#YISHREADS June 2025

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

It’s Pride Month, so here’s a quintet of queer comics for your consideration! Fantasy, sci-fi and memoir; works for younger readers and for strictly adult eyes; hailing from Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines and the USA; with characters representing every letter of the LGBTQ+ rainbow and then some.

I’ve gotta be honest, though—to dwell on works of queer joy and escapism feels a little trivial right now, when the National Guard’s descending upon LA and Israel’s bombing of Iran feels like it may have sparked off World War Three. Even in the cotton-candy-hued lead up to Pink Dot in Singapore, I can’t pretend we’re cut off from global struggles: not when Pink Fest’s Inclusive Careers Fair is sponsored by Wells Fargo, a major investor in the Israeli military [1]; not when the circuit party Beach Ball is being headlined by Zionist DJ Orel Sabag. [2]

But there’s a flip side to this. I’m old enough to remember a time when queer literature, especially illustrated queer literature, was taboo, subject to extreme scrutiny and censorship. The fact that it was easy for me to access a collection of mostly Asian queer graphic works, in a diversity of genres, is a signal of the progress that’s taken place, and cause for hope. May this little bubble of queer liberation be a harbinger of greater liberation for everyone, in a better world to come.

Lunar Boy, by Jes and Cin Wibowo
HarperAlley, 2024

Let’s start off with something phenomenally utopian: an unabashedly queer middle-grade graphic novel, set in a future where Indonesia has conquered space while losing none of the beauty of its traditional cultures. 

The story's clearly inspired by The Little Prince: a child’s discovered alone on a barren space rock and has to adjust to the strangeness of human life. But it's fundamentally its own thing, anchored in the world of the third culture kid. Our hero Indu spends almost all of his story desperately feeling out of place: raised by an adoptive mum on the space station Eyesun (just realised it’s a pun on the Malay/Indonesian word “matahari”!), he later struggles to adapt to his blended family on New Earth, where he’s unused to the broadness of space, gets sidelined for not speaking Indonesian, and struggles with being queer and trans. 

Mind you, this isn’t a homophobic society. Indu’s parents are super supportive, and there’s a whole plethora of queer characters—gay, nonbinary, bisexual, transpuan (it seems the term “waria” is falling out of fashion?), wanpria, panromantic. There’s gendered coming-of-age rituals: the Kemajuan and Berbunga Ceremonies for young men and women respectively, but they’re assigned based on gender identification, not genitals. Nevertheless, it’s driven home how even well-meaning microaggressions can hurt, and how hard it can be to grow up as an invisible minority, figuring yourself out.

One caveat. Adults who’re into sci-fi worldbuilding may complain that this doesn’t make sense. If this is a space age future, why are folks using so much 21st century tech and gender terminology? And despite the evident diversity on show (there’s Chindos, hijabis and non-hijabis, Palembangese food)—where are all the non-Indonesians?

Fundamentally, we’ve got to remember this is a book for kids, assuring them that minority cultures and sexual/gender expressions can survive into the distant tomorrow, that a culture that’s homophobic today might not be always thus, and that growing-up’s gonna be full of heartaches even under the best circumstances. All a little more important than quibbling about conventions!

 My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, by Kabi Nagata
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
Seven Seas, 2017

This comic takes the form of a queer memoir, but it’s radically different from what you’d expect. No love story: when the author comes out to herself, she realises she utterly lacks the social skills and confidence to date, so she goes to a love hotel and hires a sex worker. (As you can guess from the cover image, she is not ready for what comes next.)

While sexual encounters frame the story, most of the work actually deals with Nagata’s struggle with depression—and though these bits made me recall Baek Sehee's I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, the author’s utterly frank in revealing herself as a basket case, too messed up to graduate from university or even hold down a service job. What leads her out of the belly of the beast is actually her realisation (through a failed job interview) that creating manga is her passion. Her sexuality’s secondary to that—in fact, she perceives her lesbianism as fundamentally linked to her unfulfilled desire for maternal approval. Plus, one of the major steps that pushes her to actually engage the social escort is the knowledge that she can turn the experience into an online comic strip!

Regarding the sex—I feel like in a Western graphic novel, it’d be an ecstatic triumph, a devastating tragedy (revealing the horrors of the sex trade) or played up for laughs. Here, it’s intensely awkward and stressful for Nagata, yet the sex worker herself is sweet and 100% professional, treating the author's first kiss and fingering as no more unusual than a massage or therapy session. (Very amusing: her reflection that everything she knows about sex is from doujinshi, allowing her to talk about the “yaoi-hole”, a fictional self-lubricating orifice in male bottoms that bears no resemblance to the anus.) Even the escort service is happy with the comic she wrote!

And as for Nagata herself—well, she realises she hasn't really had a breakthrough from the encounter, but she’s gradually healing. Which is an oddly wholesome, balanced way to think about sex. Curious about her sequel comics (of which there are many)—but also prepared for the fact that they're likely to be nowhere as sensational in their subject matter.

The Woodsman, by Elvin Ching
Epigram Books, 2021

My editor at Epigram recommended this to me a while ago, but it sat unread on my shelf for years—probably cos he neglected to mention that it’s about a hunky interracial gay cottagecore couple of bad-ass hunter-warriors, who’re raising a little boy (rescued from sacrifice) in a wintry demon-infested fantasy hellscape!

