Queer Comics and Cartoon Trivia?

[got_quiet]

A fun way of measuring my business/stress levels is how often I fail to keep energy at under 120 in Nu:Carni or miss a guild point or two lol. Usually I hit 35 points with ease but I'm already 4 down this week.

A little while ago I agreed to help a friend man a table at a local comic event and do some trivia. We're just going to ask a bunch of random questions about cartoons and comics, but they have to have something to do with LGBT+ stuff, because that is what the org I'm helping table for is about.

Well, the energy I might have had to collect these trivia bits has been redirected to the house hunt, so now I'm trying to make sure I at least have a few bits ready. There is also a bank of trivia from previous events, but they are all kind of western live action from 30 years ago type items, and I want a refresher.

So does anyone know some good places for such trivia sources? Or do they have some favorite trivia that they want to throw in that a crowd a comics convention might appreciate? I'm going to dig around the LGBT Themes in Comics wiki but also want stuff like trivia from very gay properties, like stuff about Nimona, Check Please, "Who was the name of the guy Shiro Married at the end of Voltron." (lolololol) etc.

Comments

[shadowbliss]

A lot of the gay stuff I know about comics is very niche.

Like I can tell you Clive Barker was given creative control of a comic book universe in MARVEL back in the day called Razorline. It actually was there that the Wachowski Sisters got their start as writers with a character called Ectokid. The sisters would produce several publications of comics but would return to MARVEL for "Doc Frankenstein" - a reimagining of Frankenstein's Monster of "hey, what if he survived the end of the book and decided to help people?" (honestly...it KINDA contradicts the tone of how that book ended. It really did feel like a deliberate suicide attempt in the book. However...I don't have any complaints with "what if he survived?" as we don't know how the monster was created so "what could kill him?" IS something of a valid question when you think about it)

Erika Moren is the only queer comics writer I've experienced work of besides Barker, ND Stevenson, and the Wachowskis (my taste has range!) and her stuff deals with sexual education and real world experiences for her as a bi girl. I also know OF Alison Bechdel but haven't read any of her work.

I have no idea HOW you'll use any of this but I'm presuming it's helpful.

[got_quiet]

That's very helpful, thank you. I'm sure I can generate a few good questions out of this.

[shadowbliss]

I'd verify the information though. Just to be safe

[tropicsbear]

"Who was the name of the guy Shiro Married at the end of Voltron."

The way I cackled at this 😂 I was only ever adjacent to the Voltron fandom via friends but oof the level of drama that I somehow reached my bubble.

[autumndaze]

I've been in the Nimona fandom since it was still serializing as a webcomic and run the fanwiki and the main subreddit for it, so if you have questions, I could probably answer or suggest where to find the answers. That being said, the Nimona fanwiki is as filled as I can make it: https://nimona.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page

It is relatively clean (minus a few typos here and there) and most of the pages are ones I've created. Most pages have trivia on them, whether it's for characters, locations, or on the comic/graphic novel/movie pages. And there's an entire link of development stuff https://nimona.fandom.com/wiki/Nimona_Movie_Development_Work for the movie, which goes to the pages of different artists who worked on it. The artbook for the movie is also floating around somewhere if you want to read it, and Nate's blog and other socmed's are on his page https://nimona.fandom.com/wiki/ND_Stevenson. He's shared a bit about Nimona over the years on his main blog https://www.imfineimfine.com/. But you also might have luck browsing back through his tumblr, especially because he used to answer a lot of asks about the comic, many of which are funny (e.g., how Goldenloin got that name) https://gingerhaze.tumblr.com/

Some good ideas I suppose:
- How did Goldenloin get his name? (he was trying to spell likely Goldenlion but was not good at spelling, and didn't know the mistake until too late)
- What is Nimona allergic to? (bananas)
- Why is Nimona's hair initially pink? (Nate had a pink marker on hand at the time)
- What other color does Nimona's hair turn? (purple)
- How many different humans does Nimona shapeshift into? (at least seven: the Director, Ballister, a guard, a random buff guy, an old woman, a baker, a doctor)
- When did Nimona the comic start? (this is a sort of complicated one because even with the recent 10th anniversary graphic novel release, Nate seems to kind of gravitate around the comic's inception being the graphic novel's release, which was... around four years after the comic started, and also he posted the first comic pages on tumblr before they got to their own site)
- Did you know Nimona has been adapted into an audio drama?
- What inspired the creation of Nimona as a character? (ND Stevenson noted that Zam Wesell, a shapeshifter bounty hunter in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Carrie Kelley from DC Comics inspired Nimona's character design. Another inspiration for Nimona was Hit Girl as played by Chloë Grace Moretz in Kick-Ass the movie. Moretz went on to be cast as Nimona in the English dub for Nimona's movie adaptation.)

For Check Please, I'd check the website for it, since it's still up. But you could also browse Ngoziu's blogs, particularly her tumblr, and maybe her Blue Sky. A good question would be, "How many languages can Jack speak?" (at least two, since he's Canadian, and speaks I think Quebecois at one point) or "Is Jack interested in women?" And the answer is, at least to my knowledge, maybe, because he did date women in the past and is at least implied to be bisexual or pansexual. Or "why did Bitty join the hockey team?"

Unfortunately I'm not really in the kind of mainstream queer comics spaces much anymore, and the comics I know of might not be known to more regular audiences. The queer comics I read are mostly BL. Though I'm sure if you incorporated a question about like Ariel Slamet Ries' recent queer graphic novel, "Strange Bedfellows", that'd be cool. Ariel is trans, too.

Maybe, who wore the suit at Ruby and Sapphire's wedding?

[got_quiet]

Thanks for the questions! I ended up adding a couple of Nimona ones which worked out (but no one got them T_T).