Static #9
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeStatic #9 is the opening chapter of 'What Are Little Boys Made Of?,' the five-part story arc that stands as one of the most socially forward narratives in 1990s mainstream superhero comics. The arc centers on Virgil Hawkins discovering that his close friend Rick Stone is gay after Rick and a companion survive a brutal hate-crime attack by a group of skinheads — a storyline that asked teenage readers to sit with their protagonist's initial homophobic discomfort and watch him grow past it. That kind of moral reckoning for a title hero was virtually absent from the superhero genre at the time, and the fact that it ran in a Milestone book — itself a pioneering minority-owned publisher explicitly dedicated to broader representation — gave the arc additional cultural weight. Issue #9 is thus not just a plot-starter; it is the ground-floor entry point to one of the medium's earliest and most earnest attempts to treat LGBTQ+ identity as real, human, and worthy of a superhero title's full attention.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The 'What Are Little Boys Made Of?' arc was written by Robert L. Washington III, who scripted the bulk of the Static ongoing series under the Milestone editorial umbrella. Washington had already established Virgil Hawkins as a character consciously modeled on Spider-Man — a quippy, science-minded teenager navigating high school and heroics simultaneously — and the arc grew out of Milestone's broader mandate to reflect the authentic social realities facing young people of color in the early 1990s. Interior art for issue #9 was provided by Wilfred and Rober Quijano, with a cover by John Paul Leon and John Stanisci. Notably, the final two issues of the five-part arc were turned over to writer Ivan Velez Jr., who before joining Milestone had created Tales of the Closet, an independent comic about the lives of gay teenagers — a deliberate creative choice that brought direct lived expertise to the story's resolution.
Trivia · 9 facts
- Published October 1994 by DC/Milestone Media as part of the ongoing Static series (Volume 1).
- Title story: 'What Are Little Boys Made Of?' — Part 1 of 5; the arc runs through Static #9–#13.
- Written by Robert L. Washington III, with interior art by Wilfred and Rober Quijano; cover by John Paul Leon and John Stanisci.
- The issue's central event: Static intervenes in a hate-crime attack on his friend Rick Stone, after which Rick reveals to Virgil that he is gay — a landmark disclosure for a mainstream superhero comic in 1994.
- The arc also features a new villain, Joyride, introduced in this issue alongside the Rick Stone storyline.
- Subsequent issues in the arc introduce the Sons of Odin (a white-supremacist gang) and new characters Palisade and Princess Nightmare across parts 2–3, culminating in Static defending a gay-rights rally.
- The final two parts of the arc (#12–#13) were written by Ivan Velez Jr., who brought prior experience writing LGBTQ+ teen narratives via his pre-Milestone independent comic Tales of the Closet.
- Static #9 is collected in Milestone Compendium Two (DC, January 2023), which reprints Static #9–20, and in DC Finest: Static: Playing with Fire (October 2025), which collects Static #1–15 among related issues.
- Milestone Comics, the publisher behind the series, was a minority-owned entity that retained full copyright and creative control of its characters under a licensing agreement with DC Comics — an unusual arrangement that insulated the line from DC's editorial interference even on sensitive subject matter.
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Reprinted in Milestone Compendium #2 (2023)
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