Warning: Potential SPOILERS for DC Pride 2024 #1

Reading DC Comics’ annual Pride special is an emotional event for me every year, but this year’s DC Pride 2024 #1 had me holding back tears. This year’s one-shot includes stories that will please every kind of fan — including those like me who want to celebrate DC’s queer creators and history more than anything else.

Beyond telling fun stories about DC’s roster of LGBTQ+ characters — new and historical both — DC Pride 2024 #1 includes a moving short story by the iconic writer/artist Phil Jimenez, proving once again that DC’s Pride offerings aren’t just about the characters but also about celebrating the history of queer creators who have touched DC through the decades — and who have been touched by DC’s world in return.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, as Jimenez’s story with artist Giulio Macaione concludes the 100-page one-shot. Before that, DC fans can travel the galaxy with our favorite characters and creators. We find ourselves in the furthest reaches of space with Poison Ivy and Janet-from-HR and the familiar streets of Metropolis’ A-Town with Jon Kent and friends — all in search of a sense of belonging, a theme that unites each of these stories, up to and including Jimenez’s.

DC Pride 2024 #1’s Best Stories Embrace History (or Lack Thereof)

DC’s LGBTQ+ Characters Search for Belonging

With this fourth installment in the Pride anthology “series,” which began with 2021’s DC Pride #1, DC’s annual Pride one-shot is now an award-winning tradition, and one I know I’m not alone in eagerly anticipating every year. This year’s anthology is loosely themed around the idea of “travel,” but the best moments in these stories instead embrace travel as a metaphor for something far greater: a search for belonging that is often a shared experience within queer communities.

Among those best moments — and there’s a “best” to be found in every story here, even those that don’t stand among my personal favorites — the best-of-the-best latch on to even the smallest nuggets of these characters’ histories to tell stories about finding belonging in unexpected places, even when those places are unexpectedly familiar. The two strongest pieces of fiction in DC Pride 2024 are “Hello, Spaceboy” by Al Ewing and Stephen Byrne and “The Rivers and Lakes that You’re Used To” by Ngozi Ukazu, and not only because they’re by beloved creators who are making their mark on the DCU for the first time.

Ewing, Byrne, and Ukazu Offer Stand-Out Short Stories

Ewing and Byrne’s “Hello, Spaceboy” revamps the ’90s version of Starman for the 2020s — a story notable both for Ewing’s DC debut and for how Mikaal Tomas’ Starman is one of DC’s earliest openly gay heroes. This story introduces Mikaal to a new generation of readers — myself included — just as it introduces Mikaal to a new and unexpected relationship with one of his rivals. Ukazu’s story, on the other hand, stars DC’s newest young Aquaman, Jackson Hyde, and the complex hero of the Fourth World, Orion.

This Aquaman/Orion team-up is made all the more compelling by how the story acknowledges Jackson’s unfamiliarity with Orion and New Genesis — but also his willingness to meet and understand new people, finding belonging only through the process of experiencing something and someone new. I’ll always love character-focused stories above all else, and the best of these stories often show character relationships in-progress — like Circuit Breaker struggling to remember who’s who in the Flash Family in “Phantom Rodeo” by Calvin Kasulke and Len Gogou.

Phil Jimenez’s Autobiographical DC Pride Story Is an Achievement (and a Tear-Jerker)

DC’s Spotlighting of Queer Creators Is the Best Part of DC Pride

But the best-of-the-best in DC Pride 2024 #1 is absolutely undeniable: “Spaces” by Phil Jimenez and Giulio Macaione. “Spaces” is an autobiographical story about Jimenez’s childhood and adult connection to Wonder Woman, the Amazons, and the idea of Paradise Island. Jimenez, known especially for his work on Wonder Woman, is one of the most prominent out creators working in superhero comics, and this story is both a testament and a love letter to the fictional worlds that make queer children (and adults, for that matter) feel like anything is possible — including being ourselves.

I won’t lie: the story made me cry. I’m a crier; I wouldn’t be able to count the number of superhero comics that have had me clutching my tissue box over the years. But Jimenez and Macaione’s story is a crystalline example of why the DC Pride celebration — including the annual anthology — matters, and why it has never felt like an empty “celebration” designed to appease queer fans. Like Kevin Conroy’s story from DC Pride 2022 and last year’s extensive tribute to trans icon and Doom Patrol writer Rachel Pollack, DC editorial continues to spotlight real queer stories — of both struggle and triumph — from real queer people who have made major marks on our favorite characters.

“Spaces” may be muted in tone and almost philosophical in its thinking, but by standing in stark contrast to the brightly-colored superhero fiction that comes before it, it practically sparkles — and not because baby Phil’s eyes quite literally shine in the first panel. Each iteration of DC Pride takes essential time to honor not only its extremely fictional characters and stories, but to honor the people who have made those characters and stories possible, most especially in the decades before the industry — and world — would accept such a public celebration.

DC Pride 2024 #1 Insists that LGBTQ+ Stories Have Always Mattered

DC Pride Variant Covers Available Throughout June

Some may see the critic’s job as telling an audience whether the subject is “good” or “bad,” whether it’s worth the audience’s time and money. I disagree, and I have disagreed for as long as I’ve been writing: my job as a critic is to tell you whether my subject matters, and why, and how. As a regular-old DC fan, one who’s loved these characters since childhood, I have my favorite and not-so-favorite stories in DC Pride 2024 #1, and I couldn’t necessarily say this is my favorite of the four anthologies.

There are perhaps one too many moments where queer characters are lumped together as “friends” without having any real reason to know each other — an admittedly personal pet peeve in continuity-based storytelling. I love seeing my newer favorites like the magic-user Xanthe and my more obscure favorites like the Ray, but I have a lot of trouble understanding how they could have come to know the other characters in the stories where they appear. I don’t want to be told characters are friends; I want to see those friendships grow in real, organic time, even in limited page space. Such is the joy of interconnected storytelling.

But as a critic — one with inescapable subjectivity, especially as a queer reader — I still believe wholeheartedly that this anthology matters, and it matters deeply. The stories in DC Pride 2024 #1 are in constant search for belonging: the characters find their belonging within each other and themselves, the creators find belonging within their work, and the readers — or, rather, this reader — find belonging in the utter breadth of possibility within the DC Universe and superhero fiction more broadly, from obscure ’90s heroes to the Fourth World to Paradise Island and far beyond.

DC Pride 2024 #1 Is a Worthy Addition to the Award-Winning Anthology Series

Now to Wait Until Next Year…

Why does DC Pride matter? Because it makes public what has, in decades past, been a private truth: queer heroes are an important, essential part of superhero history, both on the page and in the metaphorical bullpen. That DC Pride 2024 #1, along with the anthologies before it, makes space for that history marks it as important reading; that it also makes space for the future of superhero storytelling and its storytellers, too, marks it as essential reading for fans of all kinds.

There’s room for everyone to belong in DC’s latest Pride special, readers most of all. This one-shot is a genuinely worthy addition to what’s fast becoming one of the publisher’s most important traditions. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll want to have a few tissues on hand when you pick up DC Pride 2024 #1, available now from DC Comics.