Girls With Slingshots

Girls With Slingshots broke barriers during its time running. The webcomic follows a group of friends who are all members of the LGBTQ community and their day-to-day experiences. In the beginning (2004), this idea was unique to most viewers. (Equal rights in the workplace for gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals was not ensured until 2007, and same-sex marraige was not legalized until 2015.) Thus, Corsetto quickly captured a niche audience of those who identify outside mainstream sexual orientations. The webcomic maintained traction by posing the characters within the story as everyday normal people with their own problems [1]. Corsetto constructed character relationships in peculiar ways, even going so far as to pair a bisexual woman with an asexual women to demonstrate the immense diversity represented within the LGBTQ community. In doing so, Girls With Slingshots, like Wandering Son, helped to sympathize with marganizalized viewers and increase representation [2]. Using continuity allowed Corsetto to build relationships and characters in a fluid manner, revealing the often difficult process of identifying and coming out [3].

What makes Girls With Slingshots unique is that Corsetto not only establishes a firm sense of identity through her webcomic but also through her social media platforms. Her webcomic serves to represent the LGBTQ community while her Twitter, for example, serves as a space where she can digress and convey her own voice. By looking at her Twitter posts as seen in the artifact, one can tell that Corsetto has a fiery personality. Her Twitter has many tweets boasting controversial topics such as sex and gender stereotypes that many would find unsavory to say the least. However, from her tweets and her comics, we know exactly how she stands about certain issues and almost who she is as a person from just simply reading what she has to say. Corsetto stays true to her roots and beliefs. Normalizing such taboo topics is how she has kept a stable audience [4]. 

1. W. J. T. Mitchell. "Comics as Media: Afterword," Critical Inquiry, 40, no. 3 (2014): 255-65. doi:10.1086/677376.

2. Britt Peterson. "Books & Culture: Serial Dissent," Foreign Policy, no. 214 (2015): 108-09. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24577921.

3. Aaron Meskin. "Defining Comics?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (2007): 369-79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4622260.

4. Massimo Repetti. "African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Comics," African Arts 40, no. 2 (2007): 16-35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20447826.