so much queerness on display. But then I also thought about the fact that Ms. Coover, according to her wiki, identifies as Bisexual. We're a mysterious breed, we bis, sometimes accused of greed, sometimes of not existing at all. But we exist, and persist, and as a bisexual creator, Ms. Coover is going to create some art that, sometimes, doesn't look very queer at all. I think in these cases, we have to read a little more deeply into both art and words, to see if there is a different inflection to the heterosexual stories that are told by bisexual creators. How do we identify them as bisexual stories?

And, really, do we need to?

More to follow. 

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've got a couple of other posts about Ms. Coover's work here.

And there's some other stuff about The Sentry here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1204: Small Favors #3, June 2001

As I was thinking on what to say about this comic, I surfed over to a bookseller website and was about to order the recently released collection of the series from Oni Press. Then I thought I should probably see if any of my local stores have it first, but the impulse does help me with what I want to say:

I love this comic.

This is, hands down, one of the best adult comics I've read. It's funny, it's cute, it's erotic, and it's totally, totally about sex being fun.

The set-up is that Nibbil is a tiny Jiminy Cricket-style conscience, sent to prevent Annie from masturbating too much. Instead they fall in love and have lots of really hot gay sex.

Colleen Coover's art is just wonderful. Her command of figure and expression is on display up there on the cover, but the sense of narrative contained within is just astounding. I've read adult comics where I've become bored by the sex scene almost from the first panel. Standard poses, quotes, etc. But Ms. Coover draws one particular encounter out over a fair number of pages, and turns the sex into the narrative that, very often, sex is. It's not all pouty lips and heaving sighs, but also giggles at silly things the other says, or stopping for a drink of water. It's sex as a story, rather than as part of a story, and thus has all the trappings of a story.

Here's the other thing about this comic: how can one possibly resist something that calls itself a "girly porno comic book"? Simply not possible.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1060: Head #1, March 2002 (Eek! It's a Naughty Week! Day 3)

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