In the first part of our list, we also forgot about a very important comic.
Petrichor (Saga, Brian K Vaughan i Fiona Staples)
Love, sex and family (not only biological) are the most important themes of the Saga . The key words of this comic book are undoubtedly diversity and tolerance, its characters belong to different races, they represent a wide spectrum of orientations and the entire gray scale when it comes to morality. Vaughan does not hesitate to say love is love , stigmatize pedophilia or show how politics uses all differences to divide and rule.
In the Saga , therefore, a pair of reporters from the planet appear, where their homosexuality is considered a crime, and thus – becomes an occasion to blackmail and gag their mouths. The boys still manage to maintain a healthy, strong relationship. One of the characters introduced in the comic book as a person hunting for a faithless fiancé turns out to be bisexual. Importantly, this thread does not define her at all, nor does it affect how her relationship with the woman turned out. This is a very mature use of LGBT + characters. Vaughan used a similar procedure in Paper Girls , where the “problem” of the characters’ orientation, initially a source of stress for them, pales in the face of the fragility of human life. In line with the philosophy also present in the Saga – it’s better to use each day in harmony with yourself, because we never know how much time we have left.
The comic also features a beautiful, broken, very imperfect heroine – Petrichor. We meet her in the women’s prison where Hazel and her grandmother end up. Like all female penitentiaries, she belongs to the horned race, but speaks the Wieniec language very badly. This is not the only complication in the character’s identity – his body does not have a clear gender, as we would probably say from the perspective of a binary division. Petrichor looks like a gorgeous, slightly gothic woman of mature beauty, but she started out as a man, but stopped for the time being somewhere in the middle of the full gender reassignment process. She is like balancing on the border of worlds, perfect for herself Lola from All About My Mother. As you can imagine, being with her will be an important lesson in self-definition for Hazel, whose body also incorporates a seemingly impossible combination of traits. Importantly, her role in the comic is not limited to being an example and a metaphor, she is a full-blown supporting character with her own story. – Agnieszka Czoska