Devin Grayson has been writing for DC Comics for nearly a decade now, so it wasn't totally unexpected to see her name appear on the cover of Inheritance, a tie-in novel set in the "DC Universe" starring Batman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman along with their youthful wards (who are now young adults). But as Newsarama blogger Graeme McMillan discovered, the novel plays explicitly with the psychosexual subtext of superhero comics. Specifically, everything Fredric Wertham told us was unnatural about the whole Batman/Robin relationship. The fans are having a field day with the "unbelievable, luxuriously, lustily GAY" material, although it's debatable whether they're enjoying the themes or mocking them or both. "This is straight out of a D/s scene," says one commenter, while another wonders how Grayson managed "a masterful coup of sneaking BUCKETS OF CAMP past the editors."

So I shot off an email to Grayson and asked her how this all happened. She reminded me that as one of the comic book industry's few openly bisexual women creators, she's enjoyed working queer material into her stories throughout her career. "That said, I am also a contract worker when at DC crafting stories with licensed characters," she explained, "and my job at that time is to stick pretty close to previously established interpretations and guidelines, which is a necessary and satisfying aspect of this kind of work. In the licensed publication novels, we have more room, permission, and need than we usually do in the comics to explore character back story and culture." Despite that additional freedom, she's careful to point out that Inheritance is about father/son dynamics, not gay culture. "But are the characters in Inheritance aware of gay culture?" she asks rhetorically. "Sure. And they get to joke about it, just like I, as the narrator, get to joke about it. I'm joking with the reader, the characters are joking with each other."

Grayson says DC knows her well enough by now to know what she's doing, "and they seem to enjoy it." They've asked for changes in previous stories, but Inheritance went through without any complications. (I tried to get a comment from DC as well, but everybody was still recovering from a convention weekend in Chicago.) And for comics fans who find the whole gay culture thing unseemly—believe me, there's plenty of them, and the lesbian Batwoman thing alone was enough to send them into a tizzy—she's got a blunt message: "It's 2006," she says. "I have no tolerance for tabling people's reality and lives because they make other people uncomfortable...I'm not advocating for all the super heroes in the DC Universe to come out of the closet—they're comic book characters, half of them don't even have sex lives, let alone queer sex lives. What is important to me is that the real people behind the creation of fictional entertainment remain open to exploring, having fun with, and, when appropriate, seriously addressing the diversity of human reality."