Janine Utell 
Howard Cruse 

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.

About the author

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.