You may have heard that Marvel will be launching Loki: Agent of Asgard - featuring a sexy, gender-swapping, bisexual take on the classic Thor villain. It's great to see another book with an LGBT lead, and the previous work of writer Al Ewing and artist Lee Garbett gives me confidence that this will be a quality book. But as ComicsAlliance's Andrew Wheeler points out, that's not without its iffy aspects:
"A person who transgresses against law and good conduct, we are told, is the type to transgress against accepted gender roles and relationships. In this view of the world, crime and queerness are both indecent deviations; manifestations of a broken person.
Loki may actually be one of the most enduring examples of the trope — not the Marvel Comics version created in the 1960s by Jack Kirby, Larry Leiber and Stan Lee, but the mythological forebear that writer Al Ewing intends to evoke in the new series. Loki was a thinker in a culture that valued fighters, a sometimes-female shapeshifter in a culture that valued certainty. He was the original effete European intellectual, mistrusted by the red meat-eating muscular menfolk. His trickster nature eventually and perhaps inevitably made him a father (and mother) of monsters and freaks, the enemy of the gods, and the cause of the world’s destruction. The trickster became the villain. He was too much of a freak not to be a traitor.
That’s the role that the queer villain plays; a threat to the “correct” order, intrinsically maladjusted to the way the world works."
More at the link.
