In 2017, en route to a comic event in Jakarta, my attention was caught by the enormous smiles from couples whose large-scale portraits blaringly announced their respective marriages at an event venue. These ornate marriage announce- ments set my expectation that I was entering a gendered space. Interestingly, unlike the signs outside the venue that celebrated heteronormative unions, the comic event I attended involved young people whose comics challenged these norms. Surrounded by young attendees, from high school and university stu- dents to young professionals, I weaved through rows of tables featuring cute art works, comic diaries, and experimental comic art. In between these busy tables, a handful of works caught my attention as these came with labels called boys love (henceforth referred to as BL), a genre that explores male–male romances in women’s cultures, yaoi, a label associated with male homoerotic comics, 1 or yuri, a genre associated with female–female romances from Japan. 2 On their small tables were comics featuring queer imaginations of men in intimate embraces or women finding love in each other. Despite my expectations, I was fascinated with these queer expressions finding a space of their own through comics. At other comic events in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, queer comics are emerging despite political climates that seek to make them invis- ible. When Southeast Asian populist politics are often influenced by conservative religious values, non-normative expressions are often controlled, overlooked, or ignored. In attending these independent comic events, I am impressed to find queer comics that bravely express the queer desires and imaginations of artists. In this chapter, I examine local queer comics and the spaces they navigate in Southeast Asia. I specifically survey Southeast Asian queer comics, ranging from fan made and original BL works along with other LGBTQ comics, that I encountered during my fieldwork from 2017 to 2019 at independent comic events such as Comic Frontier in Indonesia, Comic Fiesta in Malaysia, Doujinshi 9 INDEPENDENT AND SAFE PANELS FOR YOUTHS Queer comics in a time of Southeast Asian populism Kristine Michelle L. Santos DOI: 10.4324/9781003320517-10