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If you care about seeing inclusive sexiness in your stories, reading superhero comics can be challenging. And yet, I continue to love them, for reasons that are, ironically, directly related to their depictions of sexuality. I’m drawn to stories starring flamboyant mutants, aliens, robots, and plain-old-regular humans in brightly colored spandex posing and strutting and intimately colliding and tangling because of the possibilities they offer for diverse, deviant sexiness. I particularly adore the deliciously subversive fact these possibilities hide in plain sight, baked into the fabric of an officially heteropatriarchal genre that’s nonetheless centrally concerned with bodily freedom, experimentation, and transformation. Many of my personal favorite examples can be found in comics starring Nightcrawler.
Historically, mainstream superhero comics have rarely lived up to their sexy potential. More often than not, sex is linked with violence, or else violence stands in for sex, and sexiness that doesn’t involve the stereotypical objectification of female bodies for a stereotypical male gaze usually has to be salvaged from scraps and metaphors. That’s what makes exceptions so precious—those rare moments when you’re encouraged to look differently and feel loved by a genre that too seldom loves you back. For most of his comics history, Nightcrawler has loved me back. [Read more]
