GLAAD Glad for Young Avengers

According to a short news item over at the Blog@Newsarama, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) honored Young Avengers as its Media Award winner for Outstanding Comic Book. Wiccan and Hulkling of the Young Avengers are gay teens and a couple. We think it's great that the series is honored. It's well written and does take a chance with gay teen characters (the title is Young Avengers so one would assume it's being targeted to younger comics reader). But reading the list of nominees for the award, it seems as though the only criteria is to have a gay character. We're not quite sure how we feel about that. Yes, it's good that comics are inclusive and all, but it's kinda sad that for the gay community just showing a gay character is enough to get lauded. However we suppose the same could be done for any minority that's been historically oppressed by the minority (calling Noam chomsky please). Then again, it may explain the popularity of the particularly hideous Will and Grace. Gotham Central, Strangers in Paradise, Top Ten: The Forty Niners, and Y: The Last Man were the other nominees. Amongst the Mister Fanboy staff we are familiar with Gotham Central, have never read Strangers in Paradise, but are regular readers of Y: The Last Man and all of the Top Ten series, so it's hard to comment on the winner vs. the losers (kinda like it's hard for the White House to comment on anything that they don't want to talk about - assholes). But we will anyway. For our money, the best of the bunch in terms of telling a compelling gay-centered story would have to be Top Ten: The Forty Niners. It's a flashback story to a time that in our world would be ca. WWII and its aftermath. Even though it has yet to be released, we're pretty sure that the new Batwoman comic will have the inside line on being next year's winner of the award.

In other gay friendly news (What's with this theme lately?), Comix-Fan has an article up entitled "The Top 10 Gay / Lesbian / Bisexual / Transgendered Characters in Comics." As far as we can tell, the authors have compiled pretty inclusive lists, but we really don't have our finger on the pulse of these kind of things.

Again we ask: What's with the recurring theme of gayness in comics. We're just wondering. Not that there's anything wring with that.