Qomics for Queers, a product of a liberal arts education

What a week! Tyler confessed to beating himself up in Gil Thorpe, Vera seethes with vague and directionless anger in Mary Worth, and Tommie learns a thing or two about playing the field from Margo in Apartment 3-G. It almost makes you want to take a day off from reading about all this excitement, because it's just too much! But we have a little more here, Queerketeers, because there was a lot of queering it up going on in the funny pages.


Tuesday's Gil Thorpe:

Well, Gil Thorpe's latest story line came to a screeching halt this week. We saw Tyler walk into Paris's party with a bleeding head-wound, then Brynna blamed RJ for it and we all thought she did it to solidify her boyfriend Tyler's position on the basketball team, and then we saw Mr. Lazy Editor and Sleuthy McScoop (seen talking to Tyler's floating head in panel one) investigate, all to have Tyler confess to the whole thing. For no reason.

Even though I don't work within my major, college wasn't a complete waste for me. I wrote a paper on how coming out is a rhetorical act used as a tool to deconstruct the power behind Catholic confession. The long and short of it is that confession is a speech act used to reiterate Catholic teachings and strengthen them through repetition and by reifying the power relationship between confessee and confessor. Coming out is a speech act that builds a personal narrative with details about one's sexuality, but it focuses on empowerment of the confessee by seeking and expecting approval.

Yeah, I know, real original.

But anyway, here we have Tyler confessing really happily to being a big-time masochist. He says in the Wednesday strip that he wanted sympathy but that he had no part in blaming RJ. That makes about as much sense as the motion lines in panel two. No, here he is beating himself up and then proudly telling everyone. In an abstract sense of the term, he's coming out of the closet.

Of course, Coach Thorpe sends him to counseling in Saturday's strip, so I'm sure he'll find out that he's completely non-mascochistic, was just acting out, and is moving to the Midwest to study to be a psychologist.


Thursday's Beetle Bailey:

I don't even need to reiterate how gay Beetle and Sarge are. But now they're bickering like an old married couple. I mean, this is a conversation one would expect to hear from Helga and Hagar or Leroy and Loretta, not a Sergeant First Class and a Private under his command.

It gets even more intense on Friday:

I'm totally like, Oh.My.God. Beetle can't take the closet for another century and he's leaving the military. Because we know what "Maybe the army isn't for everyone" means when they're letting in high school drop-outs and convicted felons and still don't have enough people to fill the ranks. He may or may not have been asked, but I'm sure that if we could look one panel into the past here, he told.

Fortunately for Beetle, this unnamed officer doesn't believe in kicking out a soldier over DADT and is expressing his solidarity with the community in panel two.


And Wednesday's Dennis the Menace:

Haha, Dennis! You sure showed Margaret! Oh wait, no, no you didn't. Calling her ugly would have required a "no" answer. Asking if it's a trick question is just confusing. It presumes that there's no real way to answer the question. Almost as if he feels unable to judge female beauty....

Or maybe the joke has something to do with how Margaret has fused her legs together.


And this morning's Dennis the Menace:

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Well, Dennis, they're getting together to eat something, but it isn't on any Supperware....

See? I was right! I wasn't just making things up!