After baring a bit of my soul last time, I would like to talk today about geeky representations of male-male sexuality in Japan. In order to do that, I’ll be defining some keywords.

What kind of man was Fletcher Hanks? Paul Karasik, a cartoonist who edited both of his collections, I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! (2006) and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (2009), has done a considerable amount of detective work these last few years in piecing together his life. He met his son, Fletcher Hanks, Jr., six years ago and therein learned a few basic, unpleasant facts. Hanks was a brutal man, a drunk who severely abused his wife and children. He walked out on his family in the middle of the Great Depression before settling into an apartment in Brooklyn where he did his work for Eisner. The comic book culture of the Golden Age was famously youthful and mostly populated by white ethnics. As we popularly remember them, they were generally weak, nerdy creatures imagining themselves as supermen. Hanks was a different breed. He was in his early 50s when he sat down to tackle the form. And he was a muscular rough man from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Karasik does not know why he walked away from comics in 1941. And he still doesn’t know what journey he went on in the next four decades that led to his death, frozen on a park bench, in 1976.

Near the conclusion of Quentin Tarantino’s epic revenge film Kill Bill (Vol. 2), title target Bill, in the best role of David Carradine’s life, explains to Uma Thurman’s character, Kiddo, why she could never give up her life as an assassin to become one of the regular folks. His argument focuses on superhero mythology – origin stories of Batman, Spiderman and specifically Superman. Bill reminds Kiddo that while Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker put on costumes to morph into superheroes, it is Superman who must wear the costume of Clark Kent. Batman and Spiderman are men who perform great acts while in costume, but Superman IS a great man who tries to blend into society by wearing a costume. He did not become a superhero because of a chemical reaction to a spider bite or an unquenchable thirst for revenge – he was BORN a superhero.

Why would someone so great try to cover up their unique abilities and talents into order to fade into the gray mass of the work-a-day world?

TNG contributor Paul Morton brings us an interview with David Small, whose latest work, Stitches, was recently nominated for a National Book Award.

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love comic books. Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, and my personal favorite Deadpool, which was played by the hot Ryan Reynolds in the recent Wolverine: Origins movie. Growing up, there weren’t many homosexual superheros to look up to. Of course, you can infer that Iceman was a little gay and maybe Wolverine and Cyclops hated each other so much there might have been a latent homosexual attraction to one another, but there were no out and proud superheroes. Brian Anderson is trying to change the future of comic books with his own self-written, drawn, colored, formatted and published comics So Super Duper, starring a somewhat autobiographical character, Psyche. Brian Anderson also works on two other comic books, Sex and the Superhero and Reign-bow and Dee-va, about LGBT superheroes with as many personal problems as super villians. TNG interviewed Brian Anderson to find out the inspiration for his characters, his favorite comics, his favorite comic book movie and which movie was so bad, he walked out of the theater.

Steve MacIsaac’s Shirtlifter series is a lovely, unorthodox marriage of form and content. He has the eye of a melancholic sitcom writer.

Though she still might be best known for Dyke’s To Watch Out For, he addictive cartoon chronicle of modern lesbian life, Alison Bechdel’s reputation as a writer and artist went stratospheric with the 2006 release of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It details in affecting prose and detailed illustration the author’s life growing up in a rural Pennsylvania funeral home (the “fun home” of the book’s title) as she begins to realize that she is gay and her father is too.

In the early ’50s, Joe Shuster, a one-time boy genius who had, with his childhood buddy Jerry Siegel, created the greatest of American fantasies, Superman, found himself in a difficult middle age. He was always a shy, badly-dressed fellow, even at the height of his celebrity. A cop once mistook him for a vagabond. After a court case in which he attempted to salvage some of the riches Superman had wrought from DC Comics, he found himself destitute. At one point, he was reduced to working as a delivery boy. When he made a delivery to DC’s offices, the boss recognized him, slipped him a 20-dollar bill, and told him not to return. Now this small man from Cleveland was drawing for an illegal underground magazine, Nights of Horror, distributed by the brutal mob boss Eddie Mishkin, the “Sultan of Smut.”

The story of Joe Shuster’s great fall is told and his work from this little-known period is collected by the comics anthropologist Craig Yoe in his new book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams Comic Arts, $24.95). But before delving into Shuster’s story, we may want to ask about the worth of the work in the volume. I tend to be of the belief that great art is pornography that outlasts the death of its author. And I guess, based on that shallow definition, Shuster’s Nights of Horror illustrations may very well obtain. But is it all a mere cultural curiosity or accidental genius?

The New Lefthand Lesbians is back with its twelfth episode.

The New Lefthand Lesbians is back with its tenth episode. Thanks to Maggie for keeping this great series coming.