This year, I told myself, I was going to read for pleasure. I spent most of 2024 engaged in a research project, reading a lot of abstruse theory and depressing news stories about transphobia, and I could not cram any more facts about gender into my head without giving myself an aneurysm. I knew 2025 was going to be a terrible year, with a high toll of human death and suffering, and I wanted to carve out a place for joy, so that I could do my work without suffocating. I figured I would study up for my other gig —I sometimes write comics—and just read a whole lot of comic books. Simple, right?

Nothing in this world is simple. Nothing is free of politics, or of queerness, and comics have been political and queer since the beginning.

Most people’s first association with the term “comic books” is mainstream superhero comics, of the type put out by DC and Marvel, which are a notoriously escapist medium. Superheroes have never been apolitical—Superman, the world’s most powerful immigrant, was created by two Jewish immigrants in 1938 as a reaction to the rise of Nazism; the X-Men were created in the 1960s as an allegory for the civil rights movement—but they are, explicitly, power fantasies. They exist to tell stories about good overcoming evil, or (subtextually) marginalized people overcoming their oppressors. Unlike our world, they come with a built-in guarantee of justice, which is a large part of the appeal.

Yet those comics represent only a fraction of the work being made—and in queer comics, particularly, there is a long history of work that is autobiographical, realistic, organic, grounded and explicitly radical. In the 1980s and ’90s, underground comics like Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist or Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For were upfront and enraged about the realities of queer life at a time when mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch us. Rather than encoding the realities of queer oppression in an allegory, so as to sway straight hearts and minds, they spoke directly to and from the community. In the present-day culture war on trans people, independent and small-press comics like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer or the web-based Haus of Decline still spark a large share of the conversation.

In a 2021 thread on X later adapted for her website, critic Elizabeth Sandifer famously identified two competing approaches in queer art—she calls them “hugboxing” and “scab-picking.” Hugboxers attempt to create worlds that are safe, comforting and inspiring for queer readers, often at the cost of downplaying or eliminating representations of oppression. The scab-pickers depict oppression and cruelty head-on, in graphic and frequently harrowing detail, in the hopes of providing catharsis.

To be clear: this is an invented dichotomy, and most creators are somewhere in the middle. Even the sweetest narratives have sad or difficult moments, and even the bleakest comics afford some kind of pleasure to their audience. Yet queer comics are undeniably strung between these two poles, and in the hellscape of 2025, the question of how we deal with oppression or trauma in our work has never been more pressing.

What are the burdens of representation in the midst of a backlash? What do trans readers need, and how are we giving it to them? To answer that question, I spoke to trans comic creators about how they make art out of dangerous times.

Let’s start—as all things must—with the superheroes. Although this is by no means a scientific sample, every trans person I know had some kind of fixation on the X-Men when they were growing up. Two of the trans people I know have written them: Vita Ayala and Charlie Jane Anders, both of whom had recent and well-received stints on Marvel’s The New Mutants.

For much of the X-Men’s run, their queerness has been allegorical, albeit a spectacularly unsubtle allegory: during the AIDS crisis, mutants battled the “Legacy Virus.” Mutants gain their powers at puberty, and their families are typically not happy—there were coming-out scenes in X-Men movies as far back as 2003. Nor are mutants alone in this coding: “Superheroes are a very queer, very trans genre to begin with,” Jadzia Axelrod, author of Galaxy: The Prettiest Star and The DC Book of Pride, tells me. “Everyone’s hiding a more fulfilling, colourful life from their friends and family, bodies are transformed and reshaped as a matter of course.”

I will admit to being a sucker for this kind of thing. Yet allegory was necessary precisely because the dominant culture made queerness unspeakable, and in recent years, as the stigma has lifted, mainstream comics have gotten more likely to make characters’ queer or trans identities explicit—no longer subtext, but text.

“I’m not really interested in allegory,” Anders told me on a phone call. Anders is an established voice in many genres, including prose fiction (her next novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, is out this summer) and essays on the craft of queer fiction. She’s spent a lot of time thinking about how reducing trans characters to symbol and metaphor denies them their right to be people. Thus, when Anders created the first trans X-Man, Escapade, for Marvel, she made sure to give Escapade two coming-out scenes—once as a mutant, and once as a trans woman. Escapade’s parents were supportive about her being a mutant. The trans thing, not so much.

But superhero narratives are appealing to queer and trans audiences for reasons beyond the thrill of sometimes catching our own reflections. They are, explicitly, stories about people who want to make the world better. They’re about taking on overwhelming odds and succeeding. “‘Escape’ is the wrong word,” Ayala tells me over the phone. “I think it is something that is comforting and galvanizing, where it’s just like, ‘no, wait, we can do things. All the bullshit that they feed us about being powerless and being helpless is a lie.’”

That these comics tend to be glossy and optimistic is not the most damning charge one can make. The more salient problem is that they represent extremely profitable brands, and any writer or artist who takes them on will have to balance their own point of view with the interests of the publisher. At a time when many corporations are pulling back on their support for queer and (especially) trans people, that’s a risky bet.

Ayala does write creator-owned comics, like Finders Keepers and Submerged, and they’re proud of them— but they tell me that it’s easier than you’d think to make a point within the constraints of a major title. The internal structure of those companies is starting to look more diverse: “In the last decade, especially, more and more young people, femme people, queer people, brown people [have started] to work as editors and acquiring editors and assistants that have the ear of people that make decisions.” As a result, it’s easier to find allies on the inside. When it comes to the X-Writers’ room, Ayala says, their editors sometimes require them to change a word or a name here and there, but they’re pretty much given room to say what they need to say.

