One of the biggest moments in the trans history of mainstream comics was when Alysia, Barbra Gordon Batgirl’s roommate and best friend, came out to the iconic superhero as trans. Gail Simone has written more quality queer characters than almost any mainstream comics writer, and she made sure that this coming out was handled well. Later, during Cameron Stewart, Brendan Fletcher and Babs Tarr’s run on Batgirl, Alysia wasn’t seen as much, but was highlighted when she got to marry her girlfriend and have a couple other cool scenes. They married in Norway in 1971—and again in 1980 in Manhattan. This marriage was a happy one and resulted in two children, a boy, Tom, and a girl, Amber. Stanton seldom saw his erstwhile studio-mate in the years after they broke up the studio. He continued doing work until his death March 17, 1999, as “the most famous fetish artist in the world,” as Seves puts it. Users that get verified will receive a "Verified" user flair. For all OC creators, please follow the below verification methods to get verified.

We had a great working relationship,” Stanton recalled in a 1988 interview. “We were the only guys who could have gotten along with each other.” After her father’s death, she found Ditko’s phone number and called him. She wanted to know if he had any memories he could share. He couldn’t remember anything, she reported, and he denied that her father had anything to do with creating Spider-Man. After The Gender Frontier, Allen decided it was time to look outside the U.S. "I was extremely fortunate to be able to travel to Cuba, and be welcomed by transgender women, most of whom are HIV positive street workers," she said. A photography book about that time, called TransCuba, followed in 2014. Allen used her lens to reflect a more accurate reality — a positive, beautiful, even celebratory picture of a person who had finally found herself. This was no small task. For Allen to ask crossdressers or trans people to step out so publicly was a matter of trust, which Allen was dedicated to gain.

9. Rose Master

When she asked him what was so unbelievable, he confessed that he’d helped another artist, naming Steve Ditko, create the character. And he told her what he’d contributed. Says Seves: “One could only imagine how gratifying Ditko’s presence must have been to Stanton after his time with Grace; from being around someone who was repulsed by art to being around someone whose very waking moment was consumed by it. ‘There were times Steve would spend twenty hours straight doing a comic,’ Stanton remembered. Many people I met at that time thought they were the only person in the world that was 'that way,'" Allen said. "Some thought they were crazy and bad, guilty, unworthy. When/if they told their wives, many marriages ended in divorce. There were many debates about telling their children, and if yes, at what age. They lost their church communities if the church knew, and kept everything to do with their jobs secret." And she continues to seek out marginalized trans communities around the world. Her next book on the subject, Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand, comes out this fall. While Stanton wanted to honor Ditko’s work by not claiming any part of it for himself, he had another reason for avoiding the subject: he wanted to protect his family by keeping a low profile:

Pointing to the Kirby sketch, Ditko might have disparaged the web gun Kirby’s character was brandishing: “That idea is old.” Write your username, a reference to /r/TGIFS, and the date (must be same as the day to send us the mod mail). He explained that since Spider-Man was so famous, it might draw attention to him as an artist if people knew he contributed to the creation of the character,” Amber wrote. “My brother and I were children and in school, and he feared that it could negatively effect our lives if people knew he was an erotic fetish artist.”Over the years, Stanton would produce work for several merchants of fetish art: Edward Mishkin, who ran a store near Times Square (in those days, the neighborhood of sexploitation with dozens of stores selling girlie magazines, photographs, movies, and smut); Leonard Burtman, publisher and merchandiser; Max Stone, publisher of fighting female serials; and Stanley Malkin, also a Times Square entrepreneur, who would hire Stanton, putting him on salary, to do covers for his magazines—Stanton’s longest salaried situation as a fetish artist, 1963-68. Malkin also furnished and paid all the expenses for a small apartment for Stanton. Lumberjanes is one of the best all-ages comics ever and also one of the most feminist, so really really it should have come as no real surprise when Jo came out as trans in a wonderfully written and beautifully touching moment that she shared with Barney, who would later come out as non-binary, largely thanks to the guidance of and support from Jo. Jo is the best example of trans girls in print comics because she’s well rounded, she gets to live happily as a girl with lots of friends who love and support her, she’s well written, she’s funny and smart, and she seems like a real life trans girl of color. New Releases (October 5) The book’s only scholarly flaw is Seves’ failure to caption the illustrations; they are usually explained in the adjacent text, but you have to look hard for it. A photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman we determine is Stanton’s mother only because the text nearby is about her.

