LA Comic Con 2025 (LACC 2025) is home to many, many booths featuring many different artists and products, just as it was in previous years. This time though, we are going to focus on one booth in particular that has had a presence at every LACC: Prism Comics.
Prism Comics has been in business since 2003. For 22 years, they have been the “leading non-profit, all-volunteer group supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual and LGBTQIA-friendly comic books, comics professionals, readers and educators.” Seriously, the authors who contribute their comics to the group don’t directly get a single cent out of the deal. They take a percentage of the profits from the sales, but that’s it. It’s not even just LA Comic Con that they participate in. They also present booths and panels in conventions all over the US including “including San Diego Comic-Con, WonderCon, New York City Comic-Con, MOCCA, APE, Emerald City Comic Con and more”. You can find out more about them on their official website.
Of course, this means that Prism Comics not only had a booth at LA Comic Con 2025 selling wonderful yuri, yaoi, and everything queer, but they also had a pair of panels at LACC 2025. This time though, we shall focus on a specific panel in particular. The panel in question is the very specifically labelled “Queer Cartoonists Tackle The World Of Sports In Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project“. What is that, you might ask? Well, let’s take a look at it in detail below:
Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project
Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project is a comic book anthology about the stories of various queer folk in a variety of different sports. The comic book began as a Kickstarter project that recently completed that funding run back in September 22, 2025. With a grand total of $29,902 pledged from 563 backers to help bring this anthology to life.
As expected of an anthology, it features works by an extensive list of authors who double as artists. The list includes Ajuan Mance, Alina Wahab, Amalas Rosa, Andy Casadonte, Angela James, Brent Fisher, Cameron Gipson, Dave Davenport, Derek LaMastus, Diana Kresge, Jam Dyer. Jonah Newman, Jon Macy, Josh Trujillo, Knave Murdok, Lane Lloyd, Laurz Helsby, Mac Crane, Marta Selusi, Megan Praz, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Michael James, Mihael B. Peralta, Miss Jamie Kaye, Mudavaye, Richard Fairgray, R.K. Russell, Scout Tran, Soizick Jaffre, Sonya Saturday, Sophie Labelle, Steve MacIsaac, Tara Madison Avery, Tristan Crane, Wilfred Santiago, Xavier Lavagnino, and more. In fact, Tara Avery, Megan Praz, Dave Davenport, Andy Casadonte, Sonya Saturday, and Steve MacIsaac were actually present at the panel to talk about both the comic book and their experiences.
If you’re curious about getting your own copy of Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project, then you can do so directly from their publisher: Stacked Deck Press.
“Queer Cartoonists Tackle The World Of Sports In Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project” Panel Highlights
The Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project panel itself covered a wide variety of topics. With all of those topics centered around the intersection of queer people and sports, as you might expect from the title. However, among those topics, there were some notable highlights that we shall cover today:
The Relationship Between Queer People and Sports
According to the panelists, the relationship between queer people and sports is at an awkward place. Sports are highly geared towards being for cisgender and straight people. This is not a fact in doubt, and the fact that we even have separate men and women’s sports in the first place is proof of that. Meanwhile, sports is just not popular with queer people in general, also according to the panelists.
When you put those two together, it leaves queer folks who are interested in sports at a rather awkward place. Often feeling like they don’t really belong in either camp. However, the one thing that won’t change is that those who are interested in sports won’t stop being interested in sports because of that, and that is what we need to preserve.
Queer People Have Always Been in Sports
Despite that awkwardness though, it’s here where the panelists make it clear that queer people have always been in sports. It’s really simple math when you think about it. In any given sport, barring active discrimination preventing queer people from joining, you will have a certain percentage of players be queer just due to probability. In fact, the panelists mention that a surprising high number of sports players are LGBTQIA.
Specifically, they gave a shout-out to Glenn Lawrence Burke: the first Major League Baseball (MLB) player to publicly come out as gay. Unfortunately, Burke suffered discrimination from both other players and management for that, and he ended up retiring from MLB after only four years, and tragically died of AIDS-related causes in 1995.
Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project Hopes
It’s perhaps the combination of all those factors that’s why these authors in the panel contributed to Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project. Their hope is that their comic book anthology can inspire more queer people to, well, come out and play some sports. Either try out some sports and perhaps take an interest, or fan the flames of their already-existing interest. Either way, they hope that more queer folks will take to the many different sports because of their work. We can only hope that they succeed in this endeavour.
What do you think of the “Queer Cartoonists Tackle The World Of Sports In Come Out And Play: The Queer Sports Project” panel? Are you eager to check out that LGBTQIA comic book anthology? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.
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