Mark Millar: Comic book writers don't kill off gay superheroes, supervillains do

Comic writer Mark Millar isn't thrilled to learn that his story was the breaking point that inspired Perry Moore to tell a positive story of a gay superhero. A 2005 story by Millar was brought up in Sunday's New York Times profile of Moore:

But things work out relatively well for him, which makes sense given Mr. Moore’s distaste for how some gay comic-book characters have been treated. His hackles still rise at the death of Northstar, a mutant hero who made headlines in 1992 when he uttered the words “I am gay” in the pages of a Marvel comic.

In 2005 Northstar was killed by a brainwashed Wolverine, which enraged Mr. Moore. He thought the murder of Marvel’s biggest gay hero by one of its most popular characters (in comics, films and merchandising) sent the wrong message.

“I thought I was going to have to stop buying comics,” he said, but instead, “I waged my own little jihad.” He visited a comic store armed with Post-it notes, which he affixed to copies of the “Wolverine” series (first on the covers, then, more slyly, on interior pages). They asked questions like “Can there be a gay superhero?” “Homophobic?” and “Ask yourself: equal rights?”

Death is rarely final in comics, so it’s no surprise that Northstar came back to life. “They couldn’t bother to mention he was gay,” Mr. Moore said of Northstar’s most recent appearance in “X-Men.”

Taking a cue from Gail Simone, a comic-book writer who first gained notice as a fan with her Web site, “Women in Refrigerators”, detailing the mistreatment of female heroes, Mr. Moore created his own tally. “Who Cares About the Death of a Gay Superhero?,” which he has delivered as a speech, includes more than 60 gay and lesbian comic book characters who have been ignored, maimed or murdered.

“Yes, bad things do happen to all people,” he wrote in it. “But are there positive representations of gay characters to counterbalance these negative ones?”

Not nearly enough, Mr. Moore said, and that’s one reason he wrote “Hero,” for which he already has ideas for future installments.

Millar wasn't thrilled to see a story he wrote mentioned as a low point in superhero comics' treatment of gay characters, and he reacted on his website:

Oh, tell him to f**k off.

He didn't die because he was gay. He died because he'd been brainwashed by The Hand.

The key point -- and the one that Millar completely misses (probaby because he never bothered to read the article, just the portion quoted to him) -- is that positive gay characters don't gain prominence very often and that when a character like Northstar gets killed off (or, in this case, killed and resurrected three times in a single storyline) it makes a small number of gay superheroes even smaller. Unfortunately, when a good gay superhero character comes around, they eventually end up losing the qualities that made them positive role models. (Millar also is the writer who had Apollo raped in his first story arc of The Authority.)

That's the point I've taken from Simone's "Women in Refrigerators" list. Northstar is a character who goes for years sitting on the sidelines, only to reappear as a victim. Millar's story might have gotten a different reaction if Northstar had been used positively before, but, as with Apollo, one of the first things Millar did with the character was to make him a victim.

Back when the story first appeared, Millar tried to defend the storyline claiming an overall history of gay-positive stories, citing a 2003 Spectrum Award (for the Authority issues where Apollo and Midnighter marry) and for setting the seeds for Colossus to be gay in Ultimate X-Men run (Millar, unfortunately, only gave out vague hints about Colossus' orientation -- the next writer could have easily written him as straight without any inconsistency which, thankfully, didn't happen.) However, his larger history with gay characters and his reaction to Moore's criticism indicate that Millar doesn't understand how everything that happens to a minority character is magnified because those characters happen so rarely.

Then again, does anything hurt Millar's case more than claiming that he had no control over the fictional villain group he was writing?