Wrote Amber: “My father contributed to the costume, the idea of the web shooting out of Spider-Man's wrist, and the movement which he made with his hands to release the web. ... I still remember my father's beautiful, strong, broad hands as he showed me the movement that makes Spider-Man's web release from his wrist. It was just like my dad to come up with something like that. If you knew my father it would make sense that he had a hand in Spider-Man.” Spider-Man’s face mask is unusual among superheroes. The mask covers the entire face. “Prior to Spider-Man,” Seves writes, “heroes had open faces (like Superman) or half-faces (like Batman).”And Ditko was completely accepting of Stanton: ‘He thought my stuff was funny. We’d laugh a lot,’ Stanton said, as he fondly remembered years later. ‘Every experience that I had with Steve was terrific, as far as I was concerned.’” Some instances that Seves cites are not quite so convincing: if Ditko did them, he did them by dutifully imitating his studio-mate’s mannerisms to the extent that his own disappear. Or so it seems to me, but I’m scarcely a Ditko expert. Something in Stanton’s psychological makeup dictated channeling and creating art as a means of attaining a proper balance and some measure of control in his life. The actual art he made—the artifact itself—was always less important than the process. [...] It was the process of making art that Stanton lived for; it was that process of exploration and discovery. Move a bit posing in different angles while you keep the sign in frame and visible. You must show yourself as much as possible.

For basically the entire history of trans representation, we’ve been portrayed as victims and villains, or a mix of both, so this villainous character who’s actually complicated and charismatic is groundbreaking. She exists in the wonderful webcomic Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G. She’s fashionable; she’s in charge; and she’s her own woman. Exactly like every trans woman I know. Their friendship,” she added, “was centered around creating art. Each of them contributed to the other's art as part of the friendship between two artists. While each was the driving force behind his own work, there was significant overlap. Steve contributed to the erotic stories my father worked on and my father contributed to Spider-Man and probably other stories. Neither one of them ever expected any recognition or money from the other.” Ditko’s material showed a total unawareness of sex while Stanton’s material conveyed a kooky preoccupation with it. Yet both shared the same ambition of make it as artists; and both, one might say, were earnest and obsessed.” Amber said her father always spoke highly of Ditko’s art, particularly his inking ability. “When they collaborated,” she said, “my father did the pencil work, and Steve would ink over it.” STANTON’S DAUGHTER Amber wrote about her father’s contribution to Ditko’s creation of Spider-Man in an article, “A Tangled Web,” originally published in The Creativity of Steve Ditko (2012). She remembered watching with the family the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on tv when she was nine years old. As a giant balloon of Spider-Man appeared on the screen, her father exclaimed: "Would you believe that— I never would have thought," she quotes her father saying with amusement.

5. Sulla

It was, in short, just the kind of setup that encouraged the two artists to kibbitz each other’s work. And also to lend each other a hand when deadlines loomed. Maybe it shoots from his wrist,” Stanton might have said, demonstrating a maneuver with his hand and fingers. During his last months with Rogers, Stanton was also producing work for Irving Klaw. Klaw, self-named the "Pin-up King," was a merchant of sexploitation, fetish, Hollywood glamour pin-up photographs, and underground films. His business, which eventually became Movie Star News, began in 1938 when he and his sister Paula opened a basement level struggling used bookstore on 14th St. in Manhattan.