Be Gay, Do Comics

By: Bors, Matt

Book Overview

The dream of a queer separatist town. The life of a gay and Jewish Nazi-fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you'll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.

Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1684057779
• ISBN13: 9781684057771
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: IDW Publishing
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Entertaining and educational

"You can trace the phrase "Be Gay, Do Crime" back to the person who popularized it with a meme, Io Ascarium of ABO Comix, a great collective that sells comics made by queer prisoners. And it's a solid ethos to live by as a queer person in these times (and well, always). Queerness has always been transgressive, regardless of its legal status." (Introduction, 1) First off, the art in this is stunning. I've never been a big comic book reader, so I don't know how this compares to other works, but I immensely enjoyed the variations in comic styles. Everything about these comics varies from artist to artist; the level of detail, the artistic style, the color palette, the text font, and even the amount of text per panel or page. I particularly enjoyed the variation between the comics, but the level of variation also means that the collection will have something for everyone. Some of the comics are incredibly difficult to read. I don't mean emotionally hard to read, though some are also that. The text choices made by some of the artists are just poorly suited to the format of a book where you are unable to zoom in or otherwise make the text more readable. In many cases, the font is harder to read than standard fonts and in quite a few cases the text is too small to be legible at all. In no way is this book accessible for someone with reading difficulties. This collection is especially not dyslexic-friendly. "Nike shoes with a pink triangle aren't for us, they're for them. Be gay. Consider who the law was meant to protect and who passed it. Look out for each other instead." (Introduction, 1) I learned far more from this collection than I was anticipating. There are numerous comics that outline historical events I'd never heard of, or knew very little about. At least a dozen comics explained cultures unfamiliar to me and especially how queer people do or don't fit into those cultures. I enjoyed learning these non-fiction concepts, but it did make the book far denser than I was expecting the read to be. I was also expecting to sit down and read this in one or two sittings, but it ending up taking me several weeks to get through. The tagline for the book is "Queer History, Memoir, and Satire from the NIB", but the collection leans far harder into history than it does memoir or satire. This makes the book a much more emotionally painful read than the tagline suggests because. Queer history is often painful and sad. This is an incredibly important read that I appreciated learning from, but had it been tempered with more humor and satire it would have made for a much more enjoyable read.