This is Universal Love, a month-long spotlight on LGBTQ comic book stories that I have enjoyed over the years. This isn't meant as a "Best Of" list, since there are so many great works out there and so I'll spread the love around a bit, as it were.

Today, we look at Mary Wings' debut comic book, Come Out Comix, from 1973.

Wings was not a professional comic book artist when she was inspired to draw Come Out Comix. She just felt that no one else was properly exploring what it felt like to actually come out as a lesbian and so she decided that she was going to do it. She wrote and drew the whole comic book in a week and as a result, in a lot of ways, the comic book is a bit of a mess. However, it is a mess in the most beautiful way possible, as Wings' stream of consciousness approach to telling the story gave the comic a striking sense of heart. You could feel the emotion exploding out of every page. This was earnest. This was a messy, true to humanity, spirited story. It really stuck with you and it became a bit of an instant classic in the independent comic book scene of California in the early 1970s.

The comic expresses its purpose right from the first page, as this was an explanation of one woman (Maggie) and her coming out...

A fascinating aspect of the comic is that Maggie is out by the end of the first chapter of the story, but Wings knows that that is only half of the battle, as imagine being a young woman who was just coming to terms with her sexuality in the early 1970s without any knowledge of other LGBTQ people - what do you do?

The first thing Maggie does is to look for female roommates, and she finds some free spirited hippies that are totally cool with Maggie being a lesbian...

However, soon Maggie realizes that nearly everyone, INCLUDING her otherwise sweet hippie roommates, were, in a way, trying to keep Maggie from living her own truth.

With her roommates, it was the awkwardness of them all having boyfriends and Maggie having no one she was romantically seeing.

Maggie eventually befriends another lesbian and when they got to a party, Maggie meets Dorothy, someone just as new to all of this as Maggie...

She and Dorothy begin to spend time together, nominally just as friends...

But when she goes to visit Dorothy at Dorothy's parents, along with Dorothy's ex-boyfriend, Jim, Dorothy's mother hilariously has Maggie and Dorothy share a room together and finally, Maggie and Dorothy's relationship goes to the next level...

This is an adorable comic book and you can see why it became such a classic. Wings had only just started doing comics, but she was so OPEN in her work that it was hard not to feel a sort of attachment to her that made you want to read everything she was willing to share with you.

If you have a suggestion for an LGBTQ work that you'd like to see me spotlight, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com.