Comic Book Creator #12

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No. 12, Spring 2016

Art and characters © Howard Cruse.

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

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also: JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD MASTERPIECE • COMIC BOOK FEVER • HEMBECK

Spring 2016 • Voice of the Comics Medium • Number 12 EQUALITY-WOOdy CBC mascot by J.D. King

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©2016 J.D. King.

Ye Ed’s Rant: For the Love of Murphy Anderson.............................................................. 2

About Our Covers

Comics Chatter

Art and Colors by HOWARD CRUSE

Incoming: Letters o’ comment containing words on Warp and Allred accolades........... 6

Forbidden Pleasures: George Khoury gives us an outtake from his magnum opus...... 3 Incoming Extra: Hugh Surratt shares his favorite Gil Kane science fiction covers......... 8 Hembeck’s Dateline: Our Man Fred on the ruler who dares not speak his name....... 13 Comics in the Library: Rich Arndt judges books by their cover (binding, at least!)..... 15 jack kirby’s fourth world SPECIAL section

© 2016 Howard Cruse

The King’s Pinnacle: Inspired by our amazing Steve Rude cover, CBC looks at the history behind Jack Kirby’s magnificent work at DC Comics in the early 1970s, from his late ’60s break with Stan Lee at Marvel, to subsequent tribulations with publisher Carmine Infantino at the House of Superman.................................. 16 THE MAIN EVENT

Characters TM & © DC Comics. Art © S. Rude.

Above: Mr. Cruse draws himself.

Below: When we saw Steve “The Dude” Rude’s apokoliptik Fourth World art, we just had to make a cover feature out of it!

Finding the Muse of the Man Called Cruse: CBC shares an afternoon with the great Howard Cruse, learning about the cartoonist’s Alabama roots, emergence into the underground comix realm with Barefootz, pioneering work as editor of the seminal anthology Gay Comix, mainstream recognition courtesy of Wendel, and breakthrough with Stuck Rubber Baby as an important graphic novelist.

The artist’s life parallels the rise of the LGBTQ rights movement — Howard was even witness to the Stonewall rebellion! — and he shares initimate and candid stories, about life in the homophobic Deep South in the ’60s or surviving the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, as well as the more mundane experiences of a freelance cartoonist, and his current state of domestic bliss in this modern, more enlightened age of marriage equality......................................... 32 BACK MATTER Coming Attractions: Michael W. Kaluta! Ramona Fradon! Wacky Packs!.................... 77 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Doug Wildey’s Jonny Quest........................ 80

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Note: Your humble editor would love to know if you have suggestions for CBC about artists and writers you would like to see covered! If you like what we’re doing, you cam tell us that, too! Thanks!

Right: Detail of Howard Cruse’s cover art for his 2012 BOOM! Town book,The Other Sides of Howard Cruse.

SPECIAL THANKS: Glenn Whitmore colored our awesome Steve Rude cover of Kirby’s Fourth World.

Comic Book Artist Vol. 1 & 2 are now available as digital downloads from twomorrows.com!

www.twomorrows.com

Comic Book Creator is a proud joint production of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows

Comic Book Creator ™ is published quarterly by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Jon B. Cooke, editor. John Morrow, publisher. Comic Book Creator editorial offices: P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA. E-mail: jonbcooke@aol.com. Send subscription funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial offices. Four-issue subscriptions: $40 US, $60 International. All characters are © their respective copyright owners. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted. All editorial matter ©2016 Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. Comic Book Creator is a TM of Jon B. Cooke/TwoMorrows. ISSN 2330-2437. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING.

This issue is dedicated in memory of ALVIN BUENAVENTURA ™

JON B. COOKE Editor & Designer

John Morrow Publisher & Consulting Editor

MICHAEL AUSHENKER Associate Editor

HOWARD CRUSE Front Cover Artist & Colorist

STEVE RUDE Reverse Cover Artist

GLENN WHITMORE Reverse Cover Colorist

GEORGE KHOURY RICHARD J. ARNDT TOM ZIUKO Contributing Editors

STEVEN THOMPSON Transcriber

J.D. KING CBC Cartoonist

TOM ZIUKO CBC Colorist Supreme

RONN SUTTON CBC Illustrator

ROB SMENTEK CBC Proofreader

SETH KUSHNER CBC Photographer in Memoriam

Greg PRESTON KENDALL WHITEHOUSE CBC Convention Photographer

MICHAEL AUSHENKER FRED HEMBECK GEORGE KHOURY TOM ZIUKO CBC Columnists To contact CBC, please email jonbcooke@aol.com or snail-mail CBC, P.O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892 2

Recalling the luxuriant artistry of the great Murphy Anderson interview with Howard Cruse herein. A I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowlfew years back I had the opportunity to edge the importance the late, visit with Howard and husband Eddie great comic book artist Murphy C. Sedarbaum (and, yes, you too, Molly, Anderson, Jr., (who passed away the Rescue Dog), when I conducted the last October) had on my creative exhaustive Q-&-A. Yours truly has long development and relationship with considered Cruse to be an underratthe field of sequential art. Back ed cartoonist and I believe that his when I was ten or eleven, a period quasi-autobiographical Stuck Rubber during which my mother, younger Baby is truly one of the great American brother Andrew, and I lived in graphic novels. The conversation, as you Europe, Andy and I became deeply will learn, not only covers what it was interested in comics, partly out of like to grow up gay in the Civil Rights-era homesickness (though the British South, but also eyewitness accounts of weeklies also held our fascinathe Stonewall riot (which ignited the gay tion) and due to a recognition that rights movement), underground comix real people created these funny in the ’70s, activism during the AIDS books. And the artistic style I first epidemic, and he recounts becoming the swooned over? None other than inaugural editor of Gay Comix. the work of Murphy Anderson.

Many thanks to Howard for his Admittingly, it was his feathpatience, his participation, his splendid ered inks over Curt Swan’s pencils cover, and his hospitality. I’m delighted on Superman and Bob Brown’s this interview is finally seeing print.

Superboy work that initially apCBC hopes to increasingly cover pealed to me, but soon thereafter, alternative and underground cartoonists, after being exposed to his pencilsand we plan to include a balance with &-inks on The Spectre, Captain such issues to satisfy longtime readers Comet, and (yep) his great Wonder as well as new readers joining us. In the Woman cover for Ms. magazine, future, we’ll be featuring Skip Williamson Anderson became my first Art and Carol Tyler, to name but two.

God. Simply put, he made me want to draw, and I’ll forever be grateful Howard Cruse by Ronn Sutton In the unabashed plug department, for the artist’s influence. please note that, with the kind permission of TwoMaking such an early impression, it may be surMorrows publisher John Morrow, Denis Kitchen has prising to learn that I never interviewed the artist. I did published a revamped version of CBC #5, though now facilitate a publisher for R.C. Harvey’s book, The Life presented as a book containing the complete 61,000and Art of Murphy Anderson, as a favor to both writer word interview, a comprehensive article by yours and subject (Bob had suggested it for an issue of Comic truly (which includes interviews with many of KitchBook Artist; I thought it deserved a more permanent en’s peers, friends, and collaborators), and plenty of presentation). And Anderson contributed mightily to rarely-seen art — including an all-new four-page color my endeavors with “The Shiner,” a seven-page story comic story introduction by longtime Kitchen confederto Streetwise: Autobiographical Stories by Comic Book ate Peter Poplaski. Visit deniskitchen.com for details!

Professionals, edited by John Morrow and me, as well I’m also putting together, for Last Gasp, a definitive as sharing a heartfelt tribute to Will Eisner for CBA V2 history on the legendary Crumb/Kominsky/Bagge#6. We would chat at shows and on the phone on occa- edited humor magazine, Weirdo, as well as designing sion. He was friendly, reserved, humble, and quite digTwoMorrows’ The MLJ Companion, a history of the nified, gifted with a deep, resonant voice suffused with Archie Comics super-heroes, and I’m also compiling a noticeable North Carolinian drawl. I don’t think I ever Comic Book Creator’s All Star Creators Special #1, a saw the artist — always accompanied by his wife of 67 collection of the little-seen Comic Book Artist Bullpen years, Helen — without jacket and tie. What a lovely, fanzine (with new features, as well as the phenomenal graceful man. Godspeed, Murph. You are missed.

Jack Abel Tribute now in glorious color). That will either It’s a great pleasure to feature the career-spanning

be an end-of-the-year release or maybe Summer 2017.

cbc contributors R ichard J. Arndt Andrew D. Cooke Howard Cruse Mark Evanier Cliff Galbraith Jeff Gelb Gary Groth

Fred Hembeck Heritage Auctions Fritz Herzog Randolph Hoppe Dave Hutchison Christopher Irving Jenette Kahn

Denis Kitchen George Khoury Paul Levitz John Morrow Eric NolenWeathington Greg Petix

—Y e Crusading Editor jonbcooke@aol.com

John Romita, Sr. Steve Rude Eddie Sedarbaum J.P. Shannon Steve Sherman Rob Smentek Julian Soriano

Dan Spiegle High Surratt Ronn Sutton The Time Capsule Glenn Whitmore Rob Yeremian Tom Ziuko

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Howard Cruse portrait ©2016 Ronn Sutton.

CBC Contributing Photographer

For the love of Murph

eighties nostalgia dept.

Forbidden Pleasures Remembering the great Forbidden Planet in this outtake from Comic Book Fever!

by George KhourY CBC Contributing Editor

Forbidden Planet items © Forbidden Planet.

On a perfect day in 1980s’ Manhattan, if you felt like forgetting yourself and your problems, there was no better place to do so than at Forbidden Planet at 821 Broadway (at 12th Street). In terms of comic book stores, it was like nothing seen before in the Big Apple: 4,000 square feet filled to the brim with comics, genre books, international toys, games, and more.

In other words, it was paradise.

The Forbidden Planet comic book store was founded in England in 1978 by three partners who shared a passion for comics: Mike Lake, Nick Landau, and Mike Luckman. Their London store was an immediate success, a revolutionary destination that became a cultural trailblazer throughout Europe as an authority in science fiction and as a major importer of American comics. In 1981, partner Mike Luckman, a late bloomer to the comics medium, headed alone to America and opened a Forbidden Planet shop in New York City, which developed into an influential trendsetter at the epicenter of everything cool in comics.

“I was a teacher in London,” states Luckman. “I used to be the guy who was brought in to take the problem kids, and I had a bunch of kids that were leaving school who couldn’t read or write properly. I think the same with American education, these kids just got pushed to the edge, you know? Nobody gave a sh*t. I was trying to take a class after school of these kids who desperately wanted to read and write, [but] didn’t know how to go about it because no one had given them the time. I quickly realized that I didn’t have any material for them to learn from, because all the textbooks in schools are totally irrelevant to most kids. So I decided to try comics, which, of course, was a huge success. The kids were so desperate to read the comic book,

they really applied themselves, and we got some really good results. And that’s really how it came about, because I met some people who I used to try and scrounge comics off [of] so I could take them for the kids.”

Pursuing his heart, a smitten Luckman came to America as he began courting an American named Jonni Levas, the business partner of Phil Seuling (founder of the comics direct system of distribution, the drop-ship delivery of Marvel, DC, and other comic titles to specialty stores) at Sea Gate Distributors.

During this period, comics were slowly disappearing from newsstands and becoming a staple mostly found in comic book specialty stores. Since a man’s got to make his own way (and Luckman wanted to extend his stay in America), he used a little divine inspiration, and the store just followed.

“It was a gamble,” confesses Luckman. “What we were trying to do was make it a supermarket, have everything to do with science fiction, comics, toys, all in one store. And it really wasn’t that difficult to figure out. If the material is good, the people will come.”

The British impresario found his ideal location at 821 Broadway, a retail space of 4,000 square feet — about double the size of the original London store. As he began to put his unprecedented megastore and staff together, his efforts started to intrigue the media and whet the public’s appetite.

As the day of the grand opening arrived, any nervousness subsided with the steady arrival of enthusiastic customers, all wanting to survey the latest sensation in town. Luckman says, “The opening day was phenomenal. We did have press releases, and Channel 7 (WABC-TV) did a whole news thing on us. It was quite amazing. I can’t remember what they said, but, ‘Coming up at eleven, we’ll show you a new store that’s opening tomorrow.’ And you couldn’t buy that space. It was unbelievable. I think they gave us three

CBC SPECIAL!

As a special bonus this ish, Ye Crusading Editor is delighted to spotlight as our opening feature an outtake from Gentleman George Khoury’s magnum opus, Comic Book Fever: A Celebration of Comics 1976 to 1986, shipping in June 2016 by TwoMorrows.

The 240-page book, sporting a fantastic Alex Ross painted cover (above), is a love letter to his personal golden age of comics and simply an amazing compilation of articles, art, and artifacts, all put together in the indomitable style of the author of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, Kimota!

The Miracleman Companion, and True Brit: Celebrating the Comic Book Artists of England!

Must-have double-bagger!

Inset left: Brian Bolland artwork on Forbidden Planet’s custom shopping bags.

Left: Typographer/designer extraordinaire Alex Jay’s 1984 logo design for the retailer.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

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Above: Mid-’80s Fritz Herzog photo of the science fiction and comic book goodness awaiting inside NYC’s Forbidden Planet.

The store’s business arrangement with Sea Gate ensured a reliable pipeline for a constant supply of all the new comic book releases. The most instrumental form of advertising became Forbidden Planet’s key to success: word of mouth. Kids everywhere in the Tri-State area daydreamed about it; local college students couldn’t stop talking about the place; and New Yorkers, out-of-towners, and tourists gradually made it a go-to destination for all things in comics and science fiction. In some ways, Forbidden Planet was a Disneyland in New York, offering something for anyone young at heart and full of imagination.

After an overwhelming launch and subsequent lingering dropoff, the customers did eventually come, and when they did they came in droves. Recalling the tipping point, Luckman states, “[Starlog] did an article on us. I think we opened in April, and I think their July edition—because I had to lay some people off because [sales] went a little bit lower than I thought [they] would. And then I think it was primarily that article in Starlog. They did a piece on us and it just exploded.”

“Forbidden Planet was a rush,” remembers Hingley.

“I immediately hit it off with New York City, and so it was easy to extend the originally projected six-month posting to something more permanent. The Lower East Side, at that time, had an electricity about it that was unmatched anywhere else. Because the store was so much more than just a straight comic shop, it had a much wider appeal and became a cult fixture in a very short time. I liked the lifestyle, and the store began to do well.”

The comics fans of the early 1980s were a passionate bunch and, one by one, people from all walks of life made their journey to this unique paradise. Whether you were looking for 20-sided dice, Japanese robots, or the latest issue of X-Men, they all basked in the store’s enticing glow.

“Weekends were a human wave of people coming in to get their titles. Doing signings in the store was very exciting with standouts from Stephen King, Clive Barker, and [Italian graphic artist] Liberatore. One of my favorite customers was Robin Williams, who collected Japanese toys and held the floor whenever he came in. Joey Ramone, Glenn Danzig, and Ric Ocasek were regular customers. We even had Johnny Cash in there one day. I think the Johnny Cash #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photo © Fritz Herzog. Robby the Robot TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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minutes out of a 30-minute spot on the network. It was just unbelievable.”

In the primitive days of geek culture, stocking the shelves and comic book racks full of eye-catching merchandise represented a daunting challenge for a store of this size. “It was interesting,” discloses Luckman about those early days. “One of the guys from London came over here because he was a book expert, and we opened the store and we’d had a huge science fiction book order, and everything was selling so fast, he came in and said, ‘I have to do another order. We’re running out of stuff. What should I do?’ And I said, ‘Well, whatever you ordered the first time, order it a second time.’ Because these were pre-computer days, and listing thousands of book titles took forever, so we just said, ‘Repeat that order.’

“We advertised in the local magazines and stuff, and they had features on us. But after the first couple of days, it settled down. It went down quite a bit, and I had no idea what to expect, you know, what the levels would be like. It was a nightmare ordering stuff, because you really had no idea what you were ordering and how many would move.”

Making the move across the pond to assist Luckman was Robert (Rob) Hingley, the man who would become the lead singer and guitarist of the Toasters. Rob remembers, “In London, I was helping, generally, over most of the separate departments, which primarily were science fiction books, comics, and film and television. Forbidden Planet London at that time was less multi-faceted than the New York City rollout. One of my clients was [musician] Joe Jackson, who was collecting Silver Age DC and EC comics at that time. Coincidentally he and I moved to New York at the same time. He ended up being a major booster of my band and mixed several records for us. When I moved to New York, I was a ‘consultant’ basically with a brief to overhaul operations in New York, which branch wasn’t performing well at the time. When I arrived in New York City, I became de facto store manager alongside Alan Williamson. Apart from grappling with staff turnover, I was doing more of the buying, specifically on the science fiction books, developing accounts like Arkham House and other specialty publishers, but also buying collections of comics, pulp magazines, and toys.”

Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist ©2016 Sequential Artisit, LLC. The distinctive Will Eisner signature is a trademark of Will Eisner Studios, Inc.

Photo © Fritz Herzog.

day was the best. He came in with Waylon Jennings.

Two mean-looking dudes in black clothes. Johnny drew a rat in the visitors’ book. I wonder where that is now.”

Forbidden Planet maintained its hustle-and-bustle momentum throughout most of the decade despite the difficulties of keeping everyone happy, employees and customers alike.

Hingley replies, “Most of the problems stemmed from the staff turnover. At first, it was necessary to get rid of most of the original employees, as they had no work ethic and many helped themselves to the inventory. I felt that mostly the customers were happy, but it was difficult to keep everything in stock all the time. Dealing with the small publishers was particularly hard. Some comic titles sold through like there was no tomorrow. We developed a great relationship with guys like the Koch brothers [Joe and Peter] and Gary Dolgoff, who kept us supplied with back issue titles and older books as well.”

As time has shown us, things change, and the Forbidden Planet of 821 Broadway is no more. Gone are the creaky floor boards of the gigantic first floor that held shelves full of science-fiction and pop culture books, and

the racks displaying all the latest comics. Also a sad memory is the wonderful cellar full of American and international toys, games, and vintage comic book back issues. Over the decades the store has changed ownership and locations, but it continues to endure in the heart of the Big Apple’s Union Square. But for all who visited the shop in ’80s, the magical experience of the original Forbidden Planet will forever linger.

Above: Forbidden Planet’s original New York City storefront on Broadway.

Photo by Fritz Herzog.

The Storyteller’s Story Official Selection in over 25 film festivals worldwide “The best comics bio I’ve ever seen… It’s wonderful, well done.”

Brian Michael Bendis “An essential doc for comics fans, ‘Portrait’ will also enlighten the curious.”

John DeFore, Austin American-Statesman “Entertaining and insightful. A great film about a visionary artist!”

Jeffrey Katzenberg Arguably the most influential person in American comics, Will Eisner, as artist, entrepreneur, innovator, and visual storyteller, enjoyed a career that encompassed comic books from their early beginnings in the 1930s to their development as graphic novels in the 1990s. During his sixty-year-plus career, Eisner introduced the now-traditional mode of comic book production; championed mature, sophisticated storytelling; was an early advocate for using the medium as a tool for education; pioneered the now-popular graphic novel, and served as inspiration for generations of artists. Without a doubt, Will Eisner was the godfather of the American comic book.

The award-winning full-length feature film documentary includes interviews with Eisner and many of the foremost creative talents in the U.S., including Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Chabon, Jules Feiffer, Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, and others.

Available Now on DVD & Blu-ray • www.twomorrows.com

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

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incoming

Words on Warp; Allred accolades The creators of the Broadway science-fiction epic weigh in on CBC #10’s coverage Write to CBC: jonbcooke@ aol.com or P. O. Box 204, West Kingston, RI 02892

Lenny Kleinfeld Thanks for sending your article. Talk about comprehensive!

I’m pretty sure it has more words than the Warp trilogy did… An impressive piece of work on your part, and it was fun to see all those “then and now” shots of the cast.

plain. (Though, in truth, the following missive from faithful reader Joe Frank was the only letter of comment we’ve received about CBC in quite a spell…). — Y.E.]

Joe Frank

CBC #8 was a very intriguing issue. The interviews were somewhat shorter, but most still had content of great value.

The cover subjects had an element in common: both emphasize the idea of fun in comics.

I’ve read less of Bob Burden’s output. The only thing I recall offhand was the Gumby he did with Arthur Adams, but I remember it as playfully bizarre and, as such, far Stuart Gordon different from other books. A welcome contrast.

Your article is terrific and really brought back memories, Michael Allred I recognize from his work on The Atomgood and bad. Many thanks. ics; another pleasing, unpredictable book. And although, unless my math is off, he’s four years younger than I, he still [And, thirdly, this in from Stuart’s wife, co-founder of the shares some common childhood experiences. I loved the Organic Theater, and Warp actress… — Y.E.] wistful nostalgia he expressed for all the cool ’60s shows, after school, in syndication.

Carolyn Purdy-Gordon A contrast: I missed the Wednesday Batman episodes What a trip down memory lane! I enjoyed reading your marwhen they first aired, as they were opposite Lost In Space athon saga of Warp’s inception, life, and after-life… Frankly, (which I wasn’t missing for anything). Had I known episodes I am impressed at the depth and breadth of your piece. I am would available 50 years later, the selection dilemma amazed at how well you captured the personalities of your wouldn’t have seemed so momentous. interview subjects. I got lonesome for the old gang. There The thing I like most: Michael’s story of meeting his were memories and observations that I’d forgotten, and wife, Laura. It makes for terrible drama as there were few some that I never knew until I read this article. Simultaneobstacles or complications. But how cool to have it happen ously nostalgic and illuminating about a time that was one so ideally and continue on indefinitely! It’s nice — and all of the best of our lives. too rare — to have such a happy ending in real life.

[Thanks to Lenny, Stuart, Carolyn, and the cast and crew I love Allred’s Batman ’66 covers and the very idea that of Warp who helped out with the CBC #10 coverage! Yours he is, in some way, contributing as an adult to the show truly loved putting together that comprehensive piece, and he delighted in as a kid. I’m eager to see him do a story though we were worried there might be complaints that, eventually. aside from the Neal Adams connection and its comic book I appreciated Batton Lash’s stated philosophy that influences, the extensive article had little to do with comics setbacks or frustrations are learning experiences. That directly, no one seemed annoyed enough to write in to com- puts a positive spin on what could be seen as a depressing [Lenny is, of course, the playwright of Warp, which was exhaustively showcased in Comic Book Creator #10. And now a word from the Broadway science fiction epic’s other creator (and celebrated horror film director)…— Ye Ed.]

Above: One of CBC editor Jon B. Cooke’s latest projects is a reworking of CBC #5 into the book Everything But the Kitchen Sink, now available from www.deniskitchen.com.

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#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Everything But the Kitchen Sink TM & © 2016 Denis Kitchen. Man-Thing and related characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Below: Courtesy of Barcelona reader Julian Soriano, covers of the 1973–74 Spanish ManThing series, El Hombre Cosa, which sported painted versions (perhaps by artist Lopez Espi) of American comic book covers. ¡Muchas gracias, Julian!

Wrightson strip © Bernie Wrightson. Batman, Superman TM & © DC Comics. MLJ characters TM & © Archie Comics Publications, Inc.

or demeaning event. Having it happen can then help you hopefully avoid a recurrence or at least gain perspective.

It’s an upbeat outlook where too many would dwell on a failure and, highly discouraged, just give up.

I am also very much appreciative of the Bill Schelly interview about his Harvey Kurtzman book. If it was intended to generate interest and sell the book, that was too late in my case.

I already bought and savored it, but the interview made an excellent supplement.

Kurtzman’s departure from MAD, in my view, can’t be seen as a mistake on his part. He had another option, with Hugh Hefner and he took it. Though shortlived, he generated other opportunities and made the best of whatever situation he was in. In second-guessing him, we have knowledge provided by history that, at the time, he did not. Plus, any big move is the individual’s personal decision not that of opinionated outsiders.

If Harvey liked experimentation, change, and growth, new venues and ideas suited him where a static MAD would not have been ideal.

It was his choice to push Gaines to relinquish control, knowing or suspecting what the consequences would be. Years later, when asked if he regretted leaving, he answered no. So, if he didn’t feel it was a loss, why should we?

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

Fans got the best of both: Kurtzman in other venues and the popular MAD that evolved with different artists and writers at the helm. I don’t know as we would have had Mort Drucker (my favorite of all the MAD artists) under Kurtzman’s reign. And Wally Wood did outstanding work for nearly a decade, there, without Harvey.

I don’t see it as white hat/black hat with Kurtzman and Gaines.

Each was merely who he was.

They had good years and then times of conflict. The only way, in my view, Kurtzman was shortchanged is not having his name associated with MAD. The magazine now lists Gaines as the founder, which hardly seems respectful or inclusively factual.

Finally, I am delighted to see that an upcoming issue is to spotlight the late Gil Kane. I loved his work, especially when editors let him ink it himself. And it was sad to lose him in 2000. But his material was often wonderfully distinctive and I’m glad he’s not forgotten.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with, Jon.

Above: For the the 1975 Bay Con souvenir book, artist Bernie Wrightson submitted a two-page strip (which we’ve slightly rearranged here) as his biographical submission. Inset left: DC Comics featured Neal Adams paying homage to his own covers for the publisher on 25 variant covers on their February 2016 releases. Here’s the pencils for Justice League America #8, a pastiche of Batman #244’s cover. Below: Your humble editor’s design work can be found in the August 2016 TwoMorrows release, The MLJ Companion! Here’s a tiny repro of the book’s cover illo by Irv Novick & Josef Rubenstein.

[Hope you enjoyed the extensive coverage on the life of Gilbert Eli Kane last issue, Joe, and I’m grateful for your loyalty as letters’ column contributor! Everyone else, please share your likes and dislikes about CBC, okay? — Y.E.] 7

incoming extra

Kane’s Science Fiction Classics A selection of fave Gil Kane stories in Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures

by Hugh Surratt Below: The stunning cover art for Strange Adventures #80 [May. ’57]. Gil Kane pencils and inks and Jack Adler’s graytones.

Although not specifically Space Cabbie, this is a good example of Kane’s self-portraiture.

Spectacular effect!

Next page: Four outstanding Gil Kane covers for DC’s science fiction anthology comics.

From left, Mystery in Space #101 [Aug. ’65], sporting Kane pencils and inks; Mystery in Space #34 [Oct.–Nov. ’56], also with Kane pencils and inks; Strange Adventures #93 [June ’58], yet again with Kane’s pencils and inks; and Mystery in Space #55 [Nov. ’59], another spectacular Kane (pencils) and Adler (wash) collaboration.

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Between Strange Adventures and Mystery In Space, Gil Kane penciled almost 130 stories. A prolific output, indeed, especially considering he was also, at one time or another, simultaneously contributing pencils for Green Lantern, The Atom, Rex the Wonder Dog (pencils and inks), countless other miscellaneous stories, and a multitude of covers.

To drill down and identify his best DC science fiction stories is just too daunting of a task, so I’ve decided to isolate just two aspects of the artist’s work: stories he both penciled and inked, and some of his best covers for those two SF titles.

Surprisingly, out of those 120-plus stories he penciled, Kane only inked a handful — and amazingly, only one during Julius Schwartz’s tenure as editor of DC’s two flagship SF titles, the aforementioned Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space.

Maybe Schwartz assigned other inkers to his work to increase Kane’s productivity or maybe the editor wanted to maintain a certain “house style,” but both probably played roles into these respective assignments. Inkers Bernard Sachs, Joe Giella, and Frank Giacoia rotated over Kane’s pencils (with rare inks provided

by Murphy Anderson), which certainly freed the artist up to generate more work but, even more certainly, the results were similarly stylized, and frankly, homogenized finishes.

I always thought these inkers flattened Kane’s pencils into utter blandness. For my part, his oddball “Space Cabbie” series in MIS was my favorite of from Kane’s work during this era (despite heavy-handed inks by — mainly — Sachs).

And speaking of that interstellar taxi driver, the character’s face, like many of Kane’s other protagonists, was actually somewhat of a self-portrait of the artist himself.

Ironically, after working throughout the ’50s and ’60s on Schwartz’s comics, it was only when Jack Schiff was assigned as editor of SA and MIS that Kane began finishing his own SF pencils. When Schiff took on these

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Strange Adventures TM & © DC Comics. Self-portrait © the estate of Gil Kane.

Inset right: Cover detail from The Comics Journal #113 [Dec. ’86], a self-portrait by the late, great artist, Gil Kane.

[For the previous issue of Comic Book Creator, our Gil Kane retrospective, yours truly asked old pal Hugh Surratt, a tremendous fan of editor Julius Schwartz’s line of science fiction titles at DC Comics, to help with that ish’s somewhat sparse section dealing with the artist’s work in the 1950s.

Hugh was kind enough to deliver, but complications arose, and we are including the man’s list of favorite Kane stories and covers here! Take it away, Surratt! — Y.E.]

comics, he brought along his posse of old cronies from his days on House of Mystery and House of Secrets: Jack Sparling, George Roussous, Mort Meskin, Dick Dillin, Lee Elias, Howard Purcell, Bernard Bailey, etc. These were all old-time veterans from the trenches, and perhaps Schiff counted Kane as one of the old guard, too. Because when “Star Hawkins” was rebooted in Strange Adventures, it was Gil Kane who furnished the full artwork. Unfortunately, the surrounding lackluster work in those comics probably meant that Kane’s gems were overlooked for the most part… nobody bought ’em. But, in fact, the wacky five “Star Hawkins” stories that appeared in SA between 1965 and ‘66 are my favorite SF stories that he produced for DC. Kane also did the complete art for six other SF tales during this period, all of which were also gems, standing out within these comics like solar flares. Check out MIS #101’s “Space Baby” for a good example (for which, incidentally, Kane also did the cover.) Or have a look at the previous issue’s “Secret of the Double Agent.” The story layouts flow seamlessly and crackle with surprising energy. When inking his own pencils, Kane’s work was always looser and more frenetic. Faces were more expressive, spaceships sleeker, aliens more… well, alien.

And, oh, those covers! Gil Kane had long runs of covers for both MIS and SA, many of which he inked himself. As has been mentioned elsewhere many times, apparently Schwartz would meet with his cover artists to hammer out wild ideas for the illustrations. And when Julie did indeed meet with Kane, the results were often jaw-droppingly bizarre: spaceships towing the planet Earth; our planet sealed in a gigantic cosmic “safe”; Earth splitting in two or doubling up with a “counterfeit” Earth; the Fishermen of Space; or Earth as a game of interplanetary tugof-war. Dozens and dozens of ’em, most of which featured a character in the left foreground, looking towards the right background’s action. Reading left to right and drawing the eye into the scene… these are masterful designs. Really, many of Kane’s covers rank as my all-time favorites.

wonder few others have ever achieved. Long with the few stories that he both penciled and inked for those legendary SF titles, they all stand heads and shoulders above the work where his pencils that were finished by Schwartz’s staff inkers.

So, Mr. Esteemed Editor, when you asked me what my favorite Gil Kane DC SF stories are, I’m betting you didn’t count on this response! Of course, this is just one man’s (off-the-wall) opinion.

All covers TM & © DC Comics.

And as a sidebar, Kane also tried his hand with one of comicdom’s greatest space heroes, Adam Strange. He actually penciled the covers for the character’s first ten adventures in Showcase and MIS. (Though only once did the artist draw an “Adam Strange” episode, in Strange Adventures #222 [Jan.–Feb. 1970], a story inked by the great Murphy Anderson.

Once again, Kane’s finished cover art for Mystery In Space and Strange Adventures had that palpable kinetic energy and spectacular sense of

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#3: ADAMS AT MARVEL #4: WARREN PUBLISHING

#5: MORE DC 1967-74

#1: DC COMICS 1967-74

#2: MARVEL 1970-77

Era of “Artist as Editor” at National: New NEAL ADAMS cover, interviews, art, and articles with JOE KUBERT, JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, DICK GIORDANO, JOE ORLANDO, MIKE SEKOWSKY, ALEX TOTH, JULIE SCHWARTZ, and many more!

Plus ADAMS thumbnails for a forgotten Batman story, unseen NICK CARDY pages from a controversial Teen Titans story, unpublished TOTH covers, and more!

STAN LEE AND ROY THOMAS discussion about Marvel in the 1970s, ROY THOMAS interview, BILL EVERETT’s daughter WENDY and MIKE FRIEDRICH on Everett, interviews with GIL KANE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, JIM STARLIN, STEVE ENGLEHART, MIKE PLOOG, STERANKO’s Unknown Marvels, the real origin of the New X-Men, Everett tribute cover by GIL KANE, and more!

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#6: MORE MARVEL ’70s #7: ’70s MARVELMANIA

NEAL ADAMS interview about his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s from AVENGERS to X-MEN, unpublished Adams covers, thumbnail layouts for classic stories, published pages BEFORE they were inked, and unused pages from his NEVER-COMPLETED X-MEN GRAPHIC NOVEL! Plus TOM PALMER on the art of inking Neal Adams, ADAMS’ MARVEL WORK CHECKLIST, & ADAMS wraparound cover!

Definitive JIM WARREN interview about publishing EERIE, CREEPY, VAMPIRELLA, and other fan favorites, in-depth interview with BERNIE WRIGHTSON with unpublished Warren art, plus unseen art, features and interviews with FRANK FRAZETTA, RICHARD CORBEN, AL WILLIAMSON, JACK DAVIS, ARCHIE GOODWIN, HARVEY KURTZMAN, ALEX NINO, and more!

BERNIE WRIGHTSON cover!

More on DC COMICS 1967-74, with art by and interviews with NICK CARDY, JOE SIMON, NEAL ADAMS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, MIKE KALUTA, SAM GLANZMAN, MARV WOLFMAN, IRWIN DONENFELD, SERGIO ARAGONÉS, GIL KANE, DENNY O’NEIL, HOWARD POST, ALEX TOTH on FRANK ROBBINS, DC Writer’s Purge of 1968 by MIKE BARR, JOHN BROOME’s final interview, and more! CARDY cover!

Unpublished and rarely-seen art by, features on, and interviews with 1970s Bullpenners PAUL GULACY, FRANK BRUNNER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, MARIE and JOHN SEVERIN, JOHN ROMITA SR., DAVE COCKRUM, DON MCGREGOR, DOUG MOENCH, and others! Plus never-beforeseen pencil pages to an unpublished Master of Kung-Fu graphic novel by PAUL GULACY! Cover by FRANK BRUNNER!

Featuring ’70s Marvel greats PAUL GULACY, JOHN BYRNE, RICH BUCKLER, DOUG MOENCH, DAN ADKINS, JIM MOONEY, STEVE GERBER, FRANK SPRINGER, and DENIS KITCHEN! Plus: a rarely-seen Stan Lee P.R. chat promoting the ’60s Marvel cartoon shows, the real trials and tribulations of Comics Distribution, the true story behind the ’70s Kung Fu Craze, and a new cover by PAUL GULACY!

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#10: WALTER SIMONSON

#11: ALEX TOTH AND SHELLY MAYER

#8: ’80s INDEPENDENTS

#9: CHARLTON PART 1

Major independent creators and their fabulous books from the early days of the Direct Sales Market! Featured interviews include STEVE RUDE, HOWARD CHAYKIN, DAVE STEVENS, JAIME HERNANDEZ, MICHAEL T. GILBERT, DON SIMPSON, SCOTT McCLOUD, MIKE BARON, MIKE GRELL, and more! Plus plenty of rare and unpublished art, and a new STEVE RUDE cover!

Interviews with Charlton alumni JOE GILL, DICK GIORDANO, STEVE SKEATES, DENNIS O’NEIL, ROY THOMAS, PETE MORISI, JIM APARO, PAT BOYETTE, FRANK MCLAUGHLIN, SAM GLANZMAN, plus ALAN MOORE on the Charlton/ Watchmen Connection, DC’s planned ALLCHARLTON WEEKLY, and more! DICK GIORDANO cover!

Career-spanning SIMONSON INTERVIEW, covering his work from “Manhunter” to Thor to Orion, JOHN WORKMAN interview, TRINA ROBBINS interview, also Trina, MARIE SEVERIN and RAMONA FRADON talk shop about their days in the comics business, MARIE SEVERIN interview, plus other great women cartoonists. New SIMONSON cover!

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Interviews with ALEX TOTH, Toth tributes

by KUBERT, SIMONSON, JIM LEE, BOLLAND, GIBBONS and others, TOTH on continuity art, TOTH checklist, plus SHELDON MAYER SECTION with a look at SCRIBBLY, interviews with Mayer’s kids (real-life inspiration for SUGAR & SPIKE), and more! Covers by TOTH and MAYER!

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#12: CHARLTON PART 2

CHARLTON COMICS: 1972-1983!

Interviews with Charlton alumni GEORGE WILDMAN, NICOLA CUTI, JOE STATON, JOHN BYRNE, TOM SUTTON, MIKE ZECK, JACK KELLER, PETE MORISI, WARREN SATTLER, BOB LAYTON, ROGER STERN, and others, ALEX TOTH, a NEW E-MAN STRIP by CUTI AND STATON, and the art of DON NEWTON! STATON cover!

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#13: MARVEL HORROR

#14: TOWER COMICS & WALLY WOOD

#15: 1980s VANGUARD & DAVE STEVENS

#16: ATLAS/SEABOARD COMICS

#17: ARTHUR ADAMS

1970s Marvel Horror focus, from Son of Satan to Ghost Rider! Interviews with ROY THOMAS, MARV WOLFMAN, GENE COLAN, TOM PALMER, HERB TRIMPE, GARY FRIEDRICH, DON PERLIN, TONY ISABELLA, and PABLOS MARCOS, plus a Portfolio Section featuring RUSS HEATH, MIKE PLOOG, DON PERLIN, PABLO MARCOS, FRED HEMBECK’S DATELINE, and more! New GENE COLAN cover!

Interviews with Tower and THUNDER AGENTS alumni WALLACE WOOD, LOU MOUGIN, SAMM SCHWARTZ, DAN ADKINS, LEN BROWN, BILL PEARSON, LARRY IVIE, GEORGE TUSKA, STEVE SKEATES, and RUSS JONES, TOWER COMICS CHECKLIST, history of TIPPY TEEN, 1980s THUNDER AGENTS REVIVAL, and more! WOOD cover!

Interviews with ’80s independent creators DAVE STEVENS, JAIME, MARIO, AND GILBERT HERNANDEZ, MATT WAGNER, DEAN MOTTER, PAUL RIVOCHE, and SANDY PLUNKETT, plus lots of rare and unseen art from The Rocketeer, Love & Rockets, Mr. X, Grendel, other ’80s strips, and more! New cover by STEVENS and the HERNANDEZ BROS.!

’70s ATLAS COMICS HISTORY! Interviews with JEFF ROVIN, ROY THOMAS, ERNIE COLÓN, STEVE MITCHELL, LARRY HAMA, HOWARD CHAYKIN, SAL AMENDOLA, JIM CRAIG, RIC MEYERS, and ALAN KUPPERBERG, Atlas Checklist, HEATH, WRIGHTSON, SIMONSON, MILGROM, AUSTIN, WEISS, and STATON discuss their Atlas work, and more! COLÓN cover!

Discussion with ARTHUR ADAMS about his career (with an extensive CHECKLIST, and gobs of rare art), plus GRAY MORROW tributes from friends and acquaintances and a MORROW interview, Red Circle Comics Checklist, interviews with & remembrances of GEORGE ROUSSOS & GEORGE EVANS, Gallery of Morrow, Evans, and Roussos art, EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER interview, and more! New ARTHUR ADAMS cover!

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#18: 1970s MARVEL COSMIC COMICS

#19: HARVEY COMICS

#20: ROMITAs & KUBERTs #21: ADAM HUGHES, ALEX #22: GOLD KEY COMICS & examinations: RUSS MANNING ROSS, & JOHN BUSCEMA &Interviews Magnus Robot Fighter, WALLY WOOD &

Roundtable with JIM STARLIN, ALAN WEISS and AL MILGROM, interviews with STEVE ENGLEHART, STEVE LEIALOHA, and FRANK BRUNNER, art from the lost WARLOCK #16, plus a FLO STEINBERG CELEBRATION, with a Flo interview, tributes by HERB TRIMPE, LINDA FITE, BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH, and others! STARLIN/ MILGROM/WEISS cover!

History of Harvey Comics, from Hot Stuf’, Casper, and Richie Rich, to Joe Simon’s “Harvey Thriller” line! Interviews with, art by, and tributes to JACK KIRBY, STERANKO, WILL EISNER, AL WILLIAMSON, GIL KANE, WALLY WOOD, REED CRANDALL, JOE SIMON, WARREN KREMER, ERNIE COLÓN, SID JACOBSON, FRED RHOADES, and more! New wraparound MITCH O’CONNELL cover!

