Howard Cruse in Bloomington, MN

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.
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
stories, the domestic intimacies of
, and the complexity and power of
. 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.