Teen Titans: Was Jericho Always Gay? It's... Complicated

With the news that Chella Man has been cast as Jericho in the second season of Titans, there is renewed interest in the classic member of the Teen Titans and particularly his rather complicated history when it comes to how his sexuality has been presented in the comics.

For many years, Jericho was depicted in the comics as a straight man, but it was really a whole lot more complicated than that, which has been reflected in a number of recent comic books. One of these stories was written by Jericho's co-creator, Marv Wolfman, and it appeared to try to retroactively address a "wrong" that had been committed regarding Jericho's sexuality by Wolfman and Jericho's other creator, George Perez, decades ago when they introduced the Titan to the DC Universe.

We first met Jericho as simply "Joe," a mystery man who was working with a similarly mysterious woman during the early parts of the classic Teen Titans story arc, "The Judas Contract." As it turned out, the woman was Deathstroke the Terminator's ex-wife, Adeline Kane and Joe was Joe Wilson, Deathstroke's youngest son! They were keeping an eye out on the Titans because they knew that Deathstroke was planning to capture them as a way to finally complete the "contract" that the mercenary had accepted after his older son, Grant, had died in an attempt to capture the Teen Titans (way back in the second issue of the New Teen Titans). He had to finish what his son had started.

In Tales of the New Teen Titans #44 (by Marv Wolfman, George Perez and Romeo Tanghal), we learn that Joe was always the more artistic son and was distant from his father for that reason...

In a tragic accident, Joe was kidnapped by one of Deathstroke's enemies and held with a knife to his throat. Deathstroke was cocky enough that he believed that he could take out the bad guy before he could cut Joe's throat. As it turned out, he was partially correct...

Joe lived, but he was permanently mute due to his throat injury. Joe, however, also was born a mutant and so had the ability to take possession in other people's bodies. He trained with his mother the rest of his life on how to fight. Now known as Jericho, he helped Dick Grayson (who had just adopted the name Nightwing for the first time) save the rest of the Titans and eventually joined the team as a member...

The fascinating aspect of Jericho at the time was how much of a visual character he was. Essentially, he was created as a sort of challenge to George Perez's art skills. Since he was mute and Perez insisted that we not be able to see his thought balloons, it feel entirely to Perez to communicate for Jericho through facial expressions. As you might imagine, then, when Perez then left New Teen Titans a year or so after introducing Jericho, the character lost a lot of his original appeal, as few artists can draw facial expressions at the same level as George Perez.

In any event, when Perez and Wolfman were creating the character, their initial intent was to have him be gay. Perez explained to the Gay League why they decided to change their mind, ""While Marv and I did discuss the possibility of Joseph Wilson being gay, Marv decided that it was too much of a stereotype to have the sensitive, artistic, and wide-eyed character with arguably effeminate features be also homosexual. While I think that may or may not have been a righteous concern, we did establish the character as heterosexual throughout the series."

That decision would prove to be a controversial one and one that Wolfman would ultimately reverse decades later.

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Tales of the Teen Titans #51 (by Wolfman and artist Rich Buckler, as Perez had moved over to the newly launched second volume of New Teen Titans) saw the first indication of any sexuality regarding Jericho, when his mother was kidnapped and Jericho was framed for some crimes and had to go on the run (this was tough for his new teammate to accept, as they had just seen one of their teammates, Terra, turn out to be a traitor). He turned to an old associate of his mother and the connection initially seemed sexual...

Later, we see that he actually just came to see Amber for information regarding his mother's whereabouts, but there is a hint that they had a sexual past, as well.

He rescues his mother in the next issue, but in an interesting twist on her character, we see that Adeline had her own set of problems, just like Joe's father, as she berates him for not killing her captor when he had the chance...

As noted, George Perez then left the second volume of New Teen Titans after the first story arc (as Perez was drawing Crisis on Infinite Earths at the time). It was meant to be a temporary break, but ended up being much longer than expected due to Crisis taking up so much of Perez's time and then Perez rebooting Wonder Woman after Crisis. During this period, a new Titan joins the team, a young woman named Kole who had been taken from her home at an early age and raised on Olympus. She had nowhere to stay, so Jericho tries to find her a place to live. She is clearly attracted to Joe. The New Teen Titans under Wolfman and Perez had always been a book with a bit more sexual content than a typical comic book (all Comics Code approved, of course), but the second volume went to a whole other level (in part because the new volume was Direct Market-only and was not initially Comics Code approved, but the series was later reprinted with the Comics Code stamp, so it is likely that Wolfman and Perez were still taking Comics Code restrictions under consideration). In fact, earlier on this page from New Teen Titans #10 (by Wolfman, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Romeo Tanghal) with Kole looking at Jericho longingly while he gets her a place to stay, is Donna Troy and her husband taking a shower together.