Joint interview between Marvel veteran and superb Spider-Man artist JOHN ROMITA, SR. and fan favorite Thor/Hulk renderer JOHN ROMITA, JR.! On the flipside, JOE, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT share their histories and influences in a special roundtable conversation! Plus unpublished and rarely seen artwork, and a visit by the ladies VIRGINIA and MURIEL! Flip-covers by the KUBERTs and the ROMITAs!

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#23: MIKE MIGNOLA

#24: NATIONAL LAMPOON COMICS

#25: ALAN MOORE AND KEVIN NOWLAN

Exhaustive MIGNOLA interview, huge art gallery (with never-seen art), and comprehensive checklist! On the flip-side, a careerspanning JILL THOMPSON interview, plus tons of art, and studies of Jill by ALEX ROSS, STEVE RUDE, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, and more! Also, interview with JOSÉ DELBO, and a talk with author HARLAN ELLISON on his various forays into comics!

New MIGNOLA HELLBOY cover!

GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS speak, interviews with and art by NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and more! Features new covers by GAHAN WILSON and MARK BODÉ!

Focus on AMERICA’S BEST COMICS! ALAN MOORE interview on everything from SWAMP THING to WATCHMEN to ABC and beyond! Interviews with KEVIN O’NEILL, CHRIS SPROUSE, JIM BAIKIE, HILARY BARTA, SCOTT DUNBIER, TODD KLEIN, JOSE VILLARRUBIA, and more! Flip-side spotlight on the amazing KEVIN NOWLAN! Covers by J.H. WILLIAMS III & NOWLAN!

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ADAM HUGHES ART ISSUE, with a comprehensive interview, unpublished art, & CHECKLIST! Also, a “Day in the Life” of ALEX ROSS (with plenty of Ross art)! Plus a tribute to the life and career of one of Marvel’s greatest artists, JOHN BUSCEMA, with testimonials from his friends and peers, art section, and biographical essay.

HUGHES and TOM PALMER flip-covers!

Total War M.A.R.S. Patrol, Tarzan by JESSE MARSH, JESSE SANTOS and DON GLUT’S Dagar and Dr. Spektor, Turok, Son of Stone’s ALBERTO GIOLITTI and PAUL S. NEWMAN, plus Doctor Solar, Boris Karloff, The Twilight Zone, and more, including MARK EVANIER on cartoon comics, and a definitive company history! New BRUCE TIMM cover!

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COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #1

COMIC BOOK ARTIST: SPECIAL EDITION #2

Previously available only to CBA subscribers!

Spotlights great DC Comics of the ’70s: Interviews with MARK EVANIER and STEVE SHERMAN on JACK KIRBY’s Fourth World, ALEX TOTH on his mystery work, NEAL ADAMS on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, RUSS HEATH on Sgt. Rock, BRUCE JONES discussing BERNIE WRIGHTSON (plus a WRIGHTSON portfolio), and a BRUCE TIMM interview, art gallery, and cover!

Compiles the new “extras” from CBA COLLECTION VOL. 1-3: unpublished JACK KIRBY story, unpublished BERNIE WRIGHTSON art, unused JEFF JONES story, ALAN WEISS interview, examination of STEVE ENGLEHART and MARSHALL ROGERS’ 1970s Batman work, a look at DC’s rare Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, PAUL GULACY art gallery, Marvel Value Stamp history, Mr. Monster’s scrapbook, and more!

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Edited by JON B. COOKE, COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the Eisner and Harvey Award nominated magazine, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics—focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. It’s the follow-up to Jon’s multi-Eisner Award winning COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine.

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Former COMIC BOOK ARTIST editor JON B. COOKE returns to TwoMorrows with his new magazine! CBC #1 features: An investigation of the treatment JACK KIRBY endured throughout his career, ALEX ROSS and KURT BUSIEK interviews, FRANK ROBBINS spotlight, remembering LES DANIELS, a talk between NEAL ADAMS and DENNIS O’NEIL, new ALEX ROSS cover, and more!

JOE KUBERT double-size tribute issue!

With comprehensive examinations of each facet of Joe’s career, from Golden Age artist and 3-D comics pioneer, to top Tarzan artist, editor, and founder of the Kubert School. KUBERT INTERVIEWS, rare art, testimonials, remembrances, portraits, anecdotes, and interviews with JOE KUBERT, ADAM & ANDY KUBERT, RUSS HEATH, and FRANK THORNE!

NEAL ADAMS vigorously responds to critics of his BATMAN: ODYSSEY mini-series in an in-depth interview, with plenty of amazing artwork! Plus: SEAN HOWE on his hit book MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY; MARK WAID interview, part one; Harbinger writer JOSHUA DYSART; Part Two of our LES DANIELS remembrance; classic cover painter EARL NOREM interviewed, a new ADAMS cover, and more!

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RUSS HEATH career-spanning interview, essay on Heath’s work by S.C. RINGGENBERG (and Heath art gallery), MORT TODD on working with STEVE DITKO, a profile of alt cartoonist DAN GOLDMAN, part two of our MARK WAID interview, DENYS COWAN on his DJANGO series, VIC BLOOM and THE SECRET ORIGIN OF ARCHIE ANDREWS, HEMBECK, new KEVIN NOWLAN cover!

DENIS KITCHEN close-up—from cartoonist, publisher, author, and art agent, to his friendships with HARVEY KURTZMAN, R. CRUMB, WILL EISNER, and many others!

Plus we look at the triumphant final splash of the late, great BILL EVERETT, Prof.

CAROL L. TILLEY discusses the shoddy research and falsified evidence in the book SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, DENYS COWAN interview part two, and more!

SWAMPMEN: MUCK-MONSTERS OF THE COMICS dredges up The Heap! ManThing! Swamp Thing! Marvin the Dead Thing! Bog Beast! The Lurker and It! and other creepy man-critters of the 1970s bayou! Features interviews with WRIGHTSON, MOORE, PLOOG, WEIN, GERBER, BISSETTE, VEITCH, MAYERIK, MOONEY, TOTLEBEN, VEITCH, and others. FRANK CHO cover!

Huge career-spanning BERNIE WRIGHTSON interview on his life and art—from his fannish days, Swamp Thing, Frankenstein, and work with STEPHEN KING, to his ghoulish movie work (Ghostbusters, The Thing, etc.). Plus Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror’s BILL MORRISON; interview with BATTON LASH, feature on HARDMAN & BECHKO, RICHARD BRUNING, HEMBECK, and more!

The creators of Madman and Flaming Carrot—MIKE ALLRED & BOB BURDEN— share a cover and provide comprehensive interviews and art galore, plus BILL SCHELLY is interviewed about his new HARVEY KURTZMAN biography; we present the conclusion of our BATTON LASH interview; STAN LEE on his final European comic convention tour; fanfavorite HEMBECK, and more!

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JOE STATON on his comics career (from E-MAN, to co-creating The Huntress, and his current stint on the Dick Tracy comic strip), plus we showcase the lost treasure GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS drawn by Joe! Plus, Part One of our interview with the late STAN GOLDBERG, JOHN WORKMAN’s Mighty Aphrodite, GEORGE KHOURY talks with artist LEILA LEIZ, plus HEMBECK and more!

WARP examined! Massive PETER BAGGE retrospective! It’s a double focus on the Broadway sci-fi epic, with a comprehensive feature including art director NEAL ADAMS and director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, plus cast and crew! Also a career-spanning conversation with the man of HATE! and NEAT STUFF on the real story behind Buddy Bradley! Plus the revival of MIRACLEMAN, Captain Marvel’s 75th birthday, and more!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our tribute to the late HERB TRIMPE, interview with PAUL LEVITZ about his new book Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel, and more!

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BLUE BEETLE COMPANION (REMASTERED)

CHRIS IRVING follows the Blue Beetle’s 60+ years of evolution—from 1940s Fox Comics to Charlton Comics, to today’s DC Comics, including infamous Golden Age publisher Victor Fox, the Blue Beetle radio show, and Jack “King” Kirby’s Blue Beetle comic strip. Reprints the 1939 debut of The Blue Beetle from Mystery Men Comics #1! Featuring interviews with WILL EISNER, JOE SIMON, JOE GILL, ROY THOMAS, GEOFF JOHNS, CULLY HAMNER, KEITH GIFFEN, LEN WEIN, and others, plus never-seen Blue Beetle designs by ALEX ROSS and ALAN WEISS, as well as artwork by WILL EISNER, CHARLES NICHOLAS, STEVE DITKO, KEVIN MAGUIRE, and more!

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comics in the library

Bound for Glory (& Durability) Judging a book by its cover — the sturdiness thereof — is essential for the buyer

All are TM & © Wayne Vansant

by RicHard J. Arndt CBC Contributing Editor I can’t speak for public libraries, but school libraries buy their books from three basic sources: book distributors, re-binding jobbers, and local book stores. Not all book distributors work well with libraries. School libraries order the books with a purchase order. Payment is never sent until the order is completely filled. Some distributors just don’t like dealing with that. The book distributor I usually use is Ingram’s Library Services. They ship the books fairly quickly. They provide a decent discount on the books themselves and have a very wide selection of regular books, both for the adult and children’s market. However, I’ve done less and less business with them over the years, not because of their service, but because the regular book publishers’ product that they sell is becoming increasing shoddy.

A book has to survive at least ten checkouts for the library’s cost to be absorbed. The bindings on many regular books, particularly for the adult and graphic novel, are not strong enough to endure a 12-year-old kid putting it in his backpack and hauling it around for several weeks. I’ve literally seen students play dodge ball with their backpacks.

Kicking them, throwing them in the air, using them as footrests or seats. A book’s gotta be tough to survive that.

Back when graphic hardcovers first started to appear, they were terribly bound. Marvel’s early Masterworks series cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $45–50 dollars apiece — two to three times the cost of a regular young adult hardcover — and were falling apart after the first checkout. Huge chunks of the interior pages would come loose and fall out of the book. Things are much better nowadays.

Buying a somewhat cheaper paperback version just won’t do as a substitute. Even paperback spines and covers that the librarian has reinforced with sturdy book tape rarely last more than two checkouts. The shoddier the book looks, the less likely it is that a student will pick it up to read.

So more of my purchasing goes to jobbers. Jobbers are companies that purchase paperbacks and hardcovers and rebind them with a sturdier cover. The original book’s cover art is still there but the book has gone from a book that may only last two or three checkouts to one that should, with reasonable care, last the ten checkouts needed.

There used to be quite a number of jobbers out there, but there’s really only three left standing after a decade or so of company takeovers. They are Follett, Perma-Bound, and Bound-to-Stay-Bound Books. All of them issue catalogs, both online and in print, and all feature graphic novels. Many of those graphic novels, however, are from traditional children’s publishers like Lerner, HarperCollins, Scholastic, and the like. The comic book publishers are there but they are a distinct minority. The K-6 grade catalog displays quite a number of the DC and Marvel books, but the Middle School and High School library show quite a bit less. Dark Horse, Archie, IDW, BOOM!, and the rest of the mainstream publishers have very little presence.

The traditional book publishers have distinct related-interest lines of books, not just individual titles, aimed at different age levels. The comic book publishers have Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

nothing like that. What books they have in the catalog are an extremely haphazard bunch.

Perma-Bound, for example, routinely sells the Grant Morrisonand Paul Dini-written Batman R.I.P., a graphic “novel” that rams together four or five different Batman titles into one fat book, the whole mess dealing with one of those unending and entirely forgettable “crossover” events. However, that book makes very little sense without ready access to the Batman graphic novel that went right before it. In addition, the climax is anti-climactic if you can’t read the next book in the series. Both the preceding and following graphic novel appear to be out of print. And none of these books were ever presented as a book line that should be read or — more importantly for the publisher — purchased in order.

I wished to get Wayne Vansant’s top-notch war books in my library but I was hampered by the fact that the publisher, Zenith, only published them in paperback, which I don’t buy.

I called the acquisition departments of both Follett and Perma-Bound to ask them if they could acquire some of those books and hard-bind them for my library. They were not only happy to do it, but the new re-bound versions of Vansant’s books were available for me to purchase within two weeks of my calling. Both the Follett and Perma-Bound reps told me I was the first librarian since they’d been working for the acquisition department to ever call them directly and ask for a particular set of books to be acquired for re-binding.

Sometimes all it takes is one request to get something really cool done. Just one person asking.

Not only that, but I was also informed that no comic book publisher had ever contacted either of the jobber’s acquisition departments to see how they could sell their books better or to a particular age group or market. The ladies acquiring books for re-binding were picking books from Marvel or DC by just looking at the forthcoming graphic novel book covers and picking ones that looked like they had a good cover and might tie into an upcoming movie.

Not the best way to sell books.

Finally, just a curious question, Junior Library Guild is the premiere subscription book seller to libraries in the country. Each of their subscriptions send a purchasing library a dozen new books a year. I personally have five different subscriptions with them for 60 new books, five books a month. They have three very good graphic novel lines for grades K–6, 7–9, and 10–12. Thirty-six new, current graphic novels a year, sent to hundreds of different libraries. Not a single one is from a mainstream comic book publisher. Not one. Why? Next: The Mythology books (I promise!)

This page: Cartoonist Wayne Vansant’s books devoted to war are the result of a lifelong fascination with the subject, born from being the son of a World War II veteran. His books include a history of the D-Day invasion (top) and his three-volume series devoted to teenage Ukranian Nazi-fighter Katusha (above), published by Grand Design Communications.

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Miracleman TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Cpry Sed;meier photo by and © Bruce Guthrie.

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

16

THE ROAD from

APOKOLIPS All characters TM & © DC Comics. Art © 2016 Steve Rude. Photo © the respective copyright holder.

Jack Kirby’s search for the awesome in the Fourth World “I know the names of the stars. I know how near or far the heavenly bodies are from our own planet. I know our own place in the universe. I can feel the vastness of it inside myself. I began to realize with each passing fact what a wonderful and awesome place the universe is, and that helped me in comics because I was looking for the awesome.” — Jack Kirby, The Comics Journal #134

The New Age

In the early months of the young decade, the company had seen better days. Its major competitor was bearing down, forcing the outfit to rethink strategy and consider innovative, radical new approaches. Their rival had brilliantly developed a cohesive universe in their comics, with characters interacting and teaming up in a shared realm, an inventiveness that sparked readership attention — and response. The bothersome business adversary actively interacted with that coveted audience with pithy and informative letter columns, filled with friendly, chatty editorial responses to the oft ecstatic missives (which would include the printed addresses of the letter writers), connecting enthusiasts to one another all over the nation. Lines were being drawn with readers becoming ever more partisan in brand preference. Fandom was growing and the company, Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

exhausted from the vagaries and boom-and-busts of the field, began looking beyond the office to enlist a creative giant to shift the paradigm. A master of the form — a king, if you will — was needed to shake up the publisher’s line and hold back the competition’s onslaught, one ravenous to gobble up ever-larger slices of the marketplace.

Such was the situation not only at DC Comics in 1970, but at down-in-the-dumps Marvel in 1961. Stan Lee, facing limping sales of the line’s monster, Millie the Model, and Western genre titles, received a dictate from publisher Martin Goodman to appropriate competitor DC’s super-team concept (or so goes the perhaps apocryphal story). The Justice League of America, which joined fan-friendly editor Julie Schwartz’s revamped super-heroes in their own clubhouse, was igniting kids’ imaginations and fledgling fandom was all atwitter with this new cohesive universe.

Marvel’s own mystery-men characters had been mothballed long since a half-hearted attempt or two to resuscitate the genre, and aside from a period in the ’40s, before the All-Winners Squad became losers under a deluge of crime, horror, and humor titles, there was rarely any notion for a tangible “world” in which the Timely characters would interact. Few, it seemed, had the imagination to contemplate such an inventive ambiance.

Top: Jack Kirby by his Thousand Oaks, California poolside, in a 1971 photo by Bill Bridges. This portrait appeared in The New York Times Sunday magazine, May 2, 1971.

Essay by

Jon B. Cooke Art by

Steve Rude Coloring by

Glenn Whitmore 17

a quasi-super-heroic series, was adapted (perhaps an unconscious spiting of litigious Jack Schiff, editor of the DC series and Kirby’s recent courtroom adversary?), though the co-creators expertly finessed a more refined take on the notion of a quartet of adventurers transformed through extraordinary experience. On top of their atomic age conception of the characters altered by mutating cosmic rays during a brief jaunt into space, Kirby and Lee bring to the future “World’s Greatest Comic Book” a novel concept — for super-hero stories, anyway — one that added a familial bond between team members, each with their own foibles.

What made The Fantastic Four of immediate appeal was certainly the exploding Kirby imagination, artistic excellence, and storytelling expertise; but there was also the family dynamic inherent in the foursome’s rocky relationship with one another, which added a resonance and offered ample fodder for an ongoing series. And, expanding beyond the exploits of Reed Richards, Benjamin Grimm, and Susan and Johnny Storm (the latter, an echo of the imprint’s bygone golden age, sharing both an alias and ability with a ’40s Timely super-hero, the Human Torch), the makings of an interconnected universe came into focus by the winter following their debut, with the explicit revival of another long dormant character, the Sub-Mariner, in FF #4 [May ’62], linking the group to the imprint’s World War II-era roster of costumed characters.

The same month Kirby and Lee resurrected Bill Everett’s Prince Namor, a wholly new player in the burgeoning Marvel milieu exploded onto the racks: The Incredible Hulk, the pair’s green giant part-monster, part-hero. Two months later, the collaborators conjured up their mythological Norse god, the Mighty Thor (hitting the spinner displays along with the first Spider-Man comic book, a Lee/Ditko creation), and thirty days after that, in September ’62, there came AntMan. In October, the duo joined with writer and Lee sibling Larry Leiber on a FF spin-off series starring the Human Torch.

An Expanding Universe

Above: Jack Kirby’s selfportrait featuring many of his Marvel Universe co-creations.

This piece was originally drawn for a 1969 Marvelmania portfolio. Color by Tom Ziuko.

Below: Stan Lee (left) and Jack Kirby in 1965.

* For a thorough examination of the Jack Kirby/Jack Schiff squabble, please refer to “The Story Behind Sky Masters,” The Jack Kirby Collector #15, Apr. 1997, by this writer.

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* *This is not to imply that Marvel, which would shed the Atlas company name on comics cover-dated July 1961, was not already a significant account for the man. Within the Marvel releases cover-dated 1960 — remember, this was while Kirby was producing a daily newspaper strip — the creator completed 415 pages (including covers) for Goodman’s outfit: though in indicia year 1961, that output would more than double to 993. With Kirby working almost exclusively for the publisher, the imprint developed a title virtually custom-made for the creator, the short-lived but lively Amazing Adventures, which would immediately morph by year’s end, upon Kirby taking on The Fantastic Four assignment, into Amazing Adult Fantasy, a showcase for Marvel’s other major artistic contributor, Steve Ditko. #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Art © the Estate of Jack Kirby.

Lucky for Goodman and his wife’s cousin, Stan Lee, there was one of the most creative comic book visionaries, suddenly available for full-time work. Jack Kirby, having a tough go of it lately, was still stinging from a humiliating legal suit brought against him by an editor at DC* (where the creator had became persona non grata) and he had just lost his daily newspaper strip assignment due to syndicate cancellation. That science-fiction feature, Sky Masters of the Space Force, had experienced a strong start in those post-Sputnik days of 1958, debuting in a reputed 300 papers.

But, by early 1961, after 774 daily strips and 53 Sunday episides, the exquisitely rendered strip about an astronaut of the near future sputtered and crashed. The artist, responsible for keeping a housebound wife, two teenagers, a nine-year-old, and now a newborn fed and sheltered (in a suburban, heavily mortgaged Long Island home), was at a desperate turning point.

Though he had been taking on freelance assignments for Lee pretty steadily since the company’s 1957 brush with death, Kirby was suddenly in need of more page-rate work and the Marvel editor/chief writer just as urgently needed a super-hero concept to counter the DC Silver Age explosion.** Thus, in the spring of ’61, the pair hammered out a science-fiction proposal that resembled a Kirby co-creation of recent years for that rival publisher. Whether intentional or not, the general idea of Challengers of the Unknown,

By early 1963, the Marvel Universe was increasing exponentially. Lee and Kirby authored a story in the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, where the title character hoped to join the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk, whose own comic book had been cancelled that same month, gets into an epic knockdown, donnybrook with The Thing, in FF #12.

These crossovers formalized the conceit that the super-heroes existed in a shared setting — most of them populating not some metropolis with a made-up name, but the real-world New York City — a development stimulated by one simple fact: the Marvel comics line, under the creative direction of Lee, Kirby, and Ditko, was a breakout success, now snapping at the heels of rival DC. In 1961, the company had sold less than 19 million copies of its comic books; by late ’65, Lee boasted to a reporter that sales had increased to 35 million. In 1968, that number grew to 50 million; by 1971, it would be 70 million. Much of the ever-increasing circulation was doubtlessly due to an influx of older readers, many responding not only to the interlocking and thrilling storylines, but also to the pithy, hip

Characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Art © the Estate of Jack Kirby.

A Prophet in His Own Land

Jack Kirby had, thus far, produced thousands of pages of comic book art depicting Marvel Universe characters. But the creator contributed far more than just the penciled Bristol boards, as the artist had almost always plotted his own assignments when in collaboration with Lee. With or without a verbal (often barebones) outline from the credited writer (only one FF script and handful of plotlines by Lee exist on paper), Kirby and the small stable of his freelance peers at the publisher produced work using a creative process ultimately deemed the “Marvel Method.” This technique was a radical departure of comic book production from before and since, a system which traditionally

KIRBY’S KINGDOM • ALEX ROSS • KURT BUSIEK • TODD McFARLANE • FRANK ROBBINS • LES DANIELS • DENNIS O’NEIL & NEAL ADAMS • DERF BACKDERF • HEMBECK • KUPPERBERG

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

Man” Lee, and for very good reason: in just four years, Marvel had nearly doubled circulation and expanded its stable of characters from four to easily fourteen dozen, the overwhelming majority conceived, designed, and drawn by Kirby. And, as its output gained the avid interest of kids and college students alike, licensing offers came into the office (to sanction cartoon shows, model kits, and bubble gum cards, to name but three) and, with the spotlight dimming on the Caped Crusader’s TV show, the national media pivoted to Marvel, giving unprecedented attention to a single comics publisher.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #1

personality exuded by the entire brand, exemplified by editor/writer Lee’s snappy and irreverent cover blurbs; snarky, witty retorts in the magazines’ letters pages; and his engaging creation of the Marvel Bullpen myth through his “Stan’s Soapbox” columns in the “Bullpen Bulletin” pages, which was fortified with the “Merry Marvel Marching Society” fan club, all giving the illusion that the freelancers (who, in those early years, almost without exception worked from home) congregated and bounced off the walls as they drew comics in the company’s Madison Avenue office.

Of course, it was the characters and the stories, those created by Kirby, Ditko, and Lee, that drove sales of the twelve-cent books. The Marvel Universe exploits were, month after month, growing in sophistication and depth (for super-hero comics), and attracting older aficionados of college age, as well as siphoning off competitor share. And the increased circulation emboldened the creators to have continued storylines over multiple issues, giving opportunity to improve characterization and also create mini-epics, with crossovers becoming commonplace. By Summer ’63, headliners were borrowed from their own books and brought together as a team with “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” the Avengers, yet another Kirby and Lee creation.

During those years, even while its output posed an ever-widening threat to their competitor’s market share, Marvel was perennially in the shadow of National Periodical Publications (the rival’s official moniker), whose supremacy was anchored by the newsstand dominance of the Superman family titles. DC Comics was even in charge of the House of Ideas’ distribution, limiting the number of titles the underdog could release, a constraint that would remain until 1968. And suddenly, by mid-decade, the monolithic rival would steal the publicity spotlight from the rival’s new super-hero brand and see its sales bolstered with a sensation-inducing twice-weekly television adaptation of DC’s second most popular costumed character, Batman.

As Batmania and its campy spawn swept the nation in 1966, a riot of smaller comics publishers jumped into the super-hero game, and publisher Martin Goodman delivered an edict that Marvel needed to expand its character roster and stave off the interlopers. Lee and Kirby, ever dutiful, promptly developed the Inhumans and the Black Panther. In the few years prior, the creative team had already launched a second wave that included (with Lee’s brother) Iron Man, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, the X-Men, and re-introduced a 1940s Kirby co-creation, Captain America, who would do double-duty with his own series as well as anchor the Avengers title.

By that Year of the Bat, Kirby’s creativity was expanding the boundaries of the Marvel Universe to realms unimagined, whether conceiving of an oppressed tribe called the Inhumans; offering a thinly-veiled version of God himself as a character named Galactus; introducing a cosmic “fallen angel” analogue with the Silver Surfer; or debuting the Black Panther, the first Black super-hero. All of these achievements took over a span of nine issues in a single title, The Fantastic Four (a run which incidentally included “This Man, This Monster,” a tale unrelated to the foregoing epics and considered by many to be the single best issue of that lauded series). Simultaneous to these landmark accomplishments, the creator was contributing stories to Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Nick Fury, and the X-Men. His output during that nine-month period amounted to 833 pages of penciled art.

Kirby’s inventiveness was, up until that time, unparalleled in the history of the form. Since the beginning of the “Marvel Age of Comics,” the creator had enthusiastically contributed a breathtaking assortment of characters and concepts that continue to enrich the company owners to the present day. Steeled by a work ethic forged during the Great Depression to always give his all — and then some — to whoever signed the check, the creative genius was anointed with the nickname “King Kirby” by Stan “The

ALEX ROSS keeps it real

Mulling an independent life..................p.24

KURT BUSIEK V2.0

™

The Astro City writer revitalized ......p.36

FRANK ROBBINS by Michael Aushenker

The cartoonist’s Mexican sunset ........ p.8

TODD McFARLANE by George Khoury

Spawn-man’s Show-All Book........p.12

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T h e

N e w

A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n

V o i C e

o f

T h e

No. 1, Spring 2013

C o M i C S

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82658 97073

M e d i u M

p.48

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$8.95 in the USA

Cover art by Alex Ross

Above: This essay is a companion piece to article, “Kirby’s Kingdom: The Commerce of Art,” in CBC #1. Below: Another Marvelmania piece, this one featuring Galactus and his herald, The Silver Surfer (a sole Kirby creation.

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characters and concepts of his co-creation, the ever-enlarging Marvel Universe. By most accounts, co-workers and visitors found Lee to be an affable and engaging fellow, as well as a shameless self-promoter always hungry for attention. But, so what? Comics’ number one cheerleader was considered by most to be a pretty decent boss.

But imagine another scenario where that story conference has a non-participating witness, one who happens to be feature writer for arguably the second most respected newspaper in your city, the greatest and most influential municipality on the entire planet. Well, considering your creative partner is a publicity hound and masterful marketer adept at pitching his favorite brand, Smiling Stan Lee, a guy you’ve seen jump on furniture and romp about the office to emphasize story developments, you might be at a disadvantage when it comes to getting any fair share of media attention. Weeks later, long after the reporter has left Lee’s office, consider the following excerpt is what you read, at the urgent request of a distraught wife, upon opening the magazine section of that paper early one January morning: NOTE: This essay utilizes quotes and information from the following sources: The Nostalgia Journal #27 The Comics Journal #30-31, 134 The Comics Journal Library, Volume One: Jack Kirby The Jack Kirby Collector (various issues) The Jack Kirby Quarterly #8, 9 Comic Book Artist #1 Comic Book Artist Special Edition #1 Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1 Jack Kirby’s Forever People Kirby: King of Comics

by Mark Evanier The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby by Charles Hatfield The New York Herald Tribune New York magazine Jan. 9, 1966 The New York Times Magazine May 2, 1971 Esquire magazine September 1966 The Kirby Museum website www.kirbymuseum.org

* Lee is quoted as admitting, “I don’t plot Spider-Man any more. Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plot lines I told him to start making up his own stories. He won’t let anybody else ink his drawings either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he’ll come up with next, but it’s interesting to work that way.” — Nat Freedland, “Super Heroes with Super Problems,” New York Herald Tribune, New York magazine, Jan. 9, 1966.

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Lee arrives at his plots in sort of ESP sessions with the artists. He inserts his dialogue after the picture layout comes in. Here he is in action at his weekly Friday morning summit meeting with Jack “King” Kirby, a veteran comic book artist, a man who created many of the visions of your childhood and mine. The King is a middle-aged man with baggy eyes and a baggy Robert Hall-ish suit. He is sucking a huge green cigar and if you stood next to him on the subway you would peg him for the assistant foreman in a girdle factory.

“The Silver Surfer has been somewhere out in space since he helped the F.F. stop Galactus from destroying Earth,” begins Lee. “Why don’t we bring him back?”

“Ummh,” says Kirby.

“Suppose Alicia, the Thing’s blind girl friend, is in some kind of trouble. And the Silver Surfer comes to help her.” Lee starts pacing and gesturing as he gets warmed up.

“I see,” says Kirby. He has kind of a high-pitched voice.

“But the Thing sees them together and he misunderstands. So he starts a big fight with the Silver Surfer.

And meanwhile, the Fantastic Four is in lots of trouble.

Doctor Doom has caught them again and they need the Thing’s help.” Lee is lurching around and throwing punches now.

“Right,” says Kirby.

“The Thing finally beats the Silver Surfer. But then Alicia makes him realize he’s made a terrible mistake.

This is what the Thing has always feared more than anything else, that he would lose control and really clobber somebody.”

Kirby nods.

“The Thing is brokenhearted. He wanders off by himself. He’s too ashamed to face Alicia or go back home to the Fantastic Four. He doesn’t realize how he’s failing for the second time… How much the F.F. needs him.” Lee sags back on his desk, limp and spent.

Kirby has leaped out of the chair he was crumpled in, “Great, great.” The cigar is out of his mouth and his baggy eyes are aglow. His high voice is young with enthusiasm.* *

Compared to Lee’s 164 quoted words in that excerpt, Kirby gets in six, one that’s technically not even a word, and he rates no completed sentence (though he is, in truth, the only other Marvel contributor quoted in the 3,000-word feature).

Even beyond the description of a high-pitched, baggy-eyed middle-management frump of a man, it must have been devastating for the artist to realize that, at the very moment he was reading that sequence, so too were many tens of thousands of New Yorkers encountering a portrayal of Jack Kirby, a founding father of the Marvel Universe, for the first #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Characters TM & © DC Comics. Art © the Estate of Jack Kirby.

dictates that a writer submit a complete, detailed, and fullydialogued written script to the artist. (Historian R.C. Harvey said of Lee and Kirby, “The two had developed a unique way of working together, a method that had the dubious benefit of permitting each to claim creator’s credit.”)

Given his way of rendering super-hero stories was determined to be the Marvel house look, Kirby was directed

by Lee to draw loosely penciled layouts for incoming artists to acclimate themselves to the King’s style. This was when the company was in the first flush of success and frantically developing new series for the burgeoning Marvel Universe.

But, here too, the burden of fleshing-out stories was an unprecedented onus placed on the artist, a contributor who did not receive credit — or payment — as writer or plotter.

Soon enough, the new artists became acquainted with the Kirby technique, which relieved the King and allowed him to concentrate on three favorite assignments, The Fantastic Four, “Captain America,” and The Mighty Thor.

But the loyalty of the co-architect of the House of Ideas was beginning to fray at the edges. The artist, a pugnaciously proud and tenacious son of the Depression-era Lower East Side slums, was a man coming into his fifties, one flexing his considerable, industry-changing creative powers as never before. But any simmering anger was moved to the front burner, exposing a growing rage over his treatment by a tight-fisted publisher and by a creative partner who, in fact, was also a boss that happened to be family to Martin Goodman. Whether it started with an ignominious article appearing in an early 1966 edition of the New York Herald Tribune is open to question. But the peek into the real Marvel “Bullpen” in Nat Freedland’s Sunday magazine piece would prove one in a long litany of indignities, albeit of significance, that would drive Kirby out the Marvel Universe, his most magnificent creation to date. (The feature also revealed Lee’s “Marvel Method” to the outside world.)* Perhaps it is one thing to participate alone in a plotting session with the avuncular and jaunty Stan Lee, a charming and enthusiastic booster with an eminently entertaining talent to dialogue and keep in focus the entirety of the

Characters TM & © DC Comics. Art © the Estate of Jack Kirby.

time. (In 1962, the paper had a circulation of 400,000. )The artist comes off as a barely contributing, deferent hired hand subordinately taking all direction from the singular, hip creator of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, who, with his “horsy jaw and humorous eyes, thinning but tasteful gray hair, the brightest-colored Ivy wardrobe in captivity and a deep suntan,” hobnobbed with famous Italian film directors while square Kirby schlepped back to “the dungeon,” his basement studio, attired in his ill-fitting, off-the-rack suit.

Truth be told, Jack Kirby wasn’t the easiest interview subject, one with a predilection to ramble obtusely at times and go off on tangents, as brilliant minds are wont to do now and again, and his writer-partner could hardly be accused of being involved with the editing of the Herald Tribune feature, but it had ramifications that would immediately shake the very foundation of the House of Ideas.

Co-originator of Marvel’s hottest property, Steve Ditko (whom Lee described in the piece as an artist who considered himself “the genius of the world,” and someone the editor/writer had, as of late, developed a very precarious relationship with) would within weeks resign the Amazing Spider-Man assignment as well as work on his other co-creation, “Doctor Strange.” Whether Ditko’s stunning departure from Marvel was due in part to the newspaper article is open to speculation, but the timing appears telling.

For his part, in 1969 the reclusive Ditko reportedly told comics fan Robert Beerbohm that he had quit the House of Ideas because publisher Goodman had reneged on promised royalties, adding the bombshell that Ditko had recruited Jack Kirby to join him in a labor walkout, to which the King initially agreed. Beerbohm says Kirby corroborated this over a meal with the artist and his wife, Rosalind.

“During the course of this dinner was when I first asked Jack, along with Roz, about Ditko’s aforementioned claim regarding ‘royalty’ concepts, that Ditko had tried to get Kirby to walk at the same time,” Beerbohm wrote. “Jack corroborated Ditko’s ‘testimony’ of initially agreeing to walk, then backing out at the last moment, [and] so did Roz. The thought pattern as envisioned by the two, which Ditko had presented to them, was paralyzing Marvel so Goodman * *Then newly arrived editorial assistant Roy Thomas said he also sat in on the meeting. In an interview with The Jack Kirby Collector [#18, Jan. 1998], Thomas explains, “There was a big article in the New York Herald Tribune, where some reporter came in and interviewed Stan and Jack. For some reason, I was called in to be a witness or whatever, because I certainly took no part in it. We’re talking within six months or a year of when I started there. Stan is always ‘on,’ and he’s promoting Stan, but he’s also promoting Jack.

I saw that, y’know? And Jack would jump in with his own pronouncements, and Stan strides around, and Jack just kind of sits there, but he was eloquent enough in his own way.

And the reporter is more interested in Stan, but at the same time is talking to Jack. And then the article came out, which of course Stan didn’t have any prior approval of. The article is somehow very unfavorable toward Jack. It talks about him sitting there in a Robert Hall suit, and Stan saying something, and Jack falling off his chair in glee. It sort of put down Jack in a way that made Stan very embarrassed, and Jack very upset. Stan always had the feeling that Jack felt Stan had somehow maneuvered that. And other than Stan being Stan, and Jack being Jack, and this reporter having his own agenda, I just didn’t see any of that. There was no jockeying between Stan and Jack as to who was the top person, but of course Stan was the editor, and he’s the person who was doing the writing, and he’s a little more eloquent in speaking, maybe, than Jack was. But it was just one of those unfortunate situations that I think really did heap a lot of coals on the fire, and Stan always considered it an important turning point in his relationship with Jack. But there’s no way to prove that or straighten it out. How do you say, ‘I didn’t do it. I wasn’t responsible for what this reporter wrote.’?”

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would finally listen… [H]e described to me more than once that, yes, Ditko did try to get him to walk at the same time, back in 1966. At first, Kirby told Ditko ‘yes,’ he would, then backed out at the last sec[ond]. Jack wanted to, but felt he could not, as he had kids to worry about[;] Ditko did not have kids to worry about.”

In a remarkable moment of candor for the artist, The Comics Journal ’s Gary Groth had this exchange with Jack and Roz Kirby in 1989: Groth: Were you very — active isn’t the right word — but were you on top of things during that period? Did you know what was going on?

Roz Kirby: Of course. Jack was right down there working in what we called the dungeon. We had the basement then, a studio down there in the dungeon. Whenever anyone called, or Jack came to the office, I was usually there. It hurts to this day when my grandson sees Stan Lee’s name and he knows what his grandfather did, and he asks, “Why is Stan Lee’s name all over?” That’s hard to explain, you know.

Kirby: Yeah. So why wouldn’t I be hurt? Why shouldn’t my family be hurt? I know my wife is sore at me — Roz Kirby: No, I’m not sore.

Kirby: — because I say these things, but I’m deeply hurt because it hurt my family. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not going to be believed at Marvel. I’m not going to be believed anywhere else unless… Actually, my own fears probably prodded me into an act of cowardice. It’s an act of cowardice. I should have told Stan to go to hell and found some other way to make a living, but I couldn’t do it. I had my family. I had my apartment. I just couldn’t give all that up.

This spread: Jack Kirby presentation drawings for his New Gods concepts.

365 DAYS OF JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD was an online project initiated by Ye Ed back in 2010 and, while unfinished, it is an entertaining look at the incredible inventiveness of the King of comics. I was able to closely examine, in chronological fashion, the characters, concepts, and devices of Kirby’s quartet of titles and made it to Day 111 (and hopefully I’ll someday finish the epic undertaking, as I mapped it all out — Kirby did create 365 characters and concepts for those DC titles!). Please visit the spendiferous online resource, the Kirby Museum, and also check out the other rich bounties of the King’s treasures. kirbymuseum.org/ blogs/365fourth — Jon B. Cooke Note: Special thanks to John Morrow and Glenn Whitmore for their help with this essay.

Creative Embargo

While he demurred to stage a dramatic walkout in solidarity with Ditko, Kirby was beginning to envision a career beyond Marvel as, by ’66, he began producing characters and concepts to be withheld from Stan Lee, properties that would eventually see the light of day in another publisher’s comics line. Lee, perhaps remorseful over his collaborator’s newspaper depiction (or, just as likely, at Kirby’s insistence) would allow the artist to script a story now and again, and by summer, the more collaborative (and more ambiguous) “Stan Lee & Jack Kirby Production” byline begins gracing their stories, eschewing separate writer and artist credits.

But the inequities endure and the King’s temper continues to bubble, as merchandising and animated TV shows, emblazoned with Kirby artwork and appropriating actual story panels, garner not a penny for the artist. In Septem21

ber, a feature article in Esquire reports, “Some fifty thousand American college students, paying a dollar a head, belong to Merry Marvel Marching Societies and wear ‘I Belong’ buttons on more than a hundred campuses…

Should anybody still suspect that children are the only Marvel readers, it might be pointed out that the company has sold 50,000 printed T-shirts and 30,000 sweat shirts, and it has run out of adult sizes of both.” Cumulatively, with postage and handling included, the cited membership kits and clothing add up to $244,500. The cut for the artist whose work is silk-screened on seven of the eight apparel items amounts to nothing.

In the same year, Kirby stories from Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Fantastic Four are collected in a paperback series from Lancer; Donruss releases a Marvel Super-Heroes set of trading cards; and Marvel is vigorously reprinting the King’s early Marvel Age work in the twenty-five cent compilations, Marvel Tales, Fantasy Masterpieces, and Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics.

Again, the artist sees no money for their usage. During this period, Kirby is also pressured to side with Marvel against his former partner Joe Simon, who was suing the Goodman firm over ownership of the Simon and Kirby creation, Captain America. [A deeper examination of this affair, and covering Kirby’s other business dealings with Goodman during the late ’60s and early ’70s can be found in this feature’s companion essay, “Kirby’s Kingdom: The Commerce of Art,” in Comic Book Creator #1.]

By the “Summer of Love,” Kirby, who had for years given freely to the company many dozens of rich concepts and hundreds of characters in return for a page-rate, would continue to stockpile any new ideas for opportunities that might arise in a career beyond the House of Ideas.

Regarding the sudden end of new characters, Steve Sherman and Richard Howell write in The Jack Kirby Collector: After four years of establishing the [Fantastic Four] with villains and supporting characters, that magical fifth year bought a surge of new characters, like the Inhumans, Silver Surfer, Galactus, Black Panther, etc.

The number tapered off in year six, and except for Annihilus and Agatha Harkness (which some think was Stan’s idea), no notable new characters appear in the last three years of the strip.

