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"First, the name hit me: Kickass Drag Queen, which I just thought was a funny name for a superhero. Also, I really like on-the-nose drag names, as you can tell, because my name is Bob the Drag Queen," she told Vice, "There's just something funny about that to me. It tells you everything you're getting upfront. You know she's a drag queen. You know she kicks ass."
The canon of mainstream superheroes is distressingly homogenous. Which makes the sudden appearance of Kickass Drag Queen, an Instagram comic about drag queens with superpowers, feel both praiseworthy and long overdue. The series sprang from the mind of Bob the Drag Queen, a.k.a. Caldwell Tidicue. The winner of the eighth season of RuPaul's Drag Race is known for her over-the-top camp and millennial wit. And she's sprinkled the same heart and sass, which endeared her to the fans of TV's best reality show, all over her new comic.
What's surprising is that Kickass Drag Queen was created almost by accident. Tidicue, who's a prolific stand-up comedian and actor, says he has about "a million ideas a day," constantly spitting them out to see what sticks. "First, the name hit me: Kickass Drag Queen, which I just thought was a funny name for a superhero. Also, I really like on-the-nose drag names, as you can tell, because my name is Bob the Drag Queen," Tidicue says. "There's just something funny about that to me. It tells you everything you're getting upfront. You know she's a drag queen. You know she kicks ass."
Comedian Matteo Lane, who illustrates Kickass Drag Queen, says he's floored by the response from Drag Race fans. He says that at a recent stand-up gig, the MC rattled off his comedy credits before mentioning Kickass Drag Queen. "A room of 100 gay men gasped like I was Mariah Carey," Lane says. "It was like, really?" Clearly something is resonating. Just six posts in, the Instagram account boasts more than 32,000 followers.
I talked to scholars about the history of queerness in comics, and they told me that while there's a rich tradition of LGBTQ representation in underground comics, Kickass Drag Queen is pretty much unlike anything else out there. "This question of representation is something that's big in drag but also huge in comics. We see it in conversations about superhero comics especially, and who gets represented and how around questions of gender. And when you bring drag into the mix, it gets really interesting," says Margaret Galvan, PhD, an assistant professor of visual rhetoric at the University of Florida.
So far, just two episodes of Kickass Drag Queen exist on the internet. Fan engagement dictates if and when new issues will drop. Tidicue and Lane embargoed their second episode, for example, until the account hit 15,000 followers. The anticipation expressed by fans in the comments as they waited indicates a uniquely invested readership, another intrinsic quality of queer comics, according to Galvan.
One mainstream comic that helped lay the foundation for Kickass Drag Queen is the X-Men. In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jos Esteban Muoz writes about the affinity queer readers feel for the series. "One of the reasons is because it breaks the form of the superhero team. Usually a superhero team has one female character and they're all homogenous, whereas X-Men starts off like that, but in the 70s, the team transforms and becomes very international, multi-racial, and even in terms of gender," Galvan says.
The popularity of Drag Race, and consequently Kickass Drag Queen, reflects a shifting cultural landscape in which depictions of queerness is increasingly mainstream. "I think what we're seeing now is a really cool turn toward bridging the gap between mainstream and underground comics," says Ashley Manchester, managing editor of ImageTexT and a PhD candidate at the University of Florida. "One of the downsides of underground publications is that they're easily written-off or ignored. When you have something like this bridging genres and tropes, it's harder to write off as an underground, radical publication."
In the wake of the deadly riots in Charlottesville and a Republican administration increasingly targeting minority communities, Tidicue feels strongly that even though Kickass Drag Queen started as a lark, there's a place for her in the canon of American superheroes. "If you look back at old Captain America comic strips, he used to fight Nazis, you know? The American ideal is standing up and saying, 'No, that is not the status quo, and we will not accept that,'" he says. "I believe maybe Kickass Drag Queen is the new Captain America. Like, America has changed. And now it's a big, black man wearing an Afro, wielding a magical purse that flies through the air."
She loves T.V. (from trashy to classy), especially anything with kickass heroines, killer robots or Don Draper, film, theatre, late nights on the Sims 3, immersive fiction, crisp afternoons on the South Bank, pyjama days, Lindor, 3000-year-old epic poetry, Greek dancing (esp. sfarli, pentozali and zonoradiko) and eating gyros in the shadow of the Acropolis.
