ATTRACTION OF HOWARD CRUSE

HOWARD CRUSE's comic strips and humorous illustrations have appeared in Playboy, The Village Voice, Artforum International, Heavy Metal, The Advocate, Starlog, and numerous other national magazines.

The son of a Baptist minister, Cruse was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. His proximity to that city's racial turmoil during the early 1960s affected him deeply and ultimately provided the basis for his internationally acclaimed graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. Despite his attraction to cartooning from the age of five, Cruse's creative adventures have ranged far beyond comics, having included a professional acting stint at the Atlanta Children's Theatre in 1973 and eight months as Art Director for Starlog magazine in 1978. An undergraduate drama major at Birmingham-Southern College, Cruse credits his early emersion in all aspects of stagecraft with sparking his lifelong interest in the nuanced dialogue and multi-faceted characters that have been characteristic of his comic book work for over a quarter-century.

Upon his graduation from BSC in 1968 he was awarded a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship to Penn State University but, finding himself unsuited to grad school priorities, he abandoned further academic pursuits after a single term, where he shared living quarters and a hippie lifestyle with fellow refugees from Alabama until the fall of 1969, when he returned to Birmingham late in 1969 to regroup.

He soon found work in the art department of a local television station where in addition to designing station IDs, ads for local advertisers, and cartoon weather board icons he engaged in improvisational puppetry on a daily afternoon kiddie show. During downtime and off-hours he sought additional creative outlets in both mainstream and "underground" venues. For mainstream audiences he sold Tops & Button, a daily cartoon panel about talking squirrels, to the Birmingham Post-Herald; on the heels of his squirrels' debut he created a far freakier comic strip for the Crimson-White, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama. After a year spend offering trippy humor to collegians, Barefootz moved on to appear in a string of Birmingham-area underground and alternative newspapers, until Denis Kitchen propelled it into a national spotlight beginning in 1972 via Kitchen Sink titles such as Snarf, Bizarre Sex, Dope Comix and Commies From Mars. Kitchen also invited Cruse and Barefootz along for the ride during his tenure as editor of Comix Book, an ambitious but swiftly abandoned effort by Marvel Comix to turn magazine-rack browsers on to underground sensibilities.

From 1975-76 Cruse led a double-life (and that's not counting his increasingly open gay side). With Kitchen Sink's help, using money raised among friends to cover printing costs, Cruse published two issues on his solo title Barefootz Funnies and continued to contribute to underground comic anthology titles, all the while holding down a day job pasting up ads and doing occasional drawings for a prestigious Birmingham advertising agency. Then Cruse decided he would have to leave Birmingham behind in order to pursue the full-time cartooning career he desired. He moved back to New York City and, after false starts and some months spent at Starlog, he began finding open doors at Playboy, Heavy Metal, and other newsstand magazines. In 1979 he met and fell in love with native New Yorker Ed Sedarbaum and the two of them moved into an apartment in Queens. He published the third and final issue of Barefootz Funnies that year, having decided it was time to leave that feature behind in order to take his work in new directions. Shortly thereafter Denis Kitchen asked if he would edit a new underground comic book series to be called Gay Comix, and the new direction took off.

Editing and contributing to Gay Comix provided Cruse with a perfect opportunity to begin being totally open about his sexuality without apologizing for it (He had published his first gay-themed story in Barefootz Funnies #2 back in 1976 but had stopped short of declaring his own orientation at that point.) Drawing with new honesty on his personal experiences as a gay man gave his work a heightened impact, a change that began being noticed beyond the usual underground-comix circles, leading to platforms for political satire in The Village Voice and an invitation by The Advocate, the national gay newsmagazine, to create a new gay-themed comic strip exclusively for its pages. Wendel was Cruse's response.

Wendel's largely comedic but progressively substantive depiction of 1980s gay life lived in the shadow of hostile moralists and a horrific epidemic solidified Cruse's standing as one of America's premier openly gay cartoonists, aided by Dancin' Nekkid with the Angels, a compilation of the cartoonist's underground comix published in 1987 both by St. Martin's Press (in softcover) and by Kitchen Sink Press (in a signed, limited-edition hardcover). Portions of Wendel Trupstock's adventures, meanwhile, were collected in book form twice during the feature's run in The Advocate (first by Gay Presses of New York; then by St. Martin's Press), and after Cruse discontinued the series in 1989 its remaining episodes were collected by Kitchen Sink in a comic book called Wendel Comix. In 1990 Fantagraphics Books published Early Barefootz, a collection of the 1970-73 Barefootz strips and stories. In 2001 Olmstead Press reissued the entire Wendel series from beginning to end in an omnibus collection called Wendel All Together.

Cruse spent four years in the early 1990s writing and drawing his most widely acclaimed work, the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, which was published in 1995 by DC Comics under its Paradox Press imprint. A tale of racial strife, homophobia, and personal self-discovery set in the American South of the early-'60s, Stuck Rubber Baby won both Eisner and Harvey Awards in the U.S. and, in translation, won a Luchs Award in Germany and a 2002 Prix de la critique at the International Comics Festival in Angouleme, France. SRB has also been published in Italy and a Spanish-language edition is forthcoming from Dolmen. (Wendel, meanwhile, was recently translated for Spanish readers by Ediciones La Cúpula.)

Cruse's most recent book, his illustrated adaptation of a fable by Jeanne E. Shaffer entitled The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth, was published by Prometheus Books in April 2004, the year that Cruse and his partner Ed Sedarbaum decided to resettle in northwestern Massachusetts after twenty-five years together in New York City. Long married in spirit, they were wed legally under Massachusetts law in July 2004.