What’s the explanation for the absence of new characters after that sixth year? Maybe Jack simply refused to create any. ‘Him’ in [FF] #67 was the last one Jack created before the drought. He didn’t like Stan’s characterization on the Silver Surfer, and he may have felt similarly about the dialogue on the ‘Him’ storyline (there were some odd discrepancies between the art and the words on those issues). I’ve heard Jack had hopes for the Him character to be used in a more adult magazine format (perhaps like the two later 35¢ Spider-Man tryouts). It’s plausible that in the Him storyline, Jack saw more characters that weren’t being handled the way he wanted, so he refused to create any new ones after that.

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* ”After we had discussed the plot idea for (are you ready for this?) ‘The Galactus Trilogy,’ Jack spent the next few weeks drawing the first 20-page installment. When he brought it to me so that I could add the dialogue and captions, I was surprised to find a brand-new character floating around the artwork — a silver-skinned, smooth-domed, sky-riding surfer atop a speedy flying surfboard. When I asked ol’ Jackson who he was, Jack replied something to the effect that a supremely powerful gent like Galactus, a godlike giant who roamed the galaxies, would surely require the services of a herald who could serve him as an advance guard.” — Stan Lee, Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics, Simon and Schuster, 1975. #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

As teenagers, future comics scribes Len Wein and Marv Wolfman recalled biking over to Kirby’s Long Island home in 1967 and seeing concepts that were not showing up in Marvel Comics, among them Bombast, Nightglider, and Captain Glory (all of which, decades later, would show up in Topps Comics’ “Kirbyverse”). They also remember listening to the artist

discuss cloning, a “Mountain of Judgment,” and “Hairies,” which Kirby readily offered to the budding writers (but would instead show up in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen). Wolfman also heard tell of “the stories of the [New] Gods long before they were a reality.”

Stan Lee’s seizure of the Silver Surfer character, unquestionably a creation of Jack Kirby alone,* distressed the King, who had specifically envisioned the cosmic herald in what confidante Mark Evanier describes as, “a creature formed of pure energy, one who had never been human, which explained why he’d been roaming about the Fantastic Four comic, asking Earthlings to explain love and hate and other (to him) alien concepts. In Stan’s story, the Surfer had been a man on another planet who sacrificed human form to save the woman he loved.” Though Kirby did plot and draw a Surfer solo adventure in FF Annual #5, he would, to his great dismay, not be chosen to draw the character’s regular series, which debuted in 1968, boasting art by John Buscema and featuring Lee’s characterization of a forever mopey sky sojourner prone to whine-filled soliloquies. When the artist did get the opportunity to draw the series, it would be an assignment plotted and dialogued by Lee that was to lead the character, in Kirby’s eyes, into the completely wrong direction, as a raging, hate-filled “hero.” Silver Surfer #18 was, thankfully, the last issue. (Kirby and Lee would have similar disagreements about approaches to other characters, most notably top Fantastic Four villain, Doctor Doom.)

In a May 1971 radio interview, Kirby told host Tim Skelly, “There were times at Marvel when I couldn’t say anything because it would be taken from me and put in another context, and it would be lost — all my connection with it would be severed. For instance, I created the Silver Surfer, Galactus, and an army of other characters, and now my connection with them is lost… You get to feel like a ghost. You’re writing commercials for somebody and… It’s a strange feeling, but I experienced it and I didn’t like it very much.”

While he was withholding anything new conceptually, Kirby’s latter ’60s work was visually spectacular, with its decrease in panel numbers per page and escalation of full-page splashes, all of which exploited to the utmost his amazing design sense, perhaps a consolation for the dearth of new characters. And though his stories were often tampered with (Kirby’s origin story arc of Galactus in The Mighty Thor was ruthlessly altered, as was his penultimate FF “Janus” tale, published after his exit), the creator soldiered on and squirreled away any number of fresh ideas for a life after Marvel.

Still, dedicated or not, the creator was feeling less than a king when the new corporate owners came in and, finding a new distributor, the line exploded with a dramatic expansion of titles, including endless reprints of Kirby’s work for which he continued to receive not one plug nickel. The acquisition of the Marvel Comics Group by Perfect Film and Chemical (soon renamed Cadence Industries) also brought an influx of nascent artists under the new regime, some of whom mimicked the Kirby style, putting the King in competition with his imitators. Plus, there was the indignity of company executives continually stonewalling Kirby’s requests for official co-creator credit, equitable pension, and more money.

Tempting the Apocalypse

The roots of Jack Kirby’s masterpiece, one that would rise from the ashes of his Marvel Universe work, are to be found, in part, in the back pages of his Journey into Mystery/Mighty Thor comics, where the artist was given considerable freedom to re-imagine the mythology of the Norse gods, within a series called “Tales of Asgard.” An aspect of Viking legend was the notion of the apocalyptic Ragnarök, a series of foretold events that culminate with the death of the old gods and birth of a new race of men.

In his afterword for the first volume of the Fourth World Omnibus, Mark Evanier explains:

TM & © DC Comics.

While doing Thor [at Marvel] in the sixties, [ Jack Kirby] had the notion of a series commencing with the day of Ragnarok when, legend had it, the old gods perished.

Replacing them all with rookies was a fertile idea, he decided — too good to give Marvel just then. This was the period when he was starting to have real contract/ compensation issues with the firm… and anyway, he knew they weren’t about to kill off Thor and that set of characters.

The creator obviously had relished his tenure on The Mighty Thor, likely his favorite after Fantastic Four, infusing the demi-god’s title with a mind-bending mix of myth and science fiction that oddly seemed a natural blending for such contrasting subjects. The Thunder God would encounter ancient heroes from alternate mythologies and just as quickly jump to the cosmos to explore Ego, the Living Planet, with space colonizer Tana Nile and the Recorder, then interact with the High Evolutionary and his Man-Beast, then traverse the Rainbow Bridge to his home in Asgard, and drop in to visit Earth now and again. The series was constantly in motion and wildly inventive.

As mentioned, “Tales of Asgard” explored Norse legend through a Kirby prism and it was obvious the creator was contemplating deeply the olden tales of Odin and company. There’s a constant verve and relentless enthusiasm to the five-page stories which, in the early issues especially, eclipse the main feature in vitality and excitement. In a long-running serial that ran in the back-up series [in Journey Into Mystery #117–128], we literally see visions of Ragnarök with the death of Asgard and forging of a new planet in its ashes, life beginning anew in a paradise where grows an enlightened, advanced civilization — a new genesis and emergence of a race of new gods.

After the back-up series was cancelled, Kirby continued to tease Thor’s readers with the notion of the old gods’ annihilation through the multi-issue onslaught of Mangog over a series of stories that build to a harrowing, apocalyptic crescendo, where the monster with the power of a “billion, billion beings” is relentless in his drive to unsheathe the Odinsword and bring on Ragnarok and, thus, the death of our universe. (Who saves the day? Odin, the All-Father, pops in with a power scepter and dispatches the nefarious behemoth in a page or two.) For a moment, given the epic’s pile-driving march towards doomsday for the Norse gods and the actual universe itself, readers must have thought, in a weird mix of both dread and delightful anticipation, that glorious, grandiose Asgard, with its pantheon of brave and mighty warrior heroes, would be reduced to ash… and hope, with shuddering glee, that a new generation of Kirby-created deities might rise from the dust of the dead.* Soon enough, the real-life end-time was looming for Jack Kirby at Marvel. Though he would try to negotiate an equitable contract with the new corporate owners, the co-architect of the House of Ideas was dismissed as just another replaceable freelancer. “They thought everything good on the pages came from Stan,” Mark Evanier later * Between 1968-69, Kirby had actually prepared colored presentation pieces featuring characters for his new Thor proposal, most inked by Don Heck.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

quipped. But, over at the Distinguished Competition, certain parties had retired or were about to depart — folks who had been hostile to the King — and thus it seemed there might be a more hospitable climate at DC. For a creator whose name was synonymous with the Universe of which he was the chief architect, it must have been sad for Kirby to consider that Marvel — for whom he had conjured up many dozens of concepts and hundreds of original characters, properties mined again and again by other writers and artists — could get along without him.

By ’68, the House of Ideas was selling 50 million copies a year, a 400% increase since when FF #1 hit the stands, only seven years prior. (By 1971, that number world reportedly increase to 70 million, a good many of which were reprints of his work.) It was time for the king to move on and find a new realm. “I’m basically a guy from the East Side,” he told Groth. “I’m basically a guy who likes to be a man, and if you try to deprive me of it, I can’t live with it. That’s what the industry was doing to me, and I had a gut-full of that. I couldn’t do anything less. I had to get myself far away…”

This spread: Various DC Comics house ads touting Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics.

The Daring and the Different

While Marvel was having occasional flashes of brilliance in the late ’60s, with Ditko gone and Kirby keeping new ideas 23

Besides the caliber of talented editors and contributors, what distinguished a span of Infantino’s reign was an amazingly diverse stable of new or reinvigorated characters, many of which are still being creatively mined to the present day, others still with unrealized potential. These include the Creeper, the Hawk and the Dove, Bat Lash, Anthro, Phantom Stranger, Firehair, Deadman, Enemy Ace, Cain and Abel, Jonah Hex, Swamp Thing, and the Unknown Soldier. Licensed properties such as Tarzan and The Shadow shined and rejuvenations of Superman, Wonder Woman, and even the return of C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel were all highly regarded.

Also of note was a flood of new talent whose skills would develop by leaps and bounds, especially young artists Bernie Wrightson and Michael W. Kaluta, among others who were under the tutelage of Infantino and Orlando. Also Len Wein, Mike Friedrich, Marv Wolfman, and more honed their burgeoning writing skills with the direction of the creator-friendly editorial staff. But no news about the formidable “Daring and Different” coming out of DC came close to having as great an impact as when, in early 1970, word leaked out that Jack “The King” Kirby was quitting Marvel and heading over to work for the House of Superman.

The Great One is Coming!

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#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

Comic book fans (just like, rest assured, sports aficionados and political junkies) are a partisan lot and there has been no greater divide in fandom than which publisher has the better comics output. And between Marvel zombies and DC freaks, few creators’ work has since engendered more ferocious debate than Jack Kirby’s respective universes at those competing outfits. Imagine the agonized feelings for those Marvelites, at the beginning up his sleeve, the outfit had lost a bit of its verve and energy, thus there of the new decade, who would be shell-shocked and begin mourning the was an opportunity for a different publisher to grab reader attention with King’s defection and then, conversely, sense the delight and exuberant daring and different new characters and concepts. DC Comics was another anticipation of DC fans who yearned for an even more integrated Universe company that experienced corporate takeover. The imprint and its sister under the Kirby influence upon their preferred brand. divisions were purchased by Kinney National Services (reportedly most By the time industry rumors made it to fandom that Jack Kirby was interested in DC’s licensing arm, LCA) in the same merger frenzy of the day unhappy at the competition, DC had lost its recent feather in the cap. That that would soon also ensnare its main competitor. The aggressive corpora- other architect of the House of Ideas, Steve Ditko, had quit and was now tion — which would ultimately become Time-Warner, the largest commucontent producing his own Ayn Rand-inspired comics as well as submitting nications company in the world — instituted a shake-up at the House of page-rate stories for bottom-of-the-barrel Charlton (which offered nominal Superman that resulted in Carmine Infantino, one of DC’s mainstay artists, interference from its editors). But plans to “Marvelize” aspects of DC’s becoming editorial director. An industry veteran whose career stretched line began to be formulated, whether with the injection of socially relevant back to the Golden Age, Infantino was best known for his assignments on themes into Green Lantern or the notion to alter the Man of Steel’s mythos The Flash and “Adam Strange,” as well as a recent stint as talented cover by downgrading his powers (and create an over-arching multi-issue epic) designer of the company’s line. He was also a man with an eye for talent. or turn their Amazon Princess into a mere mortal — and, maybe, with the The new editorial director raided bottom-rung Charlton Comics to King in the fold, a revitalized DC could beat Marvel at their own game. snatch up editor/artist Dick Giordano, along with a bucketful of talented While still freelancing for Marvel, Kirby and his family had moved to “Action Hero” contributors, including writer Steve Skeates and artist Jim the hills of southern California in early 1969, partly to get away from office Aparo, and — the crown jewel of the plundering expedition — no one less intrigue and mostly because of the climate to help with youngest daughter than a co-creator of the Marvel Universe, writer/artist Steve Ditko. While Lisa’s asthma. The comics industry had historically been centered in New DC was still the industry leader in sales, that dominance was slipping under York, but Hollywood might have use for his ideas and there was, after all, a the threat of the Marvel juggernaut. The competition’s appeal was undenirevolution in comics taking place in San Francisco, albeit of underground able and, despite an open hostility by the old guard editors to the Lee/Kirby/ comix variety. When word got around that the King had settled in the Los Ditko approach, it was determined that DC had to reach out to older readers Angeles area, young fans Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman came to call at and take things up a notch. First up for Infantino was to sweep out the old the Kirby’s new Irvine home, and a friendship developed. Evanier told Comic and bring in the new, the old being a generation of word-based editors.

Book Artist: Infantino’s era of the artist-as-editor at DC would revolutionize the line, We got along great and I ended up seeing him a couple of times after invigorating the company with the work of an amazing array of creative that, mostly through my involvement with a mail order firm I worked for talent. Joe Orlando, late of MAD, brought the spirit of his old EC Comics briefly called Marvelmania (where I was handling Marvel merchandise). days to the mystery books and proved to be exceptional at his new gig; Joe One day, he and Roz came down to Marvelmania, and took Steve and Kubert, champing at the bit to get beyond page-rate drudgery, took on the myself to lunch. We went to Canter’s Delicatessen, where Jack told us, war books with typical Kubert gusto, creating and overseeing masterpieces “I’m leaving Marvel. I’m going over to DC, and I’m going to be editing in the process; Mike Sekowsky radicalized Wonder Woman into a woman’s a bunch of books. I need a staff; would you guys like to work for me?”… libber and imbued Supergirl with some modern fashion sense (though his We sat on the secret that he was leaving Marvel for about a month as he career at DC would be hobbled by alcoholism); and Giordano, with his finished the final parameters of the deal. Finally, one day he called and easygoing management style and ability to elicit exemplary work from freesaid, “I just talked to Stan, it’s finished, you can tell anyone you want.” It lancers, put his ex-Charlton cohorts right to work and proceeded to attract set off shockwaves throughout the business. top-flight talent into the fold, whether Gray Morrow, Alex Toth, or his future Infantino had been making overtures to Kirby, and as the editorial business partner, Neal Adams. DC’s were the best looking books in the field. director was frequenting the West Coast as consultant on DC super-hero Julius Schwartz, one of the few survivors of the editorial office cleansing, met this new age of relevancy with typical aplomb, embracing dictates cartoons, a meeting was arranged. “He and I had been friends, you know,” Infantino told Gary Groth. “So we had been talking all the while during this to modernize his Superman and Batman titles. For the latter, the veteran whole time, so there was nothing new about it. One time I said, ‘I’m coming editor recruited wunderkind Neal Adams and (late of a brief Marvel stay) out to the coast, Jack. Do you want to get together and have a drink?’ He talented writer Dennis O’Neil, whose combined take on the character, which had withered after the TV show’s cancellation, transformed him into said, ‘Absolutely’… He met me and he showed me these three book covers, the Darknight Detective. The pair would also completely convert the Green Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle. I said, ‘Geez, they’re sensational. When are you people going to put them out?’ He says, ‘Well, Lantern title by making it reflect the day’s social concerns, whether religious cults, over-population, pollution, or (most memorably) drug addiction. I created these now, and I don’t want to do them at Marvel. Would you

make me an offer?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘But I want a three-year contract.’ I said, ‘You got it, no problem.’ So I made him an offer, which was more than what he got over there, and then I gave him a contract. It was that simple.”

The news hit fandom in unprecedented fashion, as the comics fanzine Newfangles, edited by the authoritative Don and Maggie Thompson, released an “Extra” edition on March 12, 1970. The comics world was stunned. John Romita, Sr., thought Marvel’s flagship series was dead. “My first assumption was that Fantastic Four was finished,” he told Comic Book Artist. “We wouldn’t do the book anymore, just out of respect. I found myself saying to Stan, ‘Who the hell’s going to do FF? We don’t have anyone good enough!’ He said, ‘You’re gonna do it,’ and I almost fell down.” The artist who was to succeed the King on The Mighty Thor thought things were even more serious — that the company was going to shut down. “I’ll never forget when I walked into Stan’s office and heard that Jack left,” John Buscema told this writer. “I thought they were going to close up! As far as I was concerned, Jack was the backbone of Marvel.”

Contracts inked, DC began promoting the creator’s impending arrival with “Kirby is Coming” blurbs and even a full-page house ad that kept his name a mystery but trumpeted, “The Great One is Coming!” The last few 1970 issues of Challengers of the Unknown, in a seeming nod to the co-creator’s return to the now Schiff-less outfit, reprinted Kirby episodes from his previous tenure.

TM & © DC Comics.

Dawn of a New World

Much later, Jack Kirby would tell The Comics Journal of those early days at the revitalized comics line, “DC was actually like a haven because I was an individual there. I was able to do something under my own name. In other words, if I wrote, ‘Jack Kirby’ wrote it. If I drew, ‘Jack Kirby’ drew it.

And the truth was there, and I began to write and draw, and I felt at last a sense of freedom, and with sales rising from those books, my freedom became more apparent to me, and I felt a hell of a lot better.”

The agreement was for the amazingly prolific Kirby to write, draw, and edit a batch of regular books, all based on entirely new characters and interconnecting them with an overarching mythology that would relate to the current DC Universe. The creator also was contracted to take over an ongoing title, preferably a low-selling book and, at his request, an assignment that did not have an attached creative team and thus he wouldn’t be putting any fellow professionals out of work. “I took [Superman’s Pal,] Jimmy Olsen because it was a dog,” the creator told Groth. “It didn’t have the sales of Superman, and I felt the best way I could prove myself was by taking a book that was slow and speeding up its sales. That’s the way to prove yourself.”

Kirby would, deep into their respective runs, refer to these four titles as his “Fourth World” books, nomenclature of indeterminate origin but one that has stuck. Even Mark Evanier, a close friend who frequented Kirby’s studio before, during, and after this time, never learned the provenance of the term. Presumably it was derived from the geopolitical appellation “third world,” which denoted often nonaligned nations with a colonial past. (A few years after Kirby’s coinage, political scientists would use the term “fourth world” to describe countries “forcefully incorporated into states which maintain a distinct political culture but are internationally unrecognized.”)

“The Fourth World was to be Kirby’s magnum opus,” Charles Hatfield writes in Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, “a coordinated, orchestrated project of unprecedented scope, a multi-pronged epic that did all that Marvel’s Fantastic Four and Thor had done, but without Stan Lee’s intervening, diluting, and (to Kirby) now-intolerable presence.” In addition to the nine-issues-a-year Jimmy Olsen, the saga would be the basis for The News Gods, The Forever People, and Mister Miracle, all bi-monthly titles.

Though its origins are found in Kirby’s version of Norse Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

legend via The Mighty Thor and “Tales of Asgard,” the Fourth World constituted a whole new mythology, expanding the DC Universe by adding two entire planets — evil Apokolips and good New Genesis — dozens of new characters, and concepts of such astounding depth, they continue to be mined by the imprint to the present day. Hugely ambitious, the overall notion had the potential to pollinate and lift the entire super-hero line, home to the most recognized comic book characters in the world. And, for at least two editors wise enough to play in Kirby’s sandbox, some of the King’s notions did infect non-Fourth World books.

Superman’s de facto headquarters was the Daily Planet, independent newspaper for his home city of Metropolis. Kirby introduced business mogul Morgan Edge, whose Galaxy Broadcasting System snatched up Clark Kent’s place of employment in a media buy and transformed Superman’s alter ego into a television reporter. Revealed to be an agent for the evil forces of Apokolips, Edge would, for a time, be featured in other related comics, particularly Julius Schwartz’s Superman. Intergang, a group of Mafia-like gangsters allied with Darkseid, had a tiny role in “Rose and Thorn.” Even the New Gods’ harbinger of death, the Black Racer, skied aloft in Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane. But the enormous potential to embrace the Fourth World by editors other than

Above: The first issue of Jack Kirby’s Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, #133 [Oct. 1970]. Previous page: Unused cover “bullet” icon intended for Jimmy Olsen.

Art by Jack Kirby.

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Schwartz and E. Nelson Bridwell was squandered at the time, an oddly myopic hesitance given the urgency to replicate a major aspect of Marvel’s appeal to fans — an interconnected universe — and here, handed to them on a silver platter by the King of Comics, was a cosmic blueprint.

Don’t Ask, Just Buy It

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The Boom Tubers

The first all-new Kirby comic book to be released by DC in 1970 was The Forever People #1, which featured the “big bonus guest star,” the Man of Steel, a crossover presumably planned to help give the title a start-up bump. The series, jumping head-first in the Fourth World mythos, was about a quartet of New Genesis denizens from Supertown, a floating city above a planet resembling the Garden of Eden, a peaceful group with the joint ability to transform into a super-powered fighter known as the Infinity Man. A New York Times Sunday magazine feature from 1971 describes the Forever People as well as anyone: “There are five of them,” writes Saul Braun.”[O]ne is a relaxed, self-assured young black man [Vykin] who, probably not by accident, carries the group’s power source, known as the ‘mother box’; another is a shaggy-bearded giant [Big Bear] who overwhelms his small-minded taunters with a loving, crushing bear hug; the third, a beautiful saintly flower child named Serafin is called a ‘sensitive’; the fourth, a combination rock star-football hero transmogrified into one Mark Moonrider; and the fifth, a girl named Beautiful Dreamer.”

The 1971 NYT piece shares Kirby’s description of the five-some: “[They are] the other side of the [generation] gap — the under-30 group. I’m over 50. I’ve had no personal experience of the counterculture. It’s all from the imagination.” Certainly, the creator had extensive doings with young people though, and his sympathies were with the day’s youth. Hinting, perhaps, at an envy for free-living Baby Boomers as opposed to his upbringing during the Depression, Kirby told interviewer Mark Hebert in 1969, “[A]ll my generation could do was work. You worked, you connived and you fought.

My generation was very hostile, and that’s why it’s so authoritarian and why it loves kids. I know that I would have loved… I never had a childhood, I never ever had a young manhood. I never had time for it.”

The Forever People would last for eleven issues and though a number are outstanding, some (due to editorial interference) are uneven. Of particu#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

The very first comic book published by DC Comics featuring Jack Kirby’s work during his ballyhooed return was Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133, released in the late summer of 1970. It remains one of the most astonishingly inventive stories to be conceived, a tale bursting with new ideas and characters, one that even retrofitted a ’40s Kirby co-creation, the Newsboy Legion (though here a new generation of adventurers plus plebe Flippa Dippa all joined the Daily Planet cub reporter for the entire Kirby run as exuberant sidekicks). In a mere 22 pages, the tale introduces the half-car/ half-jet Whiz Wagon, sinister Morgan Edge and his Galaxy Broadcasting System, the Wild Area, the Hairies, Intergang, Iron Mask, Vudu, the Outsiders, Habitat, Zoomway, and foretells the Mountain of Judgment. After withholding new ideas from Marvel for years, concepts and characters exploded from Kirby’s mind and onto the page in a raging torrent. This promised to be one freakin’ wild ride.

The following issue gave us our first glimpse at the great Darkseid, seeker of the Anti-Life Equation and the dominant villain of Kirby’s Fourth World, and with the other linked titles being released alongside Jimmy Olsen, the King’s universe was unfolding before a readership that was sometimes receptive, sometimes perplexed. While the creator professed great freedom at his new home, there was immediate evidence of editorial interference with the altering of faces on certain characters.

Asked if he was disturbed by the changes to his Superman and Jimmy Olsen faces, Kirby told Groth, “Yes, it bothered me, of course, because a man is entitled to draw things in his own style. I didn’t hurt Superman. I made him powerful. I admire Superman, but I’ve got to do my own style.

That’s how I would see it, and I had the right to do that, and nobody had the right to tamper with your work and shape it differently.”

Carmine Infantino had something different to say about Kirby’s reaction.

“Jack himself never objected to this,” the publisher said. “He understood about when you had a licensed character like Superman, you don’t mess around with him. He didn’t make an issue out of it… But think about it. Do you think Walt Disney would allow Mickey Mouse to be changed or altered in any way?” Whatever the justification, the effect appeared unnecessarily jarring to many a reader.

Whether Kirby was enthusiastic about his Jimmy Olsen work is hard to determine — remember, this was the guy who said, “I believe that I’m in a thorough, professional class who’ll give you the best you can get.

You won’t get any better than the stuff that I can do” — but he gave it one hell of an exciting go, and integrated aspects of his three otherwise more closely linked books with innovative panache. Darkseid agents Mokkari and Simyan tormented Olsen and his super-pal; Clark Kent encountered

Lightray of The New Gods; Superman visited the New Genesis floating city of “Supertown,” sensing kindred folk… Plus the King shared the then-new conception of cloning, reintroduced his Golden Age character, the golden Guardian (who had been allied with the original Newsboy Legion), gave us the DNAliens and Dubbilex of the DNA Project, hinted at the secret of life in the DNA “molecule” (the opposite of Darkseid’s coveted Anti-Life Equation?), and foisted on us rampaging monsters whose birth, Mokkari exclaims, “Heralds the age of the holocaust! Hail homo usurpus!”

After a breathless, frantic multi-issue race to save Metropolis from thermonuclear destruction, the title gets decidedly wacky with the appearance of Goody Rickels, doppelgänger of real-life Las Vegas comedian (and unauthorized guest-star) Don Rickles. And from there on, one gets a mild sense that the series was playing out for Kirby. There are adventures in a Universal monster movie-inspired world, an encounter with a Nessieinspired Loch Trevor monster, and battle against a 150-year-old (or so) Jules Verne knock-off determined to “Form the world in the shape of Victor Volcanum and all that surges inside him!” The villain fails, Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion in the Whiz Wagon (a Hot Wheels-inspired vehicle that travels the sky), and Superman fly towards the sun setting over Metropolis, and after 15 issues of vigorous entertainment, Jack Kirby finishes his run on Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, the first Fourth World casualty. To fill the sudden hole in his work schedule, the creator begins developing The Demon.

But even in those less inspired latter issues, there are clever moments, both poignant and funny, whether Superman’s chat with New Genesis spiritual leader Highfather while both are seated on a Supertown bench, or the introduction of Evil Factory creation Angry Charlie, a wily, bug-eyed monstrosity and now beloved pet of Gabby, the Newsboy Legionnaire.

Most issues sport unenthusiastic inks by Vinnie Colletta and fine lettering

by John Costanza, but those stories inked and lettered by Mike Royer are graphic standouts, expertly complementing the King’s pencils and capturing the intensity of the work as few other delineators.

Infantino, who had ascended to the publisher’s office in the middle of the King’s nineteen-month run on the Superman family title, said in a mildly confrontational exchange with Gary Groth in 1996, “[Kirby’s] version didn’t sell. The artwork was not great on Jimmy Olsen before he did it. But it was selling. Go figure. I don’t know how you figure these things. So, I gave him how many issues to do? A couple, right?… And the book sank. I took him off it. Jack was a great talent and he had more success than anyone else in this business. But, unfortunately, these books did not make it. That’s the simple fact. If Jack were a ballplayer, he would be batting 750. Since Ted Williams batted 400 and he was a superstar, what would that make Jack?

Remember — nobody hits 100%. Anything else?”

lar resonance are stories that include a Superman who, rather than bemoaning his fate as the last son of Krypton, yearns for a future in Supertown, to finally be among fantastically endowed peers; the vampiric Mantis, Apokolips villain (and one who would be put to even better use in The New Gods); Glorious Godfrey, a clever skewering of hypocritical television evangelists, who peddles Anti-Life* as salvation (the NYT feature says the character “is drawn to look like an actor playing Billy Graham in a Hollywood film biography of Richard Nixon starring George Hamilton”); the facade of an amusement park which actually is a house of horrors to siphon the fear of tormented prisoners; the introduction of Sonny Sumo, the wrestler who possesses the Anti-Life Equation in his head; and the comeuppance of greedy Billion-Dollar Bates.

The series stumbles for the remainder of its run, marred by a dictate from the New York office: the shoehorning of DC’s character Deadman. It is “an ill-fated notion,” writes Mark Evanier, “for Jack didn’t like handling someone else’s characters, and a hero themed around death was in particular conflict with Kirby sensibilities.” But knowing #11 would be the final issue for the team, Kirby bestows a gracious exit for his Forever People, exiling them to the peaceful, serene planet of Adon, to live… well, forever.

The short-lived run was a singular showcase for Darkseid’s first lieutenant, Desaad, who (as the name suggests) takes particular delight in torture, particularly the pacifist group of innocent New Genesis youth and specifically lovely Beautiful Dreamer. The portrayal of the oily, snide, almost dandy-like henchman is quite distinctive.

Lords of Dark and Light

TM & © DC Comics.

Throughout its run, The New Gods was unquestionably the Fourth World’s finest series and the raging, passionate heart of the sweeping epic that would give it the status of masterpiece. Within its eleven issues unfold the cosmic war between two diametrically opposed planets: New Genesis, the Utopian home of the kind, Moses-like Highfather and his New Gods, where blissful peace reigns and respect for all its fantastically-powered people is supreme; and absolute despot Darkseid’s Apokolips, a hellish, industrialized, polluted orb whose accursed inhabitants — both slave-driver and slave — worship death and respect only ruthlessness. All deliriously adore and serve their dark god.

The implied connection to Ragnarök is apparent from the very first page of the debut issue, which starts the saga with an epilogue that states, “There came a time when the old gods died!” And, looking closely, the reader spies a warrior, replete with winged helmet and mighty hammer, in fierce battle.** The world of the ill-fated deities — presumably Asgard — is ripped asunder by cataclysm and split into two molten globes that will cool to become (you guessed it) the opposing planets of our story.

The leading hero of the series is Orion the Hunter, possessor of the “Astro Force” and a warrior capable of vicious savagery, but loyal to his adopted home of New Genesis. The twist here is that the feiry-haired fighter is actually the unwitting son of his most hated enemy, o’ dreaded Darkseid, the main bad guy, and half-brother to savage Kalibak, his other arch enemy. Orion’s best friend is white-clad, good-natured Lightray, and other residents of the “good planet” include Metron (cerebral scientist of dubious allegiance), Fastbak, Forager, young Esak, and (from the companion titles) the Forever People, Mister Miracle, adopted Big Barda, and Lonar and his horse, Thunderer.

Darkseid is the ultimate dictator, one of cosmic proportions and an obvious take on, at least, the hate-fueled * The “Anti-Life Equation” is the Macguffin of the series, the desire for which is the reason why the great Fourth World villain, Darkseid, has designs on our lowly planet, as the elusive secret gives the wielder the power to snuff out all free will.

Certain Earthlings possess the secret in their minds.

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

essence of Adolph Hitler (the Nazi leader is directly quoted in an issue of The Forever People). But the craggy-faced monster is not without a perverse sense of humor, and from his first appearance in the title, Darkseid has become the preeminent super-villain of the DC Universe. (The granite-hued gent has such an impact that he was soon swiped by the House of Ideas — in appearance, stature, and near omnipotent power, never mind death-adoring predilection — with Thanos, the über-villain who is poised to torment The Avengers soon enough in their film franchise.)

The narrative is rich in allegory — influenced by end of days prophecies, the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, and the peril of nuclear annihilation, juxtaposed by the promise of youth and hope for the future — peopled with a marvelous cast of characters (often described, by way of Kirby, with Faulknerian eloquence), some who seemed to have stepped from the novels of Charles Dickens, others straight out of scripture…

Above: The cover of Jack Kirby’s The Forever People #1 [Mar. 1971]. Previous page: Cover “bullet” icon for The Forever People. Art by Jack Kirby.

* *A clue is also to be found in a “Young Gods of Supertown” story, where Lonar, amid ruins of the old gods’ cataclysmic war zone, ponders an ancient winged helmet, which looks suspiciously like that of a certain Thunder God. 27

The Great Escape

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#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

Biblical overtones are rampant. We eventually learn that all-wise Highfather, the peace-loving leader, was once Izaya the Inheritor, a ferocious warrior, who rejects war, exiles himself in desolate wilderness, and finds the Fourth World’s spiritual channel: The Source, a disembodied burning finger that literally spells out prophecy upon an ageless, inscrutable wall.

We also come to understand, in perhaps the greatest story of the meta-series, “The Pact,” that an uneasy peace was established between the two planets when Izaya’s son, revealed to be Scott Free (a.k.a. Mister Miracle), is exchanged for the offspring of Darkseid, an angry, violent young lad named Orion. (It has long been surmised that this last conceit, where the epic’s main antagonist is father to the major protagonist, along with much of the cosmic vibe of the Fourth World — The Source and the Force — was appropriated by film director (and reputed comics lover) George Lucas for his epic and expansive space opera, Star Wars).

Other classic tales in The New Gods include “Glory Boat” and “Death Wish of Terrible Turpin,” epics involving humans making the ultimate sacrifice, and the battle royal of “Darkseid and Sons,” where, in the last issue of the series, one half-brother meets his ultimate fate… at the ski-pole of the Fourth World’s harbinger of death, the Black Racer (allied to neither planet and perhaps an odd variant on Kirby’s Marvel creation, the Silver Surfer).

As is fitting, Orion proves to be the second-most standout character in the series. Born of an evil world yet faithful to his adopted home, his inbred nature is in constant conflict with his devotion. His hate and rage are monstrous, as the blood of Darkseid flows through him, with his true, grotesque face is hidden by an angelic illusion courtesy of his “Mother Box.” When his coarser emotions rise to the fore, the warrior positively delights in dispatching his adversary with maniacal glee. He is also devoted to protecting Earth, finding a curious sympathy for some of its inhabitants.

But it is the malevolent ruler of a world forever darkened by the endless black smoke rising from mammoth “energy pits,” who makes the greatest impression. “It’s Darkseid, though, who’s remained [Kirby’s] most memorable creation,” opines The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide. “Although almost a personification of evil, he retains the grandeur of a ruler, and a perverse sense of justice.”

(Of note, too, is the introduction of the “bug colonies” that infest the underground of New Genesis, from which emerges Forager — as well as vicious Mantis and his giant bug army — who travel to Earth via the Boom Tube, a temporary inter-dimensional passageway that links the warring planets to our “reality.” An ambiguous shade of gray is cast about Highfather’s “good” world, as his Monitors spread deadly gas on the “bugs,” to exterminate the race of sentient (albeit thieving) beings. “Kirby… surprises throughout,” notes Slings and Arrows, “particularly with #9’s revelation that New Genesis is not the paragon of integrity thus far presented.”)

As doubtless can be now ascertained, the Fourth World was an epic cut short in midstream, cancelled in less than two years since its bombastic start, an epic battle between father Darkseid and son Orion left without a proper conclusion… until many years later.

If The New Gods is the most involved series depicting the new Kirby mythology, Mister Miracle is arguably the most entertaining (though the run overall is a mixed bag due to publisher directive). It too might well be Kirby’s most personal series as one can sense echoes of the creator’s life experience in various episodes, particularly in the deprived upbringing of the titular hero and escape from the slums of his hard-bitten youth. And there are allusions to the creator’s adult life, as well, both personal (with the presence of a strong female partner) and professional (via a thinly-veiled portrayal of a former Kirby collaborator).

Mister Miracle is the story of a young man named Scott Free, who learns the art of escape from an aging Vaudevillian practitioner. As the story unfolds, readers realize that he is an apparent orphan raised on Darkseid’s planet and is somehow connected to New Genesis. We are introduced to Granny Goodness, an anything-but-good head of an Apokolips orphanage; the Prussian-like Virmin Vundabarr, devious deviser of traps; flamboyant Shakespearean Kanto, the Weapon-Master, as well as other henchmen. But, besides Scott Free and faithful dwarf assistant Oberon (a holdover after Scott’s mentor, the original Mister Miracle, is killed), the two cast members making an impact are Big Barda and Funky Flashman.

Barda, another alumni from Granny’s orphanage, is one of the most original female characters introduced in mainstream comics. On Apokolips, she was a savage warrior (as a card-carrying member of Granny’s Female Fury Battalion, another superb series concept), and is full-figured in stature, and provocative as hell. Becoming aligned to the New Genesis cause, she gains a romantic interest in the super escape artist, and turns into his fighting companion against Darkseid’s minions. What makes her such an innovative presence is not only her linebacker, plus-size stature, but also sheer tenacity and aptitude at brawling much more effectively than her boyfriend, and the depiction of the equal partnership shared with Scott Free is one that mirrors the adoring, committed romance of Jack and Roz Kirby.

Funky Flashman, the shady, cowardly, and morally compromised huckster who guest-stars in MM #6, is a brutally explicit dig at Kirby’s former partner at Marvel, Stan “the Man” Lee. Funky is depicted as a showman without a show, all flash and no substance, and an opportunist along the likes of Sammy Glick, the titular anti-hero of that novel of deceit and betrayal, What Makes Sammy Run? Funky’s attempts to exploit Scott are pathetic failures and, well, funny in that delightfully odd Kirby way.

The apex of the series — and arguably the entire the Fourth World saga — is “Himon,” a flashback story described, as was “The Pact,” as a supplement to the larger tapestry of Kirby’s ever-expanding universe. It is the tale of young Scott Free’s mentor on Apokolips, Himon, inventor of the inter-dimensional Boom Tube, and it chronicles Scott’s first and greatest escape, the young Aero Trooper’s breakout from Darkseid’s planet of death.

It’s difficult to imagine that Jack Kirby is not giving readers an allegory about his own “bust-out” from the slums of the Lower East Side, a twist on the story of young Jacob Kurtzberg making his way uptown to find a fruitful and fulfilling career in the offices of a burgeoning comics industry, leaving behind a hardscrabble, tremendously violent existence. There also are allusions to the Holocaust, the attempted extermination of the Jewish people, and to the engineer of that genocide, Adolph Hitler, a horror that was happening an ocean away while Kirby was making his first impact on the field.

The home of the slaves of Darkseid is called Armagetto and their ruthless leader demands nothing less than complete obedience. Plus, the name of Scott’s great teacher is a tweaking of a common Yiddish name, Hyman.

During this time, DC is unable to hold back the steady, ever-threatening growth of chief rival Marvel and was desperately experimenting with different formats and page-counts for its magazines in the hopes of finding new or lapsed readers. There were the extra-large “treasury editions,” small digest-sized collections, and “100 Page Super-Spectaculars.” Between the summer of 1971 and the following spring, every DC title upped its page count from 36 to 52, and editors were suddenly scrambling to fill in the mandated space. For his part, in addition to sharing with readers his collaborations with Joe Simon from the ’40s, Kirby would add short stories to the Fourth World titles, including “Tales of the DNA Project” (Jimmy Olsen), “The Young Gods of Supertown” (The Forever People, The New Gods), and “Young Scott Free” (Mister Miracle). These vignettes helped add texture to the already momentous opus, particularly in giving nuance to mysterious Metron, who traversed dimensions with his fantastical Mobius Chair in the flashbacks of Scott’s Dickensian upbringing in Granny’s orphanage.

Metron is an important and enigmatic figure — allegedly based on Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek character, Mr. Spock — whose main interest is not good or evil or right and wrong, but rather science. “We have our

‘new’ god today — technology,” Kirby said. “A new way of looking at things that I have got to represent. How do I present that new technology? I’ve got Metron… A nuclear physicist is Metron. A mathematician is Metron. A guy who works a projection booth in a theatre is Metron. We’re trying to know everything and we’ve got the equipment to do it. That’s where Metron’s chair comes in. It’s one of our gadgets. That damn chair can do anything!”

Another superb concept is the notion of the “Mother Box,” the invention of Himon, which is a small sentient computer-like device that aids the inhabitants of New Genesis.

Orion has her encased in his Astro Glider; Vykin carries her in a box for his fellow Forever People; Scott Free hides her in a shoulder pocket. Mother Box is a living mechanism, a machine with a soul who performs many tasks for her possessor, among them abilities to sense danger, relieve torment, create protective barriers, sooth pain, transport her charge to another dimension, make friendships, sonically scold, navigate the cosmos, and — being alive — she can be hurt, tortured, and killed. But, most of all, she is capable of love, the power most feared by Darkseid. She is the direct conduit to the Source, channeling that spiritual power in her possessor.

TM & © DC Comics.

Twilight of the Gods

In less than two years, Jack “The King” Kirby had accomplished a breathtaking achievement and expanded the DC Universe with seemingly infinite possibilities in the Fourth World mythos, but his plan was to take his meta-series, one he conceptualized as finite, to a cataclysmic finale in at least three years, the duration of his contract. Soon after Kirby’s arrival, Carmine Infantino was made the publisher at DC Comics and was charged with reversing the loss of sales the outfit was then suffering. The “artist-as-editor” era instigated by Infantino was pretty much a commercial failure (though still critically well-regarded today) and the House of Superman was outplayed by Marvel, who suddenly increased price and page-count, and DC immediately followed suit. Marvel returned to the previous format, while DC was forced to stick with the higher page-count because of its paper stock acquisition — and DC was stuck with a higher price per copy (25¢) than Marvel (20¢). It was this ploy that vaulted Marvel to become industry leader.

