Early FAC: Khaos Komic

I'll be presenting a paper entitled, "This Financial Crisis Was Brought To You By The Internal Revenue Code," at the Law and Society Conference in Denver tomorrow, so this week's FAC comes early.

In recognition of the many gay rights stories in progress right now (the California Prop 8 election, the Veiga vacancy election's choice of Pat Steadman, human rights violations in Iraq, etc.), I offer you an extremely tightly plotted, fairly realistic, well drawn comic about several LBGT kids with interlocked lives coming out called Khaos Komic, as your FAC for this week. While relationship rather than porn oriented, Khaos Komic is sufficiently explicit that it is not work safe. It is currently updated weekly and began about the same time as this blog.

FWIW, I don't know why exactly, but a surprising share of the best webcomics (rated by both popularity and by editorial quality) are gay lit. My suspicion is that a lot of good work is having trouble winning over support from comic book publishers and sellers in the print market who are worried about whether there is a market for it, and are worried about conservative buyer backlash. So, these authors, some of whom are message distribution as well as profit oriented, have turned to the webcomic medium. The meritocratic internet, in turn, pushed some of the best comics to the top of the heap, without much regard for genre. These successes, in turn, may have developed an audience for similar offerings in similar places. It could also have something to do with an increasing number of LGBT people feeling more comfortable being out themselves, or acknowledging a sexual or gender orientation, in the current political climate, thereby providing a fast growing audience. But, I really don't know.

Tomorrow is also the last day of school for my children and many DPS kids. So, please be more careful out there from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., as there are far more kids about. On to a long summer of coach pitch.