Comics have been breaking a lot of barriers these days. X-Men recently had a gay marriage, a new series of Catwoman graphic novels have the famous Batman nemesis as a lesbian, and now Iceman of the X-Men is coming out of the closet.
This happens in All New X-Men #40, which will be out in the world by the time you read this. A top Marvel executive told MTV, “This is a character with decades of history, and one who we’ve seen falter on the romantic stage – more than once. So the seeds were always there.”
This exec told MTV that the reaction to Iceman being out of the closet has been “overwhelmingly positive,” and “editors are paid to have their spider-sense tingle. But what you do is you think things through. X-Men has always been the ultimate playground to see growing pains, and what it means to be different. [This story is] very sensitive, very moving, I think a lot of people are going to respond to this.”
It’s funny to think that way back in the day, alleged gay tendencies in comics were cited by zealots who wanted them eliminated from the newsstands. (Wonder Woman was once branded “a sadistic lesbian,” and therefore bad for kids to read.) How times have changed. Again, we at TG embrace superhero diversity, we still don’t think superhero movies and TV shows are diverse enough, and it’s nice to see that people of all races, sexes, and sexual orientations can have great powers to change the world.