Doubtless, pressure from the corporate owners was significant on the new publisher. Publicity over the line’s “relevant” comics had faded. Readership was dropping significantly (no doubt due to competition from television) and new formats just could not stem the bloodletting. Infantino’s faith in the Fourth World had vanished and Kirby was instructed to end the over-arching series and focus instead on developing other new, unrelated properties, including a swipe of popular Planet of the Apes movie franchise. The only surviving Fourth World title, Mister Miracle, had all but abandoned any connection to Apokolips, as Scott Free took on a young American side-kick and focused on his career as performing escape artist. (The final issue, though, was a fare-thee-well to the entire cast of Kirby’s Universe, as Scott marries Big Barda, and even o’ dreaded Darkseid shows up as uninvited wedding guest.)

Relations between Infantino and Kirby would reach its nadir at this time, and, by at least 1973, the King was receptive to inquiries from Marvel suggesting his return to the House of Ideas, which would finally occur in ’75.* In the meantime, Kirby would devote his considerable energies to The Demon and the Apes-inspired Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, the latter his most successful series at DC Comics, lasting for six years, 59 issues, with the final nineteen having no involvement from Kirby.

(A perennial question that has dogged researchers is whether or not Kirby’s meta-series was a poor-seller. Paul Levitz, a former DC publisher who had access to old sales figures, told the Jack Kirby Quarterly, “[T]he Fourth World titles were mid-range sellers… It was also my impression Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

that the Fourth World books were cancelled not so much because their sales were low compared to DC’s other books, but compared to both their expectations (remember that the Marvel books were becoming very strong competition at that time) and their costs (the creative costs of Jack’s books were very high by DC standards at that time).”

There are rumors, too, of the nefarious practice of “affidavit returns,” where magazine distributors were illegally selling copies of popular titles (though reporting them as unsold) to comics dealers out at the back door of warehouses.)

And though, as always, the King would put his usual all into the subsequent titles, no other Jack Kirby comic — for DC or otherwise — would contain the same level of vitality and ingenuity as did his beloved Fourth World. His disappointment and frustration over editorial tinkering (and possibly by the negative critical reception by some who

Above: The cover of Jack Kirby’s The New Gods #1 [Mar. 1971]. Previous page: Cover “bullet” icon for The New Gods.

Art by Jack Kirby.

* Curiously, a major fanzine of the day, Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector erroneously reported in #94 that the King, “beset by a number of disappointments,” had left DC Comics and was working again for Marvel, perhaps on The X-Men. It reported that the “official break” had occurred on Aug. 23, 1972, and there is mention of a “proposed New Gods paperback project.”

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Requiem for a King

30

Fourth World: The Aftermath

Time and again, DC has revived Kirby’s concepts, sometimes with competence and often not, but the frequency of the perennial revivals is proof enough of the property’s resilience. When Jenette Kahn became publisher after Infantino’s exit, a revival of The New Gods was put into motion (with mixed results), evidence that Kahn recognized a solid property for the company. In 1982, after Kirby had retired from animation and was slowing down considerably, an unprecedented opportunity arose for the King: Kahn, with the help of her DC associate Paul Levitz, offered Kirby explicit credit for his Fourth World and a chance to share in the profits derived from an action figure toy line based on his DC characters.

Doubtless motivated by competitor Hasbro’s wildly successful Star #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © DC Comics.

complained that the stories were missing Stan Lee-like repartee) were immense and, options in the industry being limited by the shrinking marketplace, he began to consider that the animation industry could make use of his storytelling genius. But his golden age of comics was over.

At the end of his tenure at the House of Superman, Kirby was illustrating scripts by other writers and working under the “direction” of much younger and much less experienced editors. Kirby told Groth about his latter DC days, “Yeah, there was always an editor who would operate in the wrong fashion. There were some editors who were still affectatious. If a guy is affectatious, he’s going to interfere with your work, and he’s going to want to say that you did the work, but he did the creation.” It was sounding a lot like the creator’s previous place of work.

Carmine Infantino would barely outlast Kirby at DC Comics, as he was told to leave the premises in January 1976, a unceremonious dismissal which would embitter the artist/executive to his final days. Apparently alluding to Infantino, Kirby said, back during better times in early ’71, in a joint interview with the publisher, “[DC is] a different company today. If a company feels that there is an essential need somewhere, they get the right executive to fill that need.” When asked eighteen years later if Infantino was a factor in the King leaving DC, Kirby’s tone had changed.

He told Gary Groth, “Like I say, there are people in editorial positions that shouldn’t be there. This seemed to be a period where Marvel and DC were relying on the wrong people in the right positions. These were the people who were wrong for these positions.”

Kirby returned to a much-changed Marvel Comics in the ’70s, one where Stan Lee was mostly absent and young editor/writers in charge. The King’s work would be both wonky and wondrous, whether his Captain America and Black Panther or 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Eternals, but aside from doing a fine job with the latter title (a sort-of New Gods riff), the creator’s universe-building was behind him for good at the House of Ideas.

Some holding editorial positions in the Bullpen were openly ridiculing his current work and the artist/writer was weary of interference from the New York office. “I’d had a belly-full of being subservient,” Kirby said to Groth about that period. “I had to find something else to do, and I did. I went to the [Hollywood] animation houses. I went to new fields. I did what I should have done in the first place.”

Jack Kirby’s plans when arriving at DC in 1970 were revolutionary. He planned for an intricate, interlocking series of comics that would constitute a finite epic, to be ultimately collected as a series of honest-to-goodness books. As for the readership of this meta-series, “I am trying for a universal market,” he said in the early days of the Fourth World. “It’s going to be rational for adults and exciting for the kids. In other words, if an adult picks it up and he analyzes it, as an adult should, he might find it interesting, whereas the kids will have the costumes, the action, the strange atmosphere, which I think every strip needs.” (Though well after his passing in 1994, the entire run was collected and published chronologically as four hardcover books, in 2007. Today paperback editions remain in print for new generations.)

He had also hoped to jolt the crime and horror genres with a series of black-&-white magazines (though only one issue each of In the Days of the Mob and Spirit World were published, doomed to poor distribution and lackluster promotion by DC). Romance, too, was in his sights, but the sole respective issues of True Divorce Cases and Soul Love would remain unreleased. “One of the things that intrigued Jack about going to DC ,” Evanier said, “was the prospect of launching new formats, and unleashing different sizes and shapes of comics.”

One wild notion was a tabloid-size anthology called Superworld (though briefly Uncle Carmine’s Fat City Comix was considered), which Kirby devised with assistants Evanier and Sherman, who were also in charge of the Fourth World letters columns and occasional text pages. The concept was influenced by the New York underground comix tabloid, Gothic Blimp Works, and a mock-up was prepared to pitch to the DC publisher. Superworld contained a strip by Kirby, “Galaxy Green,” and Steve Ditko’s “I Am Gemini,” as well as text articles, movie reviews, and (hopefully) high-end consumer ads. “As far as I know,” Steve Sherman said, “Carmine never even saw the proposal. Once the Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob magazines came out and bombed, there was no more talk of doing anything other than comic books.”

Kirby had also envisioned being nexus for a proposed DC Comics West, a California-based division that he would oversee in a creative consultant capacity. “He wanted to develop a group of writers and artists that he could work with so that he could eventually supervise,” Sherman explained.

Evanier added, “Jack wanted very much to be an idea man, an editor, a nexus for creative talent, and that did not fit in with DC’s plans or structure at the time, so he wound up doing it all pretty much himself.”

In fact, the King had specifically hoped for Dan Spiegle, a West Coast comic book artist primarily working for Gold Key, to draw the continuing Kamandi series after a first issue by Kirby (though Spiegle recalls no offer). It’s been suggested that Wallace Wood was the artist Kirby had in mind to take over The New Gods and for Steve Ditko to draw Mister Miracle, and that Kirby’s assistants, Evanier and Sherman, would write some books and to be DC West’s “handson” production managers, according to Evanier.

The King had dreamed of comics collected in book format and thereby having a new life beyond the newsstand. He hoped to see longer-form comics, stories that appealed directly to adults, tales that were novel-length sagas filled with imagination and new mythologies. He presciently envisioned, quite frankly, the world of today’s graphic novel.

Wars toys, Kenner Toys approached DC to license and develop a new line based on the publisher’s super-hero properties, including the Fourth World heroes and villains.

Thus was conceived the Super Powers Collection.

“We thought that Jack hadn’t been appropriately paid for his lifetime of work in the comics industry,” Kahn told this writer, and she sought out the creator to offer him work as toy designer and to share in the royalties for figures based on his Fourth World. In a Comics Journal interview, Roz Kirby paraphrased Kahn’s offer: “‘Look, we know what Marvel always did to you. You were always getting screwed all your life, and we want to be fair. We feel you created this, and that you should get something out of it.’” Kirby’s wife added, “They were very nice about it. We had nice meetings and they were very fair about it.” Her husband concurred. “With this kind of management,” Kirby said, “a deal could be made on a humane level.”

Reportedly, the Kirbys did very well financially with the Kenner deal and henceforth his “created by” credit would grace stories containing his Fourth World characters in all DC titles. Plus, in 1984, the King was given the opportunity to conclude his magnum opus, which he would do in the pages of a New Gods reprint series and in The Hunger Dogs, a bona fide graphic novel. (The story behind the production of these “final” chapters is simply too convoluted to go into with any detail in this space. Suffice to say the results were mixed, partly due to publisher dictates and some production nightmares, but the Kirbys made out fine in the end.)

Jack Kirby’s final assignment for DC Comics was Super Powers, a six-issue mini-series which integrated his Fourth World cast firmly within the realm of the other mainstay DC characters. While he was assigned to only contribute pencils on the job (a story he likely had no real interest in writing anyway), there still might have been a comforting realization that came over him. As the King’s characters were now recognized by the publisher — in writing, on paper — as being his own sole creations and were being used in a story he was drawing, he could take solace in knowing the Kirby family would share in royalties on top of his regular page rate. There must have been satisfaction in realizing that, for his relationship with DC Comics at least, the universe of Jack Kirby was very much at peace.

TM & © DC Comics.

Postscipt

If the New York Herald Tribune in 1966 was a low point in public recognition of Jack Kirby as conceptualizer of comic book universes, surely the May 2, 1971, feature article, “Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant,” by Saul Braun, in the The New York Times Sunday magazine (circulation 1.4 million), made for a high-water mark in the King’s career, at least in terms of publicity. Though his former partner and now rival is given sole credit for rescuing the entire industry therein (“The turnabout came in 1961, when Stan Lee metamorphosed the Marvel line and very likely saved comic books from an untimely death,” quoting the piece), the 6,500-word feature, graced with handsome photo portraits of Kirby, Lee, and Infantino, devotes a significant closing portion to the King, who was interviewed poolside at his Thousand Oaks, California, home.

The creator’s Fourth World is prominently discussed — and with a surprising accuracy (for a general newspaper article of the day) — in the 1,250-word section devoted to the King. (Incidentally it reveals that Kirby had been pulling in $35,000 a year at Marvel — nearly $220,000 in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation — though no details are shared about the DC deal.) While the feature writer’s tongue may be slightly in cheek, his is a thorough account of the unfolding masterwork (though any description of Mister Miracle is left unmentioned, perhaps #1 having not been available).

Braun’s article closes on a high note with the Fourth World auteur making a confession. “‘I have no final answers,’ Kirby admits. ‘I have no end in mind. This is like a continuing novel. My feeling about these times is that Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

they’re hopeful but full of danger. Any time you have silos buried around the country there’s danger. In the forties when I created Captain America, that was my feeling then, that patriotism. Comics are definitely a native American art.

They always have been. And I’m feeling very good about this. My mail has been about 90 per cent positive, and sales are good.’”

Nearly two decades later, when asked by Gary Groth to select the most creatively rewarding period of his career, after originating many hundreds of characters and drawing tens of thousands of comic book pages, the King replied, “I believe when I was given full rein on The New Gods. I was given full rein on The New Gods and I was given full rein on Mister Miracle. Mister Miracle was a fine strip.”

That same year, 1971, all four titles shared a Shazam Award for “Special Achievement by an Individual,” bestowed by Kirby’s peers in the Academy of Comic Book Arts. Here we will conclude this look at the King’s magnum opus, as the creator revels in his brief but optimistic period at DC. Overall, that first and only full calendar year with his Fourth World work on the stands, must have been a very satisfying period for the King.

Above: The cover of Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle #1 [Apr. 1971]. Previous page: Top is cover “bullet” icon for Mister Miracle. Art by Jack Kirby. Inset is cover of The Hunger Dogs [1985], art by Jack Kirby and Greg Theakston.

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An in-depth interview with the comix pioneer and graphic novelist I confess it was a little weird when first encountering Howard Cruse’s work. His Barefootz stories in the pages of Comix Book, that strange underground comix hybrid published by (of all things) the Marvel Comics Group, were… well… exceedingly cute in appearance, quite the juxtaposition from the S. Clay Wilson and Kim Deitch strips featured alongside the episodes of the big-footed, business-suited Candide-like character, his bossy lady friend, and an apartment full of snarky cockroaches. But editor Denis Kitchen found a solid cartoonist in the young talent from Alabama, whose wit and meticulous style soon became a personal favorite, an artist worth following, and someone I hoped to someday interview.

Understandably, the cartoonist, who today lives a modest domestic life in western Massachusetts with husband Eddie Sedarbaum, is reluctant to be categorized as merely a gay comic book artist. But Howard’s impact on the gay liberation movement through the prism of comics cannot be understated, if not as the first editor of Gay Comix, then certainly as author of the semi-autobiographical graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. Plus, Howard witnessed the first of the Stonewall riots, contributed his charming Wendel weekly comic strip to The Advocate for a good portion of the ’80s, and volunteered his artistic Below: A 2010 self-portrait of Howard talents as an activist during the AIDS epidemic, so there’s no denying the Russell Cruse. Next page: Original painting by Howard, which appeared as man has got solid cred. Primarily, though, Howard is a great cartoonist.

The Comics Journal #111 [Sept. ’86] cover.

The comic book creator was interviewed at home, on Feb. 1, 2014, and Howard copy-edited the transcript for accuracy and clarity.

Comic Book Creator: Howard, what is your middle name?

Howard Cruse: Russell.

CBC: What’s your first memory of comic strips? Was it Uncle Scrooge and Little Lulu that you were mostly interested in?

Howard: Little Lulu. Well, comic strips, of course, would have been in the newspaper, but in terms of comic books, Little Lulu was the first one that I was aware of and fascinated by and devoted to.

CBC: What was it about it?

Howard: Well, I was too young to realize at the time how good it was. I just knew it was good. I knew the stories were really funny. As time went on, I realized it was widely respected as one of the great comic book series. But I would read pretty much any comic series that one could buy from the spinner rack at the local drugstore. I probably was around five when I first saw a Little Lulu comic. We moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to a small town named Springville when I was fourand-a-half. My dad got ordained as a Methodist minister and they gave him a church in Springville, so we moved out there, and that’s where I spent the next ten years or so.

CBC: Are you an only child?

Howard: No, I have a brother, Allan. He’s three years older than me and lives in San Francisco. He recently retired from teaching computer science at the University of San Francisco.

CBC: Were you close?

Howard: Yes, we played together a lot as kids. We went through a brief period where he outgrew our games and I was the embarrassing younger

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#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Art © Howard Cruse.

Inteview conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Thompson

Art and characters TM & © Howard Cruse.

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brother, but that didn’t last long, and we’ve been close ever since.

CBC: Did you share your interest in comics? You were just a regular reader? You weren’t obsessed or anything?

Howard: Correct. I was never a collector; I was an accumulator.

CBC: Now, what’s the difference there, Howard?

Howard: Well, an accumulator doesn’t bag his comics in plastic but he doesn’t throw away his comics after he’s read them, either. One of our closets at our home had a stack of various titles that was several feet high.

CBC: So it wasn’t important for you to have all the issues in sequence, the sign of a collector? If you missed one, you just missed one. No big deal?

Howard: That was mostly true, except that I never missed an issue of Little Lulu! [laughter] Little Lulu was the only comic I ever subscribed to, unless you count MAD magazine. I was so anxious not to miss an issue of Little Lulu that I kept my subscription going until I reached high school age

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Uncle Scrooge TM & © The Walt Disney Company. Little Lulu TM & © the respective copyright holder.

Above: Photo of the Cruse family, circa 1952, in their Springville, Alabama home — father Clyde and mother Irma, older brother Allan, 11, and Howard, 8. Inset right: Perhaps Howard’s greatest influence was Little Lulu written by John Stanley and drawn by Irving Tripp, and published by Dell.

Below: Another inspiration were the Carl Barks Duck comics, also Dell titles.

and went off to boarding school. Other than Lulu, it depended on what was available at the drugstore. I read Uncle Scrooge and all of the various funny animal comics, but I could tell there were differences in quality. I knew there was something special about the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, which I later came to realize had to do with Carl Barks’ talents. Comics rarely listed credits when I was a kid, so I didn’t know about Barks or Lulu’s John Stanley until years later. I just assumed that since “Marge” was above the title on Lulu comics, that that was a woman who wrote and drew every issue of Little Lulu.

CBC: Was it anything about the depiction of gender in Little Lulu that — at least in retrospect — had any impact on you? It really was at least in some ways a role reversal, right? The girls were empowered; the boys could be stupid.

Howard: I think that I subconsciously absorbed the unusual fact that Lulu was the smartest kid in the neighborhood. Very rarely were girls portrayed in comics as being especially smart. For one thing, most of the humor comics didn’t develop rounded enough characters for you to have a feeling for them. I mean, how smart was Little Dot? Who knows?

CBC: She was clever.

Howard: I could tell the difference in sophistication between the Harvey comics and my favorites of the Dell comics, before I knew what sophistication was! I grew up before the big super-hero explosion. I read Superman and Batman and I played super-hero games in costumes and stuff like that, but I didn’t live and breathe super-heroes. I was interested in all the various genres that were available — cowboys, space adventures, spin-offs of TV shows. I read all of those. On a subconscious level, I developed a sense of which ones were better. Occasionally they would bring in substitute artists who were inferior. I could always tell if one of my disfavored artists was drawing a particular Little Lulu story. The weight of the lines around the balloons was a giveaway, for instance.

CBC: Stanley was a writer, right?

Howard: Yes, but he was a cartoonist, too. It’s my understanding that he drew the covers for Lulu comics. The covers had a radically different style from the interiors, which seemed strange to me as a kid. But I accepted it as just the way things were. I knew a good comic when I saw it.

CBC: Were you drawing from your very youngest years?

Howard: Yes. I still have stuff that I drew when I was in first grade thanks to my mother’s packrat tendencies.

CBC: What was the subject matter?

Howard: Oh, I had a succession of characters. I had a little elf named Landie Lucker.

Don’t ask me where you’d come up with a name like that. His father’s name was “Lusty” Lucker. I have no idea what was up with that; I had no idea what the word “lust” meant. It was just a nonsense name to me, like “Landie.”

But it’s sort of funny in retrospect.

CBC: Did you tell stories with the character?

Howard: Yeah, I did comic books in pencil and crayon.

CBC: Did you share them with anybody?

Howard: Yes, I shared them with my parents and showed them to friends sometimes.

CBC: Did they like them? Were they supportive?

Howard: My parents were always supportive of anything I did that was creative. I was fortunate in that my parents were totally devoted to their parenting. It was very important to them to be supportive.

I did little puppet shows and my mother in particular was encouraging. Dad usually had a job outside of the house

Birmingham-Southern College, like my mother did, until she had to quit and find a job. But, in Dad’s college yearbook, under “Ambition,” he had written: “To be the world’s greatest cartoonist.” That never happened but, when he saw which way my talents were going, he bought me my first India ink tools. Up until then, I had only drawn in pencil and you can never, with pencil, get the kind of blacks I was seeing in newspaper strips. So, when he bought me a Rapidograph and India ink, I was in heaven. I could do stuff that actually looked professional — at least in terms of the black areas being good and black, I mean. Anyway, when I was around eight, Dad clued me in to the fact that some people actually made their living drawing cartoons and I

Above: Howard says this was probably done at age seven (1951). Inset upper left: Initial installment of Howard’s Calvin, his first published comic strip, which ran for a year in a rural Alabama weekly, The St. Clair County Reporter. Below: An episode of Reuben, Howard’s strip from 1960–62 and featured in The ISSINFO, the Indian Springs student newspaper.

Most items in this section are courtesy of the artist.

All TM & © Howard Cruse.

but, until I was eight or nine, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. She would always stop whatever she was doing to watch one of my puppet shows, and she would always read any new stories I wrote or comic strips I drew. I also wrote horror novels and plays all through my pre-teen years.

Very juvenile stuff, but I was getting used to expressing my creativity.

My father once came across a used record-cutting machine and brought it home. It had a microphone and was like a tape recorder, except that you would record your voices on blank vinyl discs. My brother and I would write radio plays and record ourselves performing them.

You didn’t have the benefits of a tape recorder since you couldn’t tape over what you’d recorded. You were stuck with whatever you did. I remember being very disappointed when I would hear my voice. Sometimes I would be the narrator and was imagining myself sounding like…

CBC: Deep resonant?

Howard: Exactly. But when we played the records we made I had a little pipsqueak voice. [laughter] CBC: I still hate hearing my voice.

Howard: I do, too.

CBC: [Affecting deep voice] We always sound like this to ourselves.

Howard: Fortunately, none of those homemade recordings from my childhood survive.

CBC: Where did the idea arise, “Hey! People actually get paid for drawing pictures?”

Howard: That hit me when I was eight. Dad was delighted when he saw me developing some drawing talent and encouraged me in every way possible. In his youth, he had fantasized being a cartoonist himself. He had some cartooning skills, but he never developed them. He had to deal with the Depression and stuff like that. He had gone to

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said, “Well that’s great! I wanna do that!” I wanted to have a famous newspaper strip and be like Chic Young or somebody like that.

CBC: To get attention?

Howard: Well, the idea was it would be a stable way to make a living that didn’t involve farming, which is what most of the adults in Springville had to do. Farming looked like a lot more work than I wanted to do! So, when I learned that grownups could get by just drawing pictures, that became the focus for me. The pinnacle of cartooning in those days was either to be a New Yorker cartoonist or to have a syndicated newspaper strip. I assumed that I would ultimately get a syndicated strip. All through my teenage years, I created and submitted strips to the syndicates. Unsuccessfully, of course.

CBC: Can you describe any of these?

This page: Howard’s father, Rev. J. Clyde Cruse, was embroiled in a squabble in 1950, when the Methodist elders determined his sermons lacked tact and diplomacy. Here are article clippings from Alabama newspaper The Anniston Star. In the photo, Howard is at far left. When these articles were shared with the artist, he responded, “I was six when the controversy described in the newspaper article was going on and didn’t understand any of the issues involved. All I knew was that after coming to Springville as Methodists, we were suddenly Baptists! I view the complaints by his church’s board of stewards that his sermons were ‘too strong’ to be an indication of his idealism about the appropriate role of a pastor. Although I had abandoned most of my parents’ specific religious beliefs by my mid-teens, Dad’s commitment to living a life true to his beliefs was something that I permanently absorbed into my personal value system. (Dad certainly did succeed in raising a stir, didn’t he?)”

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Howard: When I was thirteen I did a comic strip for the weekly county newspaper. It lasted a year and was called Calvin. It was embarrassingly amateurish and imitative of Luttle Lulu. I’m sure the editor printed it because the paper was hard up for content and he was friends with my father. The first strip I submitted to syndicates was about a kid who had a pet dinosaur. It was called Thom and was influenced by both Lulu and Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. I did a goofy pantomime strip called Poor Willoughby, and, while I was in college, I submitted one called Mary Bean. It was about a morose little girl and was way too influenced by Peanuts.

A syndicate was actually interested enough in that one to ask for more samples. I got my hopes up but they rejected it in the end.

CBC: Were they gag or serial?

Howard: I tried to do both. Down through the years, my efforts got a little more sophisticated. One of my later tries was very influenced in tone by Li’L Abner. It was called Muddlebrow. It was set in a little kingdom that functioned the way Dogpatch functioned in Li’l Abner and had story lines that were satirical.

CBC: Was the King the protagonist?

Howard: Yes. His name was King Plentywaist. He was childlike, totally infantile, and his best friend was a verbal infant in diapers named Yodel. They got into funny adventures together. Looking back, I can see that I was borrowing a lot from Dr. Seuss’s King Derwin of Didd in the Bartholomew Cubbins stories. I mailed a number of Muddlebrow strips to syndicate editors but got nowhere.

That was kind of late in the game, long after I had left Springville. I was already out of college and in New York when I developed Muddlebrow. I still regret that the era of the continuity newspaper strip had passed by the time I achieved the skills to do one. And, by the time I started getting really serious about my cartooning, I had realized that I didn’t want to be censored at the level that newspaper strips were censored. My sensibility had gotten too underground. Also the idea of doing a strip a day sounded grueling.

CBC: Did you talk to professional comic strip creators? A lot of people don’t know how demanding daily strips can be when they want to go for it. Every single day!

Howard: Well, I had gotten inklings of that issue while I was in high school taking a correspondence course in cartooning, the Famous Cartoonists course. But of course, when you’re a kid you think there’ll never be an end to your energy!

Among the people who wrote the Famous Cartoonists textbooks were some favorites of mine like Al Capp and Milton Caniff. The solo chapters that those two wrote for the course were the best lessons in the textbooks. I learned huge amount from both of them. Then, when I was sixteen, I serendipitously got a chance to meet Caniff in person. The physical education teacher at Indian Springs, the boarding school near Birmingham where I was going to by then, had been Caniff’s next door neighbor in New York for a while before he came south. So when Coach Cameron became aware that I was so interested in cartooning, he invited me to travel with him and his basketball team when they were going to New England for a tournament. He booked me into a YMCA in Manhattan for three days while he and the team went on to the tournament, and he asked Caniff if I could come spend some time with him while I was there. So that’s #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Muddlebrow TM & © Howard Cruse. Photos © the respective copyright holders.

how I got to spend an afternoon in Caniff’s studio chatting and watching him draw Steve Canyon. After our visit, Caniff took me to lunch at Sardi’s with Sylvan Byck, who was the editor-in-chief at King Features.

CBC: You brought samples of your stuff?

Howard: For sure. And Caniff had already shown Byck samples that we had sent to him before the trip. It was characteristic of Caniff to be encouraging to young aspiring cartoonists.

I had fantasies that that lunch at Sardi’s was going to be a breakthrough event for me. I was ready to sign a contract on the spot. Byck was very nice but, at the end of the conversation, he said, “This is the big leagues. You’re not ready for the big leagues yet.”

Which I hated to hear but which I knew was true.

CBC: Fair enough.

Howard: Yeah, but still. You can have fantasies at sixteen.

CBC: And you can have fantasies crushed!

Howard: [Laughs] Well, somewhere in my heart I knew I was thinking a little too far ahead.

CBC: Now, would you say that the cultural environment while you were growing up in Springville was repressive or conservative or…?

Howard: Yeah, Springville was a very conservative little town. I took that for normal. When you’re a little kid in a town like that, you assume that that’s just the way the world is. By Springville standards, my parents were on the progressive side. My dad raised eyebrows by ministering to the black families in town as well as to the white folks in his congregation. If they were in the hospital or sick, he would visit them. This was considered out of the ordinary for a white minister. My folks read books all the time and were kind of advanced in their acceptance of sex, by 1950s standards, in that they didn’t freak out if Allan or I saw them naked. If they took a bath and we walked in, it was not a big deal.

You could never have mistaken Dad for a present-day liberal, though. His opinions would never have been in synch with the ’60s. But he didn’t live long enough to have to cope with the counterculture. He died in the winter of 1963, while I was in college, so he never had that challenge.

I’m sure he would have had a hard time with the way the ’60s played out.

CBC: How old was he when he died?

Howard: He was born in 1910 and died in ’63… You can do the arithmetic. Fifty-three or something like that. The last years of his life were tough. He was mentally ill enough to be committed for several months when I was around 13.

Then he came home and was fairly stable for a few years.

But during my freshman year in college his demons got the better of him.

CBC: Why do you think he killed himself in the end? Just madness?

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

Howard: I think he could probably sense his psychosis returning and he didn’t want to put the family through another round of stress. He had originally been diagnosed as paranoid/schizophrenic but, in retrospect, I think that was a misdiagnosis. From today’s perspective, I think he was bipolar. Several events in his life during my youth showed the wild swings of emotions that go with that, the extreme ups and downs.

CBC: How’d your mom deal with his mental illness?

Howard: It was very hard on her. Signing the papers to have him committed took a lot of courage because they were a very close couple. But she recognized that he was endangering…

CBC: Your safety?

Howard: Not our physical safety, but our financial safety.

He developed the illusion that if you have faith, Jesus will always put money in the bank if you need it. So he began taking financial risks that put our family finances in danger.

CBC: Did she have any skills?

Howard: Oh, yes. She became a pioneering Alabama businesswoman and also wrote inspirational articles for religious magazines. Both Dad and Mom had writing skills.

Dad wrote some religious plays that could be put on in churches.

CBC: Were they any good? Did you read ’em?

Howard: They weren’t Broadway material or anything.

They were intended to be performed by amateurs in church settings. Two were published by Baker Plays. I was in one of them! I had a kid’s part in a production at the Springville Baptist Church. But, by the time I got old enough to have any sort of a critical eye about such things, I was moving away from the family’s religious orientation and had very little interest in re-reading them.

CBC: Were they morality tales or…?

Howard: One was a Biblical play called Son of Stephen. I don’t have a copy and don’t know what I would think of it as an adult. The one that I was in was called Healing in Its Wings. A family gets stranded on Christmas Eve when their car breaks

Above: Muddlebrow strip from 1969. The young cartoonist unsuccessfully pitched a previous version of the concept to King Features editor Sylvan Byck (left inset, at right) during a visit to Milton Caniff (left) in Howard’s high school days.

Below: Pro cartoonists were featured in the Famous Artists correspondence course.

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Above: At age 20, Howard contributed this illustration to the Birmingham-Southern College theater program.

Below: Political cartoon drawn

by Howard for the Shades Valley Sun weekly in 1964.

Howard: Yeah, I think the big explosion that led to the Comics Code happened in the late ’50s. I could be wrong about the date. I know that the book Seduction of the Innocent was in the school library in the ’60s. I don’t remember the date it came out.

CBC: It came out April ’54. It was in your school library?

Howard: Yes. Like I mentioned, I went to high school at Indian Springs, which was a progressive boarding school south of Birmingham, between 1958 and ’62. I didn’t know what to think about [Fredric] Wertham’s book. I sensed that it was more critical of comics than it should be, but I didn’t have a lot of perspective about that yet. Some of the pictures in it were very sexy! I liked that. [laughter] CBC: Was Harvey Kurtzman the editor of the MAD issues you first encountered?

Howard: No, I discovered the magazine after the Kurtzman years. Al Feldstein was the editor by then.

CBC: What was it about MAD that appealed to you?

Howard: Well, when I first came across an issue on the newsstand, I was amazed that they could have characters from other people’s comic strips in their parodies. I didn’t know that was allowed. The premise in one of the first features I saw was: what would happen if famous comic strip characters answered the little ads in the backs of magazines? It showed Nancy reading an ad for a hair-straightening product and then what she would look like after using it. I just didn’t know that you could do things like that! I was immediately attracted to the concept!

The magazine still had a lingering Kurtzman effect for several years after he left. I mean, eventually the magazine became repetitive, but for a while the satire remained pretty sharp. Feldstein was smart enough to get contributions from famous comedians like Ernie Kovacs, Tom Lehrer, Danny Kaye, and Bob and Ray. Artists like Mort Drucker, Wallace Wood, and George Woodbridge would illustrate the scripts, or in Lehrer’s case, the song lyrics. So they had some really high-prestige talent on call, you know, even after Kurtzman was gone. Kovacs used to do regular takeoffs on Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Yeah, I loved all that stuff and started subscribing immediately. Then a friend of mine clued me into the fact that there had been an even better prior incarnation of MAD that Kurtzman had edited and that it had been a comic book before it was a magazine. He had a complete collection going back to #1, which he let me look through and savor. That’s when I began to be aware of Kurtzman.

CBC: How was homosexuality treated in America in the 1950s?

Howard: Well, it was awful — in the South, in particular.

It was grounds for beating people up or killing them. It was a guaranteed way to be a pariah and probably to go to jail.

I was still living in Springville when I first discovered that there were real flesh-and-blood homosexuals in the world. In Springville, even. Years later the memory of that incident inspired my story “Jerry Mack,” which is Gay Comix #2. There was a man who was prominent in Springville who just kind of disappeared all of a sudden. It was strange.

After much prodding, I learned from my parents that one of our neighbors believed he had come on to his teenage son.

As I understood it, from my mother’s second-or-third-hand account, the father stormed out to the guy’s farm, beat him up, and told him he’d better get out of town — immediately!

He even took a preacher along to make sure he didn’t lose control and kill the guy. So this person was, all of a sudden, gone! Once I heard about this from my folks, I naturally asked, “What is a homosexual?”

CBC: And how old were you?

Howard: Probably eleven or so. I remember my mother explaining to me with great difficulty that there were some men in the world who, as she put it, had an uncontrollable urge to put other men’s penises in their mouth!

CBC: Good heavens!

Howard: She said this with great anguish! It’s not that #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All © Howard Cruse.

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down and the only place they can get warm is an empty church. As you might expect, they end up reacquainting themselves with Jesus.

CBC: Do you remember any lines?

Howard: No. I was, like, nine when I was in it.

CBC: How about being on stage? Did you like it?

Howard: Oh, yeah! I loved that part of it. The theatre bug had definitely been born in me by then. I was always a big show-off.

Dad’s playwriting was just a sideline; he mainly earned his living as a magazine writer, photojournalist, and public relations man after he quit being a full-time minister.

CBC: You had a darkroom in the house?

Howard: We had a darkroom in the house.

CBC: Did you dabble?

Howard: I watched him. I never learned to use it while I was in Springville, but once I began boarding at Indian Springs, I became very involved with putting out the school paper, which was printed on campus on a little offset press.

So I learned lots of production techniques, which included darkroom skills — shooting layouts and developing film. I learned the difference between panchromatic and orthochromatic film and got good at doing paste-ups, which stood me in good stead later when I needed to earn a living as an adult.

CBC: Midway, or certainly early on with our comics reading, the Comics Code came along, right?

All items TM & © the respective copyright holders. The Cruse Nest TM & © Howard Cruse.

she was being hateful. My parents never stopped being kind to this guy when he would call them from wherever he ended up. They would sympathize with his guilt and pray with him.

CBC: But her explanation to you was not “Some men love other men”?

Howard: Absolutely not. Homosexuality was all about being compulsive and predatory. That was the general attitude back then. Did you ever read Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask? CBC: When I was twelve.

Howard: The author [David Reuben] had a chapter on homosexuality that was totally ignorant and damaging.

CBC: Oh, really?

Howard: Yeah. It denied the existence of gay love. Basically it said that life for a homosexual was just a “parade of penises.” That’s the phrase that stuck with me. That’s all there is to homosexuality, he said. [Jon laughs] Now that’s a really shocking thing to read if you’re a kid and you think the author might be writing about you! It was hurtful, very, very hurtful. I remember when my parents told me about this guy in Springville who had gotten run out of town, one of the things that disturbed me was that I didn’t feel adequately repelled. I mean, I had no inclination to put anybody’s penis in my mouth or anything, but I was aware that

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

in some way I didn’t understand I identified with this guy.

CBC: So your mother is giving you, like, this, “Aaaaa!” whatever. Her… Howard: She was obviously in distress. She used compassionate terms, like it was a disability. Like, there are some children that are born without limbs, y’know?

CBC: You said you were not adequately repelled…

Howard: I had heard the terms “queer” and “c*cksucker” bandied about in school, but I thought they were just gross, nonsensical insults. I didn’t know that they had anything to do with real people. It made me uneasy. I knew that I wasn’t on schedule when it came to being attracted to girls. Thinking about attractive boys was a different matter, though. I would have passing thoughts like: how come, in famous art, it’s okay for them to paint naked women but not naked men? I hadn’t come across Michelangelo’s statue of David yet. [laughs] CBC: Which is on your refrigerator, by the way…

Howard: I think that David magnet is on the refrigerator of every gay man in the world. It’s very popular.

Then I began discovering veiled gay magazines. I say “veiled” because they were not acknowledging themselves as gay magazines; they just had photographs of naked men in them.

Actually, it was illegal to have total male nudity in those days, so all the models wore these little so-called “posing straps.“ CBC: Were these, like, photography magazines?

Howard: Well, there was one called Body Beautiful.

That’s the first one I saw. I discovered it in a second-hand magazine store in Birmingham. Its ostensible purpose was being a resource for artists who wanted to do figure drawings but couldn’t afford live models. And then there were the muscle and health magazines. The most famous one was called Tomorrow’s Man. There’s a whole generation of gay men who, if you mention Tomorrow’s Man, will get all nostalgic. [whispers] “Ah, yes! Tomorrow’s Man.” CBC: Was it a good magazine?

Howard: It served its purpose. It had a few obligatory articles about which vitamins you should take and stuff like that, but it was the pictures of well-built guys in posing straps that made it a must-have for budding homos like me.

It became my first porn. I actually subscribed to it, which was kind of daring in Springville.

CBC: Were you getting it at home?

Above: Anniston Star obituary for Howard’s father, who had committed suicide in late January, 1963. Inset upper left: An installment of The Cruse Nest, a panel feature that ran from 1966–68 in The Hilltop News, the Birmingham-Southern student newspaper. Below: The mass media’s notion of homosexuality was downright bizarre, rife with stereotypes and misinformation. Center is One, a magazine which advocated for gay marriage in 1963.

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Above: Nov. 8, 1971, editorial page of the University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson-White, which for a time featured Howard’s Barefootz strip. Inset upper right: The vertical newspaper strip Tops & Button was featured in the Birmingham Post-Herald between 1970–72. Inset right: Detail from “The Guide,” Dope Comix #3 [1979]. Below: Lysergic acid diethylamide tabs.

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

All art, characters TM & © Howard Cruse.

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Howard: No, it would arrive at the post office. It was mailed in a plain brown envelope with no return address so nobody would know what it was. I would stop by the post office on the way home from school every day to pick up the family mail and to make sure my parents didn’t see it.

CBC: How old were you?

Howard: Oh, this all happened in that vague period between eleven and thirteen when I was coming of age sexually.

I certainly had no role models for being a gay cartoonist, open or otherwise. There were no openly gay cartoonists working in the mainstream at all. The closest thing I had to a role model was Allen Ginsberg, who I became aware of from articles about him in Playboy that I read, once I was at Indian Springs. It was very important for me to know that there was someone like Allen Ginsberg who could be a famous poet and even be celebrated in some quarters even though he was gay. [laughs] Okay, not celebrated by Alabama people, but by Hugh Hefner and people who read Playboy magazine. Ultimately, in the years that followed, other famous writers came out. Tennessee Williams did it in an interview I read. So

did Truman Capote. This gave me hope. It became clear that there were areas of literature where you could be openly gay and still have a show done on Broadway.

But there was still much more chance that you would be a pariah if people knew. So there was lots of motivation to keep it to yourself.

CBC: And you were in the Deep South!

Howard: I was in the Deep South, which was very homophobic when I was a kid. It’s better today. Back in 2004, I was even the grand marshal in Birmingham’s Gay Pride parade! So things have changed.

But, especially in political and religious circles, you still have people who’ll fight tooth and nail to keep LGBT people stigmatized, just like some people will still go to the mat to keep the Ten Commandments on display in the State Capitol.

Going to Indian Springs made a huge difference in my life. It was a great school. Still is.

CBC: It was a revolutionary school in a certain way.

Howard: Right. Very experimental. People hear “boarding school” and think about military academies or Christian schools, but that’s not what Indian Springs was. It was influenced by the “Summerhill” approach to education.

Students had a lot of freedom. There was a big emphasis on excellence for its own sake and learning to think for yourself. Learning to think critically instead of automatically accepting what you were told. That school was really life-changing for me in many ways. It was an hour’s drive from the school to my home, so I lived at the campus. My parents would come out and visit me, but I only occasionally came home to Springville. It was great to start fresh without being pigeonholed as a preacher’s kid. I enjoyed carving out a new identity.

