MARVEL PRIDE
SUPERPOWER COUPLE
FROM THEIR FIRST KISS TO GETTING MARRIED, HULKLING AND WICCAN HAVE MADE MINE MARVEL FOR GAY SUPERHEROES
WORDS: STEPHEN JEWELL
ITH THEIR TEAM BOOK Young Avengers’ original tagline of “They’re not what you think”, Hulkling and Wiccan – aka Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Kaplan – have always boasted the ability to surprise. Quickly shrugging off their initial status as junior counterparts of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Teddy rose to the challenge of heading up the new Kree/Skrull Alliance in 2020’s Empyre, even finding the time to marry Billy not once but twice over the course of the six-issue event series.
“One of the tricks that was baked into Young Avengers from the start was the idea that on the surface these characters would all look like one thing, with one affiliation, but would soon be revealed to be a different thing entirely, with a different affiliation,” explains Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort.
“So Billy started out as Asgardian, with a design that was somewhat more Thorinfluenced, and it was only over time that we revealed that he was really connected to the Scarlet Witch, not Thor. Teddy, too, superficially resembles the Hulk, but we come to learn that his real Avengers connection is through his father, Captain Mar-Vell.”
Alongside teammates such as Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye, Hulkling and Wiccan made their debut in the pages of April 2005’s Young Avengers issue one, written by The OC scriptwriter Allan Heinberg and drawn by Jim Cheung. Hulkling was at first conceived of as the opposite sex. “Allan pitched Teddy as a female shapeshifter called Chimera who would adopt a male guise, as he wasn’t sure that he’d be permitted to do an openly gay character at that point,” recalls Brevoort. “But after playing with it for a little while, he told me that he preferred to make Hulkling both male and gay. We had some internal conversations about this and got the sign-off to proceed. Allan being who he was definitely helped in getting the go-ahead, as the comic book world was still very averse to diversity in sexuality at that time. While there were a few gay superheroes, they were still few and far between.”