Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Paul Cornell, Demon Knights, Trans Treatment
by Travis Hedge Coke
I recently reread Paul Cornell’s run on Demon Knights, a DC title from the 2012 “New 52″ relaunch taking place in all-white European ye olden days, with faces familiar to comics nerds, like Madame Xanadu, Jason Blood, and Vandal Savage, and some new characters, including Horsewoman and Exoristos, an exiled Amazon. The books centers itself around grail cosmogony, King Arthur and Morgaine, and things specific to the grail mythology of DC Comics, the aforementioned Blood and the Shining Knight.
I am very partial to that end of the DC Universe. I adore the classic Shining Knight comics and I love Jack Kirby’s The Demon, what Grant Morrison and Simone Bianchi did in reinventing the Shining Knight as a trans and genderqueer young “perfect knight.”
I am not hugely keen on where Bianchi and Morrison left said knight at the end of Seven Soldiers of Victory, in a girls’ school, specifically, in dress and being, it seems, a girl destined to be a great queen under her birth name, not the name used through that entire story. But.
Mostly it’s very good.
And, Paul Cornell is good. I love his Captain Britain and MI 13, his Wisdom, much of his television work.
So, I had not remembered that so much of Shining Knight’s appearances in Demon Knights are solely that he is there and every other character has to vocally announce that he’s not male. Multiple times per issue, while sometimes accomplishing nothing else.
And, their first big bad, Morgaine, the sister of King Arthur, the faery queen, the nightmare, in their climactic battle, is doing all her world conquering and machinations to, as Vandal Savage puts it, exchange her genitals.
Morgaine wants to be male.
That’s her bad guy motivation.
I don’t think anyone on the comic meant harm. I don’t know. And, I think there remains a lot of good to it. Even the Knight ends up in a good place, with a possible love interest, at the end of the run. You cannot call them out, you cannot even politely make note without someone taking it as a full-go demonization.
It has been two days since completing my reread and I cannot shake the displeasure.
I know it is not wholly in the comics. I know I cannot demonize the artists and writer and Editor, et al, to satiate myself. I’m not going to tweet Paul Cornell and ask him.
The world has moved on. It may not even be in print any longer.
What do you do? It does not seem to have bothered lots of people. Does that matter?
Do I let it die inside me? Will that dead upset fester?
I have a column, do I let things hang here on display, or split them open for surgery and examination. I could do that, but how fairly?
I’d this the readerly version of, It’s not you, it’s me? Am I, as audience of one, taking things too much to heart?
Some of you may say, well, at that time in history – which is an imaginary time in an imaginary history with faeries, Satan, and dinosaurs – people were not kind or understanding to a trans man. If we accept that premise, what of it? Why include one, or perhaps two genderqueer individuals, only to crap on the transgender aspect over and over again? What good does that do for your story? How does it help the story?
I cannot find a good in it, for the stories we got, their tone otherwise, for the characters or characterization. Is there good in it for the audience?
I am the audience and it messed me up. It tainted the entire run. So, am I not the audience? Not the intended or wanted audience? That’s also not a great feeling. Like we have a billion comics with trans knights adventuring. Especially for DC Comics, this is a pretty limited range of books and maybe this one specifically wants to use trans characters, trans narratives, but not address trans audiences?
But, I don’t know that, do I? I can’t know. I can’t be sure. All I can do is worry.
And, worry.
It becomes, for me and for many readers, something we can only wrestle with inside, in quiet, to ourselves.