Single Issue Showcase: The Strangers #5 – “Dynamic Tension!”

The cover of The Strangers #5

I take great pride in presenting books on this blog that might go unnoticed by mainstream readers; a friend of mine told me he’d never heard of any of the books I wrote about last year and I took that as a great compliment. For this month’s Single Issue Showcase, I’d like to highlight a book so obscure other friends of mine accused me of making it up entirely: The Strangers. I’ve written on Spectral, the gay member of this superhero team, elsewhere and issue #5 is the one in which he comes out of the closet.

Technically, he’s forced out of the closet by another team member whose costume ironically wouldn’t look out of place at the Folsom Street Fair. (Seriously, I showed a handful of Strangers issues to people, and they guessed Grenade was the gay guy every time. And Spectral’s costume has a rainbow!) Spectral gets his own side story in which he tries to use his healing powers to cure a friend of a debilitating condition. He tells the team it was cancer, but it’s really AIDS. The Strangers #5 was originally published in October 1993, when there was still a great deal of paranoia and misinformation about AIDS going around. That’s part of why this issue was bold in the first place.

The central conflict is a standard superhero fight against a villain with a connection to their past who’s destroyed in the end (OR IS HE???). Except this battle is won by the gay guy. And he’s outed after he wins. And everyone’s cool with it. This was a big deal at the time. Yeah, it’s handled clumsily and the art is so dated it could be held upside down at a distance for even a casual observer to declare that it’s from the 90s. But it mattered that Spectral was gay.

I know it’s easy to make fun of this stuff. (And believe me, I’ve done my share.) I doubt that any of the gay creators working in comics today or creators working with gay characters would credit Spectral as a milestone or remember him as any kind of influence (except perhaps the highly influential ones who wrote and drew him). I’m writing about this character as much to remember the effect he had on me, and to rescue him from being undeservedly ignored. The Strangers #5 can be found on eBay and probably the discount bins of your local comic shop if you’re willing to do a lot of digging.

The outing of Spectral (art by Rick Hoberg)