Male comic book writers and artists still far outnumber female artists and writers in Western comics, and only a small proportion of women artists craft narratives that center around lesbian characters. Even fewer still make lesbian romance the central driving force of their narratives. Lea Hernandez’s Clockwork Angels, Colleen Coover’s Small Favors, and Ariel Schrag’s Potential are significant because they showcase multiple and fluid possibilities for visualizing lesbian romance in the medium of comics. By virtue of the medium’s sequencing of graphic images,coupled with each artist’s individual style, each comic plays with a variety of expectations and opportunities for readers to decipher meaning from both that which is visible and invisible in the text. (333)
By examining texts that disprove the rule and destabilize the heterosexual foundation of feminist studies on romance, we can begin to deconstruct the genre and generate necessary and critically queer interventions. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have persuasively demonstrated that “heterosexual culture achieves much of its metacultural intelligibil- ity through the ideologies and institutions of intimacy,” and the multi- billion-dollar romance industry undoubtedly plays a key role in this pro- cess.54 Examining lesbian romance comics that exist at the margins of the genre and its traditional mass-market paperback medium opens up a productive space in which to begin queering approaches to the study of romance by considering how women comics artists’ visions of lesbian love and intimacy intersect with and destabilize the metacultural intelligibility of the heterosexual status quo. (334)
