I am delighted to be able to announce that I will be presenting a paper at the academic conference at the Worldcon in London this August. Here’s the abstract.

Trans-cending the Comics Code

While gender bending is a regular feature of manga and webcomics, appearances of trans characters in mainstream American comics have been few and far between. Indeed, they have been so rare that when Alysia Yeoh, a support character in Batgirl, came out as trans last year the media hailed her as the first ever trans character in comics. As usual, the media was wrong. Down the years, comics writers have found creative ways to address gender issues in their work. This paper looks at the history of trans characters in DC and Marvel comics.

Once again please note that I will not be looking at manga. That would be a topic for a separate paper, but only if I can learn a lot about Japanese culture before then. I have no desire to write a “Western gaze” piece about Japanese comics.

That said, hopefully one of two of you will come along to listen.