It was still an all-boys school when I was there. Many of the students were from the Birmingham area and had girlfriends who would come out to the campus to visit, or the guys would drive into Birmingham to date girls they had known before they enrolled. The fact that I wasn’t doing that was noticeable enough for me to begin getting peer pressure to date like everyone else did. My sophomore

All art, characters TM & © Howard Cruse.

roommate decided to help me become more socially skilled and arranged a couple of blind dates for me, double-dates with him and his girlfriend. They were just awful. I didn’t know how to behave. I knew I was supposed to be sexual and try to grab my date’s breast if the opportunity arose, but the inclination wasn’t there. On our first double-date we went to a movie and I summoned the courage to put my arm around her in the dark. Then I started gradually trying to cop a feel, like you’re supposed to. I was sort of actually, y’know, going to town a bit! But I wasn’t getting any reaction. So I squeezed harder and she asked me why I was squeezing her purse. [laughter] That ended my little attempt at…

CBC: Foreplay.

Howard: Yeah. After that I refused to go to anymore movies at public places where I would be expected to make a move. But he gave it one more try. This time we went to a drive-in, where there was a little less pressure because the girl and I weren’t shoulder-to-shoulder. I had the whole back seat to be shy in. I’m sure this girl was a perfectly nice person, but we had nothing in common and it just felt awkward. In the front seat my roommate and his date were seriously necking. My date and I were just sitting like statues.

CBC: What was the movie? [laughter] Howard: I don’t remember. My mind wasn’t on the screen. But I refused to go on anymore dates with girls.

With each year at Indian Springs it became clearer to me that it was boys I was attracted to, not girls. Theoretically this was just a phase I was going through, so I kept desperately waiting for the phase to end. But it just wasn’t happening. On the outside, it looked like I was a cheerful, successful student, but on the inside, I was getting more and more depressed. Then, during my senior year, I had a crisis. I attempted suicide.

CBC: Was it over your identity?

Howard: Probably, but I didn’t realize that yet. I thought it was just about depression. I was convinced I was going to have an unhappy life. I didn’t connect it to my fears about being gay until later.

CBC: How did you, uh… attempt it?

Howard: Oh, in just the most ineffective way possible.

I tried to overdose on aspirin. Right on the bottles, it says don’t take more than six, you know? Being naïve, I took 25 and figured that would do it. That turned out to be short of a lethal dose, but my doctor said it was a wonder I hadn’t Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

destroyed my liver! My ears rang for a week. That’s a classic symptom of acetylsalicylic acid poisoning. On the night I took the aspirin, I went to sleep genuinely expecting that I wouldn’t wake up. But then I did wake up with my ears ringing.

CBC: Too much aspirin?

Howard: Yeah, that’ll do it. Once it seemed clear that I wasn’t going to die, I decided to tell my most trusted faculty member what I had done. With my permission, he told my father and the school’s headmaster, who I was close to. Everybody agreed that I should get some professional therapy once they had had me checked out by a doctor. So I went for counseling and, for the first time, was able to talk honestly to a theoretically knowledgeable adult about my homosexual feelings.

One of the first things the therapist did was assign me to write a totally honest essay about myself. So I brought in the essay on my second visit and, when he read, “I think I’m probably homosexual,” he immediately saw that as a crucial piece of information.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t all that knowledgeable. He did me some good in the few sessions we had, but his attitude was basically, “You just think you’re gay. The problem is you’ve been going to an all-boys school. You need to spend more time with girls.” He assured me that if I went to a co-ed college the next year and made a point of dating girls, I would be just fine. So, given that you’re supposed to believe what your therapist tells you, I tried to follow his advice. He was the expert.

So I enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College, which was co-educational, and I did my best to follow the therapist’s advice and not be a social misfit anymore. I went to frat parties during rush week. I even took girls to a couple of the rush parties. I felt like a fish out of water. But then I saw that auditions were being held for the college theatre’s fall production and I decided to try out. The difference between the fraternity scene and the theatre scene was like night and day. I got cast in a small role and was immediately welcomed into the theatre group. They were loose and funny and quasi-bohemian. I could enjoy the camaraderie without feeling sexual pressure. Sex aside, it was my first time to hang out with girls who not only were smart but weren’t afraid to act smart. Southern girls in those days were not supposed to seem smart because that might scare the boys away. That had left me with the impression that girls just weren’t all that smart. This was the first time I got to have human-to-human relationships with girls. I met Pam, who was part of the theatre group, and she and I connected in an especially nice way.

CBC: Did you fall in love?

Howard: Yes. I was attracted to her as a person immediately, enough so that I could begin letting down my barriers and begin experimenting sexually. I was able to shove the fact that I was fundamentally gay into the back of my mind and persuade myself that it was possible for me to lead a straight lifestyle.

CBC: Was it about making other people happy?

Above: Panel from “The Guide,” Dope Comix #3, which is more commonly known as “My First Acid Trip,” an autobiographical story about Howard’s experience taking acid with a bunch of friends in Alabama during the 1960s.

LSD, of course, would have a significant impact on the cartoonist, as it did on any number of underground comix artists.

The Kitchen Sink anthology title included not just gratuitous exploits involving drug use, but often featured cautionary tales of “bad trips” and the consequences of addiction.

Inset upper left: More of Cruse’s Tops & Buttons newspaper strips. Below: Howard shares that this psychedelic gag cartoon is from the early ’70s, drawn with ink, Pentels, and Magic Markers.

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This page: In the history of LGBTQ rights, the events at the Stonewall Inn, in early summer 1969, cannot be underestimated, where the New York City gay community pushed back against police oppression, igniting the modern gay liberation movement. Howard Cruse, who was tripping his brains out after attending a Tiny Tim concert in Central Park, happened upon the riot — a turning point in history — and, as seen in his strip below, the cartoonist was witness to history.

This account was featured in The Village Voice, in 1982.

as Toland’s and Ginger’s is a real relationship. But part of that was me being in denial. I was trying to make myself over into a straight person. And within the theatre group, I appeared to be a straight person. Pam and I were everybody’s favorite little lovebirds for a while. Then things got complicated.

CBC: Was Pam’s and yours an active sexual relationship?

In Stuck Rubber Baby, there’s that one moment, right?

Howard: Yeah, Toland’s first try at having sex with Ginger being a fiasco, that’s based on my experience. My first try and having sex with Pam was when I learned that, if you stash a rubber in your wallet for too long, the lubricant is likely to dry up and make it impossible to unroll. Which can interrupt the mood, to put it mildly. When it happened to me I got totally embarrassed and non-functional, the way Toland does in my book, and like Toland I was so chagrined that I took that occasion to own up to Pam about my gayness.

It took a while for us to rethink our relationship after that, but since we did love each other we eventually did try making love again — minus the condom part. I was still freaked out from our earlier experience, so we decided to try the rhythm method of birth control, which we thought we understood but didn’t.

In terms of the time of the month, Pam couldn’t have been any more fertile.

CBC: You did exactly the wrong rhythm, right?

Howard: Yeah. It only took one time and Pam was pregnant. People who’ve read my graphic novel will recognize that plot development. Fortunately, as scary as the situation was, neither Pam nor I wanted to have an abortion. We really felt nice about our relationship and it seemed like any baby that grew out of it was likely to be cool. Also, I was pretty sure this was going to be my only opportunity to be a parent of any sort.

CBC: You had a desire to be a parent?

Howard: Yes, growing up I had always assumed #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Photos © the respective copyright holders. “That Night at the Stonewall” © Howard Cruse.

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Was it about conforming to the world? Did you ever think, “I wanna be liberated”?

Howard: At some level I did, but who knew that liberation would ever be possible for gay people? I only knew one openly gay person and he was in a younger generation. He was a friend of Pam’s who was still in high school. He was adamantly unafraid to say he was gay. And that’s the first time I knew that anyone could be like that. Once I was in the theatre group, there’s another guy who was essentially the inspiration for Sammy Noone in Stuck Rubber Baby. In many ways, he was unlike Sammy, but he was still the basic inspiration. He was the organist at a church in Birmingham.

After he got kicked out of his home, he lived at the church, and after that, he got kicked out of Birmingham-Southern for behaving outrageously.

As lots of people know by now, Pam is the person on whom the character Ginger in Stuck Rubber Baby is based.

Ours was a real relationship, a loving relationship, just

Gay Comix TM & © the respective copyright holder. Art © Howard Cruse.

I would be a parent someday. My folks were good role models for parenting, and I thought I could be a loving parent like them. But I also had a strong sense that I was not psychologically mature enough to be daddy right then!

CBC: How old were you?

Howard: Nineteen. And I wanted to be an artist, which meant I had a good chance of spending my life in poverty, especially if I was trying to raise a family at the same time.

After talking everything over with Pam and getting advice from her parents and my mom, everybody agreed that the best plan would be for Pam to have the baby and then surrender it for adoption. Meanwhile, all this stress was driving home the fact that being gay comes with one big benefit: nobody gets pregnant!

CBC: What were the representations of gay people in the early ’60s? And in the mid-’60s? What was your interpretation of that? You’re realizing you’re gay. What did the outside world represent besides Allen Ginsburg?

Howard: The big issue in those days was: are gay people sinners or are they just sick? The idea of gayness being natural and healthy didn’t exist as a concept in Birmingham.

Once I ventured into the city’s gay subculture — which I could only do after hitting twenty-one because that was the legal drinking age then — my experience was similar to the one that’s depicted in Stuck Rubber Baby. The gay bar was kind of like a community center. It was an accepting environment where you could be among people like you.

This was years before Stonewall, and my sense is that people in the gay bar scene in Birmingham back then thought of themselves as disabled to some degree, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a good life and feel like they were a community. I don’t think many of us really thought it was totally okay to be gay. But we could think, “So here we are: gay. We didn’t ask to be gay, but we can still enjoy ourselves.”

CBC: Was there an acceptance, a tolerance, within the college theatre department? Was that part of the attitude?

Howard: When you say “acceptance,” are you talking about being gay?

CBC: Yes. Howard: Well, working on plays gave me my first chance to be part of a group that had gay people in it, but very few were totally uncloseted outside of our circle. You generally knew who in the theatre was gay, but they didn’t broadcast it to the campus at large — unless they happened to be “readably” gay and didn’t have a choice. Most could pass for straight, and most of them chose to do that.

Of course, as much as you might worry about others rejecting you, there are some things you just can’t control.

Once when I was in the Fire Pit, which was the main gay bar in Birmingham while I was at Birmingham-Southern, one of the college’s fraternities decided that it would be a kick to drop in and see what the Fire Pit was like. The bar had a bunch of tables in the center of the room and booths over to the side. So I was with people at the tables and we Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

were chatting along, blah, blah, and I happened to look over my shoulder. There were all these straight fraternity boys from the school. I saw them; they saw me. These were the type of students that I was used to hoping would not learn I was gay.

CBC: But they were in your world, right?

Howard: Yes, and soon they would be back on campus and the gossip would begin! Suddenly I felt relaxed about what was happening. Okay, that’s over. I didn’t choose it, but that hurdle’s been jumped. From now on I will never know, when I’m talking to somebody on campus, whether or not they know I’m gay. And, in all likelihood, the world wouldn’t end. It certainly wasn’t going to cause any problems with the college theatre gang, and the college theatre was where I had been putting most of my energy when I wasn’t studying for courses.

Back at Indian Springs, we hadn’t had much of a theatre program, but they did some short plays and I was one of the people who would try out for ’em and get to perform. They later developed quite an ambitious theatre program, but, when I was there, they didn’t have a good stage to work with. They did plays in the school gymnasium, which was echoey and had bad acoustics, and they didn’t have much money in the budget for sets. But I began writing plays for fun, and actually got an honorable mention in the Cavalcade magazine student playwriting contest one year. Meanwhile, the school used to bus us out to Birmingham-Southern to see the plays that were being done there. Their productions were exciting. That had made me more enthusiastic about choosing Birmingham-Southern as my college. It wasn’t just so I could date girls like my therapist had wanted me to!

Of course, by the time I was winding up my high school career, I had become alienated by all the racial turmoil that was going on in Birmingham, which was the biggest argument against staying in the area once I graduated from Indian Springs. I’m sure I would have made a different choice if it weren’t for the BSC’s great theatre department, which I thought I could maybe be a part of, and because of Dr. Arnold Powell, the director who had made the school’s theatre program great.

Arnie, which is what he liked his students to call him, became a mentor of mine while I was a student and we remained good friends until

Above: Left is the 1976 gay pride march in New York City.

Right is gay hero Harvey Milk.

Below: “Safe Sex” splash by Howard Cruse [Gay Comix #4, Nov. ’83], pro-gay button during the AIDS epidemic, Howard’s cover for Gay Comix #2 [Nov. ’81], and detail from “Billy Goes Out,” Gay Comix #1 [Sept. ’80].

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Above: Howard Cruse drew his own portrait for the Kitchen Sink button series, Famous Cartoonists. Below: Cover detail from Barefootz Funnies #1 [July 1975]. The first two issues of Howard Cruse’s series were self-financed by the cartoonist during a time of struggle for Denis Kitchen’s comix outfit.

Barefootz, a comic strip about a business-suited, giant-footed urban dweller with a platonic (though sexually aggressive) lady friend, and an apartment full of hippie-like, anthropomorphic cockroaches (and the occasional frog), was weird, certainly, but also charming.

from school was when I took a job so I could make money and help contribute to the cost of Pam’s stay at the unwed mothers home in Atlanta.

CBC: You gave the child up for adoption?

Howard: Yes. CBC: And the baby was a daughter?

Howard: The baby was a daughter. Pam never came back to Southern after giving birth. She went to New York to study acting, met and married a fellow she met there, and they eventually settled down in Maine and had a bunch of kids. I kept my distance out of respect for her new family situation. But they got divorced a number of years later, by which time I had moved to New York, and we got reacquainted. We discovered that we still enjoyed each other’s company, which was great. The best parts of our relationship from college were still there and the worst parts, all the adolescent insecurities, were not part of it anymore.

She has remarried by now and lives in California, so we don’t get to see each other that often. But we’re still close and, once in a while, my husband, Eddie, and I get to spend time with her and her family, as happened last summer. And we’re Facebook friends, so the bond continues.

CBC: Let’s talk about psychedelics. Were you introduced to the Summer of Love, Peter Max’s art, the general culture of pop art, before indulging?

Howard: Well, my crowd and I were certainly aware that all that was going on while I was still in school in Birmingham. Everything from the Beatles on was leading me in the direction of turning on. I was in a production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in my junior year. It’s hard to explain why that was such a consciousness-expanding experience, since I hadn’t even had my first puff of marijuana yet, but once I did take my first LSD trip I felt like it was taking me somewhere that Beckett had already prepared me for. I was really aware of the Summer of Love, in 1967, and wished I could be part of it, But I had a summer job I had to hold down in the Birmingham News art department.

But I was all into that song about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair. I felt like those were my people.

I wanted to go! But even though I was totally, like, in the headspace of being there with the hippies, the counterculture, I hadn’t actually experienced any of the mind-bending drugs yet.

That came in the Fall of ’67, in the wake of the Summer of Love, when this guy who had been there showed up on our campus with a plastic bread bag full of marijuana and an evangelical spirit about turning the world on. That’s when my group started playing with pot, which I did a little bit of but I was not hugely into. I’ve never been a cigarette smoker and wasn’t totally comfortable with sucking any kind of smoke into my lungs. But then, in the first quarter of ’68, dealers started finding ways to sell LSD on our campus.

They weren’t just dope-dealing strangers; they tended to be fellow students or friends from the neighborhood who wouldn’t think of selling us trash. Basically, they were the Consumer Reports of Birmingham hippiedom. Anything they sold, they had taken themselves and could give us a review of. “This is buzzy; this’ll make you nervous; this is mellow.”

I was not the first student in my group to take the plunge. I worried about it having some negative effect on my brain.

But then some in our crowd started having the experience.

Sunday morning, somebody’d come into the snack bar with their eyeballs spinning. They’d tripped the night before and it didn’t seem to have done them any permanent harm. It was really intriguing to hear them talk about it. They’d say, “You just won’t believe what it’s like! It’s incredible!” So finally, I said, “Okay, I’m gonna give it a try, and I did.

It was wonderful. I immediately took to it. It was so visually terrific. It was such an incredible introduction to a whole different way of seeing the world, a different way of thinking about the world.

CBC: What do you mean? Visually?

Howard: I mean, as an artist I couldn’t get over #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Barefootz TM & © Howard Cruse.

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he died, long after I graduated. Whenever I would go back to Birmingham after moving to New York, I would visit him. Besides being an exciting director, he was an excellent playwright, and seeing him at work inspired me to continue writing plays, too. He changed my idea of what art was all about.

CBC: How so?

Howard: I had grown up assuming that art was about being popular with audiences. Being beloved. What Arnie liked to do was challenge his audiences, to create discomfort and make people think. Watching him do that made me realize that there could be much more depth to being an artist than was possible — I thought at the time — in cartooning.

Nobody was even trying to have psychological depth and complex themes in the world of newspaper comics. I mean, there were exceptions; Walt Kelly and Milton Caniff came close, and, of course, George Herriman in the distant past.

But overall the comics page didn’t have room for the kind of subtleties and nuances that you could have in theatre. In the long run the time I spent putting on plays made syndicating a newspaper strip seem a lot less attractive.

CBC: When did he pass?

Howard: Nineteen eighty-three. As much as I loved the theatre, I had a love-hate relationship with being in college itself. My father’s death and Pam’s pregnancy had left me feeling very unstable emotionally, and I kept changing majors without ever finding one that felt right for me. I didn’t have the option at first of being a drama major because the College Theatre was only an extracurricular activity until my junior year, which is when they finally established a drama/speech department with Arnie as chairman. It took me six years to graduate because I dropped out several times.

CBC: To work?

Howard: For various reasons. My longest stretch away

Barefootz TM & © Howard Cruse.

how dazzling acid made the world look. You could sit in front of a mirror and watch your face go through a million transformations, or walk around the campus, look up in a tree, and see a giant Winnie the Pooh up there. Those are things I still remember vividly from my first trip. The visions raised questions about the true nature of reality. Why does tripping make you feel this way? Why is it that, when you’re in your normal head, you want to trip so you can have these incredible hallucinations, and then when enter the tripping world you say, “Oh. This feels real! And what I normally experience is like a form of half-asleepness.” It just raised philosophical questions. What is reality, anyway? It felt like you were seeing the world for the first time as it really is. That in normal life you had some kind of blinders on.

It’s obviously no coincidence that the theme of “What is reality?” is so omnipresent in the comics by the hippies who were drawing underground comix during that period. Not to mention the rock-‘n-rollers who were writing songs. In one of his interviews, Robert Crumb said he tripped some while he was still in Cleveland (or wherever he was living) and then saw the psychedelic posters they were doing in San Francisco. He could recognize that there was some LSD-taking going on out West and knew he wanted to go there. So he went to San Francisco for a while.

CBC: What world did you feel while you were tripping?

Can you articulate it?

Howard: Well… it was a world that was malleable and full of color and full of joy. There was a sense that all the different components of existence were really part of the same web. I felt a unity with life on earth as a whole.

CBC: How do you look at it now? Is that as authentic as anything?

Howard: I think it’s good to be aware that that state of mind exists. It helped me give my creativity free reign.

CBC: What have your psychedelic experiences done for your art?

Howard: Well, have you looked at my art from that period? [laughs] I never did a good drawing while I was tripping because the drug screws up your eye-hand coordination, but it gave me interesting visual ideas to play with afterwards. I still have some of the images that came out of my Rapidograph during trips. They’re just pages full of squiggles. But, during the trip, the squiggles were constantly moving around and mutating. That led me to experiment later on, when I was not tripping, with stream-of-consciousness images that weren’t inhibited by rational thought. It’s been more than thirty years since I dropped acid and I still come up with surreal images that are rooted in those old hallucinations. Like this one. [Pulls a surreal cartoon out of his files.]

CBC: It has a grotesque craziness.

Howard: You sense that you’re almost seeing something, maybe even something dirty, but you can’t quite prove it. [laughter] CBC: “It is! It’s filthy! Filthy, Howard!”

Howard: That’s just your dirty mind at work.

CBC: Basil Wolverton!

Howard: People always say that. I don’t think my crosshatching is that much like Basil Wolverton’s.

CBC: No, but I’m talking not necessarily stylistically, but content-wise.

Howard: Well, you know, Barefootz did a lot of reality-bending. I mean, in the story “The Eclipse,” Barefootz and Dolly experience an eclipse of the ocean, which is a strange concept: when the moon comes between you and the ocean! Don’t worry about it; just go with it! And for a little while they don’t connect with the real world. They just experience bizarre stuff. Not necessarily hallucinatory stuff, just non-linear narrative. Then the eclipse is over and they’re back to reality.

CBC: Why did you stop, if it was so enjoyable?

Howard: A time came when it felt like I had learned what psychedelics had to teach me. And it’s not an activity that Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

meshes all that well with the responsibilities of adult life.

CBC: So, when you were in college, was there any kind of alternative cartooning opportunities that you had? Were you aware of God Nose?

Howard: Not at that time. To the extent that underground comix were happening, there was very little awareness of them in Birmingham while I was in school. I visited my brother in San Francisco in 1966, and I saw a sort of mini-comic by Joel Beck that’s generally seen as a predecessor of the underground comix that came later. It was a satirical little comic I came across somewhere in the Berkeley area, which is actually where my brother lived.

I was really impressed. It was good cartooning and not hindered by all the restrictions of mainstream comic books.

CBC: What was the story?

Howard: I don’t know. It may have been Lenny of Loredo.

All I remember is that it was political satire, that it wasn’t like a kid’s comic, and I thought, “It’s interesting that you can do that.” I did some political comics when I went back to Birmingham Southern. I persuaded the student literary magazine at Birmingham-Southern to run a four-page comic strip. That was a radical thing for them to do back then: put comics in a literary magazine! The faculty advisor was totally against it, but the editors persuaded him that it was okay. It was called “The Commonest Conspiracy” and parodied the John Birch Society, the big right wing organization of the time. The faculty advisors would only let it run if it was accompanied by a dis-

Above: Barefootz page which originally appeared in Comix Book #2, reprinted in glorious color as the back cover of Barefootz: The Comix Book Stories [Mar. ’86]. Courtesy of Heritage. Below: Ever eager to release a new button, Denis Kitchen produced this “Make Woof — Not Warp” design featuring Barefootz and friend.

This item was hawked in the pages of Barefootz Funnies #1.

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Above: Snarf #7 [Feb. ’77] included “How Barefootz was Created” by Howard Cruse.

Below: The cartoonist changed the final panel of the “origin” story for an online version and both renditions are seen here.

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Barefootz TM & © Howard Cruse.

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claimer that said…

CBC: [Exaggerated voice] “It’s not about any particular organization.” [laughs] Howard: Yeah. Lame, right? But that was the only way I could get the thing in there. I joked about tripping in one panel of “The Commonest Experience,” which I drew in 1964. It’s pretty obvious in that panel that I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

Actually, all the way back in ’63, there had been a little short-lived interest in peyote on our campus. It wasn’t illegal at the time; you could just order it and get a shipment by mail.

CBC: Were those the little caps?

Howard: I think what you got were the little buttons from the cactus, but I don’t actually remember what they looked like, since I never swallowed anything myself. At the time, the propaganda was that you might jump out a window or do something to hurt yourself, so you’d want somebody who wasn’t tripping to be around. I was the person designated to be present and in his right mind while others tripped.

CBC: As a guide.

Howard: It’s strange in retrospect. Here I was, hanging around people tripping five years before I dared to trip myself. I was afraid to do peyote. I was very protective of my mind. I didn’t want anything to fiddle with my brain. But I also learned from talking to the people who experimented with them that psychedelics were not scary the way addictive drugs were. Not only were they not addictive but, in most cases, they tended to usher you out of their orbit eventually. That was my experience, anyway, and that’s how things have gone for most everyone in my old tripping crowd.

But those exciting few years were important to me.

They enriched my art. Still, the time came when I wanted to just draw pictures instead of using my spare time messing with my head. That evolution took several years, though, after I graduated from college, which was in 1968.

CBC: Was New York beckoning at the time?

Howard: Not directly. I had gotten off the cartooning track because of the college theatre program, and I left Birmingham-Southern with a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship to pursue an MFA at Penn State. The Penn State theatre program was a good one and I took some excellent courses, but I realized after only a single term that I was psychologically a poor fit for grad school. Getting the fellowship meant that I was committing myself to write plays that could be workshopped there but, even though I managed to eke out a couple of one-acts, I was hit with a major loss of confidence. I realized that what I was writing was too derivative of other playwrights I admired. I hadn’t had enough life experiences of my own to write plays that would be meaningful to audiences outside of academia. I started getting more and more depressed, and, given my brush with suicide back in high school, that raised real red flags for me.

Meanwhile, some friends of mine from Birmingham had relocated to an apartment in Manhattan, so I bailed out of grad school and moved in with them. We had a crash pad of sorts where all our hippie friends from Birmingham could come up and sleep on the floor if they wanted to.

I was on two tracks for a while: seeing if I could break into professional theatre somehow and also trying to pull in money with freelance cartooning. I got nowhere with theatre, and even though I did get a few cartooning gigs, they weren’t enough to survive on. It was pretty dispiriting because I hadn’t yet gotten to know myself enough yet to have a drawing style.

My portfolio was all over the map. I mean, some of my drawings were good for someone my age, maybe even professional-level by some standards, but there was no consistency of approach. My personality hadn’t found a way to get into my artwork yet. What saved the day were the production skills I had gained years before in the print

Comix Book TM & © the respective copyright holder. Denis Kitchen photo © Denis Kitchen. Barefootz TM & © Howard Cruse.

shop at Indian Springs. Doing paste-up work for a salary stabilized my income and left time on the weekends for my roommates and me to take our LSD trips.

My acid experiences were drawing me farther away from mainstream syndication styles more and more toward surreal underground approaches. I hadn’t yet seen many underground comic books, but I was fascinated by the underground newspapers like the East Village Other that were being sold in New York that year. I strolled over to the Other‘s office one time with some samples of my weird drawings. The editor liked them, but we hit a roadblock.

I wanted to have a regular feature in every issue, but he said, “Oh, we never do that. Even Crumb, we won’t run in every issue.” They were into egalitarianism and didn’t want “stars” on the staff. So I lost interest in doing that.

CBC: What was the content of the feature you wanted to do?

Howard: They were little cartoon panels called Phenomena, just trippy images. I still have a few of ’em I can show you.

CBC: Have you ever gotten ‘em published?

Howard: Not as a regular feature. Some have made their way into print here and there. One of the Phenomena drawings was included in a British anthology called The Mammoth Book of Skulls a couple of years ago. It showed a lady sitting on a skull as if it were a toilet, with her underwear pulled down and reading a magazine called Potty Jokes. I had always liked the image, but I asked the anthology editor if I could redraw it because my drawing skills had improved a lot in 45 years. There aren’t that many times when I’ve done remakes of my artwork, but there are a few.

CBC: Were there gay periodicals in New York at the time?

Howard: I think there were beginning to be, but it’s easy for me to get my chronology mixed up because I moved to New York in ’69, then lived in Birmingham for seven years, then moved back to New York in ’77. There were tabloids like Fag Rag and Gay that sprang up in the years after the Stonewall riots, but I don’t remember exactly when they got started. I know that The Advocate, where my comic strip Wendel appeared many years later, had already been launched.

What I mainly remember about the New York gay scene during the summer of ’69, after the riots, was the growing sense among gays that, “Hey! We should be liberated, too!” Liberation on various fronts had been in the air for years before Stonewall, all through the ’60s, thanks to the Black Civil Rights Movement down south and the early stirrings of women’s liberation. Harry Hay, one of the pioneers of gay liberation long before Stonewall, said that it was

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

as if a stream of gasoline had been being poured all over the country and Stonewall lit the fire. What was startling was the speed with which the riots led to political activism. Within a day, flyers started going up all over Greenwich Village announcing gay liberation meetings.

The anger had already been there, waiting to be focused.

CBC: And what was the target of the anger? What were the flyers about?

Howard: Homophobia.

We were finally refusing to be ashamed of ourselves, to accept second-class citizenship!

CBC: What kind of action would you take?

Howard: It was time to become a movement like the Civil Rights Movement. You know, homosexuality was still illegal in a lot of states in 1969, including New York.

It was illegal in New York to serve alcohol to a homosexual. The reason gay bars could exist is because their owners would pay off the police.

CBC: The Stonewall Inn was mob-run, right?

Howard: Right. So the mob always had its relationships with the police and the police would look the other way as long as money changed hands, except when there was political advantage to be gained by harassing homosexuals.

[New York City Mayor] John Lindsay, who was generally billed as a liberal Republican, was not above exploiting homophobia. His cops started raiding lots of gay bars, and most times the gays would be embarrassed and humiliated and go quietly. Sometimes their names would be in the papers and their lives would be ruined. But, on this one particular night in June, the bar patrons had had enough.

CBC: It was kind of late in coming, right? It needed incidents to happen and the frustration got so pent up. You had Watts in ’65, you had Detroit in ’68, you had all this social upheaval…

Howard: Recent history had shown that if you were an op-

Above: Comix Book, the Marvel Comics Group/underground hybrid edited by Denis Kitchen, offered a national audience for burgeoning cartoonist Howard Cruse, whose Barefootz was included in every issue along with an array of comix pros.

Inset left: The head honcho of Krupp Comix Works and Kitchen Sink Press, the indomitable Denis Lee Kitchen, in a 1969 photo. Howard Cruse was among the innumerable contributors to Everything Including the Kitchen Sink: The Definitive Denis Kitchen Interview, a reconfiguration of the print and PDF editions of Comic Book Creator #5. The tome, designed by Ye Ed (with an long introductory article by same), is now available at www.deniskitchen.com.

Below: Courtesy of Heritage, a 1972 Barefootz strip playing with comic strip conventions.

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Above: For the first four issues, Howard Cruse was editor of Gay Comix. In #2 [Nov. ’81], the cartoonist contributed “Jerry Mack,” about a mature, shamefilled, closeted gay man.

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“Jerry Mack” © Howard Cruse. Gay Comix TM & © the respective copyright holder.

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pressed minority, sometimes the only way to draw attention to the injustice was to raise hell.

CBC: Nineteen sixty-nine sounds kind of late in the game.

Howard: Yeah, but homophobia was deeply entrenched in the culture. Even lots of the hippies were homophobic. It can take a while to get a liberation movement going.

CBC: Right. From Jan. 1, 1960, to Dec. 31, 1969 — you’re really talking about a tsunami of change. And today we’re discussing gay marriage [which has been legalized nationally since this interview took place].

Howard: Even in a supposedly liberal city like New York City, it took decades to get a gay rights bill passed, partly because it was staunchly opposed by the Catholic Church, which has great political power in the city. There’s also a lot of homophobia in the orthodox branch of Judaism. So between those two and lingering homophobia in parts of the general population, any attempt to have a gay rights bill passed was thwarted for years and years and years.

CBC: You were at Stonewall?

Howard: Yes, but I was not a “combatant.” By coincidence, I was tripping on acid with friends in the Village and we happened to stroll up to the Friday night riot in progress.

It was late in our trip, but we were still quasi-hallucinating, so it was very hard to judge what the extent was of what we were seeing. Clearly some sort of battle was going on, but

what did it mean? It was hard to tell if we were watching the beginnings of a national revolution or something!

CBC: Indeed you were!

Howard: Anyway, we finally walked around the Village for a while and then went home to sleep.

CBC: You told me that you had been to a Tiny Tim concert earlier?

Howard: That’s right. A Tiny Tim concert up in Central Park.

CBC: Did you just stumble upon it or did you intentionally go there to see Tiny Tim perform?

Howard: It was intentional. We thought that it would be fun to hear Tiny Tim singing on acid.

CBC: He was campy.

Howard: Yeah, he was the essence of camp. And weirdness. You’re attracted to weirdness if you’re on acid. We had all been doing paste-up work for a company downtown and it was a Friday night, so we said, “This will be our tripping activity tonight.” We didn’t have tickets, but there were loudspeakers, so you could sit on the grass outside the concert and listen to his trilling voice…

CBC: “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

Howard: Yeah. We had a good time. And, when it was over, we taxied down to the Village because, y’know, we were way too stoned to dare take the subway. And, once we were there, we happened on this riot underway.

Interestingly, after we’d watched the riot for a while, we wandered off to tour the Village and we found ourselves talking to a nice Midwestern guy. He seemed friendly and we were in an expansive state of mind. We mentioned to him that there was all this stuff going on over on Christopher Street. He thought that was interesting and said he was going to walk over and take a look. We never knew his name. He had this endearing farmland accent, so we nicknamed him “Hayseed” when we talked about him later.

Then, many years later, in 1985, I did a slideshow at the gay community center in New York, and afterwards this guy came up and reminded me that he had met me the night of Stonewall. [Jon laughs] That was so cool! Every now and then, someone will pop up out of the past that way. I went home with a guy in 1969 on a night when New York was hit by a huge snowstorm. It turned out to be a historic blizzard that ended up wrecking Mayor Lindsay’s political ambitions.

Voters in the outer boroughs were furious with him because he didn’t clean up the outer borough streets as fast as he did the ones in Manhattan, and they took revenge by voting him out of office. Anyway, the morning after, I went home with this cute New Jersey guy, we woke up to find this incredible blizzard going on. Somehow I slogged my way home in the snow and didn’t think much more about it. Then lots of years later he showed up at one of my panel discussions and reminded me about that night we spent together in ’69. It was nice to connect again that way.

CBC: I remember the pop culture from that time. The veiled behavior of Paul Lynde… y’know; the effeminate, “Oh, that’s cute!” Liberace.

Howard: Charles Nelson Reilly.

CBC: Right. They were charming, sweet, and marginalized to some degree. The Boys in the Band [the 1970 William Friedkin movie based on Mart Crowley’s Off-Broadway play] came out and that was really, like… ”Yikes!” This ain’t what was typically portrayed. And I just saw a documentary on that, too.

Howard: I saw the same documentary. Making the Boys.

CBC: Did that play do more harm than good?

Howard: I think it did more good than harm. I had known gays in Birmingham who were just like the characters in that play. But it also had a negative side, and poor Mart Crowley got pilloried — unjustly, in my view — by the more strident gay activists. The play debuted in 1968 and broke valuable ground, but it wasn’t in sync with the changes of consciousness that were about to take over. Did you see the movie Stonewall?

Pudge, Girl Blimp TM & © Lee Marrs. Dyke Shorts, Come Out Comix © the respective copyright holders.

CBC: I saw a PBS documentary.

Howard: No, this was a fictional movie that came out in 1995 [not to be confused with the 2015 Roland Emmerich movie].

It got a lot of stuff right, but it largely ignored the ways that the 1969 gay culture was connected to the hippie counterculture.

CBC: Why did you move back to Birmingham late in 1969?

Howard: Just plain discouragement. It was clear to me that I wasn’t yet skilled enough as a cartoonist to compete with all the talent in New York. And forget about breaking into the theatre there!

Looking back, I don’t think I really began getting my act together as a cartoonist until I was about 25 or 26.

When I returned to Birmingham I had all but given up on my cartooning career. I lucked into getting a job working at a local TV station, which offered enough opportunities for creativity to distract me from moping and give me time to get over feeling like a failure.

Eventually the old juices began bubbling back up to the surface and I started developing a little cartoon panel that was really stripped down to basics, style-wise.

CBC: Was that the vertical strip?

Howard: Yeah, Tops & Button. It featured two squirrels who would say droll things to each other. I was low-balling it. I didn’t even try for the sophisticated satire I had aimed for in earlier strips. My goal now was to do a strip that was so simple in its humor — so basically corny — that it would have a chance in Alabama.

CBC: You dumbed it down?

Howard: I dumbed it down. I was being a little snobbish, I admit, but that was my mood at the moment. By limiting it to a single panel with no scene changes, I thought I could keep producing it on top of holding down a full-time job.

Actually, though, for all my low expectations, it turned out to be a pretty successful learning experience. I did it for two years, six days a week, and over time it gradually got more personal and nuanced despite my original intentions.

It was a very simple strip to draw, and the TV station was okay with me doing some of the drawing during working hours. I pulled together a few weeks’ worth of samples and showed them to Duard LeGrand, the editor at the Birmingham Post-Herald, one of the city’s two dailies. LeGrand had been a friend of my father’s, so I’m sure he liked the idea of helping me out. And he liked the idea of having an original strip appearing in the paper instead of just the syndicated ones.

CBC: How much did it pay?

Howard: Oh, practically nothing. Maybe six dollars a strip or something like that. But that didn’t bother me because I already had a salary coming in. I liked the idea that Birminghamians would be seeing my cartoons every morning when they read the paper over breakfast. And I owned it. I copyrighted it from the beginning, and for all I knew it was gonna get hugely popular and go national! LeGrand was as ambitious as I was about that. He did everything he could to get it syndicated. When the syndicate salesmen would come, he tried to interest them in showing it to their bosses.

He fantasized that he could be instrumental in launching a new nationally syndicated strip, but it never happened.

Still, it helped me find myself as a cartoonist. In the course of doing the strip, I discovered that drawing styles are like signatures. Your personality will emerge eventually no Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

matter what you do, if you keep drawing long enough. And by trying to keep the feature so simple, I was shedding all of the influences of cartoonists that I had been unconsciously imitating. I was also learning to be more reliably funny.

There are probably only 25 percent of the Tops & Button panels that I would claim now. I look back at the rest and see all the signs of a fledgling cartoonist finding his way, y’know? Groping and developing, bit by bit, but certainly not worth having the entire run anthologized by Fantagraphics!

CBC: How did you write? Did you just come up with ideas on the fly or did you sit down and say, ‘I have got to write this strip’?

Howard: It was always in the back of my mind. It was never knee-slapping humor. Lots of the humor arose from simple turns of phrases that struck me as amusing, like the great turns of phrases that A. A. Milne used to build into his Pooh books.

The conversations between the two squirrels — or between them and some other characters who’d hang around next to their tree — were always going on inside my head.

CBC: Were they friends? Were they partners?

Howard: Who knows exactly what the relationship of those two squirrels was.

They were like two people in neighboring apartments. They lived in what was theoretically a hollow tree. I guess you’d call them roommates of a sort.

CBC: Was it like The Goldbergs?

Howard: Well, every strip showed a hollow tree with two holes in it and a squirrel head poking out of each hole. In the beginning all you saw were heads impaled on necks that looked like poles, but later on they stood at the base of the tree so you could see their

This page: The first editor of Gay Comix is always quick to point out that his anthology was not the first underground comic book devoted to homosexuals and that, in fact, precursors include Mary Wings’ Dyke Shorts [1978] and Come Out Comix [’73], as well as Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels [’76], Lee Marrs’ Pudge, Girl Blimp [’73] (below) and Larry Fuller’s Gay Heartthrobs [’76].

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Above: The Hate cast. Below: Stinky (Leonard Brown to the authorities), despite being an outrageously entertaining character, would meet a surprising fate in 1997.

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Blab!, Bizarre Sex © the respective copyright holders.

Top: Howard Cruse illustration for Blab! #1 [1988], edited by Monte Beauchamp. Above: H.C. also appeared in Bizarre Sex, Kitchen Sink’s anthology title. Cover for #10 [Dec. ’82].

whole bodies. One said this and the other said that. There are some examples of Tops & Button panels in the Early Barefootz book that Fantagraphics put out in 1990.

CBC: And the panels were always vertical?

Howard: Yes. That was a very conscious decision. I wanted to make it easy for the newspaper. Being one column wide, they could be used as filler anywhere in the paper. You didn’t have to kick Blondie off the comics page to make room.

CBC: It was not going to run on the funny pages?

Howard: Right. Usually you need filler in a newspaper, so it was tailor-made for the Post-Herald’s convenience.

Both Tops & Button and Barefootz were created at the beginning of the 1970s, while I was living with Don Higdon.

Don was my first long-term lover; we were together from late in 1969 until the spring of 1973. Don was a drama student at Birmingham-Southern the way I had been, an aspiring actor. And since he worked with the College Theatre, we had lots of mutual friends. We met at an LSD party and bonded quickly.

CBC: How open were you and Don about your relationship

in those days?

Howard: When we moved in together, all our friends figured out what was going on pretty quickly. As far as my mother and my co-workers at the TV station knew, Don and I were just sharing an apartment. Over time, as we became more confident that our relationship was going to last, we got more and more open. We were even invited to come out to my old high school, Indian Springs, to talk to the senior class about what it was like to live as a gay couple in Birmingham. The students took it in stride, which was a pleasant surprise considering how scared I had been only a few years before whether anyone at Indian Springs would suspect I was gay.

CBC: When did you come out to your mother?

Howard: After Don and I had been together for a year.

The apartment we shared was near the campus, and my mother still lived across town. Mom thought Don was just my roommate and invited us to her house for Thanksgiving.