Later in the issue, Kole essentially flat out propositions Joe...

Joe's response, as he turns down her offer is fascinating. It sure seemed at the time as though Wolfman was possibly implying that Joe wasn't interested in women sexually...

This was at a period where there wasn't a single "out" superhero in mainstream comic books, with Northstar being about as close as you could get to being out in the pages of Alpha Flight. Thus, for many LGBTQ readers of the era, anything that even remotely signaled that there might be some representation in a major comic book like New Teen Titans, was a big deal.

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In the following issue, Kole continues to try to pursue a romantic relationship with Joe while Wolfman (along with artists Garcia-Lopez and Tanghal) sure seems to continue to imply that Joe is struggling with his sexuality. She makes a sexual advance on him and he recoils and then flashes back to how his parents kept trying to instill a stereotypical view of masculinity on him as a child while he pulled away from it...

It is difficult to read these pages in any context other than a guy struggling with his sexuality.

Three issues later, when Jericho volunteers to go on a mission in outer space with Nightwing and Starfire (art by Eduardo Barreto and Romeo Tanghal), his parting with Kole continued to support the whole "struggling with his sexuality" angle...

Sadly, Kole would be killed in Crisis on Infinite Earths while Jericho was on his space mission.

However, over a year later, in the Teen Titans spinoff series, Teen Titans Spotlight, Wolfman then revealed in a three-part story (with art by Ross Andru and Dennis Jensen) that Joe was once in a relationship with a young woman named Penelope...

They were even engaged to be married...

The relationship was part of a ruse cooked up by her criminal father (all part of him tricking Adeline into faking his and his daughter's deaths so that he could continue his criminal dealings in secret) and by the end of it, Penelope vowed revenge on Joe and his mother. Still, this was a significant development regarding Joe and his sexuality.

After the initial debate on whether to make Jericho gay or not, Perez went all in on Jericho as not only being straight, but being a ladies man. He noted in interviews from the time period, "George Pérez talks about developing Jericho:

We’re going so begin dealing with Joey as an artist. We’re taking him beyond the Arts that we’ve shown him doing already. He also takes ballet training and is a dancer. He also has a very, very healthy libido. Let’s face is, if he’s as a ballet practice or an art evens or a Renaissance Faire, when he makes eye contact with a girl, he really makes eye contact. (Laughs) For that one brief instant, they’ve shared an existence. What a turn-on! This guy s got it made.”

He’s not a nasty person, nor a love’em-and-leave’em type. He makes it the girls’ choice, but he’s always straight ahead with them. He enjoys sex. He enjoys loving women. If they want that type of lifestyle, he’s willing so give is so them, and if not, he won’t desert them. He’ll still be their friend, and a good friend as that.

He does have a very healthy sexual appetite though.

Thus, when Perez returned to New Teen Titans to co-write the book with Wolfman (and initially pencil the book again, as well), they established in New Teen Titans #55 that Jericho was now very much a "ladies man"...

That continued to be how Jericho was portrayed over the next few years until his death in 1992. The character was later brought back to life during Geoff Johns' run on Teen Titans in 2003. Then, of course, the "New 52" revamped DC's continuity entirely in 2011. Changes were made to a lot of characters and Jericho was no exception.

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In 2015, DC did a crossover event called Convergence that involved re-visiting different famous eras of their past. Marv Wolfman went back to the 1984/1985 era of the New Teen Titans with Convergence: New Teen Titans #1-2 (art by Nicola Scott, Marc Deering and Jeremy Cox) and re-visited the Kole/Jericho dynamic, only now it had a different outcome.

In the first issue, Kole approaches Wonder Girl about Jericho and Donna clearly knows something about Joe that she isn't sure if Kole is ready to hear...

In the next issue, after Jericho is injured in a battle, Kole expresses her feelings once more for him and he once again pushes her away...

She later continued to pursue the topic and he finally admits to her that he is gay...

It's all very well handled. It is admittedly not something that would have ever been allowed in a 1985 Comics Code approved comic book, but it is still nice to see done today.

The following year, Christopher Priest had Jericho become a recurring character in Priest's DC Rebirth Deathstroke series. DC Rebirth allowed DC creators to alter continuity even more from the New 52 era. In Deathstroke #6 (by Priest, Larry Hama, Carol Pagulayan, Jason Paz and Jeremy Cox), we see that Jericho is engaged to a woman...

However, he is also in a relationship with a man (his father's "tech guy," who is secretly working against Deathstroke), a guy who is not happy with Jericho's other relationship...

So in the current DC continuity, then, Jericho is established as bisexual. It took over three decades, but Wolfman and Perez's initial instincts regarding the character have finally made their way into the actual DC comic books. Time will only tell how Jericho's sexuality is handled in the Titans TV series, as well.