Overview
Howard Cruse is the first biography to tell 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Janine Utell
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Imprint: University Press of Mississippi
Dimensions:
Width: 13.90cm
, Height: 1.60cm
, Length: 21.50cm
Weight: 0.363kg
ISBN: 9781496843555
ISBN 10: 149684355
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 28 February 2023
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
Howard Cruse is a compelling and moving narrative that puts Cruse in his rightful place as a significant figure in late twentieth-century comics history, LGBTQIA+ history, and US culture in general.--Andrew J. Kunka, author of The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth
Author Information
Janine Utell is author of several books, most recently Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and Intimacy, and editor of The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In, published by University Press of Mississippi, and Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English. Utell serves as editor for ""Orientations,"" a forum dedicated to queer and feminist modernist studies for Modernism/modernity. She also currently serves as president for the Modernist Studies Association.