Being secretive was wearing and it felt like it was time to stop shielding her from the real nature of our relationship.

So, on the day before Thanksgiving, I went over there and told her about everything. It was a long conversations and there was a lot of crying on her part because it took a while for her to absorb that I was not telling her, “Mother, I’m destined to have a sad life.” I was telling her, “Mother, being with Don is the happiest time I’ve ever had.” Once it sunk in that I was not giving her bad news, she brightened up, and when we came over the next day and Don walked in the front door, she gave him a big hug and said, “Welcome to the family.”

CBC: Oh, how sweet! That’s great! How did your brother take it?

Howard: He was fine with it. I had talked with him about being gay a long time before.

CBC: And then there’s always that, “Don’t you think we knew it?” Did you get a lot of that from your friends? Did people recognize it well before you told them?

Howard: Of course, there are always perceptive people that will say, “Oh, finally!” Being open about our gayness felt more natural over time and, in general, our liberal circle of friends were supportive. Once in a while we’d run unexpectedly into homophobia, though. In 1972 or ’73 (I don’t remember exactly), we got asked by Dr. Ralph Blair, who had founded the Homosexual Community Counseling Center in New York, if we would help him find a venue in Birmingham where he could conduct a workshop aimed at raising awareness about gay issues among local people in the helping professions. Y’know, like teachers and psychologists, people who were likely to find themselves counseling gay people. I had become friends with Ralph back when we were both grad students at Penn State. Besides running the HCCC in New York, Ralph made it part of his mission to travel to various cities around the country to conduct these kinds of workshops. Since he knew I was living in Birmingham by then, he asked if I could help. I mentioned this to my mother and she thought of one of her professional friends who worked as a social services administrator in town.

Mom suggested I phone and ask her if her agency could provide a meeting space for Ralph’s workshop. So I did, but this lady was chilly. She didn’t see why workshops like Ralph’s were needed. She said, “If it’s okay to be gay, why do gay people need counseling?” I was, like, “Well… maybe because it’s hard on you psychologically when the world hates you.” [laughter] I couldn’t get through to her, though.

It was a pretty ignorant and disappointing reaction to get from a professional. Fortunately, a local Unitarian Church came through with the space Ralph needed.

Then there was the time when Don and I became friendly with a teenager who was an aspiring filmmaker.

He met us through the community theatre Don worked with after he graduated. The kid kind of latched onto us as creative mentors. He came over to our apartment a time or two and we encouraged him and offered whatever advice we

Dope Comix © the respective copyright holder. Illustration © Howard Cruse.

could think of. I have no reason to think he was gay and, of course, we were never inappropriate with him in any way.

Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from his mother.

She got right to the point. “I don’t want you to ever spend time with my son again. If you see him on the street, don’t even say hello. I never want you to have any contact with him at all!” I was totally taken aback. I’d never even met this woman. I stammered something about not understanding what the problem was and she said, in this ominous, contemptuous voice, that still sends chills down my spine when I remember it, “I know what you are!” It was such a hateful tone that I didn’t know what to say. She knew what we were, like we were objects, not people. That sentence stuck with me so much that I used it in Stuck Rubber Baby.

It’s what one of the policeman says to Toland when they’re interrogating him after Sammy’s death. “We know what you are.”

CBC: Back to cartooning: how did you get from squirrels to underground comix?

Howard: As I mentioned before, I had begun wanting to break into underground newspapers while I was still in New York, and that desire stayed in the back of my mind after I returned to Birmingham. Of course, underground newspapers were practically non-existent in Birmingham in 1970, so I settled for being as trippy as I could get away with in Tops & Button, and even trippier once I found a home for Barefootz. It was more about being psychedelic than about being gay. I was not openly gay in my cartoons yet; it was tripping that was on my mind.

I created the character of Barefootz shortly after returning to Birmingham in late ’69. In its original incarnation, Barefootz was an office strip. The character Barefootz was an oddball in his office setting. His way of dressing symbolized that, wearing a suit and tie but no shoes. It reflected the conflicts I was feeling about my own weird life: going to my day job on weekdays and tripping with Don on weekends. Our tripping crowd called ourselves “freaks” in those days, and in his own way Barefootz was a freak. I submitted samples of the office version of Barefootz to a bunch of syndicates in 1970, but couldn’t get any traction.

Then, in 1971, by a stroke of good fortune, a totally re-conceived version of Barefootz found a home in The Crimson-White, the University of Alabama’s student newspaper — even though I myself had never been a student at U of A. The paper’s editor, Despina Vodantis, was a longtime friend of Don’s, and once she got to know me she decided that it would be fun to commission an original comic strip that would appear exclusively in The Crimson-White. So I reworked Barefootz, threw in Glory and the cockroaches, and began turning out strips for a college audience. It wasn’t an underground paper, but a college paper was still a better fit for my psychedelic humor than a mainstream syndicate would have been. Meanwhile, I was plugging along doing Tops & Button for the Post-Herald and holding down my job at the TV station. I was straddling the line between the mainstream and underground worlds.

At the end of Despina’s editorship, her successor didn’t choose to continue the strip. I wanted to keep the series alive, though, so I started trying to place Barefootz in anything I had access to that was trying to be an underground newspaper. These would crop up in periodically and usually didn’t last many issues. But I did my best to get Barefootz into them before they folded, and over time I accumulated enough printed episodes to send to Denis Kitchen at Kitchen Sink Comix.

CBC: What made you pick Kitchen Sink Press? Did you also send out to the Print Mint and the other underground publishers?

Howard: I had come across a few stray Print Mint and Last Gasp titles in a Birmingham bookstore that had a bohemian flavor, and I enjoyed reading some of them. But it didn’t seem like my mild-mannered humor would play very well next to the heavy-duty strips S. Clay Wilson, R. Crumb, Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

and the other San Francisco undergrounders were publishing. I read interviews with them in fanzines that I had begun subscribing to, and they came across as a very tight clique that would probably be hostile to me. Maybe that was a misimpression, but it intimidated me at the time. But then I noticed that Denis Kitchen was listing Kitchen Sink Press in the Writers’ Yearbook as a possible market for underground comix, and his listing included an offer to send free samples of underground titles that he had already published, which was smart of him. So I sent for the samples and noticed that Kitchen Sink seemed to have room for mellower styles of humor than the West Coast publishers. I mean, the Kitchen Sink titles were druggy and broke rules and had naked people and all, the way underground comix were supposed to, but some of them also had a light, relaxed touch. I was particularly intrigued by O.K. Comix by Bruce Walthers. Its universe didn’t seem totally different from Barefootz’s, in spirit, at least.

I did want to establish my cred as an undergrounder, though, so the first thing I submitted to Denis Kitchen was a trippy single-pager that was maybe trying too hard to be surreal. Denis rejected it, as well he should have; it was stupid and content-less. But he was nice enough in his rejection that I felt encouraged to try again, this time with something that showed my real personality, like my Barefootz strips. Those he liked. He reprinted some of my Crimson-White strips and some half-pagers from the Birmingham underground papers in Snarf and Bizarre Sex, and he suggested that I try drawing longer stories that were specifically created for comic books. That’s how my first multi-page Barefootz story, “Tussy Comes Back,” made it into Commies From Mars #1. Around the same time I did crack one of the West Coast titles, Yellow Dog Comix, with a two-page Big Marvy story. But Kitchen Sink was where I quickly felt most welcome and appreciated.

All of this was happening while some big transitions were going on in my personal life.

I was getting restless in my TV job and decided I wanted to try being a full-time freelancer. So I quit the job, and I also ended my Tops & Button series in the Post-Herald.

It was showing no signs of getting syndicated, and two years of squirrel jokes seemed enough.

Don was also at loose ends by then. He graduated from Birmingham-Southern, in June of ’73, and now he had to figure out how to go about becoming a professional actor. He read a notice about open auditions being held by the Atlanta Children’s Theatre for an upcoming production of Robin Hood and decided to drive over from Birmingham and try out. I went along for the ride and decided on impulse to try out for the play myself. And we lucked out. We both got hired for the show, as much because we were both artists who could help out with building

Above: Another frequent Kitchen Sink assignment for Howard Cruse was the anthology title Dope Comix. This is the cover for #3 [June ’81], by Jay Lynch.

Below: Whacked-out illustration by Howard, called by the cartoonist, “Disturbingly surreal.” As the artist confesses in his interview, psychedelic drugs were a definite influence on his drawing style.

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Above: The copyright line of this Cruse illustration (found at Heritage) indicates this was apparently done for Marvel’s Crazy magazine, likely #71 [Feb. ’81], illustrating a Cruse writtenand-drawn piece. Online, we found the caption, “Final ‘human sculpture’ draws raves from the opposite sex and creates interesting challenges for hip manufacturers of designer jeans.”

Below: CBC was surprised to learn that Howard contributed mightily to the Topps Chewing Gum legacy during his freelance days of the ’70s and ’80s. For his “Loose Cruse” blog, the cartoonist writes, “I didn’t create the [Bazooka Joe and His Gang] characters (that legacy belongs to Wesley Morse, who launched the series under the guidance of Topps Product Development head Woody Gelman decades before I entered the picture); and other people wrote the gags I was assigned to illustrate. But I did have the honor in 1983 of providing re-designs of the characters that ushered them from their longstanding status as tykes into rock-’n’-roll loving adolescence.” A reminiscence appears in the Abrams book.

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Bazooka Joeand His Gang TM & © Topps, Inc.

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sets as well as act. I got a bit part in Robin Hood, and soon thereafter Don got a nice role in an original musical called Skye. He wore a duck costume for that, which was my inspiration for the duck costume one of the actors has on in the Wendel episode where Wendel first meets Ollie. Anyway, beside getting a little professional acting experience, Don and I both got good at patching scenery and costumes together with glue guns.

In my spare time, while I was working at the Atlanta Children’s Theatre, I kept drawing Barefootz stories for various Kitchen Sink comix. It was an exhilarating time; it seemed like some kind of real cartooning career was beginning to build up steam. But then came the 1973 Supreme Court decision that screwed up everything. All of a sudden, the legal definition of obscenity changed. Instead of a national standard, the ruling said that whether or not a work of art was legally obscene would be determined by local community standards. And, if you think about how prudish many communities in America can be, you can see how vulnerable stores that sold sexually explicit material like underground comix were to harassment by ambitious local prosecutors around the country. Material that was legal in, say, New York, could be illegal in Georgia if the local community said it was. Head shops that were already under fire for selling bongs and hash pipes now had to worry about being busted for having Crumb comix in their comic book racks. The distribution system for underground comix collapsed everywhere except in the most unshockable cities, and it looked like the whole underground comix industry, Kitchen Sink included, was going over the cliff. As far as being an underground comix contributor goes, I was out of work.

Oh yeah, and I was also suddenly single. That was around the time that Don and I broke up. It was one of the most depressing times I had had since my aspirin overdose in high school. I blamed it all on Kohoutek.

CBC: Kohoutek?

Howard: You probably don’t remember this, but in 1973 a big comet named Kohoutek was due to pass by Earth. It wasn’t coming dangerously close or anything, but astrologically-minded people were warning that it was going to bring about bad things of some kind or other. So, any time something bad happened to me that year, I jokingly blamed it on Kohoutek. And, as it happened, 1973 was a year when one bad thing after another did happen to me. First the underground comix industry disintegrated out from under me just as it seemed like my career was beginning to get some traction. Then Don decided to leave me. And then I got fag-bashed.

CBC: You got beaten up??

Howard: Yeah. Not life-threateningly or anything. The three guys who attacked me were actually pretty incompetent muggers. They had the illusion that they knew karate and tried to damage me with karate chops. As it happens, if you don’t know karate, probably the least harmful thing you can do to someone is hit them with the edge of your hand. I mean, if I’m going to be hit, better that than with a fist. But they spent some time pummeling me while I curled up in a fetal position, the way Civil Rights activists used to do to protect themselves. I was trying to be the most boring victim possible so they’d lose interest. Which they did after a few minutes.

CBC: How did they know you were gay?

Howard: I was in a gay cruising area in Piedmont Park, just sitting on a park bench, and one of them came over to me and struck up a conversation. This being a well-known cruising area, I assumed at first that he was gay. We did small talk for a minute or two and then he asked me if I was gay. I said yes because, in general, I was not into pretending I wasn’t gay, particularly while I was hanging out at night in a cruising area. We talked some more and I noticed that he was trying to steer me into an argument about Vietnam. I sensed that he was picking a fight so he’d have an excuse to hurt me. Once I saw where the conversation was going I avoided taking his bait. It was like he was trying to punch jelly. I wasn’t giving him anything he could really grab hold of to be angry about. Finally he went off, and I noticed him joining up with two other guys and the three of them came back. This time they didn’t even try to find an excuse; they just started beating on me. They bruised me some and broke my glasses, but nothing more. I didn’t bother going to the police afterwards because, y’know, in those days you knew that a “faggot” wasn’t gonna get any sympathy from a cop. I went to an optometrist the next day, showed him my glasses and told him I’d been mugged. He was very nice and fixed my glasses for free.

Anyway, after being knocked around in various ways by a stupid comet, I was in a state of funk and despair. At least I got a comic strip out of it, though. My two-pager “I Always Cry at Movies” [Gay Comix #3, Dec. ’82] was a riff on the miserable feelings I had while Don and I were breaking up.

I found a job at an Atlanta art studio making Photostats and doing production work. But, after a few months, I said to myself, “What am I still doing here in Atlanta?” Don and I had moved out there in the first place to be in the theatre, and now he was gone. And, by now, I had figured out that being a professional actor wasn’t in the cards for me.

I was really lonesome, and my old friends from college were 300 miles away in

Bananas TM & © Scholastic, Inc. Illustration © the respective copyright holder.

Birmingham. So, finally, I said, “I’ve gotta get back there.”

Meanwhile, it was around that time that Denis succeeded in launching Comix Book.

CBC: So how did that come about? The Supreme Court decision came down, Denis got in touch with you, and…?

Howard: Well, he and I had kept up a correspondence during all the underground comix turmoil and he knew I was dispirited. He bucked me up by telling me that something good was in the wind, but he couldn’t say what yet. Finally he was free to tell me what he had been hinting about.

Comix Book, an underground-mainstream hybrid magazine, was going to be launched soon and distributed at regular mainstream newsstands. Marvel’s parent company would be publishing it, thanks to a longstanding fascination Stan Lee had with underground comix. Denis would be editing it; there would be lots of freedom — though not total freedom — and contributors would be paid a significantly better page-rate that underground comix had ever been able to manage.

CBC: A hundred bucks a page.

Howard: That’s $500 a month, which a Spartan-living hippie could get by on then. Denis asked me to draw a Barefootz story for every issue. This gave me renewed hope. I drew “The Boss Bug,” my story for the first issue, while I was still in Atlanta, and drew the rest of my stories after my move back to Birmingham.

Unfortunately, Marvel gave up on Comix Book after only three issues. Two more were already in the can, and those were published several years later under the Kitchen Sink label. But the loss of my Comix Book income so quickly threw me for a loop, coming so close on the heels of my excitement over the opportunity. But I was able to scrounge up a job fairly quickly, doing production work at a Birmingham design studio and then at an advertising agency. In other words, I managed to keep paying the rent. And I was able to revive the Barefootz series in some local alternative papers and find some time for drawing undergrounds by getting up really early in the morning.

I was beginning to feel a little less isolated from other underground cartoonists during that period. I had written a fan letter to Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose work I liked, and it led to some continuing correspondence. In one of my letters, I mentioned to her that, of course, I was aware that she was married to Robert Crumb. I admitted that I found it intimidating to write to him directly, but I said, “Tell him I said hello.” I didn’t expect him to say hello back or anything because I figured he hated Barefootz like so many of the other big names in underground comix circles. But then I started out getting letters from both Aline and Robert! He criticized Barefootz, but not in an ungenerous way. He said that he could see what I was getting at, how I was trying to do social satire, y’know, by using this microcosm world with Barefootz and the cockroaches. So he was not as dismissive as some of the others.

CBC: Was he kind?

Howard: He was friendly, but frank. He said, “The problem with Barefootz is, it’s cute. And I hate cute!”

CBC: This from the cartoonist who used to do Cutie Bear and Bearzy Wearzies.

Howard: Well, those were parodies of cuteness. In one of his letters, he talked about the time he spent doing cards for American Greetings, where they wanted nebbishes and cute characters. He had developed a real loathing of them, so in his comix he went in the other direction. Instead of big heads and little bodies, he went to big bodies and little heads. [Jon laughs] He made me realize that one of the reasons Barefootz was getting so much resistance came from how the characters looked. What I was trying to do was portray an innocuous surface like you might see in a syndicated strip but undermine that with a subversive subtext. But a lot of underground fans could only see the surface. They just hated the way Barefootz looked.

CBC: Comix Book was a game changer for you, right? In Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

terms of being recognized?

Howard: Yeah, a lot of new people got to see my work.

That was in 1974–75. The first flush of the underground comix collapse was subsiding and Denis had begun to rebuild Kitchen Sink. He knew that I wanted to do a Barefootz solo comic, so he said that if I could raise money for the printing cost, Kitchen Sink would promote distribute it. It was a good deal for me because I had no clue how to distribute an underground comic book.

So I raised the money I needed from my friends in Birmingham and the first issue of Barefootz Funnies came out in 1975. Then, in ’76, I came out with the second issue. That one included the Headrack story called “Gravy On Gay,” which was the first story with gay content to appear in any of my comics.

CBC: Was that the one with the real a**hole?

Howard: Yes. CBC: I saw a quote…

Howard: My cousin’s wife said it was the angriest thing of mine she had ever read.

CBC: It is one angry story!

Howard: Very! And it was unusual for a Barefootz story to vent that kind of rage. But I had a lot of stored-up resentment after years of being jerked around by homophobes.

CBC: Had you received any feedback about your comix from anybody? Did you go to the comic conventions at all that were starting to come up?

Howard: No. Atlanta didn’t have any comic

This page: Other ’80s freelance assignments included art for Scholastic’s Bananas magazine (above, #54, ’82), where his Doctor Duck strip appeared, and spot illustrations for American Health magazine (sample below).

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Above: Howard Cruse at his drawing board in 1986, drawing Doctor Duck, his regular Scholastic assignment for Bananas magazine. The photo is by friend and colleague from Starlog magazine, Dave Hutchison.

Inset below: For a period in the late ’70s, upon moving to New York City, Howard put his paste-up and artistic skills to good use as art director for the Starlog magazine group.

Though he would soon move on to a freelance cartooning and illustration career, Howard was given his own column for Starlog’s sister mag, Comics Scene, with his feature “Loose Cruse.”

Subjects included a three-part history of a notorious copyright infringement case, where monolithic Disney Inc. took on the underground cartoonists who adapted the studio’s famed cartoon characters for a pair of rather subversive”Hell” comics titled Air Pirates (a case which the comix artists lost.) This illo accompanied Howard’s column.

story. But I was treated with respect. And I briefly crossed paths with Aline, even! She was with other people and we didn’t get a chance to really chat. But, overall, my experience at the con was validating.

CBC: You said you had worked in the Atlanta Children’s Theatre. Not that there were that many, but there were children’s comics. Was there any thought to getting into that area?

Howard: Not really. I had gotten pretty addicted by then to the “adults-only” freedom of undergrounds, even if I didn’t make use of it all the time. And my earlier experience with tripping and making peace with my full-self made me resistant to drawing comics where I would have to carve off and hide parts of myself. I mean, I had avoided being out in my comix for several years, but I had always felt that it would be temporary. I knew that eventually I was going to do comix about being gay, ones that would include actually gay sex. Showing a world that didn’t have sex in it would have felt very unreal to me. Even now, people sometimes say to me, “Why don’t you do regular children’s books?”

And I love a good children’s book! There are people I admire hugely who do children’s books. But anytime I start trying to make up stories, I can’t go on too long before I start wanting somebody to have a sex life, y’know?

CBC: Those are the stories you want to write.

Howard: Yes. Some good friends on mine invited me to illustrate a children’s book they were going to write, and I almost agreed to do it. But then I got cold feet. It’s not that anybody in their story was going to have sex; it’s that I would still be publishing stuff elsewhere that was very sexual. I told them, “I’m afraid to proceed with this because the comics I publish at the same time might contain sexually outrageous stuff, and the association with me could harm you and harm the book. If the right wing tabloids got hold of my undergrounds they’d say, ‘Look what the artist for this children’s book is doing.’”

CBC: What was the depiction of homosexuals in underground comix of the late ’60s and early ’70s?

Howard: Well, gays were mostly invisible.

CBC: Non-existent?

Howard: There were practical no homosexuals — in the best known underground comix, at least. The stories that had sex in them were mostly about men f*cking women, since they were drawn mostly by straight men. When gays did appear, they were typically shown as freaky stereotypes. Now there were exceptions. Take Rand Holmes.

Despite how heterosexual most of his comics were, he did one very outrageous Harold Hedd strip in which he ridiculed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and showed Harold Hedd and a guy giving each other bl*wjobs.

He also volunteered to do cover art for the first issue of Gay Comix. I had no information in 1981 about what his orientation was. I understood that he was married, and he usually showed Harold Hedd f*cking women. But he also did these very pro-gay strips. He was a mystery man to me. I myself never had any contact with him. When he told Denis Kitchen he’d like to do the cover for Gay Comix, Denis said yes immediately and then apologized to me for not running the idea by me first, since I was the editor. But I would have

© Howard Cruse.

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conventions then and Birmingham certainly didn’t have any. The first time I lived in a city that had a comic convention was when I moved to New York in ’77 and Phil Seuling was having his conventions. I would read about cons in the fanzines, though. And, in 1976, before my move back to New York, I attended the Berkeley Con, which was organized by Clay Geerdes and focused specifically on underground comix. That was the first convention I ever set foot in, and being in underground territory instead of Marvel super-hero territory was great!

CBC: Did you drive out there?

Howard: Oh, no. I had money saved up from my ad agency job and could afford plane fare. I had become a full-fledged fan of underground comix by then and was continuing to do stuff for Denis, and had begun corresponding with a number of the other underground cartoonists, including Crumb. But attending the Berkeley Con was my first time to be under the same roof as the people whose comix I had been reading, so that was a big thrill.

CBC: Any highlights there?

Howard: Any number. I walked in feeling very insecure because I had learned from fanzine interviews that the San Francisco underground scene could be very insular and cliquish. I had already learned through the grapevine that the ZAP crowd hated Barefootz, and didn’t consider it a real underground because it was too “nice.” So I steered clear of most of the Big Names. But Trina Robbins was very welcoming. So was Phil Yeh. Trina and Phil remain good long-distance friends to this day even though I almost never get to see them. Sergio Aragonés couldn’t have been nicer. He greeted me with such enthusiasm when we were introduced that you would have thought that I was the star instead of him!

CBC: He knew who you were?

Howard: Yeah, he was apparently somewhat aware of me. I think he knew that his standing in the cartooning community was such that he could give me a real morale boost, which of course he did. I mean, I guess he actually liked my work, but I also think he knew that it would make my day for him to praise it. So he saw me and went, “Howard Cruse!

I’m so glad to meet you!” I was in heaven!

CBC: He was kind.

Howard: He is a kind man. I’m sure you know that since you’ve probably spent time with him.

CBC: Yes, I have.

Howard: And the women undergrounders were all friendly, probably because they weren’t as uptight as some of the men about comix that were not drawn in ZAP style.

So I came away with a feeling I did have a place in the undergrounds after all.

CBC: Did you have copies of Barefootz Funnies #2 in hand when you went?

Howard: Yes. Some of the less snobbish of the undergrounders were friendly and remarked about the gay aspect of “Gravy On Gay” without acting weird about it. I’m sure everybody must have figured that Cruse had to be gay, since it would never have occurred to any straight person to draw that

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Comics Scene, Count Fangor TM & © the respective copyright holder.

made the same call. Rand already had a major fan base and had a history of supporting gay rights. And he was a great artist whose presence would make a statement to potential buyers. As for what his subterranean motivations might be, who knew at the time? I certainly didn’t. I wrote him a note thanking him but also warning him, “You do realize that doing this cover will make people assume you’re gay, don’t you? There’s going to be a cover line next to your drawing that says, ‘Lesbians and Gay Men Put It On Paper,’ and there you’ll be. I don’t wanna spring that on you.” But he never responded.

CBC: Is he dead?

Howard: Yeah. He’s been dead for years. Patrick Rosenkranz has written a book about him. Harold Hedd was an important, beautifully drawn strip!

CBC: He was just an astonishing talent.

Howard: Anyway, it was really women who introduced gay themes — as in lesbian themes — into their stuff because almost none of the men would do anything about gays except use them to be outrageous or as the butts of jokes. In general the underground comix drawn by women made room for lesbians in the world, whether or not the cartoonists themselves were lesbian.

In the mid-’70s, LGBT cartoonists started speaking for themselves. Mary Wings published Come Out Comix and Dyke Shorts, and Roberta Gregory came out with Dynamite Damsels. Lee Marrs’ Pudge, Girl Blimp series included a lesbian episode. And then the first issue of Larry Fuller’s Gay Heartthrobs came out. Lots of the strips in Gay Heartthrobs were campy and didn’t relate much to my own life, but it and the lesbian comix I’ve mentioned were still important forerunners to my later Gay Comix project.

CBC: I read in Robert Kirby’s Qu33r anthology about a gay strip that was published in ’73.

Howard: Listen, gay cartoons were being printed even before Stonewall, like Miss Thing, Joe Johnson’s campy single-panel series that ran in early issues of The Advocate.

These things go way back, but they were off in the fringe world of gay magazines that nobody but gays would ever see. I couldn’t adopt them as role models for my own work because I didn’t want to be a fringe cartoonist. I wanted to be a mainstream cartoonist.

CBC: Were there homosexual porn cartoon books, too?

Howard: For sure. I have always approved of ’em in principle, but doing porn has never been what I was about.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t done porn. I certainly have — not in comics so much as illustrations I’ve done erotic drawings for gay porn magazines. I couldn’t sustain my interest in having everything revolve around sex, though. Too many other things in life are interesting to draw about.

CBC: Did you say that Robert Crumb came and visited you once, and stayed over at your place there in Birmingham?

Howard: Yes, he did. That was a very unusual experience.

CBC: What was that like? What was the occasion?

Howard: He was just visiting the area. Back when I was exchanging letters with him and Aline, I had remarked in passing, you know, “If you’re ever in Birmingham you can come sleep on my couch.” Not that I thought that it would ever really happen. But, after a while, he wrote and said, “Terry Zwigoff and I are going to make a cross-country car trip, checking out garage sales, and collecting old 78-rpm records. Can we come stay with you?”

CBC: Terry Zwigoff?

Howard: Yeah, the guy who directed the Crumb documentary. Crumb doesn’t drive — or at least he didn’t at that time. So Terry was doing the driving. As far as I was concerned, Crumb was a cultural hero on a level with the Beatles, so it was like having a Beatle in my living room!

CBC: [Laughs] Which one?

Howard: But it was also frustrating because I knew from interviews how much he hated being treated as a star. I knew the surest way to get him out the door was to try to show him off to my friends, even though I also knew my Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

friends would kill me when they found out Crumb had been in my apartment for three days and I hadn’t told them! I almost got him to go to a play at the college with me. I could have sauntered around the lobby and whispered, “Do you know who that is?”

CBC: You were chompin’ at the bit to show off.

Howard: He decided to stay in and draw, though. He drew the cover for his second Cheap Suit Serenaders album in my apartment. It was strange to see a Robert Crumb drawing being done on my drawing board!

CBC: What’d you guys talk about? Did you talk a lot?

Howard: I remember one of our conversations: We talked about the anti-intellectualism in a lot of undergrounds and how it really bothered me that there was this sort of reverse snobbery about not being “intellectual.” I couldn’t understand why we shouldn’t feel it was a good thing to make full use of our brains. He said he saw my point. And we talked about pop culture. We watched network TV and he made fun of things. We went to an art store so he could buy some art materials.

CBC: Did you guys get a picture taken together?

Howard: No. I’m sure that would’ve come under the heading of showing him off. I can’t believe he’d have allowed me to take out a camera. It’s sort of painful when you see the scene in the Crumb documentary where the kid in the comic store asks for an autograph and gets rebuffed.

I was trying hard not to be a “fanboy.”

Above: For the initial issues of the Starlog sister mag Fangoria, Howard produced the shortlived Count Fangor strip. Below: As noted, not only did the cartoonist serve as an art director in the Starlog office, but he also contributed a regular column, “Loose Cruse,” to Comics Scene.

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This page: Howard Cruse’s superb cartooning gained an entirely new audience with his contributions to Kitchen Sink’s anthology title Gay Comix (of which he edited the first four issues) and particularly with the debut of his Wendel comic strip, which appeared in The Advocate, a nationally distributed magazine, starting with the Jan. 20, 1983, installment above. Wendel even made it on the Mar. 15, 1988, issue’s cover.

shed the last of my internalized homophobia. It was the LSD trips I took with Don — and the relationship itself, of course — that prompted my epiphany, that made me realize that there was actually nothing at all wrong with being homosexual. It was perfectly natural. That was my major turning point. Once it hit me that I’d been put through all this torture during my adolescence and that I had nearly killed myself over being gay, I got angry. I wanted to be part of the gay liberation movement that I had begun reading about after soon I returned to Birmingham. I wanted to help keep the next generation of gay kids from being hurt the way I had been.

Sometime around 1974, Rolling Stone ran an article about the burgeoning gay liberation movement in places like San Francisco and New York. And, even though I was stuck in Alabama, using my comix seemed like an especially promising way to be part of that. I had decided as early as 1973 I wanted to eventually come out in my work, but I didn’t want to be known only as a gay cartoonist. My whole self wasn’t about being gay, after all; there were other parts to my personality, too. I had a whole range of topics I wanted to cover. So, even though it was on my agenda to eventually come out professionally, I spent several years trying to first carve out a place for myself in underground comic books that had nothing to do with being gay. My Barefootz stories appeared in several Kitchen Sink undergrounds, then got some added visibility in the newsstand magazine Comix Book. I finally got to put out my first solo comic, Barefootz Funnies #1, in 1975. A year later, in the second issue of Barefootz, I began my process of coming out very gingerly with my story called “Gravy On Gay,” my first story that featured Barefootz’s artist friend Headrack instead of Barefootz himself. When I say gingerly, I mean the story stopped short of proclaiming unambiguously that I myself, the cartoonist, was gay. If I got a bad reaction I could always claim that it was just my character that was gay. I was taking one step at a time, waiting to see what the repercussions would be for my career, waiting for the sky to fall. But the sky didn’t fall and I got more confident. So, when Denis [Kitchen], a couple of years later, got the idea of doing Gay Comix and asked if I would edit it, I thought, “Well that would be an ideal way for me to come out of the closet to my peers and readers both.”

CBC: By then you had moved back to New York, right?

Howard: Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that. By 1976, I had figured out that if I was going to have a real cartooning career, I wasn’t going to be able to do it from Birmingham.

So I quit my ad agency job and headed back to New York City. I made the move on the first of January, so I wouldn’t have to file state tax returns in both Alabama and New York. I tried freelancing for a number of months and had better luck at it than I had back in 1969 because I had more experience under my belt. Also, some of the art directors I encountered actually knew my work from underground comix. I still wasn’t quite making ends meet, though. Then the art direction job at Starlog opened up. I had become friends with Starlog’s then-editor, Howard Zimmerman, since getting to New York, and Howard introduced me to the magazine’s publishers, Kerry O’Quinn and Norm Jacobs.

The upshot was that I found myself art directing a national newsstand magazine, mainly thanks to the production skills I had gotten editing our high school newspaper at Indian Springs.

CBC: New York in the late-’70s must have been an incredible place to be for a young gay man. There was a sense of freedom taking place. Perhaps a “libertine” lifestyle?

Howard: Correct. You can see that freedom in action in my story, “Billy Goes Out.” It was a fulfilling period to live through, especially if you spent your childhood feeling repressed. Unfortunately, the AIDS epidemic put a damper on that sexual free-for-all.

CBC: What was that like for you? Honesty means a lot to you. Was that living honestly to yourself? #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Wendel TM & © Howard Cruse. The Advocate © Here Media, Inc.

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CBC: Were you openly gay at the time?

Howard: No. I was in the late stages of my decision to be more out professionally, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

I had a few teasing suggestions in comics I was drawing then.

C… I was dancing on the closet threshold.

But I was still hedging. I suggested that I was straight without saying so in the last panel of “How Barefootz Was Created.” I showed myself walking along with an unidentified girl. I didn’t say, “This is a girlfriend,” or anything like that…

CBC: You intentionally did that.

Howard: It was the closet in action! This is what cartoonists had always done: portray themselves as straight. I felt queasy about the dishonesty but rationalized it. It was really only in retrospect that I thought, “Face it: you were using that girl as your ’beard.’” For years I hesitated to reprint that strip because I was embarrassed to have done that. Finally I redrew the panel when I adapted and colored “How Barefootz Was Created” for my website. This time I had a male with me in that panel, not a female. I’ve changed a lot since I drew the first version. People would roll their eyes at me if I tried to pass off anything like that now.

CBC: But it was a part of your development, right?

Howard: Transitioning from not being out to being out can be awkward. The signals you send can be full of contradictions. We’ve all seen that with celebrities.

They’ll hint that they’re gay, then do something that reaffirms their straightness. Back and forth.

Even when their orientation is ridiculously obvious to anyone.

Liberace insisted to the end that he had never married because he had lost the woman he loved early in life. I parodied that syndrome one time in a Wendel strip. The length people go to hold onto the safety of the closet can seem absurd in retrospect. But I can’t make fun of Liberace too much, considering how many years it took me to admit to even my closest friends that I might be gay… or maybe bisexual.

And, even though the shock of Pam’s pregnancy resulted in me venturing out into Birmingham’s gay subculture, it still took a few more years after that for me to

on the other hand, there might be somebody more exciting waiting for you at the next gay bar. The tendency was to not build relationships. Later on, you had the LGBT Community Center, which was a great advance because it wasn’t about cruising! You could spend time with people you shared interests with, y’know? Gay chess clubs, gay softball teams, gay…

CBC: Basketball.

Howard: Yeah. But that came later. What did exist in the late ’70s were discussion groups — or “rap groups,” as we called them until that turned into a musical genre. We’d sit around comparing notes on the gay experience and making new friends in the course of that.

CBC: Did you have a regular weekly discussion?

Howard: There were several of them around New York. You’d see notices about them in The Village Voice.

CBC: Were they big groups of people?

Howard: It varied. I tried out several. I went to one and found it disturbingly cultish, with a cult of personality built around the guy who led the group. And I went to a meeting of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had played a historic role in the early movement and was a remnant of its original self by the time I got there. Very ideological and argumentative. But finally I found a group called Identity House that I felt comfortable going to regularly. Every Sunday, they’d have a meeting of gay men; every Saturday, they’d have a meeting for lesbians. A lot of my friendships grew out of Identity House, and that’s where I met Eddie Sedarbaum, who became my lover and is now my husband these many years later.

CBC: It was a place to go for camaraderie, not to cruise?

Above: Kitchen Sink collected a run of Howard Cruse’s Wendel strips for this 1990 oneshot. Around the same time, St. Martin’s Press published their Wendel on the Rebound compilation. Below: Here — and on the page following — is a Wendel episode that reveals the characters passion for science fiction, perhaps hinting at his creator’s involvement with the SF magazine Starlog.

As evident here, the titular character was charming, silly, oft naïve, and boundlessly enthusiastic. The strip originally appeared in The Advocate.

Wendel TM & © Howard Cruse.

Howard: Yes. Humans are sexual beings and incorporating sex into your life without feeling guilty about it is an authentic way to live. In my personal life, I had been enjoying myself as a gay man in Birmingham during those years from 1969 to ’77, and I continued to enjoy myself in New York, where I encountered a level of sexual abandon that was just astonishing to me. It was really radical. People could become obsessive about it, but I felt it was psychologically liberating on the whole, as long as it didn’t take over your life. The only shoe that hadn’t fallen yet for me was being fully out as a professional cartoonist.

CBC: Now you wanted to go to New York, you wanted to be part of the movement. Did you wanna be the cartoonist for the movement? Where was your ego in all this?

Howard: I had my fair share of ego (and still do), but my goal was to contribute to the movement without giving up on my mainstream ambitions. Whether I could achieve that was an open question, but I wanted to give it a try.

The major tool in my skill set was that I could do cartoons.

Temperamentally, I’m not an organizational-type person.

I hate spending time at meetings. Throughout my time in New York, I tried to stay available to do flyers or posters or graphics when they were needed. Doing those was fine because I could do them at home without having to listen to people arguing about strategy. And I was happy to be a warm body in a crowd when numbers were important at protest events.

Of course, the burst of movement activism that had flowered in the years immediately following Stonewall had slipped into a comparative lull during the late ’70s, when it seemed that gay liberation was gaining momentum. We didn’t have the option of becoming complacent or anything — Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Florida, the battle over the anti-gay Brigg’s Initiative [the California proposed constitutional amendment that aimed at outlawing gay teachers]; and the assassination of Harvey Milk made sure of that — but we were gaining more mainstream support and it felt overall like the winds were blowing our way. So a lot of gay people felt free to concentrate on partying. The AIDS epidemic brought activism roaring back, but that was in the 1980s. When I got to New York in 1977, I had lots of fun, but I also was aware that it was hard to make good gay friends with one-night stands. The whole psychology of that kind of life discourages…

CBC: Any continuity of intimacy?

Howard: Yeah. It’s true that you could go back and see that guy again that you went to bed with the other night but,

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Below: By our count, there are 37 variant covers for the recently released Archie #1, a reboot of the Riverdale “typical teen,” and we were delighted not only to know that our local retail chain, Newbury Comics, had enlisted Peter Bagge to do their variant, but also to see that the cartoonist did a smart take on Bob Montana’s splash panel of the very first appearance of Young Andrews, back in Pep Comics #22 [Dec. 1942] — albeit with a more modern take on Betty Cooper!

Frankly, it’d be a hoot to see our pal Peter do a full-length story on the whole Riverdale High School gang, huh?

This page: This editor suggests that Howard Cruse’s Wendel strip went a long way by depicting — certainly for comics fans — the normal, loving, and domestic relationship between a gay couple, skewering (and lampooning) stereotypes, and showcasing an alternative lifestyle with the artist’s tremendously friendly and accessible style. Above are the covers of two Wendel collections.

Howard: I mean, everybody knew it was quite possible you might see somebody cute that you could take things further with, as happened with Eddie, but the main point was to share experiences and feelings with other gay people. Usually there would be somewhere between ten and twenty people there on a given Sunday.

CBC: Did a good number of people come because they were in crisis or just ’cause they wanted to…?

Howard: Some people would be in crisis, but mostly it wasn’t about wanting advice. It was about having people to compare notes with, so you weren’t leading either a solitary life or a sex-obsessed one.

CBC: Did you just stand around?

Howard: No, there were chairs. We’d sit in a circle and exchange names and have a discussion about some topic or other. A facilitator would try to keep the conversation from going down blind alleys. Afterwards everybody would usually go out together to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

Eddie and I found ourselves sitting across from each other at the restaurant and I discovered that he was a very interesting person, someone I could talk with about lots of different things. At the time, Eddie was working for New York’s Department of Social Services, providing services for older communities. Shortly before that I had visited my grandmother in a nursing home in Birmingham and happened upon my old second grade teacher, who also lived there, and who was in a very bad stage of Alzheimer’s.

She wasn’t just forgetful; she was in some sort of turmoil, tossing in bed and moaning. It was very disturbing to see, especially because when she was my teacher she had been invariably well groomed and elegant. To see her now, not knowing where she was, making faces and tossing with her hair all over the place — it was very disturbing. And Eddie, because of his experience with older people, could talk knowledgeably and sympathetically about the issues surrounding gerontology. I really liked that he was the kind of person who gives real thought to things. After the group broke up, we continued to spend the rest of the evening together.

CBC: Did you fall in love immediately?

Howard: Well, I wouldn’t say we fell love instantly, but we did spend the rest of the afternoon and evening talking and, by the next morning, we had sex like, y’know, gay men do. But I sensed that there was potential for more here. By then, five years had gone by since I broke up with Don. I had spent the first couple of those years grieving for the loss of that relationship but, in New York, I had begun

Wendel TM & © Howard Cruse.

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few gag cartoons in some national magazines, but finding a place to do gay comic strips wasn’t in the wind yet.

CBC: What was it like at Starlog? Were you doing cartooning and writing for them?

Howard: I was on Starlog’s staff for about eight months.

I did some spot illustrations, but I was mainly doing layouts.

