MARKALAN JOPLIN

MARKALAN JOPLIN COMIC BOOK WRITER, MUSICIAN

A promising career was cut short-and a controversy was sparked when Joplin, one of the few openly bisexual authors of super-heroic adventure comic books, died of AIDS.

Markalan Joplin, a native of Oakland, California, was born in 1956. He began his career in comics in 1981, as an interviewer for Comics Feature. In 1984, under the pseudonym "Thom Roman," he was a reviewer for The Telegraph Wire. Hired as assistant editor of that magazine, he made the jump from commentator to comics creator when he became the writer of the popular Japanese animation series Robotech: The Macross Saga and RoboTech: The New Generation in 1987. He also wrote the superhero titles Justice Machine and Talisman. In a field where ultra-masculine violence was the norm, where virtually all gay writers and artists remained in the closet, and where only independent publishers allowed portrayals of gay characters, Joplin's open bisexuality was path-breaking. A professional drummer and DJ, he maintained a separate career in the gay music scene of San Francisco, where he also edited the newsletter of The Janus Society.

After he lost the sight in one eye due to toxoplasmosis (see card 72), Joplin attended comic book conventions wearing an eyepatch and spoke quite frankly about his illness. But when he died of complications of AIDS on May 31, 1988, reports in comics industry papers cited other causes. His colleagues protested with "corrected" obituaries, and publication of the facts helped pave the way for gays in the field to break the bonds of secrecy, which in turn led mainstream publishers to lift their bans on gay characters in comics. Next Card 28: ROBERT JACOBSON & BARRY LAINE: Journalists