Yes indeed, I’m working away on a new PiQue one-pager, which will introduce us to two new characters: Yuki and Sunita, a pair of gamer dykes.

You may well have heard about the recent panel, where straight white dudes like Todd McFarlane declared (superhero) comics to be solely the provenance of straight, white dudes, because of something having to do with testosterone. I really didn’t quite get it, since testosterone is not listed as an ingredient in any of my art supplies, but he appears convinced of this.

The comic I’m working on was not written as a reaction to the panel; I wrote the script for it a couple of months ago, but as you may be able to tell from the excerpt here, the subject matter is not entirely irrelevant.

One of the panelists also suggested that the only correct way to write PoC characters is as though race doesn’t actually exist, I guess because PoC supes are somehow magically immune to racism, like that’s their superpower. I personally would love to see a Black Batman. 1960s Batman bears only the most superficial resemblances to 2010s Batman, so I’m not sure why Batman’s race should be set in stone.

Again, I didn’t cast this comic with people of color as a reaction to that particular discussion (Yuki as a female knight is also a total, but delightful, coincidence), but it does strengthen my resolve to present a diverse cast whose experiences are reflective of what actual, real people in the modern world are experiencing. Pretending racism doesn’t exist would be a huge disservice. That doesn’t mean that PoC characters have to sit around talking about racism all the time. They will also talk about video games, or food, or music! Theater, or books, or movies! Art, or writing, or … you know, “interests” that people sometimes have and like to share with their friends. And it’s really my friends for whom I’m writing these characters, so they get to see some aspect of themselves reflected in my imaginary world, just as they are part of my life in the real world. Being invisible is a neat superpower, but it kinda sucks when you can’t turn it off.