I was the art director. I didn’t do any writing for the Starlog line of magazines until 1981, when they launched Comics Scene. I had my Loose Cruse column in there for the first ten issues. By then, my only connection to Starlog was as a freelancer. I continued to illustrate David Gerrold’s columns and they’d occasionally call me for other assignments. I designed the movie tie-in special for Rocky IV, if you can

This page: In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Howard was a freelancer with a vengeance, as he contributed not only to Scholastic’s Bananas (above is one of his Doctor Duck strips), but also to that cartoonist holy grail, Playboy magazine.

Below is are panels from a Little Lulu parody by Howard, which scored him a job making parodies of well-known comic strips for Playboy.

Doctor Duck TM & © Scholastic, Inc. Little L*l* Howard Cruse.

feeling somewhat open to a new relationship if I could find the right guy. So whenever I spent time with people that I met at Identity House or somewhere else, going to movies or whatever, I was kind of auditioning them in my mind, imagining how it would be to spend a lot of time with them. When I met Eddie, I immediately felt like he had real relationship potential.

Eddie had broken up with his wife only six weeks earlier after a ten-year marriage. He was living in temporary quarters in his recently-deceased aunt’s apartment, which, y’know, he wasn’t gonna get away with for long because New York landlords really want to get people out of their apartments, so they can charge more rent to the next tenant. But that’s where he was living when I met him, and he told me it was very isolating. He told me, “I’m not where I used to live, so I never get phone calls.” Which, he later admitted, was totally manipulative because, of course, the next day I called him and we got together for dinner. [Jon chuckles] We started spending time together. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance; we just liked spending time together.

But he was going to have to move soon, so we had to decide quickly whether we dared do anything so rash as to go ahead and move in together. Where I was living was not big enough for two people, so the question was: would Eddie get an apartment for two or an apartment for one? Finally, we decided that we would experiment. We were perfectly aware we might break up eventually, since we had only known each other for six weeks when the time came to rent a U-Haul. Who knew if this relationship could really make it? So in the absence of lifelong vows, we decided on a fall-back position. Our promise to each other was that we would not break up frivolously, because of some momentary argument or something. We would just see how things went. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t work. Some of our friends thought that was very unromantic, but I think it was pretty healthy. When you start making vows like “I will be with you for the rest of my life,” you can end up feeling trapped.

It became a private joke for us over the years. “When we break up I’ll get this and you’ll get that.” But here we are now, almost 40 years later.

CBC: You were pragmatic. You were a young couple and the world was changing, right? Gay liberation was taking place.

Howard: Yeah, one of my reasons for moving to New York had been wanting to be part of the Movement, and all of the anti-gay ferment offered lots of opportunities for cartoons.

I didn’t really have a good venue to cartoon in, though. I did one cartoon for a paper called Gaysweek, but it was on its last legs at that point.

CBC: What was the strip about?

Howard: It wasn’t a strip; it was a one-shot political cartoon. It wasn’t that great; single panels have never been my strength. Even while I was in Birmingham, I had published a

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Inset right: Photograph of Eddie and Howard from 1979.

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I hadn’t been remotely part of that San Francisco scene I was depicting. I interviewed people who were part of that story and did what I could to extrapolate from the anecdotes they shared with me, but as soon as I moved beyond direct quotes and started describing how things were, I might not be getting it right. It was a good lesson for me. I was learning the limits of my skills. So I decided to leave history to the historians after that.

CBC: It was right after you left Starlog that you started doing work for Playboy, wasn’t it?

Howard: Right. It’s hard to be certain about the chronology after all these years, but sometime during that period I got a call from Skip Williamson, the underground cartoonist famous for Snappy Sammy Smoot. Skip was based in Chicago and had done work for Playboy, and he said Hugh Hefner wanted to establish a “Playboy Funnies” section in the magazine and use short strips by underground cartoonists in it. Would I be interested in meeting with Michelle Urry, the cartoon editor? So I took a portfolio that had a bunch of my stuff in it to the Playboy office in Manhattan. One of the things in the portfolio was “The Nightmares of Little L*l*,” a four-page Little Lulu parody that ultimately ran in Snarf, but that I had originally drawn for a comic that Larry Shell was planning to publish about pop stuff from the ’50s.

Well, Michelle Urry loved it and said, “I wanna see if we can publish this in Playboy!” That would be like a dream, I thought. I asked Larry to let me do a different strip for his comic so that “Nightmares” could be shipped to Hugh Hefner in Chicago for consideration. Unfortunately Hefner didn’t feel like giving me four whole pages in his magazine.

But he liked the fact that I could mimic the Little Lulu style and asked if I could submit sketches for shorter parodies of mainstream newspaper comics that could run in “Playboy Funnies.” Several of those were accepted and I did finished art for them, and that’s how I got into Playboy.

CBC: Did you always have this mimicking ability? Had you known you had it?

Howard: I wouldn’t say it’s a special ability. I’m just observant about cartooning styles, so if I put my mind to it I can usually find ways to mimic the ways other people draw. The only one of my Playboy parodies that fell short, in my view, was my spoof of Momma, the Mell Lazarus strip. That strip is drawn so loosely and spontaneously that it’s like Mell Lazarus’s handwriting! I’d have had to have been a forger to nail it! My version of Momma was much tighter than the real Momma strip. But it was funny and I was delighted to learn that Lazarus liked it. He wrote Playboy and asked if he could have the original.

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Wendel TM& © Howard Cruse.

Above: Howard Cruse’s longtime partner and now husband Eddie Sedarbaum earned some impressive endorsements during his unsuccessful run for New York State Senate in 1998, as seen on this campaign poster. By the early ’00s, the couple moved to North Adams, a small city in northwestern Massachusetts, to enjoy the splendor of the New England seasons and — of no small concern — the fact that the Bay State had legalized same-sex marriage, in May 2004, the first in the nation to affirm marital rights to all regardless of sexual orientation. Soon upon settling in the Commonwealth, and after living together for over a quarter-century, Howard Cruse married Eddie Sedarbaum.

believe it!

CBC: While you were doing your Loose Cruse columns for Comics Scene, you did a three-part series about the Air Pirates [a group of underground comix artists who incorporated Walt Disney characters into their comix and were sued]. You said you were really trepidatious about encroaching into the world of historians.

Howard: Yeah, writing history is its own craft! Accounts about happened in the real world in other times need to be done by writers who are far more observant of details than I am. I chose that topic because I wanted to write about the issues involved in creating cartoon parodies and the story of the Air Pirates seemed like the perfect vehicle for that.

But I was in over my head.

I did my best but I realized that I was really an amateur at this historian stuff. I’m like Wendel: I’m oblivious to a lot of things. I live inside my mind. I have to force myself to absorb the world’s concrete details, because what really interests me in life is human interaction. I pay a lot of attention to the subtexts of conversations and things like that, but I couldn’t tell one make of car from another. Doing Stuck Rubber Baby went seriously against my grain because there was no getting around the need for research.

I did my best to include accurate details when I could so readers wouldn’t be distracted by errors, but I was well aware that someone who was really observant about the world would notice flaws in my depiction of that period, just in terms of stuff that I couldn’t find reference material for and had to draw from memory, which is very fallible. Once I was writing my articles about the Air Pirates, I realized

Wendel TM& © Howard Cruse.

CBC: Oh, yeah? Did you give it to him?

Howard: Yeah, we swapped originals. He gave me a Momma original, which I’ve always treasured since I’m a Lazarus fan. Anyway, most of the more cartoony strips in newspapers are close enough to my own style for me to mimic. The most challenging one was my riff on Rex Morgan, M.D. That was a stretch, but I got away with it. Then Hefner started getting angry letters from the syndicates’ lawyers and decided to drop me from his lineup.

CBC: How long did it last?

Howard: I wasn’t in every installment of “Playboy Funnies.” I was in five or six, maybe over something like a nine-month period. When they said they were gonna stop buying the parodies, I tried to get them to get them interested in strips drawn in my native style, but Hefner didn’t go for anything.

CBC: Was it a lucrative time?

Howard: The money was great from Playboy. Nothing to retire on, but compared to what I had been getting from undergrounds, those were great paychecks.

CBC: Did you pitch Denis at all with ideas?

Howard: I kept contributing to his anthologies. He would put out an issue of Snarf every year or so and I was in every one of ’em for a long time, and I was in Dope Comix regularly. I continued doing underground comic books into the ’80s, with a lot of my focus being on Gay Comix, obviously. Then my time started being taken up by Wendel.

CBC: Was the decision to take on Gay Comix difficult?

Howard: Nineteen seventy-nine was the year when Denis Kitchen asked if I would consider editing Gay Comix.

Eddie and I had moved in together in June, a couple of months earlier, and he helped me think through the possible ramifications of saying yes. The political timing seemed right, since the best way to counter all the anti-gay crusades that were going on was to unapologetically make our presence felt wherever we could. In June, Eddie marched with me in his first New York Gay Pride parade that summer and we were gearing up to attend the first Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, in October. So our political juices were flowing, and my immediate impulse was to accept Denis’s proposal. But there were risks to consider. By then I was doing a lot of non-gay, non-underground work, drawing illustrations for mainstream magazines, and I was afraid I might lose clients. What would it do to my cartooning career to be openly gay? Of course, Gay Comix would be an underground comic book and who of them would be underground comic readers — among my mainstream clients, I mean. Editing Gay Comix seemed like it would be fairly safe, but I couldn’t be sure. Eddie helped me weigh the pros and cons, but in our hearts we knew that the only thing to do was go for it.

The first problem was figuring out how to find gay cartoonists to be in the comic, since we didn’t know who in the underground comix world was gay and who wasn’t! So we composed a form letter that Denis sent to his entire mailing list of cartoonists saying, “Hey, we’re doing this comic book called Gay Comix and here’s what it’s gonna be like.

We’re sending this letter to everybody because we don’t

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know who’s gay, so if you’re not gay but know a cartoonist who is, please pass on this letter to them.” It was a little easier to find lesbians, which was good because I didn’t wanted Gay Comix to be an all-male thing. So I contacted Mary Wings and Roberta Gregory, who had already put out some lesbian comix, and asked them if they would be part of this new project. They were immediately enthusiastic.

Then Lee Marrs volunteered. This was a little confusing to me because she’d been in a long-term relationship with Mike Friedrich. On the other hand, there had been lesbian moments in her Pudge, Girl Blimp series, she already had a fan following, and she really wanted to do it. Like Mary and Roberta, she’d be a great asset to the book, and it didn’t seem like my job to cross-examine valuable contributors.

Even though Lee was a friend and fellow Alabama native, it was a few years before I finally got up the nerve to say, “Lee, what exactly is your story?” [laughs] She said she would characterize herself as a “currently inactive bisexual.” Anyway, her contributions were great and it’s hard to imagine having launched Gay Comix without her.

The same was true with Roberta and Mary Wings. They were both pioneers. Having both of them and Lee in the first issue — and for all we knew that might be the only issue — made an instant statement about how important Denis and I thought it was for projects like this to be co-gender. The whole trans issue wasn’t on many people’s radars then, but I was delighted when David Kottler showed up out of the blue with his autobiographical trans story “I’m Me,” which

Above: Howard and Eddie during their 2004 wedding ceremony. Below: Howard Cruse’s Wendel appeared in the bi-weekly gay magazine The Advocate during a crucial period for the LGBTQ community. The 1980s was a decisive decade not only for confronting reactionary forces amid those Reagan years but, in a fight for their very lives, there was the war of survival against the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — AIDS — a subject dealt with in Howard’s strip. As is evident in this “loop strip” (pieced together in a single row from its multi-tiered Advocate appearance) there remained, as well, other issues of importance to LGBTQ U.S. citizens (and enlightened straights), such as gay-bashing, military service, homophobia in the media, the assassination of California city supervisor Harvey Milk… and the whole point, really: the right to love — and marry — who you love.

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All © the respective copyright holders.

Above: Howard Cruse was tapped to illustrate the poster for the 1982 Radical Humor Festival, an event curiously co-sponsored by Marxist scholars, a political persuasion not often lauded for any sense of humor. Inset right: Attesting to his impact on the form, Howard was joined by fellow cartoonist greats Robert Crumb, creator of ZAP Comix, and Gilbert Shelton, creator of Wonder Warthog and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, with their induction into the 1993 Underground Comix Hall of Fame ceremony, a Chicagobased event that proved to be the last of three annual gatherings. This is a reproduction of the acetate color separations, courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

In a recent interview, Jay Lynch, one of the founding fathers of underground comix, rated Howard’s ground-breaking Stuck Rubber Baby as equal to Art Spiegelman’s Maus as being one of the most important graphic novels ever conceived.

pleased with the amount of good stuff that came in from cartoonists we hadn’t heard of. Some stuff came in that was somewhat amateurishly drawn but had worthwhile things to say. With each issue, more cartoonists made contact with us, ones who hadn’t previously thought they would ever have a place to publish comics about the lives they were leading. Even Alison Bechdel made it into Gay Comix! She was such a find!

CBC: Was that some of her first stuff?

Howard: I think she had already begun publishing cartoons in alternative papers. I don’t remember if she had started Dykes to Watch Out For yet. I think [subsequent editor] Robert Triptow brought her into the fold. Although I was happy to publish work by people with drawing skills that weren’t that advanced as long as their stories had heart and substantial themes, but it was a major plus when you found someone like Alison or like Burton Clark. Burton’s skills were really professional; he had learned a lot from studying the work of Leonard Starr [creator of On Stage].

CBC: And you saw Gay Comix as part of a movement?

Howard: Well, it was a part of a movement in that visibility — simply being visible in the world— was an important step for gays and lesbians to take.

CBC: Being out.

Howard: Being out… and being honest. I didn’t want propaganda pieces, though. We wanted pieces about real-life experience. They could be funny; they could be serious; they could be fanciful or stylized — but they needed to be somehow rooted in reality. It was okay if someone had a point of view that was different from mine. It wasn’t about being politically correct. I’m sure there are exceptions here and there, but propaganda doesn’t usually make for interesting comics.

By the end of the ’80s, a real flowering of LGBT cartooning was showing up all over the place. It’s still happening, in fact; the Queers & Comix Conference that Jennifer Camper spearheaded in New York last year was packed with new talent as well as old-timers like me. In 1989, Jen and Burton and Mark Johnson and I co-curated a show at the LGBT Community Center in New York. When I was editing Gay Comix, I had known practically all the lesbian and gay cartoonists who were willing to be open, aside from the porn people. I had been kind of a gatekeeper; I was the guy we ran in the third issue. saying, “Come on in through this door.” But, by 1989, the I was especially pleased with “A Visit From Mom,” Mary next wave of queer cartoonists was largely new to me. I Wings’ contribution in the first issue, because it set a tone hadn’t met or seen the work of half the people in the show that I wanted to be set from the beginning. She showed a we put together at the Center. And that was 23 years ago; gay world that was miles away from the gay male ghetto you can imagine how crowded the field is by now! Most life that was over-represented in gay pop culture in those of the people who are in Rob Kirby’s Qu33r anthology are days. Magazines like Blueboy and Christopher Street had people I don’t know. high-quality writing — or, in Blueboy’s case, high-quality CBC: Well, new generations do arrive. beefcake — but the flavor that Howard: Anyway, editing dominated them was of gay Gay Comix was an important male life on the two coasts. You turning point in my own comcould forget that lesbians and ing-out process professionally, gays were living very different but it pretty quickly led to an lives in other places, or that they even bigger one, when The came in different age groups. In Village Voice asked me to do Gay Comix, I wanted stuff that a full-page gay-themed strip represented gay life in America to accompany an essay about in general — and all around the the anti-gay backlash that world if I could swing it. And, had been gaining steam ever sure enough, we had submissince Anita Bryant began her sions from countries like France “Save the Children” campaign and Finland (and others I don’t in Florida in the mid-‘70s. The remember off the top of my full-page Voice strip I did, head). The first issue was discalled “Sometimes I Get So tributed in gay bookstores and Mad,” was the final domino got a good enough reception to fall for me in terms of being to justify more issues. As I said publicly out. A handful of my before, when were preparing the mainstream illustration clients comic book we thought it might might have been underground be a one-shot, so we were very comix readers who already

All © Howard Cruse.

knew about Gay Comix, but being out in the Voice was a whole different ballgame.

CBC: It’s not a typical coming out, right? Your average person wouldn’t normally have to come out in such a public atmosphere, but being open was going to be part and parcel of your professional identity.

Howard: I knew it could hurt my career, but I also felt it was something I just had to do. It was important for young LGBT people to know that it wasn’t the end of the world to be gay, and that being honest about it didn’t mean that you couldn’t have a career. That may seem obvious to young gay people now because they’ve got Ellen DeGeneres on TV and Neil Patrick Harris hosting the Oscars, but when I was a teenager I hadn’t had any role models. Gay visibility in the real world would have saved me a lot of anxiety. The more people are open about being gay, the less strange and scary gayness will seem to the next generation in line.

The same opening-up process is going on these days with trans people. Being trans is seeming less and less weird as more people become aware that it’s the reality for other kids at school or for grownups they know and admire. Even celebrities. Even Olympic stars.

CBC: Did you have alternative distribution systems for Gay Comix?

Howard: Most of the regular comics shops wouldn’t touch them in the beginning, but a lot of gay and lesbian bookstores had sprung up during the 1970s.

They were the biggest avenues for distribution of Gay Comix. Unfortunately, Denis ended up feeling that his regular distributors for Kitchen Sink comix didn’t give him all the access to gay bookstores that he needed.

That’s what led him to hand over the series to Bob Ross after the fifth issue. Ross was the publisher of the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco and was tapped into national gay bookstore channels in a way that Kitchen Sink wasn’t.

CBC: Did you suffer any career setbacks from coming out?

Howard: To my relief, not many. It probably would have been different down in Alabama, but in New York most art directors and people in publishing weren’t going to be shocked that some artists they were working with were gay. If they needed cartoons, most couldn’t care less if gay people were drawing them as long as the drawings were what they needed.

Nothing changed at Starlog. I left my art directing job in 1979 to have another go at full-time freelancing but, as old-time Starlog readers know, I continued to contribute illustrations for quite a while after that. I also did a short-lived comic strip called Count Fangor for Starlog’s sister magazine Fangoria and wrote Loose Cruse, that column I mentioned before, for the first ten issues of Comics Scene.

And, over at Scholastic Publications I was hired to illustrate a regular comic strip called Doctor Duck for Bananas magazine. The fact that the target audience for Bananas was teenagers didn’t seem to faze anybody. I guess they weren’t worried that youngsters would be corrupted if they looked at pictures of a goofy duck that had been drawn by a gay cartoonist. And Topps Chewing Gum used me for a bunch of their stickers and even handed the Bazooka Joe series over to me for a while. Playboy cooled off on me once I came out, but that was a special case.

CBC: How did your goal of being part of the gay movement fit in with all this mainstream work?

Howard: Well, the mainstream work paid the bills. Gay Comix paid very little, just like underground comix in general. You could make big money in undergrounds if you were hugely popular the way Crumb was, or Gilbert Shelton, because then the royalties would build up over time. But nothing I ever did ever sold in big numbers. Even Gay Comix, which was a bigger success than Denis Kitchen or I had dared hope for when we started it, never brought in big Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

bucks. The money I made by doing freelance illustrations for mainstream magazines was what made it possible for me to spend so much time doing gay work, which I wanted to do because I felt it was valuable, not because there was much money to be made. It was only when I started drawing Wendel for The Advocate that the financial balance shifted a little.

CBC: What was the genesis of Wendel? How’d that develop?

Howard: Well, The Advocate was a bi-weekly gay news magazine that started in Los Angeles and went national as the Gay Liberation Movement gained steam. It had been around since before Stonewall and was the most prominent gay magazine in the country by the time I started subscribing. Eventually it changed to a standard magazine size, but it was a newsprint tabloid with big pages when I discovered it. They had accepted a few gag cartoons from me in the ’70s, but it was my full-page Voice strip, “Sometimes I Get So Mad,” that made them start taking more of an interest in me. Robert I. McQueen, the Advocate’s editor, saw that strip and asked to reprint it. Once I saw how cool my stuff looked when it had a full tabloid page to play in I started thinking, “Hey, that’s a lot of space for a comic strip!”

CBC: And that was appealing.

Howard: Yeah! It would be like getting to do Prince

Above: Village Voice contribution from 1989. Below: In 2012, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and BOOM! Town co-released the FCBD release, The Censored Howard Cruse.

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real world that its readers were living in. In Wendel, of course, I had added freedom because it was totally my baby, not a project done collaboratively with other LGBT cartoonists that had to incorporate everyone’s different perspectives. But, in both cases, I tried to keep my eye out for all the real-world things that were going on and make room for aspects of gay life that might be being neglected. Like, when contributions for the first issue of Gay Comix began coming in, I began to get the feeling that everyone was taking my request that the stories be “about people, not penises” a little too literally. The realities of the gay male sex scene were being avoided, which was weird in an underground comic book where the ability to portray sex without censorship was part of what made it underground. I didn’t want gratuitous porn, but I also didn’t want to pretend that the sex drive wasn’t part of what made people human. So, late in the game, I tried to fill that void with “Billy Goes Out,” which is very sexual and very human at the same time. When contributions for the second issue were coming in, I felt that the spirit of gay liberation was tempting us to forget that there were still tortured, self-hating gay people around who didn’t feel liberated at all. Sadly, they were part of our larger community and deserved to have their reality acknowledged. That led me to make “Jerry Mack” my contribution to the issue. I had a similar motivation for including the sad story of a guy named Otis in an episode of Wendel years later. Otis was never able to accept being gay and wound up dying of AIDS without ever being mourned. Except for by Wendel’s friend Sawyer, who sewed a panel of the Names Project AIDS quilt in his memory. There were lots of Jerry Macks and Otises who were still part of our community, despite all of the progress that had been made in the decades after Stonewall.

My fictional Otis was inspired by one my co-workers at a Birmingham TV station where I worked in 1964. He was a sweet guy, an older, alcoholic guy, who hung out at the gay bar I went to when I first came out. This guy was always around gays and lesbians, but he was too inhibited to ever call himself gay. I never saw any indication that he had a sex life at all. But there was one New Year’s Eve when I was sitting next to him in the bar and he got drunk enough to reach over and take my hand. There was no follow-up.

He didn’t say anything or even look at me while he was doing it. He just held my hand for several minutes and stared into space. I found it sad and touching, and I was glad that I could kind of pay tribute to him in a Wendel strip years later, even though it was highly unlikely that he stayed alive long enough to see the strip.

There were lots of older people in the gay scene, too, including very campy ones who were often very funny but were looked down on by the wider world, and even by a lot of gay people who were embarrassed by them. The so-called “queens” may have been in the front lines of the Stonewall riots, but once Gay Liberation got going lots of activists thought they were too stereotypical.

Looking super-masculine became all the rage as the ’70s rolled along. The Village People were kind of a parody of that impulse, but plenty of the “Christopher Street Clones” took their mustaches and flannel shirts really seriously.

Meanwhile, the gay magazines, including The Advocate, liked to show young studs with great bodies every chance they got.

You’d never know any gay men were making it past twenty-five.

That obsession with youth, youth, youth was what prompted me to create Luke and Clark, the stars of “Dirty Old Lovers,” when I was putting together Gay Comix #3. Once I spent time with them, of course, I found them wonderfully entertaining to draw comics about. They’ve never stopped being among the favorite characters I’ve ever created.

People used to ask if Luke and Clark were standins for Eddie and me. I’d tell them, “Luke and Clark are Eddie and me ten years from now.” Of course, that seems quaint now, since Eddie and I were around 40 when I drew “Dirty Old Lovers,” and we passed that “ten years later” mark a long time ago!

Whether we ever turned into Luke and Clark I’ll leave for others to decide.

AIDS was the toughest nut to crack, both in Gay Comix #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TM & © Howard Cruse.

Valiant in the old days, you know? By then I was feeling my oats from doing stories in Gay Comix, so I proposed the idea of doing a comic strip exclusively for The Advocate, and I was nervy enough to ask for a real, professional-level page rate.

CBC: They were open to the idea?

Howard: They were. Gay Comix had paved the way. Initially I proposed doing a comic strip starring my characters from “Dirty Old Lovers,” a story about an outrageous older gay couple that I had done for the third issue of Gay Comix. McQueen said, “We’d like to see a comic strip, but could you make it about a young gay guy?” A little unconscious ageism going on there, but I wasn’t in a great position to quibble. So I sketched out a strip about a gay man in his 20s named Wendel Trupstock. It was just a one-shot; nobody was thinking about a series at that point. But they thought my idea was funny and asked for finished art, and that’s how it all started.

CBC: Where’d the name Wendel come from?

Howard: I had once known a newscaster in Birmingham named Wendel and I couldn’t think of any other comic strip character that already had that name.

CBC: How did that first published Wendel strip go over?

Howard: Well enough for McQueen to ask me to submit some more. So I did sketches for a couple more and they asked for finishes and ran them, and finally they decided I knew what I was doing and said, “Just start sending us finished strips. Don’t bother with rough sketches anymore.”

CBC: Carte blanche?

Howard: Yeah. It wasn’t officially carte blanche, but it was de facto carte blanche. They never asked for revisions or anything. At first, Wendel ran in what they called the “Pink Pages,” a section printed on pink paper that you could only get if you were a paid subscriber. They couldn’t include the Pink Pages in issues that were sold on newsstands because they were way too raunchy for public display. They were full of classified sex ads or advertisements for gay porn — not stuff you’d want a kid to accidentally come across at a newsstand. Because it was in the Pink Pages, Wendel could be totally freewheeling, sexually. Being an underground comix guy, that freedom was really appealing to me.

Wendel was essentially filler in the beginning. It ran they had an empty page available. But readers liked it enough for them to say, “Okay, let’s make it a regular feature that’s always on the back of the Pink Pages. That freed me up to begin having a little continuity from episode to episode.

Then a few months later they decided it deserved to be seen by the people who bought The Advocate at newsstands, not just subscribers, and they moved Wendel to the more respectable white pages that were available to everybody. That was great from my point of view; that was I could build a much bigger audience. For a while after that the back page of each issue belonged to Wendel.

CBC: Were you continuing to edit Gay Comix while Wendel was getting started?

Howard: I tried to do both for a while. The first Wendel episode ran in January of 1983, and since the episodes ran intermittently in the beginning I could still keep the correspondence for Gay Comix #4 going and draw my own pages and still take time off for Wendel and my other freelance gigs when I needed to. But once The Advocate decided it wanted a Wendel strip in every issue, I realized that I couldn’t keep that many balls in the air.

So I told Denis that the fourth Gay Comix issue would be my last and suggested that Robert Triptow might be willing to take over editing it, which happily he was up for.

And, since Wendel paid well enough in the early days to cover the time it took to draw it regularly, I was free to put less effort into chasing down illustration jobs. For a while, Wendel became essentially my full-time job.

In a way, my goal in Wendel was an expanded version of what my editorial goal had been in Gay Comix, which was to bypass the old stereotypes and reflect the

All © Howard Cruse. Barefootz TM & © Howard Cruse.

and in Wendel. It was definitely not ready-made for a comic strip! But by the time I was putting together the fourth issue of Gay Comix, the epidemic was looming so large in the gay community that I couldn’t let it go ignored. None of the other contributors were submitting stories on the topic, so I knew it was gonna be up to me. At first I tried doing a story about somebody getting AIDS, but no matter what I did it was coming out too glib, like a soap opera. It wasn’t authentic. It wasn’t coming out of my own experience. People who were suffering from AIDS or who had lost their lovers to it would be reading whatever I did, and they would spot any inauthenticity instantly. Finally I realized the part of the epidemic that I was experiencing along with everyone else: the toll that anxiety and anguish was taking on our whole community. It was an epic, lifeor-death struggle that was happening on all sides of us right along with everyday life. It did things to your head to be in that situation, to have your friends die and be worried that you’re sick, and at the same time to be aware of all the weirdness that went along with widespread panic. So I said, “This is something I can draw from personal experience about.” That’s how my “Safe Sex” story in Gay Comix #4 came about. I was relieved when a lot of people who were dealing directly with AIDS said they really related to that story CBC: And you said you also introduced the epidemic into Wendel? What was the context there?

Howard: Well, I had sneakily brought Luke and Clark into the series once it was established, even though they had been rejected as its central characters when I first proposed the strip….

CBC: The “Dirty Old Lovers”?

Howard: Yeah, from Gay Comix #3. I made Luke Wendel’s uncle. Luke and Clark lived in some distant city, probably New York, which explained why they hadn’t shown up in Wendel earlier. So I had a sequence where Wendel went to visit them, and while he was there he decided to look up Sawyer, who had been his next-door neighbor when they were teenagers and had been the first guy he slept with. But it turned out that Sawyer had AIDS and was in the hospital, so Wendel visited him there. This was a familiar experience during the ’80s, discovering that an old friend you assumed was doing just fine had been suddenly hospitalized.

But, while gay men who were in hospitals fighting for their lives was a reality during those times, it also becoming a new stereotype.

Once TV news quit ignoring the epidemic, it got addicted to showing dramatic images of pathetic men in hospital beds looking like they were going to die any minute.

But oftentimes you could treat the opportunistic infection that came with AIDS even though you couldn’t cure AIDS itself, and just because a gay man got hospitalized, it didn’t mean he was there to die. So if I was going to reflect reality in Wendel, it was gonna be important to show the other sides of the epidemic. Continuing to live. Learning how to take care of yourself. Being an activist, like the members of ACT UP, who made a huge difference.

There was a place in New York called the Living Room where PWAs [People With Aids] could hang out and be with others who were going through the same things they were going through. Since neither I nor any of my close friends were ill yet, I spent time at the Living Room so I could get a feel for what they PWAs were experiencing in the real world instead of depending on the unconscious stereotypes I might pull out of my imagination. I Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

knew that I was going to bring Sawyer back into the strip when he was in a healthier state, and I didn’t want to strike any false notes. The thing that struck me first was how good the guys there looked. I had expected to walk into a room of people who were seriously debilitated, but the guys I encountered in the Living Room looked like gay men I might see anywhere, except that you’ve never seen a bunch of laymen who were more sophisticated in their understanding of pharmaceuticals. Their lives depended on keeping up with what the newest meds were and whether their side effects were grim. These were people who were almost all on disability, so they didn’t have jobs to go to. That meant their lives were structured differently than other people’s. They could go to the movies in the middle of the day, for example, but their friends who were not infected had jobs and didn’t have that freedom.

Even if their friends were totally okay and sympathetic and everything, they were leading a different kind of lifestyle. It could be isolating, no matter how supportive your friends were. Things like that gave me an insight into what the experi- ence of AIDS was from the inside — during the periods between the periods of fighting opportunistic infections. Talking to these guys helped me feel more grounded in reality, so that I could flesh out my portrayal of Sawyer with more confidence later on when he and his lover Ramon came to visit Wendel and Ollie.

Ramon was also HIV-positive, by the way. There was a sequence where you can see him quietly in the background while something else is going on, looking in a mirror and checking a spot on his neck. Being on the lookout for spots on your skin that might be KS [Kaposi Sarcoma] was a familiar part of mundane life for gay men back then, including for me, before I finally confirmed that I was HIV-negative.

CBC: What was the response overall to Wendel from people outside the gay community? Was there any?

Howard: People outside the gay community as a whole weren’t aware of it because they didn’t read The Advocate. Some straight people got into it when the series was compiled into books but, on the whole, its target audience was gay readers. In a way, that made things simpler for me, since gay readers were already familiar with the quirks of the gay subculture and I didn’t have to explain everything to them. But I tried to strike enough universal chords in the strip to make it relevant to readers who weren’t part of the scene. Most straight people wouldn’t have any reason to discover it, but I secretly hoped that those who did would find it more relevant to their lives than they might have expected.

CBC: How would you characterize Wendel? Is he an innocent babe in the woods?

Howard: Well, not quite a babe in the woods. He’s a guy who’s just constitutionally optimistic. Both Wendel and his lover, Ollie, are political activists, and they reflect different sides of my own personality. Ollie is a few years older than Wendel and carries more scars. He’s an activist and he’s out in the gay world, but he’s still nervous about coming to his parents. Wendel, on the other hand, has always gotten total support from his parents, who were old-line lefties in their youth. Wendel comes from a post-Stonewall generation who don’t know what it is to hate yourself. So I’ve got some of both in me: the idealist and the person with scars.

CBC: Did Eddie enter the strip in any way?

Howard: Eddie was the original inspiration for Sterno. Sterno’s very uninhibited and is given to acting 65

Above: Since its premiere in 1995, Stuck Rubber Baby has had three editions, most recently under the Vertigo imprint. Below: The graphic novel is a coming of age tale staged before an Alabama backdrop during the 1960s and is a nearly autobiographical examination.

Sometimes you get useful feedback when you run into people who read your stuff. One time Eddie and I were down in Birmingham visiting my mother, and we went to a gay bar and fell into conversation with a nice young guy.

He asked me what I did, and when he discovered I drew Wendel, he was, like, “Oohh!” He was really excited! Then a few drinks later he was telling me what was wrong with Wendel! He gave me some constructive criticism that led me to make changes in the strip once I got back to New York! Before that, I had used Wendel to satirize oppression a lot, to make fun of homophobes. But this guy said, “You should quit telling people how oppressed they are.

They already know.” I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe it was useful in those days for straight people to hear about anti-gay oppression, but how much did gay people need to hear it? They already knew! They were living it. Because of that fellow’s criticism, I decided it was time for me to broaden my characters. So, when I got back to New York, I began working on a sequence that would do that, that would show more about Wendel’s inner life — apart from the gay movement; apart from Ollie, even. That was the genesis of Wendel’s trip to visit his uncles, who led him to do some soul-searching about what his goals in life were, which had nothing to do with being gay.

Another time, I ran into a guy at a Los Angeles book signing who complained there weren’t enough young people in Wendel. I mean, Wendel was comparatively young, but he wasn’t representative of the kids who were just coming out. I realized that the one young gay kid in Wendel had been a video game-obsessed airhead. This reader in L.A. said that was kind of insulting to his generation. Once I was back home, I devoted more energy to showing more sides of that character, whose name was Cyril. So it can be nice to the ego to get praise from strangers, but it’s also useful to have feedback from people who are not your friends, who will just say what’s really on their mind about what you’re doing.

CBC: How much effort would you have to put in on a weekly basis?

Howard: It was a full-time job.

CBC: You’re slow, right?

Howard: Yeah.

CBC: And what makes it slow? The stippling?

Howard: Well, the thinking, drawing carefully, not having a loosey-goosey style.

CBC: Are you harsh on yourself? Do you say, “Forget it.

That’s not good,” and do it again?

Howard: Usually back then I could recognize very early #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Stuck Rubber Baby TM & © Howard Cruse.

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impulsively. If Eddie noticed a cute guy cruising us back when we were young, he’d be the one with the nerve to go over and say hello, not me. The first time Ollie brings Sterno home to meet Wendel, he leaves the room to get wine, and by the time he returns, Sterno is crawling all over Wendel on the sofa. Eddie proudly accepts the part of him that is Sterno, although he also identifies with Tina, Debbie’s lesbian lover.

CBC: Is that so?

Howard: Yeah! Tina is a very uninhibited gay liberationist who doesn’t put up with sh*t from anyone. Sterno’s about libido; Tina’s about not being an asshole.

CBC: Do you think Wendel was an asset to the gay liberation movement?

Howard: Well, the characters in Wendel had everyday lives that mirrored the lives of many of the strip’s readers.

That was kind of validating, I think. Wendel recognized the importance of balance in your life, of being aware of political imperatives without letting them take over your life. The Wendel characters didn’t live and breathe the movement, but when the time came to be in a demonstration, they stepped up to the plate. That’s pretty much the way Eddie and I and our circle of friends were. Gayness didn’t define our lives. Cartooning was important to me and Wendel was an aspiring science-fiction writer. Ollie held down assorted jobs, but made time to work in community theatre.

So I think the strip humanized the notion of activism, showing that it’s only one side of a rounded life, the way sex is a part of life without being the be-all and end-all.

CBC: Comic book artists, generally speaking, would receive their accolades when they went to comics conventions, or they’d get interviewed by the comic book press.

Did you get much public acclamation? If you met people in social situations and were introduced as the cartoonist of Wendel. Would you get, “Oh!”?

Howard: Once in a while I’d run into some Advocate reader I didn’t know who was impressed that I was the guy who did Wendel. On the whole, straight comics readers at conventions didn’t know me from Adam unless they were into undergrounds. My friends in everyday life knew I was doing Wendel and were supportive, but it wasn’t a big deal. I was a cartoonist and that was an interesting profession, so people were interested in that. It’s not like other people weren’t doing interesting things, too. Once in a while I would do a talk or book signing and get the celebrity treatment for a few hours. Ego boosts are fun when they happen.

Gathering Home © Vicki Covington. Stuck Rubber Baby TM & © Howard Cruse.

when I was going down a wrong track, at the preliminary-sketching stage, before I had inked anything. But once in a while I would realize that there was something really wrong with an already inked panel and I’ll have to mortise in a redrawn one.

CBC: What’d you call it?

Howard: “Mortising.” It’s a way to avoid winding up with an original that has a big patch stuck on its surface. It’s hard to explain in words, but if you look at my originals you’ll find plenty of times that I’ve made corrections that way. It’s a bit of work, but you end up with neater originals that are more collectible. As I said, though, usually it’s during the sketch phase that you realize you need to rethink the way you’re building a picture, not when you’re already inking.

These days, of course, I do most of my corrections in Photoshop, so the old mortising technique is largely obsolete.

CBC: You put a lot of detail in your drawings. I just think your artistic style — just being a fanboy here — I just think you’re a wonderful artist and a great cartoonist.

You’re a quintessential cartoonist!

You do it all, down to the lettering and some coloring… I saw some coloring that you did.

Howard: Yeah, you can find a fair number of color drawings in my files here. I miss the chances to be really goofy in my illustrations, the way I could when I was doing spot illustrations for magazines like American Health. Still, back in the days before digital coloring, if I did color at all, I had to paint it, which is a lot more trouble than coloring digitally. If you made a mistake, it could be hard to fix. If you knocked a jar of paint over onto your drawing, there was no “undo” button you could push on a keyboard. That’s why such a small percentage of my work from before the ’90s is in color. When I did color illustrations for magazines, I used gouache, which is water-soluble but opaque. But, for the most part, I kept things simple and stuck to black-&-white. Now, of course, I can do color easily because of Photoshop.

CBC: Easy-peasy.

Howard: And people can publish color drawings inexpensively. It’s a whole different world.

CBC: Why did you interrupt the Wendel series in the mid‘80s?

Howard: Well, that happened because of a decision The Advocate made that kind of blindsided me. Wendel had gotten promoted to the magazine’s white pages and was coasting along comfortable when I was suddenly told that the format was going to be changed. The tabloid format was going to be ditched in favor of the more conventional Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

newsstand size: 8½" by 11". More like Newsweek or Comic Book Creator. So would I mind shrinking the strip to fit?

They didn’t give me a lot of warning and, once I began thinking about that, I realized that it would totally ruin Wendel to try to do it at that smaller size. Each Wendel strip had been like a little one-act play when I had the tabloid pages to play with. But, if I formatted it for the smaller size, I would have so few panels to work with that I wouldn’t have room to develop any interesting nuances. It would have to become a gag strip and I wasn’t interested in drawing a gag strip. So I saw that I didn’t have any choice. I would just have to end the strip. And I did. I pulled together a nice ending, with Wendel and Ollie having a fantasy wedding. But as far as I knew at the time, that would be the last Wendel strip I would ever draw.

CBC: So you were suddenly out of work?

Howard: Pretty much. Because of the time Wendel took to draw and the stability it had provided for a couple of years, I had let my stream of freelance illustration gigs dwindle to a trickle. I assumed I could beef up that part of my life to compensate for the loss of Wendel income, but I discovered that wasn’t going to be easy. All of my old art directing contacts at magazines seemed to have moved on from their jobs. It was almost like starting my career from scratch. I tried to drum up jobs wherever I could. I even experimented with yet another attempt to syndicate Barefootz for newspapers. That didn’t go anywhere; one of the editors told me I might have a shot if I got rid of the cockroaches, which was sort of missing the point of the strip. It was a pretty unnerving time. This went on for about eighteen months, after which I had the bright idea of proposing to The Advocate that we resurrect Wendel as a two-page feature. Having the extra page would restore the space I needed to do what I had been doing on the single tabloid-size pages before. I also asked for a heftier payment than I had gotten before. That may have been kind of nervy, but it was the only way I could afford to revive the series, given the amount of inflation that had occurred between 1983 and ’86. To my relief, The Advocate liked the idea. By then, Wendel had a fan base, so it was an asset

This page: The cartoonist did father a daughter in real life, just like his SRB counterpart.

