Gaysians and Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices were among the winners at the 37th annual GLAAD Media Awards, which recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ+ community and the issues that affect their lives.
GLAAD recognizes the comic arts in two categories — “Outstanding Comic Book” and “Outstanding Original Graphic Novel/Anthology.” The awards were given out Thursday night in Los Angeles, across categories that recognized film, television, video games and more. Other winners included the TV show Heated Rivalry and the video game Lost Records: Bloom & Rage.
Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices is a Marvel Infinity Comics series written by Anthony Oliveira and Elsa Sjunneson, with art by Carola Borelli, Bailie Rosenlund, Alti Firmansyah and Minkyu Jung, colors by Pablo Collar, Charles Stewart III, Ruth Redmond and Dono Sánchez-Almara, and letters by Ariana Maher, Joe Caramagna and KJ Díaz.
The series was published as part of Marvel’s ongoing Voices initiative, which highlights underrepresented communities. The comic features LGBTQ+ characters like Escapade and Captain America Aaron Fischer navigating both superhero life and their own identities at Avengers Academy.
Gaysians, published by Algonquin Books, is a graphic novel by Mike Curato, the acclaimed creator of the young adult graphic novel Flamer. Set in Seattle in the early 2000s, the story follows AJ, a gay Asian man who arrives in the city hoping to reinvent himself, only to find the reality of starting over is harder than he imagined.
A chance encounter at a bar introduces him to three very different men — K, a glamorous drag queen; John, a shy gamer; and Steven, a reckless flirt — whose friendship becomes the chosen family AJ didn’t know he needed. When a brutal attack tests the bonds of that friendship, the book deepens into an exploration of queer resilience and belonging. The book won the Stonewall Book Award in 2026 and was named one of Kirkus’s best fiction titles of the year.