Last month, DC Comics announced that it would be producing its second annual DC Pride 2022. After the overwhelming success of the 2021 Pride anthology, the first year the Big Two released special comics in celebration of Pride month, DC has decided to go even bigger and gayer this year (if that’s possible) with its celebration. On Wednesday, the comic book publisher announced the latest details of DC Pride 2022, including that the iconic voice of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series, Kevin Conroy, who is openly gay, would be penning a story for the issue.

Conroy played the role of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series from 1992 to 1995 and in The Animated Series’ various spinoffs. In a New York Times interview in 2016, Conroy came out as gay to the public while discussing a play he was featured in, Eastern Standard, where he played a television producer secretly battling AIDS. Conroy was very open with the interviewer about what it was like to live through the HIV/AIDS crisis as a gay man and how that shaped his career.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

“I went to so many funerals that I felt such a sense of obligation to do it right,” Conroy said in the NYT interview. “Every night I would just wail, feeling all the pain. I couldn’t not feel it. It was a scream of, ‘Look what’s happening to us! Help!’”

DC Comics also announced that joining Conroy for his story, “Finding Batman” is artist J. Bone and letterer Aditya Bidikar, who are now adding their artistic prowess to the comic book arriving this June. According to the press release, “Finding Batman” will be a “personal story.”

DC Comics Released an Excerpt from Nicole Maines’ Introduction

     DC Comics/Sway

The DC Pride 2022 anthology already had a packed roster of ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT creative talent from the 2021 Pride anthology. Also released today as part of the next wave of details about the DC Pride 2022 anthology was an excerpt from The CW Supergirl actress and trans activist Nicole Maines’ introduction.

The excerpt from Maines’ introduction reads:

DC Comics is pulling out the stops to showcase a diversity of LGBTQ+ rep and demonstrate that it has long been apart of the DC Universe.

Representation is something that so many take for granted. But as queer people, we have always understood not only its necessity, but its power. Seeing yourself in the media you consume is validating in a way that says, “You are not alone.”

Seeing yourself in comic books, though, in your favorite superheroes, is especially powerful. It tells us that not only are there other people like us out there (something that this young trans girl growing up in rural Maine desperately needed), but that they stand alongside the very best of us.

They are the best of us.

Superheroes set the bar and they set it high. Because if you can be a superhero, you can be anything. And superheroes are categorized as such not due to their superhuman abilities, extraterrestrial origins, or truly fabulous fashion choices. They are superheroes because they stand up for what is right against any odds.

It is their courage that sets them apart.