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Celebrate Pride Month with Graphic Novels

To celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride in the month of June, we wanted to highlight some graphic novels in our YA and Adult collections. From comic book heroes to real-life heroes, introverts and extroverts, butt-kickers, heart-melters, and heart-breakers. For more titles and information, check out the new Queer Comics Database.

Profiles of inspiring women, some who are world famous and some who are little known in graphic format, including Nellie Bly, Hedy Lamarr, Josephine Baker, Tove Janssen, and Naziq al-Abid.

Blue is having a hard time moving on. He's in love with his best friend. He's also dead. Luckily, Hamal can see ghosts, leaving Blue free to haunt him to his heart's content. But something eerie is happening in town, leaving the local afterlife unsettled, and when Blue realizes Hamal's strange ability may be putting him in danger, Blue has to find a way to protect him, even if it means...leaving him.

Bingo Love by Tee Franklin

When Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at first sight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both married young men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Mari reunite again at a church bingohall. Realizing their love for each other is still alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength and courage.

Queer : a graphic history by Meg John Barker

From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.

As the crow flies by Melanie Gillman

Charlie Lamonte is thirteen years old, queer, black, and questioning what was once a firm belief in God. So naturally, she's spending a week of her summer vacation stuck at an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp. As the journey wears on and the rhetoric wears thin, she can't help but poke holes in the pious obliviousness of this storied sanctuary with little regard for people like herself . . . or her fellow camper, Sydney.

The comic book industry comes together to honor those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, which took place on June 12, 2016, in Orlando. From IDW Publishing, with assistance from DC Entertainment, this oversize comic contains moving and heartfelt material from some of the greatest talents in comics--mourning the victims, supporting the survivors, celebrating the LGBTQ community, and examining love in today's world.

Kim & Kim are twentysomething besties out to make a name for themselves in the wild world of interdimensional cowboy law enforcement. In a massive "screw you" to their parents and the authorities, they decide to hijack some high stakes bounty -- and end up in way over their heads. A day-glo action adventure that's bursting with energy and enthusiasm, it puts queer women and trans women front and center, with a story that embraces the absurd alongside realistic pathos.

Who are the Rat Queens? A pack of booze-guzzling, death-dealing battlemaidens-for-hire, and they're in the business of killing all god's creatures forprofit. It's also a darkly comedic sass-and-sorcery series starring Hannah the Rockabilly Elven Mage, Violet the Hipster Dwarven Fighter, Dee the Atheist Human Cleric and Betty the Hippy Smidgen Thief. This modern spin on an old school genre is a violent monster-killing epic that is like Buffy meets Tank Girl in a Lord of the Rings world on crack!

In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman's failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?
 

Blue is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel about growing up, falling in love, and coming out. Clementine, a high school student, has an average life: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school. When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Their attraction is instant and electric, and Clementine finds herself in a relationship that will test her friends, parents, and her own ideas about herself and her identity.

Yaichi is a work-at-home suburban dad in contemporary Tokyo; formerly married to Natsuki, father to their young daughter, Kana. Their lives suddenly change with the arrival at their doorstep of a hulking, affable Canadian named Mike Flanagan, who declares himself the widower of Yaichi's estranged gay twin, Ryoji. Mike is on a quest to explore Ryoji's past, and the family reluctantly but dutifully takes him in. What follows is an unprecedented and heartbreaking look at the state of a largely still-closeted Japanese gay culture: how it's been affected by the West, and how the next generation can change the preconceptions about it and prejudices against it.

An honest and heartfelt look at one young woman's exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist's burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers

Every 90 years, a 12-deity pantheon of gods incarnate in mortal form, only to die after two years. These gods wield considerable power and occupy themselves with various pursuits, including pop-music stardom. A series of horrifying events backstage after the goddess Amaterasu's latest concert thrusts a mortal woman named Laura into a quest to help clear the reincarnated-as-female Lucifer of a murder she did not commit. Laura serves as the reader's stand-in as she navigates the bizarre waters of the pantheon's in-fighting and politics, and Lucifer manages to charm while owing a major fashion debt to David Bowie during his Thin White Duke phase. The rest of the gods are intriguing in their look and character, but why are they here? 

Midnighter. Volume 1, Out by Steve Orlando

Between the supercomputer wired into his brain and the enhancements saturating his body, the living weapon known as Midnighter doesn't face a lot of real challenges to his uncanny combat skills. Lucky for him, he enjoys beating the tar out of low-level bad guys as much as the high-end ones--and since his recent breakup with his first love (and fellow superhuman) Apollo, he's had plenty of chances to engage in his unique brand of physical therapy.

Midnighter and Apollo by Steve Orlando

From their days as founding members of the Authority, the heroes Midnighter and Apollo have been forever linked, both professionally and romantically. But when the duo are torn apart by a mysterious villian who sends Apollo to the underworld, Midnighter faces the gates of hell for his lover.

She was a Young Avenger. She leads the Ultimates. And now she officially claims her place as the preeminent butt-kicker of the entire Marvel Universe! But what's a super-powered teenager to do when she's looking for a little personal fulfi llment? She goes to college! America just has to stop an interdimensional monster or two first and shut down a pesky alien cult that's begun worshipping her exploits before work can begin. Then she can get on with her first assignment: a field trip to the front lines of World War II - with Captain America as her wingman!

Determined to continue serving others after her military career was cut short by bigotry, Kate Kane has taken up the identity of Batwoman, leading a one-woman war on Gotham City's evil underbelly. And at the heart of her investigation is the Religion of Crime, a criminal cult led by a madwoman known only as Alice. Speaking in riddles and storybook rhymes, the Lewis Carroll-inspired Alice aims to transform Gotham into her own twisted wonderland. But is everything Alice says truly mad? Underneath her deranged theatrics, she may hold the key to understanding Batwoman's past...

Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Saga. Vol. 1 by Brian K Vaughan

Two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war, Marko and Alana, fall in love and risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old world.

Sex Fantasy by Sophia Foster-Dimino

Begun as a loose, ephemeral zine that was produced in limited editions, these comics, small in both size and length, are esoteric and immensely personal. Covering a span of four years, the comics collected here build a relationship that is deeper than their elegantly drawn surfaces.

Crossplay by Niki Smith

Close friends and new acquaintances at an anime convention confront theircrushes, challenge their hang-ups, and question their once-comfortable identities in this erotic graphic novel about discovering who you're meant to truly be and who you're meant to love.