Joe Corallo: Knowing Your Place

Joe Corallo

Joe Corallo is a queer cisgender white guy who tries to keep his privilege in check while residing in Queens, NY. He's been an active participant in life for three decades, has been reading comics for over two of those decades, and has dabbled in writing comics for over half a decade. He's self published four issues of a cyberpunk comic titled Electronic, has work published in Geeks OUT Presents: Power Anthology, Margins Publishing's Our Hearts Still Beat zine, and Grayhaven's The Gathering: Music anthology. He's currently back at self publishing with a new series, Saturn's Call, alongside co-creator and illustrator Robby Barrett with issue #2 ready for release later this year. A couple of other projects are going on currently that can't be announced yet. Joe also contributes at Geeks OUT and [insertgeekhere].

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3 Responses

  1. Mindy Newell says:

    Joe, I wrote a TALES OF THE GREEN LANTERN CORP story, a SUPERMAN, and various LEGION titles–actually I worte a Tales of the Legion (well, I scripted it over Paul’s plot) in which Sun Boy, the Legion “Romeo” and womanizer, got his “comeuppance.” But I’ve always just naturally gravitated towards the women characters in comics–can’t explain it, I didn’t do it as a statement…well, I don’t think I did, but who knows what was going in my subconscious? :-)

    BUT…I do think that when a woman writes a woman, a gay person writes a gay character, or a transgender person writes a transgender character, there’s can just a little bit “more” there, know what I mean?

    But I would never put anyone in a box.

    The truly GREAT writers can write anybody. Alan Moore in comics, for instance. As for novels: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina were written by men. Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes were written by a woman. (These examples are just off the top of my head.

    Mark Waid recently got into trouble for STRANGE FRUIT, his (science fiction) take on being a black man in the early 20th century South. And you should look up the column I wrote in which I tried to defend him. Holy shit, did the trolls come out!

    • Joe Corallo says:

      Hey Mindy!

      I was aware of your contributions, particularly your Tales of the Legion as I’m a pretty big Legion fan. I was talking more in terms of women who had the opportunity to work on full run or at least several consecutive issues of a comic like the ones I mentioned to really have an impact on the story and character, but I certainly didn’t intend to make you feel left out in any way if you did.

      And it’s true, a great writer CAN write anybody, or almost anybody. But they have to be given that chance. I feel there are women in comics already that fit that category and should be given that chance, and many of them probably haven’t been asked to yet. Sure, a couple or so may have been asked to do a run on Batman or Superman or Spider-man etc and turned it down, but I imagine plenty of women writers or artists would have just the same passion and dedication to those stories and more. Hell, I’d love a crack at Supergirl or Wonder Woman myself.

      I’ll have to check out that column later today too!

      • Mindy Newell says:

        Joe, I CERTAINLY didn’t feel left out!!!!! Get that out of your head! :-)

        I was given the opportunity to write a short run of WONDER WOMAN before the title ended and the wonderful George Perez rebooted her. It was not a happy experience. I talked about in an interview with Gail Simone…I’ll try to find it and post the link here. But I don’t think it had to do with my being a woman…it was just that my editor, Alan Gold, and I didn’t see, uh, “eye-to-eye.” He’s a great guy, but he was the type of editor who “fed” stories to the writer…

        I do think that as more and more women enter the field that the opportunities will open up…it’s already happening. I don’t know if that glass ceiling, which is more like concrete, or that “diamond” wall that the Doctor kept punching/chipping at in HEAVEN SENT (the penultimate episode of Season 9) will ever truly get broken through–this is a discussion that I have been hearing and participating in since I first got into the field in 1983…32 years ago!

        It tooK the Doctor MILLIONS of years to punch through that “diamond” wall. I don’t think it will take that long! :-)