Still, Ayala cautions, the mainstream exists in balance with the underground, which is why many writers swing back and forth between the two worlds. “I don’t worry about the hard edges of queerness being co-opted because the general party line of a major corporation is never going to be that, right?” they tell me. “Instead, I look for reflections of that in work that is from smaller publishers or from individual people.” So let’s look there.

“I certainly see myself as part of a lineage of untrained weirdos who just love to draw,” says Cee Lavery, in an email. Lavery’s work—consciously organic, intimate, autobiographical pieces like My Gender Is Saturn Return, where you can practically see the dents the pen leaves in the page as it moves—is very much a part of that underground queer tradition.

Lavery was introduced to these kinds of comics as a teenager in the 2000s, starting with popular graphic novels like Persepolis and Blankets, and later through the work of underground legend Lynda Barry. “But it was the zine scene in the ’00s, the queers and weirdos who were like ‘fuck it, make stuff’ that made me realize, oh yeah, I don’t have to make anything particularly ‘good,’ I don’t have to have gone to art school, I can just start drawing comics and putting them out,” he says. “I remember buying Nicole Georges’s Invincible Summer diary comics from the zine rack at the Beguiling [comic book store in Toronto] when I was 19 and being like, whoa, could I do this too?”

This variety of art feels very queer—for people of my generation, and for Lavery, it’s what a “queer comic” looks like. But, like the prevalence of allegory in mainstream comics, it’s a result of oppression: queer people have developed a rich tradition of self-published comics because, for a long time, no one else would publish us. Zines and webcomics and other “amateur” formats created a thriving queer and trans comics community when we were untouchable for the mainstream—as, indeed, we may soon be again.

There are, Lavery says, benefits to keeping a low profile. “An unknown or invisible ‘enemy’ cannot be attacked,” he tells me. “Visibility is not the be-all end-all, and it’s certainly not synonymous with safety and/or power.”

Even as mainstream comics have gotten more diverse, there are still things that only smaller presses and projects are free to do—including overt sexuality, open radicalism and specific, furious engagement with oppression. When you don’t have to worry about keeping the brand viable, you can say whatever you want. When major successes emerge from that field—they do, with increasing regularity—they often do it on the strength of conviction. Case in point: Mattie Lubchansky, author of the critically acclaimed Boys’ Weekend and the forthcoming Simplicity.

Lubchansky’s work is instantly recognizable if you spend any time on the queer social media—short, sharp, often very funny four-panel strips. It feels insulting to call them “political comics,” but they undeniably live within the tradition that created Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. In Lubchansky’s long-form work, she’s a horror writer: Boys’ Weekend was a transfeminine take on the “final girl” narrative, and Simplicity flirts with rural cult horror in the vein of The Wicker Man or Midsommar.

Lubchansky’s radicalism is central to her work, and as such, she doubts that the burdens of representation under Trump are much different than they were under any other president. She’s been condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, for example, for just about as long as she’s been making comics, and doing so under Democratic and both Republican administrations: Joe Biden “was directly and materially supporting a genocide for a year and a half while he was president,” she tells me. “It doesn’t matter who the president is. How the United States is constructed is the issue. This country is haunted. It’s soaked in blood.”

Simplicity (of which I received an advance reading copy) is, in many ways, a rebuke to hugboxing, even as it is a book about the haunting of the United States. The protagonist, Lucius, joins a utopian queer commune in the ruins of upstate New York—based on the many real utopian communities that have formed in that region over the years, and specifically the Shakers—only to find that it is ultimately impossible to seal oneself off from the violence of the wider world.

“I think people’s inner lives are interesting too, and I’m interested in characters as characters, but to me, the thing that is interesting about making art and engaging with art is thinking about the world that I live in,” Lubchansky says. “I think there’s a tendency to relax into reading work that is comforting to you. I don’t begrudge anyone who does that, but I think it’s a dangerous thing if you’re not doing anything else in your life.”

In other words, art has a responsibility to be directly engaged with difficult realities because people have a responsibility to be engaged with those realities—it’s only “escape” if you have some actual problems to escape from. Otherwise it’s just avoiding the issue. “You’re out there in the streets every day and you want to go read a romantasy? I think that’s very reasonable and good; more power to you,” says Lubchansky. “But I think some people spend too much time trying to shut out what’s going on.”

After all, it is precisely that complacency and desire to escape that generates the unbearable reality we’re all trying to escape from. If we could stay engaged with the horrific realities of our situation, we might end up changing them.

As for Sandifer, the originator of hugbox-scabpick theory, she’s not sure which way the balance will tip next. Given the enormous amount of animosity currently aimed at trans people, she predicts, “you might well see the swing toward scab-picking stall out in favour of trans representation focused on making us seem non-threatening.” That said, it’s not a sure thing: “It’s clear that even the most anodyne trans representation is going to get accused of grooming and described as pornography, so perhaps what you’ll see is the trans community developing a catastrophic fucks deficit and just going wild.”

Probably it will be both. Probably we will need both. Just as not all readers are the same readers, not all comics are the same comic: “I don’t think that all art has to be educational with a capital E,” Ayala tells me. “But fundamentally, I think all art is about communication, and having only one message is not going to help you be a stronger, more well-rounded person.”

In dark times, people turn to stories to keep them going. That has been true since two scared Jewish teenagers invented Superman. But what keeps you moving is less important than how you move: “You need reprieve, you need rest. You need a place where you can breathe,” Ayala says. “Otherwise you burn out as a human being. But also you need the catharsis of seeing people who have more strength than you do, or more than you think you do, go through the trauma and come out the other side.”

To imagine that there is another side, and that we can get there, is an act of resistance. None of us knows what the end of the current fascist resurgence looks like, or whether we’ll still be around to see it. We need someone to draw the horizon we’re walking toward—to create a picture of what a queer future looks like, so that we can get there one day.