Published in: September-October 2013 issue.
No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics
Edited by Justin Hall
Fantagraphics. 304 pages, $35.
NO STRAIGHT LINES is not a book about Tom of Finland. While the erotic art of Finnish illustrator Touko Laaksonen makes a brief appearance in this book, Justin Hall is primarily concerned with the cultural underground that GLBT comics have documented—and the political alternatives that they have imagined—from the late 1960s to the present. Gathering selections of work by more than eighty artists from North America and Europe, No Straight Lines is a landmark publication for comics readers and a valuable introduction for those new to the genre.