No Straight Lines: Four Decades Of Queer Comics Paperback – August 3, 2013

A very ambitious project to attempt to collect "the best of" and provide an introduction to the history of Queer Comics. While devoid of the gratuitous and more obvious "porn" comics, this work still contains a lot of sex and mature themes representative of the plurality of the queer community.

This book was an amazing accidental find. My boyfriend often loves reading LGBTQIA+ comics on the Internet and this book not only provided great comics for him but also some new names to lookup online for more comics. This book is a fantastic idea and a great way to find some LGBTQIA+ comics when you want a break from straight content.

It's the American competition publication to Markus Pfalzgraf's STRIPPED: A STORY OF GAY COMICS (2012) which is a much 'heavier' book with a lot more text in it - and very different comic authors. Still, I found Justin Hall's NO STRAIGHT LINES in its paper back version the more elegant book, visually. And, truth be told, I really enjoyed reading his intro, short and compact as it is. It basically only deals with the comic scene in San Francisco, at least that was my impression, whereas Pfalzgraf has a much more international approach. But as a book on a specific place and time, Hall's collection is more touching, feels more "united". That said: I didn't get a feeling that these comics come from "Four Decades of Queen Comics", as the subtitle promises. They all look timeless, in a good and in a bad sense. There is more of a time-travel feeling to Pfalzgraf's selection, and there is a lot more explicit sex happening there too. But because they are so very, very different, it's good to have both books. As both are highly enjoyable.

Must Get This if you're at all curious about LGBTQA representations in comics.

Absolutely love this book, I've been after a copy of this for a while. so happy I finally got myself a copy. superb!!!

Gorgeous, heartbreakingly tender, hilarious compilation. I love the choice to include the assembled material in chronological order, making this anthology a valuable contribution to LGBTQ history.

Good, but explicit; hard to recommend to casual readers. It contains a healthy variety of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender comics, but there's a distinct lack of Bisexual stories. Worth picking up!

For those wanting a view of gay comics coming out of the US since the late 60s then this serves the purpose well.Look out for the more current focus found in the authors later books. Look at a book called Stripped for a survey of Euro, Japanese and comic porn which this book specifically avoids. Together this book and Stripped form the basis of a launch pad for choosing to find further materials by comic artists that interest you.My only grips are:1. that looking at Robert Triplow's Gay Comics book which is an earlier book upon the same theme i felt the sketchy historical narrative was essentially just being repeated. I would like to see a definitive anthology of the Crumb / Triplow - Gay Comix era comics in their entirety as a celebrated encyclopaedia of an era which has passed but whose political and social attitudes remain creatively precocious and where a history is niftily contained in an entire series of 2 gay comics which spans 12 years or so. I felt that a time had come for all that material to form a book in it's own right. I found the taster format lacking in depth and again essentially repeating Triplow's previous approach.2. I found some of the cartoons just to damn small to read - i had to invest in a major page magnifier to read the book. Perhaps i am getting old i here you say ? Well - maybe but a little bigger would still be nice. It ruins the impact to have to struggle to see and read to such an extent. It's more like deciphering a code.

fantastisk

There was more gay cartoons than lesbian related, but not an extreme difference. Some comics were very sex related, well other didn't seem to really make any sense. I did enjoy reading this however. And would recommend it to anyone interested in checking out the history of LGBT comics.