The art’s gorgeous—fine cross-hatched linework in black and white, capturing both intimate domesticity and the horror and gore of battle, more reminiscent of Hong Kong wuxia manhua than American comics or Japanese manga. But on a more critical note, it's a little difficult to follow the plot, because of the flashbacks/dream sequences and the fact that a number of characters kinda look like one another (e.g. Drif and the shaman, who turns out to be his dad—also everyone’s face keeps on turning into a demon’s at some point, so who’s real?). Plus, I kinda wish Singaporean storytellers would embrace our tropical climate for our SFF rather than turning to global fantasy conventions of wolves and winter.

Still, this remains a punchy, moving, one-shot adventure romp, especially considering it’s Ching’s first writing project (usually he just illustrates). If there’s a follow-up, I’m putting in a request for more naked scenes.

Thirsty: A Filipino Boys Love Anthology, ed. Paolo Herras
Komiket, 2022

This BL collection comes from one of the Philippines’ leading comics publishers, which is kind of fabulous: I don’t think a similar collection of illustrated gay stories—there’s sex and full frontal dicks in here!—could be made by anything but an underground press in Singapore.

But this isn’t 100% porn—the fifteen chapters here, each by a different creator, offer a diverse selection of styles and stories. There’s skinny pretty schoolboys longing for each other; there’s flabby blob characters detailing their Grindr mishaps; there’s hunky, hairy-chested delivery boy and plumber fantasies; complaints of homophobia from beyond and within the gay community; fantastical scenarios of parrots turning into dream lovers and boyfriends who are kapres or Cyclops... although that last one was a short manga dream sequence in Filipino, so I can’t really be sure what happened? Quite a few are in Filipino or Taglish, and I haven’t surveyed them all with my screen on Google Translate.

Favourites for me are Electromilk’s “Mellow” and Karvic’s “Flick Me”, both of which examine the intimacies and heartbreaks of online gay dating; also Lumilui’s “Human and his Kapre”, cos I'm a sucker for Southeast Asian monsters. But as much as I roll my eyes at BL conventions—the valorisation of youth, beauty, thinness and inexperience, all of which get a bit creepy when you’re my age—I do respect the fact it's tales like this that win over female readership, giving the stuff targeted more directly at gay men a broader platform. And hey, it’s not unpleasant to recall the intensity of young love and desire, and to relive it through graphic fiction. (Occasionally, very graphic!)

The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
Jonathan Cape, 2021

I've been following this cartoonist since the early 2000s, when all she was known for was her Dykes to Watch Out For comics—even met her c. 2004 when she came to speak at The Strand, well before she became known for Fun Home and the Bechdel Test.

This graphic novel hasn’t received as much buzz as her other work—and why would it? It’s billed as an entertaining examination of the author's obsession with lifelong exercise—running, skiing, karate, yoga, hiking. However, I’d argue that it surpasses her earlier work, both in ambition (it’s folio-size, with multiple colours and detailed illustrations, e.g. of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) and intimacy. After putting the lens on her dad in Fun Home and her mum in Are You My Mother?, she’s now narrating her own life story, decade by decade from her birth in 1960, lingering less on her childhood and adolescence than on her relationship with her own body, including her troubled relationships with girlfriends, her addiction to work and last-minute deadlines, and the agony of processing repressed grief.

And as always, it's also deeply intellectual. She's assembled a constellation of likeminded thinkers throughout history to better understand her own life and ideas—Coleridge and the Wordsworths (William and Dorothy) in the 1700s with Romanticism; Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the 1800s with Transcendentalism; Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in the 1950s to 60s with the Beat Movement and early American Buddhism; all of them outdoorspersons, losing themselves in mountains in search of clarity and self and bliss—with special attention given to the unacknowledged privilege of the men in their quests for enlightenment and the way Fuller and Dorothy Wordsworth's lives were constrained by their sex. (There’s an early reference and callback to lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, but as much as Bechdel loves her work, it’s clear she doesn't relate as much to the highs and lows of her life... or maybe doesn’t find them as fun to draw?)

The whole thing’s this beautiful illustration of one woman’s journey in search of wisdom in the midst of crazy political shifts (there’s a slow dread at the end as we realise we’re approaching the era of Trump and Covid) and also the acceptance that no matter how addicted you are to the adrenaline of running and karate, your body will age and gradually fail you, and even your wildest successes (i.e. Fun Home) may not yield the fulfilment everyone believes are your desserts. And the last section includes the struggle to write this very book, and the revelation of the shape it must take.

A final note, since this is a Pride Month column: the work’s not all that insistently queer. Though Bechdel provides all these details about her lesbian life, even working for a queer newspaper in NYC during the HIV epidemic, the main thrust of the story isn’t about coming out or seeking acceptance or activism. It's about these universal human questions of the body and spirit and meaning.

And why shouldn’t it be? As Taylor Mac states, “Queer people rarely in mainstream culture or even in alternative culture, ever get to represent anything other than themselves.” [3] Just for a change, may we not speak for all humanity?

Endnotes

[1] Bi+ Collective, “Open Letter to Pink Fest + ICF 2025.” Google Docs. 31 May 2025. Tinyurl.com/icfopenletter. Also publicised on heckin.unicorn. “Open letter to Inclusive Careers Fair & Pink Fest: There is no pride in genocide.”  Instagram.  4 June 2025. https://www.instagram.com/p/DKeplnmNDDP/?hl=en&img_index=1

[2] The best document I have of this is  @shizuodotmp3. “via Heckin’ Unicorn on IG.” X. 12 June 2025. https://x.com/shizuodotmp3/status/1933154299598774467

[3] Jeff Parker. “Taylor Mac -Closing encore "Songs from The Bark of Millions" Joe's Pub NYC, June 28, 2022.” YouTube. 3 July 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZq0RZdNWg8

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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