Is Stan Lee creating the world's first-ever gay superhero?

Have you heard the news? Comics legend Stan Lee is "to create world's first gay superhero"!

News is out that Lee is creating a character named Thom Creed, which is the same as another character I remember reading about, the protagonist of Perry Moore's novel Hero. Maybe The Telegraph's web browser doesn't have access to Google, or they might have discovered that Lee and Moore were working together bring Hero to Showtime.

Maybe that headline just needs to be cleaned up a bit. We'll help the Telegraph out after the break.

This news is very exciting because there has never, ever been a gay superhero before. Well, there was Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice in Alan Moore's groundbreaking comic Watchmen.

Watchmen's Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice, with friends

Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis, however, were minor supporting characters however while Thom Creed is the hero of Hero, so lets adjust the headline a little more.

There was also Extraño, who first appeared in DC's 1998 crossover series Millennium and was created by Steve Englehart. So maybe the Telegraph is showing their ignorance.

Okay, I could understand The Telegraph forgetting all about Extraño. With his flamboyant fashion sense, his nurturing nature and his way of referring to himself as "Auntie", Extraño came off as an offensive stereotype. The character never caught on, never got noticed outside of comics and quietly disappeared.

Let's get the headline to reflect that:

There's some debate if Extraño is the first gay superhero, however. After all, Northstar has been around since 1979, even though he didn't come out until 1992, four years after Extraño's debut, though he was long written as gay.

Further, this is a TV project and all those gay superheroes were in comic books, so maybe that's the distinction the Telegraph is seeing:

But wait, wasn't there a British comedy that focused on a bunch of superheroes living everyday lives and had a gay character in its cast?

The cast of No Heroics

That's right, No Heroics included James Lance (in the center of the cast pic) as Timebomb, a gay Spanish hero with substance abuse problems and an ability to see 60 seconds into the future. Though No Heroics is a comedy and Thom Creed's show is going to be a drama ...

There you go, the headline is more accurate now. Then again, maybe it would have been simpler to just say, "Stan Lee continues his trailblazing ways by bringing new gay superhero to TV".