Howard Cruse

Janine Utell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781496843500
• eBook ISBN: 9781496843517
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

Howard Cruse tells the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher's kid from Alabama who became "the godfather of queer comics," Cruse (1944–2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse's graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs.

Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse's entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse's art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Biographer’s Preface: “Only your future biographers will know for sure!”
• Chapter One: “Little did I suspect that I was destined to eventually become a fabulously successful cartoonist” (1944–1963)
• Chapter Two: “There were things buried inside of me that were getting pried loose by all these vibes in the air” (1962–1968)
• Chapter Three: “Was I going to heed the call of my acid visions and cast my lot with the counterculture?” (1968–1977)
• Chapter Four: “I discovered a sexy New Yorker” (1979–2019)
• Chapter Five: “There’s more to the gay experience than can be chronicled in 36 pages” (1979–1984)
• Chapter Six: “I’m interested in the undercurrents of life, the ways people relate to each other” (1983–1989)
• Chapter Seven: “Seeing them and missing them still makes me angry” (1981–1996)
• Chapter Eight: “Are you crazy? Do you realize how long it would take you to draw all those pages?” (1990–1995)
• Chapter Nine: “I’d like for people—if they looked at the totality of my work—to feel they have come to know me as a person” (1996–2019)
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author