A few years ago, Sigourney Weaver made the rounds of the annual Comic Con gathering in San Diego disguised as Batman. Hidden behind a borrowed Batmask, she relished the opportunity to observe, rather than being observed.
"I just kind of wandered through," she says. "It was fascinating. I'd never been 'backstage', as it were, before. But they were so caught in what they were doing that I think I could have walked through without a mask and they wouldn't have noticed."
Part family drama, part magical-realist fable, A Monster Calls centres on a young boy who loses himself in vivid fantasies as a way of coming to terms with his mother's terminal illness. The story was conceived by British author Siobhan Dowd, who planned on writing the book before succumbing to breast cancer herself, and completed by writer Patrick Ness.
"It was very real to me, and I guess I felt like I wanted to be part of that. It really has a universal message and a universal audience. Just one of those rare projects, with a tiny ensemble, where it's really just a privilege to be part of telling this story. Wherever it took you."
Only a self-conscious 11-year-old would not get swept up in the mass delirium of a Beatles concert at the height of Beatlemania. "I was this tall [182cm]," Weaver says. "No one has a good adolescent story, but I think for people who are very short, or very tall, or very something that's different, it is an awkward time. And a sensitive time."
The daughter of a stage actress and the president of NBC, Weaver was christened Susan. People called her Sue, or Suzie, for short. The names didn't gel. "I didn't feel like a Susan," she says. "I just thought, that's not right. I'm too big for that name. Physically, I need a longer name."
When she was 14, she adopted the name of an incidental character in The Great Gatsby. It was only meant to be temporary. "I was going to try and think of the name I really wanted," she says. "And you know, I never could get rid of it. I look back and I can't imagine what possessed me. Such a crazy thing to do."
Sometimes, she may have even been too fierce. When she auditioned for the role of Dana Barrett in Ghostbusters, one of Weaver's rare appearances in a comedy, she hadn't realised the demon hellhound would be a special effect. She growled, howled, and proceeded to tear up the audition room with startling canine earnestness. ("Don't ever do that again," director Ivan Reitman told her.) Weaver did, however, make the case for her character being a concert cellist, rather than the "professional model" of the script.
That's not to say that Weaver has only played indestructible women, or that her fiercest characters are without their moments of vulnerability. "You know, I hear from journalists that I play these strong women, but I don't see it that way," she says. "They're not always strong. They could be like, 'f---' but they just don't give up. I don't go there with the goal of trying to present the strongest aspect of this woman. I try to reflect what I really see in the world, and what I think is truthful, and I truly do believe that women are pretty kickass.
"The teachers were putting us down all the time. There were a lot of us who were made to feel pretty bad. It was very discouraging for me. I think I had a mini-nervous breakdown. I did waste some time listening to them. Teaching art is a tough thing to do. It's a great thing to do and an important thing to do. But not everyone can do it with grace and generosity."
In the meantime, often as a favour to her theatre friends, she would take roles in little shows in small, squatty venues in New York. "And finally after a couple of years I realised I was sort of making a living and all the terrible things that they told me [at Yale] weren't going to come true. 'Well, I guess they were wrong, I'm going to be fine!"'
In one of the shows, Weaver interacted with a live hedgehog that, according to the story, resided in her vagina. "That little hedgehog is one of my fonder memories," she says. Truly, though, she recalls her time "slumming it" off-off-Broadway with immense pleasure. She even turned down a major role in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, since she was occupied performing Kurt Weill parodies in a cabaret show at the time. (She makes a brief appearance as Alvy's date.) "To me that's still where I live as an artist," she says. "I'm not that far away from those people or those parts. It was probably the most fun I ever had."
Weaver was making a name for herself as a theatre artist in the late '70s when she was approached with the screenplay for Alien. "It was a very, very bleak script," she says. In the beginning, she was incredulous, thinking, "I survived drama school to do this?" She pictured the aliens as gelatinous blobs and was snobbish about the idea of doing science-fiction in general.
"It wasn't till I met Ridley Scott and saw these amazing drawings by [Alien concept artists] H.R. Giger and Carlo Rambaldi of the alien itself that I thought, 'Oh. Well. I've never seen anything like this'."
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