Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Trans Spider-Verse in Context
by Travis Hedge Coke
It is 2023, and more people watch superheroes in cartoons than read them in comics. Peter Parker is trans in memes and Gwen Stacy is transgender in an animated movie.
In 1956, Judge Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Authority Administrator, tried to bar from publication a comic because its protagonist was black. Or, because he was black and sweating.
For decades after the initiation of the Code, American comic books were saddled with a distorted inability to address race or sexuality in a reasonable, mature manner, with Code-approved, sellable at normal outlets and stores comics being regulated with comments like Judge Murphy’s, “he can’t be a black,” or a need to present non-white characters in ethnic caricature or as coded whites who just happened not to be white, or the non-Code comics, which are sold by mail or in head shops, and essentially justified their existence by exaggerated sexual and racial neuroses.
DC Comics editors worrying that Superman’s bottom might be too homosexual predates Gil Kane drawing every butt he can possibly, in all the detail and hip-swerve serve he can, but it also predates DC Comics being DC Comics.
1968, a few short years after Marvel had found their printer refusing to produce issues of Fantastic Four that featured the definitely black Black Panther, Charles Schulz and the distributors of his Peanuts, were being threatened by newspapers unpleased with his intention of including a black child.
In 1975, editor (and writer) Len Wein rejected a costume for a new Native American superhero for not being ethnically caricatured enough, leaving him in red and blue leather fringe and some feathers in his hair that people have made fun of ever since.
In 1981, Chris Claremont may have been tasked with de-lesbianing the Spider-Woman comic and regularly-appearing Lindsay McCabe.
In 2002, Selma Reesdale is introduced in an online-only cartoon, Gotham Girls, as the first transgender police shown in Batman-related media. Commissioner James Gordon is the only other police to know she is trans, and he keeps her secret for her.
In 2023, tweeters on Twitter complain that an animated Spider-Man movie did not go far enough in confirming a character who is blatantly transgender is transgender. In the face of intense American outlawing of queer media and queer presence in media, it is seen as the filmmakers and animators fault for not making it undeniable to people who claim they do not believe real life people are transgender.
It is 2023 and people on social media are suggesting white men to play “Spider-Man India,” and claiming they believed “India” was a given or surname, not indicative that this is a Spider-Man from India.
It is 2023, and the best we can do for Spider-Man India is “Spider-Man India.”
Comics are, traditionally, the combination of integral visual art with integral textual elements. Either may be implicit, both may be separate or combined on a page or screen, and in no way is it ever confirmable that explicit, didactic, declarative, blatant announcement is the superior form for either visual or textual information.
Much subtlety is forced and reinforced by restrictive, censorious, censuring, litigable, legislative, or socially taboo repining fussbudgets in power, but that does not make that subtlety bad.
We currently live in a world wherein Captain America cannot fight Nazis or Neo Nazis in movies or television. They need to be reframed as somehow Soviet Union-adjacent or third-party megalomaniacs or understandable European nepo-babies.
We have lived in a world which has, for more than eighty years, danced around why Roy Harper’s birth mother cannot be delved into, Roy Harper is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Roy Harper cannot date members of the tribal nation in which he is enrolled, and that these unaddressed avoidances circle around either issues of incest and mixed ethnicity or DC Comics wanting all the flair of having a Native character without him having to be too Native American.
If you think trans kids or children who are happy to acknowledge trans existence would not be put at extra risk if Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse explicitly announced transgender characters, I am suspicious of how much you actually care about trans youth or trans representation.
Having girl characters, alone, is enough on some playgrounds and for an increasingly vocal subsection of angry adults, to label a movie too gay, too woke, too groomer.
Across the Spider-Verse would not be released if it included a character saying, in words, aloud, “I am trans!” and the movie is not a Scott Lobdell comic from 1990. We have better ways. We always have.
At best, Across the Spider-Verse would have been permitted to animate a scene to satisfy these folks who cannot parse subtext when the subtext is literally badges on people’s chests, but this scene would be cut from the released version. More than likely, the film would be labeled “impossible to release,” and buried for a tax credit, as we have seen with the recent Batgirl and two Scooby-Doo movies.
It would not make it to theaters or DVDs or streaming to be bait for brutality, a momentary excuse for bigots to hurt somebody.
And, so, we do what we do. We speak to multiple audiences at once.
Before Wolverine’s earliest years and parentage were confirmed, in canon, Larry Hama used to consistently have characters ask him about his ethnicity. Was he Native. Was he Blackfoot.
In the 1980s, the doomed-to-die-soon Robin, dear ol’ Batman’s sidekick, thought he might be mixed white and Asian. There were reasons for him to suspect, and there was no good reason not to. He did not know his background, his parents or their families. And, mixed-race people do not have a racialized, caricatured look.
Turns out, both were white, but in both cases there was no reason, at the moment of those stories, they could not have been nonwhite.
The reason everyone thinks Starfire is probably one of their minority groups, is that Starfire is designed to reach out and talk to minorities. Starfire talks to a broad, general (white cishet male) audience, but she also communicates something integral to Black Americans, to Asians second-generation immigrants, to Brazilian-descent people in New York City, to gays and trans people and queers and Cherokees and Filipinas and other othereds.
There are reasons that cartoon versions of Starfire radically reinvent the visualization of comic book Starfire.
There are reasons that the Gwen of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is not the Gwen of a fifty year old Amazing Spider-Man comic or one from last month.
Queer coding, queer communication that is simultaneous with general consensus communication, is not cowardice. It is talking.
And, if the movie really is not doing the talking, at least somebody is having that conversation.