Deadline reported recently that DC Comics will be introducing a nonbinary hero named Kid Quick. Kid Quick is set to make their debut in an upcoming, holiday-themed anthology titled DC’s Merry Multiverse.
Kid Quick is a younger, gender-fluid, BIPOC, spin on the character the Flash. After their holiday debut, Kid Quick will appear as the Flash in an upcoming comic series titled Future State: Justice League. Like the Flash, DC’s new hero can run at superhuman speed, but this time with gender-neutral pronouns.
While Kid Quick is DC Comics’ first nonbinary hero, they’re not its first non-binary character. Kid Quick joins the Suicide Squad character The Aerie, a nonbinary antihero. Rival publishing company Marvel Comics recently announced nonbinary characters as well, physic twins Snowflake and Safespace, who debuted in the one-shot release The New Warriors.
“In the DC superhero universe, we’ve got a superfast character, Kid Flash. And I thought about how ‘Kid’ can really be any gender,” writer Ivan Cohen told NBC News. “There are all these choices we can make—why don’t we do something besides what we would have made up if it was 1965?”
LGBTQ advocates seem to be on board. A spokesperson for GLAAD told the press that writers for DC Comics and Star Trek were “helping to reach new audiences that may not normally be exposed to these identities, which has a profound impact on accelerating acceptance and understanding.”
Kid Quick, whose “Earth name” is Jess Chambers, isn’t the only nontraditional character on Teen Justice, a new super-team on Earth-11, the author told Screenrant. Other characters are “gender-flipped” versions of mainstream DC Universe heroes such as Aquagirl and Supergirl.
While the comic industry still has work to do when it comes to the inclusion of all identities, seeing characters like Kid Quick come into the lime light feels like hope for the future.
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