No Straight Lines

It features work from established cartoonists such as Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory, Eric Shanower, and Paige Braddock, as well as then-up-and-coming cartoonists including Ellen Forney, Erika Moen, Ariel Schrag, and Dylan Edwards.

• Name — No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics • Editor — Justin Hall • Country — United States • Language — English • Genre — Anthology • Publisher — Fantagraphics Books • Release Date — August 1, 2012 • Media Type — Print (hardback and paperback), digital • Pages — 304 • Isbn — 978-1-60699-718-5

Editor Justin Hall was inspired to put together the anthology after curating a show of LGBT comics at the Cartoon Art Museum for the San Francisco Pride in 2006. According to Hall, despite the prevalence of gay male erotica in the underground comics scene since the late 1950s, LGBT literary comics become a subgenre only after the 1969 Stonewall riots, when a "sense of community" emerged and the queer underground comix scene began to thrive in San Francisco. With this anthology, Hall wanted to document, preserve and celebrate the "hidden history" of queer comics. Hall selected the works to include based on, in decreasing order of importance, "artistic merit, historic merit and representational merit". He explained that: "First and foremost, No Straight Lines should be a tremendously good read. After that, it should leave the reader with a better understanding of the complex history and diversity of LGBTQ comics". Filmmaker and transgender woman Lana Wachowski wrote an introduction to the book.

To put the material into an "historical and cultural context", the anthology is organized into three sections. The first section, "Comics Come Out: Gay Gag Strips, Underground Comix, and Lesbian Literati", covers the late-1960s and 1970s. It collects gag cartoons from early gay newspapers and magazines that emerged after the Stonewall riots, as well as works from the feminist and lesbian-oriented underground comix, concluding with the creation of the anthology series Gay Comix. This section includes Trina Robbins' Sandy Comes Out, which according to Hall was the first literary comic that "offered gay people a representation of themselves that validated, as opposed to degraded, their experience." The second section, "File Under Queer: Comix to Comics, Punk Zines, and Art During the Plague", covers the 1980s and 1990s time period, focusing on the artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, as well as the emergence of punk zines and mini-comics. The third section, "A New Millenium: Trans Creators, Webcomics, and Stepping Out of the Ghetto," features work from the increasing number of transgender cartoonists, and details the shift in queer comics from queer comics media towards the internet and crossing over into the mainstream.

A feature-length documentary film inspired by the book, No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics was completed in 2021, with a world premiere at that year's Tribeca Film Festival.