DC Pride 2022: “The Gumshoe in Green”: The Bi Sleep

With “The Gumshoe in Green,” writer Tini Howard and artist Evan Cagle offer readers a lovingly crafted homage to the noir genre and a look at the ways biphobia makes dating difficult.

“The Gumshoe in Green” is filled with a multitude of noir tropes, from Evan Cagle’s mostly black-and-white visuals to the way light filters through the vertical blinds on Jo Mullein’s windows and covers everyone in stripes of light. For a majority of the story, Evan Cagle cleverly treats green as a spot color, calling attention to the futuristic element of Jo’s Green Lantern ring/powers while embracing the aesthetics of noir.

While its predecessor Far Sector could comfortably be described as a neo-noir, “Gumshoe in Green” takes the genre back to its roots on both visual and thematic levels, with Jo filling the role of Humphrey Bogart-esque antiheroic detective and a carnivorous plant alien taking the part of Jo’s femme fatale. In noir, the relationship between the detective and femme fatale is often doomed to fail and the romance of “The Gumshoe in Green” is no different. When the alien carnivorous plant woman and her alien carnivorous plant husband turn out to be predatory in more ways than one, it falls to Jo to teach them a lesson or two. 

When it comes to dating, bisexual women have to be wary of “unicorn hunters”: heterosexual couples searching for a bisexual woman (“unicorn”) for a threesome. As is the case for Jo with these carnivorous plant aliens. Not only is unicorn hunting predatory, hinging on unequal power dynamics that see people as sexual objects, but it’s also — as this comic addresses — inseparable from the stereotype of bisexuals as hypersexual and promiscuous. With wit and humor, Howard uses an absurd setting and sexual partners (a noir story with carnivorous plant aliens) to balance out a serious issue that for some readers may be all too familiar.