My Superhero Husband brings representation to Cartoon Forum
During this year’s Cartoon Forum, Greek creatives Alex Tagali and Mikaela Deligianni showed off their 2D animated superhero romcom My Superhero Husband. Cartoon Forum is a pitching and co-op forum for animated TV projects. Creators get three days to pitch their projects to broadcasters, investors, and other potential partners from 40 countries.
The show is about managing the responsibilities of being a superhero, a husband, and a cat parent. It follows a pair of superheroes who are opposite sides of the same coin. Cynthis is a transgender man who likes to chill at home with a good book after spending the day saving people. Joule, meanwhile, loves to bask in the limelight of his superhero status, complete with having his face on billboards.
“Whenever you see queer characters on TV nowadays, it’s all about how they’re scared about it, or how they are coming out, or it’s centered around their queerness, and we wanted to make a series that had a lot of love and casual everyday life between a queer couple, but where the focus was not the fact that they are gay,” Tagali told Variety.
The show is produced by Greek company Funny Tales, which means the project would benefit from the country’s 40% tax rebate during production. It also won the Disney+ pitch prize at this year’s Mifa market in Annecy. My Superhero Husband is co-produced by Berlin-based The Alphabet Initiative. The project is represented by G Beaudin, a former child actor of indigenous American descent.
“A project like this gives kids an opportunity. I didn’t have this opportunity: I wasn’t able to reach out to Indigenous children. I was told not to tell people I was Indigenous – they went with my last name, which is French – and the suicide rate among this group is so high. Casual representation matters, especially with young trans people, and having a trans superhero character is life changing,” Beaudin told Variety.
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