At upper left is an informal 2009 photo of Eddie and Howard with Pamela Montanaro, inspiration for the character of Ginger in Stuck Rubber Baby, taken by her husband, Raymond Barglow. Above is Howard’s daughter, Kim Kolze (in white blouse), and her two children, Ethan and Emily, all posing with Eddie (far left) and Howard in 2012. Inset left: The Stuck Rubber Baby herself. Below: Inspired by the heartfelt reunion of father, mother, and daughter, Vicki Covington, the wife of Howard’s cousin, was so moved, she wrote a novel, Gathering Home, published by Simon & Schuster in 1988. “It’s a tender, lovely book,” Howard says. “It’s totally fictionalized, though, except for the fact that the central character who goes searching for her birth parents finds out that her birth father is a gay cartoonist who lives with his Jewish lover in New York City.” The book would serve as a catalyst for the artist to tackle his own memoir (of a sort) in comic book form.

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Above: Stuck Rubber Baby is not only about the transformative experience of a young gay man beginning to comprehend his real identity in the repressive Deep South but, as it takes place during the early to mid’60s, the graphic novel is also about the Civil Rights movement for African-Americans which so consumed that turbulent era.

Below: A glimpse at the page size and meticulous detail given

by Howard to his magnum opus.

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

Stuck Rubber Baby © Howard Cruse.

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the magazine’s readers would be happy to see again. So the series resumed in November of 1986 and continued running until ’89.

CBC: And you owned it outright?

Howard: Yes, it had always been mine. The copyright had always been in my name.

CBC: Were they asleep at the wheel or anything like that or were they just… ?

Howard: About what?

CBC: Well, here they had a property that they were running for a period of time and you decided that you were gonna quit because they decided to change the format. Did they come back asking you, pleading…?

Howard: They regretted losing it for that period of time, but it was an artistic decision I could make because the strip belonged to me. It hadn’t occurred to either them or me that we could have kept the feature going without an interruption by expanding it to two pages. I only thought of proposing that later on.

CBC: But they cared about the strip?

Howard: Yes. It had a lot of followers.

CBC: Did it ever make the cover?

Howard: It did when it returned from the hiatus. I got a big cover drawing with a banner: “Wendel’s Back!”

CBC: That’s nice!

Howard: Yeah, it was a popular feature. And, for a while, selling the originals was an extra source of income for me. Most of the earliest pages have gone to collectors by now.

CBC: Do you still have any of the tabloid originals?

Howard: [Digs one out from his files.] Here’s one. I only have a handful left.

CBC: [Looking at the 1996 sin-

gle-pager “Little Howie In Slumberland,” which was drawn for the final issue of Gay Comix when Andy Mangels, who had renamed the series Gay Comics, was editor] Wow. Is this a true story?

Howard: Well, no.

CBC: It’s not?

Howard: I mean, I never went to a party and encountered the Wendel characters. [laughs] CBC: No, no, no. The dream! You had that dream?

Howard: Not literally. It’s based on a certain kind of a dream that I have had, a dream where you’re talking to people in a really noisy crowd, and you just can’t quite make out what the person you’re talking to is saying. That’s what this strip sprang from. It’s a challenge to show dialogue that’s not understandable in a comic strip. I had to invent an alphabet that looks like it ought to be normal letters but isn’t.

CBC: So how many Wendel strips did you do? You did it once every two weeks.

Howard: Yeah, for something like five or six years if you don’t count the year-and-a-half in when it didn’t appear. I launched the series in ’83 and ended it in 1989.

Around 130 episodes, I guess, if you count a few extras I drew for special circumstances. All of ’em are included in my 2011 collection, The Complete Wendel.

CBC: How were you received at comics conventions after you came out?

Howard: Actually, that was the point when I began getting more respect from other creators. Before then I got the feeling that most mainstream comics people viewed me as an unimportant, fringe guy at the edge of their scene. It’s not that everyone was suddenly at ease with gayness, but I think they could see the difference it was making in my art to be free to be who I really was. As I’ve often said, there’s nothing like honesty for jacking up the voltage of your art.

After the first Wendel book was out and available to everybody, one straight comics creator came over to me at the Great Eastern Convention in New York and said that looking at Wendel and Ollie’s relationship had opened his eyes.

He hadn’t visualized gay couples as hugging and sharing everyday life the way straight couples do. He had thought we’d be somehow more exotic, not like him and his wife.

The Great Eastern Cons were organized for many years

by Fred Greenberg and his wife Nancy. They were nice people and very welcoming to me. Fred made a point of putting me in the middle of the room. He didn’t want me sitting off in some corner as if I wasn’t a real cartoonist, y’know, like everybody else. He didn’t want me to be ghettoized because of being gay. Eddie would spend a little time with me at the cons sometimes, even though he has a limited interest in fan culture. He pointed out how a lot of times some daddy would come drifting toward our table with his young son in tow, and as soon as he spotted the word “gay” on my stuff he would veer away. Eddie called it “bouncing off of my gay force field.” But that kind of thing happened less and less as people got used to seeing me and decided that my comics weren’t going to seduce their children.

CBC: So it was during the whole Gay Comix-Wendel period that the AIDS epidemic hit. How did that affect you, aside from your comics?

Howard: Well, it was scary. It started with a story in The New York Times in 1981 about a rare cancer that was hitting a lot of gay men in California. And the big mystery was: why would that be happening? Cancer isn’t contagious!

And then PCP [pneumocystis pneumonia] started also showing up in gay men, not just in California, but in New York and other cities, too. I mean, in retrospect we learned that people had begun being infected years before the Times article, but because of the disease’s long incubation period we didn’t start hearing about it until ’81.

CBC: Did you know people with AIDS? Howard: It took a while before it started making it into my circle of friends, but not that long. In the very early days,

Stuck Rubber Baby © Howard Cruse.

there was essentially no treatment, so people would be healthy, get sick, and be dead a week later. That happened with guy in our neighborhood we had become friends with, who was a symphony conductor. He was a young guy with rising career. He’d had a couple of albums out. First his lover fell ill and died, and then, not too long after, he was dead, too.

The first guy to get AIDS that I was actually close friends with was named Scott. Professionally, he was a dresser for Broadway shows, but he was also an aspiring playwright. He and I were part of a circle that would meet to talk about our works in progress. By the time he got sick there were at least a few treatments, like AZT. AZT had terrible downsides and it was never clear that it did much good, but that was all there was at that point. Eddie and I had dinner with Scott while he was a dresser for The Gospel at Colonus, during its Broadway run. We were eating at a diner between the matinee and evening performances of his show and he told us he was infected. That was awful news, of course. But he was optimistic because he was putting his faith in some alternative treatments and positive thinking and other things that he was sure were going to help him beat it. Unfortunately, in the end he died, like so many others.

In 1990, I was invited by a friend of mine in Birmingham to write a one-act play that she could direct for World AIDS Day down there. So I did this play called About Scott. It was a very stylized piece with masks and multimedia and slides of real events mixed with a New York street scene in which people were dressed as taxicabs. Serious and fanciful at the same time. It was appropriate for that time, but it’s not something that would have a long shelf life. In a place like Birmingham at that time, people still needed to know that AIDS was happening to people like the Scott we’d known, people like their neighbors, not just weird outsiders.

CBC: Right.

Howard: In that sense, the play was educational for its time. Unfortunately, About Scott isn’t likely to ever be performed again. It’s no longer needed because by now everybody knows that AIDS happens to everyday people.

Also, it would be a nightmare to produce because you’d have to get permission for all the recorded songs that were in it. That wasn’t a problem in Birmingham because it was an amateur production that was presented for free by Birmingham AIDS Outreach, a social services non-profit.

But its time has passed.

CBC: Now, with the epidemic coming on full-force, was there a chilling effect on past behavior? Was there a realiComic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

zation or a thought that, I could be dormant?

Howard: Frankly, once it became clear that AIDS was sexually transmitted and had a long incubation period, I assumed that I must be infected. After all, I had been a full participant in the sexual free-for-all during the late ’70s. I pulled way back on that kind of activity once the epidemic hit, of course, but I figured it was probably too late. For years, there was no sure-fire way to test for HIV in the blood, so you couldn’t be sure. It felt like a Damocles sword was hanging over your head. But you still had to go on living your life, hoping this wouldn’t be the day your first KS lesion would show up.

There was one point where I was absolutely sure I was coming down with AIDS. I had just had my blood drawn for a study in New York that was trying to determine the prevalence of infection in the city’s gay community and how it correlated with what people were doing sexually.

Eddie and I both volunteered for this study along with a lot of others. While there wasn’t yet a direct test for HIV, there were some antibodies that could be detected that might indirectly suggest the presence of the virus, so there was data that could be gathered by regularly getting samples of blood from a wide range of gay men. Anyway, the day after I gave one of my monthly blood samples I was scheduled to fly down to Nashville to do a television interview about underground comix and about Wendel. Just as I was getting ready to head for the airport, I got a call from the Blood Project and they said, “It’s probably nothing but we need you to come in and be re-tested.” That sounded ominous enough but, by coincidence, a big brown spot had appeared underneath one of my toenails that morning. By then everyone had trained themselves to be on the lookout for KS, but what was I supposed to make of a brown spot under my nail. You couldn’t tell if it was a raised bump or not.

But, between the enigmatic request for a new blood test and the brown spot on my foot, I figured this was it!

I was doomed! I didn’t tell Eddie before I left because it was just too hard to absorb and I had to rush to catch my plane.

CBC: Wow. Howard: So I flew to

Above: Three rejected cover designs for Stuck Rubber Baby.

Page 66: Howard’s “Dirty Old Lovers” from Gay Comix #3.

Page 67: At top is Howard’s Krupp Card discussed in the interview. At bottom is vignette from the cover of Barefootz: The Comix Book Stories [’86]. Page 72: Cover illustration from the collection Dancin’ Nekkid with the Angels [’87]. Page 73: Cruse self-portrait from Wendel Comix #1 [’90]. Page 74: Portrait of the cartoonist that appeared in Berkshire Living. Photo by Adam Mastoon. Page 76: Top, “Why Are We Losing the War on Art?,” Harpoon, 1999. Bottom, “Love Among the Pheromones” panel, published in Alphabet.

Page 77: “Sometimes I Get So Mad…” originally appeared in The Village Voice, in 1981, and it was, to date, his most public declaration regarding his sexual preference. Page 78: Jon B. Cooke and Howard, 2014, and Molly the dog. Page 79: Howard Cruse and Eddie Sedarbaum, Feb. 2014. Below: Howard won the “Best Graphic Album” prize at the 1996 Eisner Awards.

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breath and closed down shop.

CBC: So, what were you doing after you ended Wendel? Were you doing freelance work?

Howard: Trying to figure out how the f*ck to earn a living. I had the same discouraging experience I had when I interrupted the series earlier. My cartooning style was out of fashion with the new crop of art directors who had taken the place of the ones who had given me work in the early ’80s.

I hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be to go back to drumming up freelance gigs.

CBC: You’d made a major career choice, hadn’t you? Just like when you quit Wendel the first time.

Howard: In that first case, it was for the sake of the strip. The strip would have been inferior if I had gone with the single shrunk page. So I was sort of forced into that one. The second time I decided it was time to find a different career path where I could earn a better living.

CBC: You couldn’t have set that up before quitting or it just wasn’t tenable?

Howard: In retrospect…

CBC: Would you have done it again?

Howard: Here’s the problem: trying to look for work in the arts while holding down a full-time job — and that’s what drawing Wendel amounted to — at the same time is a recipe for a very stressful life and with no guarantee of success. I did misjudge my ability to find new work in reasonably short order. It was a bit of cold water in the face to find it so hard to find illustration work after all my years of experience. I just did the best I could while living off my savings, trying to figure out what to do. There was some empty space to be creative in, though. It was during that period that I wrote my play About Scott and went down to Birmingham to see it produced.

One unexpected development that had happened during my Wendel years turned out to be important. Out of the blue one day I had gotten a call from Pam’s and my daughter, Kim, who had been surrendered for adoption as a baby but who succeeded in tracking her birth mother and me down when she turned 21. That’s one of the instances where Stuck Rubber Baby is almost autobiographical but not quite! In the book, Toland says that when he visits Ginger and the baby at the Hannah Bay Home for Unwed Mothers, he says he was seeing his daughter for “the first and last time.” But, in real life, things played out in a happier way. Kim found us when she was grown and we’ve all been in contact ever since.

CBC: Wow! How’s she doing?

Howard: Fine. She lives in Atlanta, but we’ve found ways to visit every now and then over the years. She visited Eddie and me up here in Massachusetts only a few months ago. And we talk on the phone and are Facebook friends, of course. It’s sort of shocking to think that Kim is a middle-aged woman by now!

But why wouldn’t she be, since I’m a senior citizen at this point!

CBC: What was it like to see your daughter and know you were going to give her up for adoption?

Howard: It was wonderful — and bittersweet. Who knew I would ever be a father? But here I was with my child in my

© Howard Cruse

Nashville and did the interview, and then made a side trip I had already planned for to Birmingham to visit with old friends. Eddie wasn’t with me and the situation felt too heavy to discuss over the phone. So that was a really strange few days. I was trying to be cheerful for the interview and have happy conversations with my friends, but part of me was always in a fog. In the back of my mind I kept composing my obituary. It wasn’t that I thought I might have AIDS; I was absolutely certain that I did have AIDS! Well, when I got back to New York it turned out to be a false alarm. The brown spot was just a burst blood vessel and my blood retest didn’t indicate any problems. But, when I look at that interview now and see myself chatting away about underground comix, I can’t help thinking about what was going through my mind when it was taped. The guy I’m looking at thinks he’s gonna be dead in a year, but he’s not letting on.

When the real test for HIV came out and Eddie and I both found out for sure that we were negative, we could finally relax about our own health.

But, of course, hundreds of others weren’t that lucky and we had to join with lots of other activists to do what we could to fight the epidemic.

Besides being part of demonstrations when big crowds were needed, I volunteered to do fliers and AIDS education pamphlets and safe sex posters and whatever.

CBC: It was both activism and reflecting the reality of your life in your art?

Howard: Right. It took a while for me to digest all of this before I could figure out how to do comics about it. Life-threatening illnesses aren’t an easy fit for cartooning, and I felt a responsibility not to trivialize real-world suffering by seeming to be glib about it. As I said before, it took me until the fourth issue of Gay Comix to figure out a way to even introduce the topic.

That’s when I did my “Safe Sex” six-pager, which opens with a gay guy getting struck by lightning while the cartoonist chews on his pen and says, “Not funny, not funny, not funny!” I knew that people would be reading Gay Comix who were themselves sick or whose lovers were, and I didn’t want to trivialize what they were going through. And I had the same concerns when I introduced Sawyer and Ramon into Wendel.

AIDS was a horrific calamity for us and still is for a lot of people around the world. But, in terms of what we American gay men had to deal with in the 1980s and ’90s, I’ve often said, only half-joking, that there’s no community I’d rather go through a deadly epidemic than with mine. I was proud of our resilience and the way we stepped in to take care of each other. And I’m talking about lesbians, too, not just gay men. The lesbian separatism that had caused rifts in the early ’80s took a backseat to the unity that was needed to save the lives of friends. I admired the gallows humor that helped us survive the horrors. The Names Project Quilt was an astonishingly creative way for us to grieve communally. When you walked alone that quilt and looked at the panels, you often got unforgettable glimpses of the individual lives that had been lost. You couldn’t help sobbing over the losses, but then you’d find yourself laughing over some funny aspects of particular lives that had been incorporated into the panels.

CBC: So you did Wendel until what year?

Howard: Nineteen eighty-nine.

CBC: And why did it end?

Howard: I had begun realizing that even though I was well-paid by many standards, I was not being paid well enough to cover the rising cost of living, particularly the skyrocketing cost of health insurance.

Plugging along the way I had been doing was financially unsustainable. It was like being stuck in very slow quicksand. I had never planned to keep doing Wendel for the rest of my life, but I probably would’ve given it another year at least if The Advocate had been willing to give me another raise. But they didn’t feel able to do that, so I took a deep

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© Howard Cruse

arms! In Stuck Rubber Baby there’s an exchange Toland has with the Hannah Bay nurse that’s lifted verbatim from an exchange I had when I went to visit Pam and the baby. “Are you pleased to see your daughter?”

“Yes. I just wish it was under different circumstances.” I’ll never forget how sympathetic the woman was. Not judgmental at all.

CBC: What was your daughter’s reaction when she found out her father was gay?

Howard: Oh, she was fascinated by the whole thing.

CBC: And she lives in Atlanta?

Howard: Yes. Once Kim got in touch with us, we arranged a reunion in Birmingham. Eddie and I came down to visit my mother and Pam flew in from California to see her family. Everybody met everybody. It was all a big emotion-fest!

CBC: All this happened while you were still drawing Wendel?

Howard: Yes. But a creative seed was planted in the back of my mind.

From time to time, I had wondered whether I could do a graphic novel sometime, and what it might be about if I did. And my experience being a gay guy fathering a child while in college seemed to have possibilities. In general, I need to build comics built around things that I have strong feelings about, and the experience Pam and I had certainly fitted that description. But there didn’t seem to be any way that I could afford to take the time out to draw a graphic novel, so that idea just sat around in the back of my mind for years being an interesting impossibility.

Meanwhile, after Kim, Pam, and I, and our respective families got to know each other, in 1985, my cousin Dennis’s wife, Vicki [Covington], learned about the reunion and was so taken with the situation that she wrote a novel inspired by it. It’s called Gathering Home and it was published by Simon & Schuster, in 1988. It’s a tender, lovely book. It’s totally fictionalized, though, except for the fact that the central character who goes searching for her birth parents finds out that her birth father is a gay cartoonist who lives with his Jewish lover in New York. The girl who’s the main character and her birth mother are totally made up, since Vicki hadn’t met Kim or Pam when she wrote the book, and as a result a lot of the details in the novel don’t have much to do with the actual events in Pam’s and Kim’s and my lives. Vicki’s affection for Eddie really comes through; the gay cartoonist’s Jewish lover is much warmer and wiser than the cartoonist, which Eddie enjoyed teasing me about.

Vicki’s fictional birth mother is not at all like Pam, not a warm character at all. So, when the book came out, I called Pam to make sure that she didn’t think that that’s the way I had described her to Vicki. Pam wasn’t upset or anything but, in the course of our conversation, she said, “Howie, I think you should be the one to tell our story.” So another little seed was planted in the back of my mind.

CBC: But you still weren’t ready to take the plunge?

Howard: I still couldn’t see any way I could afford to make it happen.

Denis Kitchen would have been happy to publish a graphic novel by me, I’m sure, but Kitchen Sink didn’t have enough money to pay the kind of advance that would be needed to cover my costs. But I kept being intrigued by the idea, as impossible as it seemed.

Then an odd stroke of luck arose, later on, when I was no longer doing Wendel and was trying to figure out where to turn next. My friend Martha Thomases, who was doing PR for DC Comics at the time, suggested that I talk to Mark Nevelow. DC had just launched a new imprint called Piranha Press, which was going to be a home for experimental, creator-owned comics that weren’t connected to DC’s super-hero universe, and Nevelow was Piranha’s editor. Martha knew that I was struggling to survive financially and thought the idea of doing a project for Piranha might be worth exploring. And DC would have deep enough pockets to possibly pay a big enough advance to support me while I drew a couple of hundred pages, which Kitchen Sink could never have done.

So I telephoned Mark Nevelow and was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was aware of my underground comix and was ready to have a meeting about whether a “fringe” comics creator like me could conceivably do a graphic novel for a company as mainstream as DC. Mark didn’t seem to find that an outlandish notion, and asked me what a graphic novel I did might be like. I hadn’t come with a proposal in mind, but there was this ready-made germ of an idea already in my mind, the one about a gay guy who’s trying to be straight and ends up getting his girlfriend pregnant.

Mark thought that had possibilities. I warned him I couldn’t work the way DC was used to working, where there was editorial oversight over every artistic decision. I wasn’t being a prima donna; it’s just that I was used to having lots of creative freedom so that I could make adjustComic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

ments all the time as they occurred to me. That’s the way I’d gotten used to working in underground comix and in Wendel. I understood, of course, that I couldn’t have the extreme level of freedom I’d had in undergrounds.

DC wasn’t going to publish an X-rated book! But I could live with refraining from showing genitals. And we agreed that before I started drawing anything, I would do a working script for DC to approve, since DC would be investing a lot of money in advance payments if we did the project at all.

That seemed a fair requirement to me, as long as I could make changes in the script as I went along. I always do lots of revising while I’m working on a comic book story. As anybody who’s familiar with Stuck Rubber Baby knows, there did end up being a fleeting frontal view of a naked Riley in the book, but it was totally casual, not erotic or anything, and nobody at DC had a problem with that.

So Mark suggested I go home and work up a proposal, including a synopsis of what the story might be, which I did. Once I got into working on a story, though, I realized that the pregnancy storyline by itself was pretty thin for a whole novel. And I remembered how the Civil Rights battles in Birmingham had been all intertwined with my personal coming out story back in the ’60s. Pam and some other friends had broadened my perspective about political activism, the way Ginger and Sammy broaden Toland’s perspective. Once I thought about placing my novel in the early ’60s, I started getting excited. That would give me a chance to show parts of the Southern culture, including the pre-Stonewall gay subculture, that hadn’t been shown much in fiction — certainly not in comic-book fiction. I could break new ground. So thinking about all of that made it seem that there was the basis for a real novel there, not just an extra-long comic book story. And my feeling was that, if I was going to do a comic that called itself a novel, I would want it to have the richness of a “real” novel. It would have to be like the novels I had really liked during my youth. There would have to be enough facets of the story that when you finished the book you couldn’t remember everything that had happened in it. It would be worth reading more than once.

CBC: How did the title come about?

Howard: Stuck Rubber Baby just popped into my head while I was working on my proposal. It seemed right because of the role a condom plays in Toland’s story and because the word “baby” has several levels of meaning when you put it together with Toland’s infantile level of self-absorption. And I liked the quirky sound of it. It indicated that the book was gonna be first and foremost about an individual and not a pompous saga of Gay Liberation or the Civil Rights Movement. It didn’t sound momentous, like Mississippi Burning, which was a movie about the Civil Rights era that I had lots of complaints about and that I definitely didn’t want my book to resemble. I did worry a little that Stuck Rubber Baby was too much of a tongue-twister, with all those consonants in it. But, by now, it pretty much rolls off my tongue, I’ve said it so often.

CBC: How long did the DC proposal take?

Howard: I don’t remember exactly. Several weeks. I asked my old friend Mike Friedrich if he would negotiate my contract

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Photo © Adam Mastoon and Howard Cruse.

for me if DC really wanted to go ahead with the book, and I showed him my first draft of the proposal. He made some useful suggestions for making my synopsis stronger. For example, he said the story needed additional interesting female characters besides Ginger and Anna Dellyne Pepper. So I added Mavis Green and Toland’s sister Melanie to the mix.

CBC: So you gave the proposal to Mark Nevelow and…?

Howard: He liked it and said he’d show it around to the decision-makers at DC. CBC: How long did that take?

Howard: I don’t remember exactly. Nearly a year, I think. Wondering whether DC would go for it was always in the back of my mind, but there was nothing I could do to push it along. Finally, late in 1990, they okayed it.

Mike negotiated the contract, everybody signed it, and I started working on my script.

That’s when I first began getting an inkling of how long this project was going to take. Since my proposal already had a plot synopsis in it, I had figured that fleshing out the details and dialogue could be done in a couple of weeks. Maybe a month. I was really wrong about that. It was like writing a full-length play from scratch! The more I got into it, the more ideas I had for improving it and taking it in directions that weren’t included in my proposal. It ended up taking five months and several drafts before I had a script worth showing to Mark Nevelow. And I had only allowed myself two years to do the whole book.

CBC: Did that make you nervous?

Howard: Totally! Before that the longest underground comic book story I had done was thirteen pages long, and this one was going to be more than 200! I can’t blame anybody but myself for that inadequate timetable. Two years had seemed like a really long time when Mike was negotiating the contract, but almost a quarter of that time was gone before I drew the first picture. At first, I thought I could make up for that by being disciplined. I would simply make myself draw faster than usual by sheer will power. But I quickly discovered I can’t force my creativity that way. I freeze up. My brain stops working and my hand can’t make the necessary marks that fast. I started feeling panicky about time right away, but there was no backing out.

Fortunately, DC never gave me a hard time about not meeting their original schedule. The problem was that my advance wasn’t an amount of money that would support living in New York City for as long as the book was gonna take to draw.

CBC: Was it a big advance?

Howard: It was lavish advance compared to any other book I had done. If I could have drawn it in two years there would have been no problem.

CBC: They were thinking that they could make that money back, I assume.

I mean, they wouldn’t do it otherwise.

Howard: Yeah. I was amazed that they would gamble on this book by an underground cartoonist who had never made much money for anybody.

They did earn the advance back eventually, but it took seventeen years.

CBC: Did you have any champions there that, uh…

Howard: Sure. Mark Nevelow wasn’t the only person at DC who stood behind the book. He’d accepted it and shepherded it through all the approval hurdles, and when I handed in the working script, he critiqued it. Part of our original verbal agreement was that his critiques would be suggestions, not commands. In other words, I promised I would take his suggestions seriously and he promised I wouldn’t be obligated to follow them if I disagreed with them. That was his concession to the independence I had gotten used to from doing underground comix. It was a system that worked well. I thought lots of his suggestions for improvement were valuable and I made changes based on them.

A few months after I started drawing the book, some changes happened that made me nervous. Mark called me to say that he was leaving DC. I’ve never known what was behind that, but since Mark and I had established a good rapport, it was scary to hear. I wasn’t sure what that was going to mean for me and worried that my book might be orphaned.

Soon after Mark left, the Piranha Press division was renamed Paradox Press and Andy Helfer was named its editor-in-chief. I had never met Andy and didn’t know if he would honor all of the promises Mark had made about our working arrangement. But, to my relief, Andy stood by Mark’s commitments and let me do the book my way, as did the editors whose job it was to look over the finished pages I would lug in periodically, chapter by chapter, for the next few years. Margaret Clark was my editor briefly, but for most of those years it was Margaret’s successor, Bronwyn Taggart, who was great at spotting corrections that needed to be made. Bronwyn was a joy to work with. She encouraged me all the way and was quick to run interference for me when I needed to insert Toland’s shower scene in chapter eleven.

The scene hadn’t been in the working script DC approved and Bronwyn later said there had been a little eyebrow-raising about that in the halls of DC, but she stood by me. It was an important moment to insert, because Ginger needed to show a mischievous side to soften what was in danger of seeming like a terminally earnest personality.

Nobody at DC ever saw penciled artwork before I walked in with my inked finishes. That was necessary because of the way I have always worked. I never pencil full pages to completion before starting to ink; instead I draw isolated panels to completion as they congeal in my mind and leave other portions of the page to tackle later, when I feel more certain of the images I’m after. It’s a quirky way to draw comics, but that’s the process I had developed in my undergrounds and it had always worked for me.

There was no good entry point for an editor to step in and micromanage whatever artistic decision I was thinking about making.

Once the contract was signed, my advance money started coming in.

It was parsed out in equal monthly installments so it would cover the two years I originally thought I would need. But, as I said, my “educated guess” about how fast I could work turned out to be way wrong, so beginning halfway through it was like holding down a full-time job for two years without getting any salary. I was traumatized when I realized what a train-wreck the book was going to be financially. But I knew I had to finish the book no matter what, because if I didn’t finish, I’d have had to give the advance back, and it would have already been spent. So I had to just accept the inevitable and keep telling that once the book was done I would figure out some way to pay off my debt. I borrowed to the hilt on my insurance and on every credit card I could get my hands on, and some friends helped me work out some other fundraising ploys along the way. All of these are described in the book’s afterword. The upshot was that somehow I did manage to finish the book, which was the important thing.

CBC: Was it worth it, given the toll it took on you financially?

Howard: Absolutely. Putting the money issues aside, those were the most exciting four years I’ve ever spent creatively. Even after I had turned in my working script, my story never stopped evolving. In my original proposal the character of Toland had been much more like me than he ended up being.

CBC: You were drawing on your own life experience, weren’t you?

Howard: To a significant degree, but being literal about that was holding me back. In my proposal’s plot summary, Toland is in college just like

All © the respective copyright holders.

Ginger, just as I was in college with Pam when we had our romance. But when I began drafting my script, I realized that I was creating problems for myself by doing that. It’s hard to get an exciting story going when the characters have to constantly stop and study for exams! I was a big breakthrough when I decided to make Toland someone who didn’t go to college, who worked at a gas station. That made him more distant from my own experience and opened up possibilities for making him more interesting than I was in 1963. The Toland in the book is far more alienated than I ever was.

Whatever level of alienation I may have had, I also was never anything other than ambitious, whereas Toland has no direction in life when most of the story is happening. It’s a good bet he isn’t spending his time fantasizing about having a syndicated comic strip! Once I allowed Toland to be a lot more harder-edged than I ever was, he became more interesting. I did my share of f*cking up, but I was never anywhere near as much of a f*ck-up as Toland is.

Having Toland be as unself-aware as he is helped Stuck Rubber Baby break out of Wendel territory. One of the limitations in Wendel was that Wendel is basically a sweet guy. I could make fun of little aspects of his personality in that he’s kind of oblivious, for example, and he imagines he can write a higher level of science fiction that he can. But you couldn’t get the kind of conflict that makes for an edgy storyline out of Wendel himself.

CBC: Right.

Howard: It was like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. You couldn’t make a show out of Mary alone. That would be boring. You had to have the other, crazier people she worked with to make the comedy happen. Toland gave me a chance to build incidents around a guy who could be a real jerk. That was liberating! I could also explore the ways that I was seriously immature when Pam and I were first going together. There were times when I was so thoughtless, I cringe to remember them. Most of us remember things we did as adolescents that make us wince as grownups.

And Pam could be difficult, too, of course, just as Ginger could be. You know the scene in Stuck Rubber Baby where Ginger is doing that passive-aggressive thing, playing bad chords on her guitar intentionally while Toland’s trying to talk to her about, y’know, what are they gonna do about the baby?

CBC: Plinking.

Howard: It added an extra level of human-ness to Ginger that helped her come alive. I tried to convey the edgy subtext of that conversation in the way I composed the panels.

It’s impossible to read them comfortably because the narration blocks don’t match the positions of the word balloons.

I wanted readers to run into speed bumps there. It was a way of visually communicating the awkwardness of conversations between people who are not saying what’s really on their minds. Ginger loves Toland, but she’s also angry at being put in the position she’s in. I mean, she’s having a baby with a gay guy, y’know? It’s not easy to deal with that.

CBC: I think what makes the graphic novel transcendent, which is another level, is the Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

expert melding of the Civil Rights movement for African-Americans in this country during that same time and the internal conflicts that Toland was going through as an emerging homosexual. Acceptance!

Howard: Well, there were people who criticized Stuck Rubber Baby because they felt I was trying to piggyback on the Civil Rights Movement, trying to get “cred” I didn’t deserve by using emotions that people have about Black Civil Rights to invest my book with unearned emotion and import. I was very conscious of that danger and I very specifically did not say that Toland’s battle is the same as the Civil Rights battles that were happening around him.

They’re very different. Toland could hide the fact that he was gay. Black people couldn’t hide their skin color.

But there were things they had in common. The segregationist culture trained Black children from birth to have low expectations of themselves. I mean, you had to be an exceptional Black person in the South back then to buck the tide and believe that your life could flower in some really wonderful way. Everything in the culture was saying, “You’re a second class person, not fully human.” Gay people in those days were trained by the homophobia all around them to feel that same way about themselves.

To me, the big theme of the book is about the damage that can be done by dishonesty. Anybody who really thought about humanity and human equality would know there could be no way to defend the South’s segregationist culture, but a majority of white Southerners were unwilling to confront that reality, just as Toland was unwilling to confront the damage he could do to himself and others by being in the closet. In the one crucial moment where he could possibly have saved Sammy, he’s too invested in hiding from his own truth. And I think this is a theme that transcends the era when Stuck Rubber Baby takes place, because America still doesn’t know how to be honest with itself. About race; about homophobia; about health care and gun violence and wealth distribution, and all kinds of

Top: Cruse-drawn button for Kitchen Sink. Inset: Howard Cruse illustrated this brochure for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in 1984, urging the gay community to engage in safe sex, a response to the AIDS epidemic.

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Allmaterial © the respective copyright holder.

things. There’s so much stuff that needs to be worked on, and we can’t get anywhere until we learn to be honest with ourselves.

CBC: What was the reaction to the book when it came out?

Howard: Well, even before it was published a handful of people had seen it, chapter by chapter, while I was working on it. Eddie, of course, and the DC editors and Mike Friedrich. All the feedback I was getting was encouraging. Don Thompson at Comics Buyer’s Guide saw some early chapters that the publicity people at DC sent around and raved about them in a column he had about works in the pipeline. That certainly felt good.

Some positive buzz started building up based on pre-publication galleys that DC sent out during the months leading up to publication, and I prepared a four-page teaser on my own that I handed out at conventions. It’s on my website, if anybody wants to see it. All in all, the good feedback I was getting gave me a reasonable amount of confidence that it was at least not going to bomb. I was a little afraid about one thing: what if Black people didn’t like it, y’know? What if I was accidentally committing some stupid misstep with the racial parts and…

CBC: And sh*t hits the fan.

Howard: Yeah. Or what if some people noticed the flaws that I knew perfectly well there and hadn’t figured out a way to correct?

But, in general, once the book came out it was received really well. The Comics Journal gave it good coverage and it got scattered good reviews. Not The New York Times, unfortunately; the Times hadn’t begun regularly reviewing graphic novels yet, the way they do now. I could have used that visibility. It was never any kind of best seller, but it stayed in print and kept getting new readers regularly, which is more than any of my other books have managed to do. Over the years, it began being included in college and university courses in various academic disciplines. So overall, an author couldn’t ask for a much better reception, short of best-sellerdom. Paul Levitz at DC took a lot of pride in the book and made sure it stayed in print.

It was quite an adventure, but once was

enough. Early in the game, when people were looking at my first few chapters and saying, “This is gonna be good,” while at the same time I was heading toward probable bankruptcy, I would marvel at the irony of it all. I was thinking, “This is gonna give me credibility as a graphic novelist — and I’m never gonna be able to do another graphic novel!” [Jon laughs] But it’s one more graphic novel than I would have done if there had been any way of getting out of the commitment when I saw the train wreck coming.

CBC: Has anyone specifically come up to you and said that your work served as an example to them? That they felt empowered by anything that you’ve done?

Howard: That’s one of the most rewarding things that have happened.

People have written letters or have come up to me at conventions and said I helped them come out of the closet. There’s one guy who had been married and who told me that he had always feared coming out of the closet because he had no real idea what being gay was like in terms of how you lived your life. He said reading Wendel reassured him that being gay didn’t mean he couldn’t still be an everyday person. He wouldn’t have to be fabulous all the time! That was part of the strip’s point. The characters weren’t totally defined by being gay, just like in real life. Interestingly, I just yesterday got an email from a guy who’s straight, who said he had changed his whole attitude about gay people from reading my work. That was really rewarding. The least rewarding thing has been being pigeonholed, as if gayness was the only thing I could do comics about. It’s not the case; I’ve always done work on other topics.

CBC: How much comic book work have you done in the twenty years since Stuck Rubber Baby?

Howard: I’ve stayed creative, but it’s been hard to find a niche for myself, given that doing another graphic novel wasn’t practical. There’s not a lot of room for me in the mainstream industry, and the alternative comics scene doesn’t offer much of a way to make a living. One time I read that DC had gotten the license for the Hanna-Barbera characters, and I asked Bronwyn Taggart, who was gonna edit a kids’ line of comics for DC, what the chances were of me taking on Huckleberry Hound. I know that sounds like a screwball idea, but I told her, “There’s nothing about the character of Huckleberry Hound that is distinctive in any way, so why don’t you let me be the John Stanley of Huckleberry Hound? I could give it heft the way Stanley gave Marjorie Henderson’s Little Lulu some heft.” But she reminded me that the owners of big-time licensed properties tended to be very controlling and there wouldn’t be any way Hanna-Barbera would give me the kind of creative freedom I’d want. It wasn’t practical and I’m kind of amazed that I ever even proposed such a stupid idea. But I guess it shows how desperate I was to get out from under my Stuck Rubber Baby debt.

I quickly learned that I was going to have to learn about digital graphics.

The world had changed, and nobody wanted their cartoonists to turn in physical drawings anymore. They wanted digital files emailed to them. So I used more credit cards to buy a Mac and a scanner and a printer and took a crash course in QuarkXPress. Some friends helped me learn how to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. That made me more marketable and I began to get a few illustration gigs. And the publisher of a humor magazine called Harpoon hired me to do some satirical comics for him. He paid good rates and it was my first opportunity to do comics and color them digitally. My favorite of the Harpoon pieces I did was “Why are We Losing the War on Art?,” which was actually an expanded version of a strip I had done in black&-white years before for The Village Voice. But Harpoon went under after three issues.

I was beginning to get advertising work for some commercial websites when the dot-com bubble burst and all those clients disappeared.

Then 9/11 happened and the freelance illustration markets in New York largely froze for a while. The human tragedy of 9/11 was awful, of course, but, on a practical level, it also started a number of really bad dominoes falling. A lot of the major magazines’ big-paying advertisers had offices in the Trade Center towers and, when those clients disappeared, the publications had to cut way back on hiring freelancers.

That left a lot of artists and writers out in the cold. Some good came out of that, though, because as long as I was out of work I could use the free time I suddenly had to do illustra-

Qu33r TM & © Northwest Press. “Sometimes I Get So Mad” © Howard Cruse.

tions for The Swimmer with a Rope in His Teeth, my adaptation of a fable by Jeanne E. Shaffer, which had been a back-burner project of mine for years.

Prometheus Books published it in 2004.

CBC: [Holding up a copy of The Swimmer with a Rope in His Teeth] Did you give this to me?

Howard: I don’t think so.

CBC: But I do have it.

Howard: Then I guess I must have given it to you unless you just came across it somewhere on your own. It’s so unlike anything else that I’ve done that it’s gone largely overlooked. It came about because my old friend Jeanne, whose main career was as a composer and who has since passed away, showed me a fable that she wrote years ago that I really liked. I always thought it deserved to be expanded and illustrated, but a bunch of years went by before I realized that using silhouettes would be the perfect way to visualize the story because, unlike most of my own satirical stories, this one doesn’t satirize individuals. It satirizes a whole society. So I needed to deemphasize the individuals instead of particularizing them, which is what I would normally try to do. Silhouettes gave me a way to get that effect. The style also supports the fable’s timeless qualities by mimicking the silhouette drawings that used to be painted on ancient Greek vases.

CBC: Yeah, this is really nice.

Howard: So I asked Jeanne’s permission to expand the text and illustrate it and she gave me the go-ahead. Frustratingly, almost nobody reviewed that book and it’s been out of print for years now. But it’s still a project I’m fond of.

I also taught cartooning part-time for a while at the School of Visual Arts and did design work for Eddie’s campaign when he ran for the New York State Senate in the late ’90s.

CBC: Eddie ran for public office?

Howard: Yeah. He didn’t win, which isn’t surprising since he was challenging a very entrenched incumbent. But I can still brag on him because he got endorsements from The New York Times, New York Newsday, the Amsterdam News, and practically every progressive organization in town.

So as you can see, I was all over the map when it came to digging up creative outlets.

Let’s see. What else? I spent a lot of time building my web site, www. howardcruse.com, which stopped being active years ago, but still has a whole lot of stuff in it. I give it minor updates once in a while, when something major changes in my career. Then I maintained a blog for a number of years, but there, too, the time came when it felt like too much effort was going into communicating with too few people. These days I’m very active on Facebook, which is my main way of interacting with readers from around the world and also a way to keep up with old friends. I contribute new comics to anthologies from time to time, like Jennifer Camper’s Juicy Mother books and Rob Kirby and David Kelly’s Boy Trouble series, and in the last couple of years I’ve been in the No Straight Lines and Qu33r anthologies.

And, by the time this interview comes out, the Stacked Deck Press comics anthology called Alphabet will probably be available. It’s a benefit book for the Queer Press Grants, which support new LGBT cartoonists, and I’ve got an eight-page story in it. Also I’ve done a six-page story for the upcoming second installment of Mike Winchell’s Been There, Done That anthologies, which are aimed at middle-schoolers. Doing comics for middle-schoolers is definitely off the beaten track for me: no sex, drugs, or profanity!

Since the Internet took over the world, it’s been almost impossible to find markets for new comics that pay a reasonably professional rate. I’m at the tail end of my career and am eligible for Social Security checks, but I feel for young cartoonists who are just trying to get started. They’re lucky in that it’s really easy to find audiences for your work, much easier than it was when I was starting out. But when nobody pays to see what you’ve spent hours coming up with, that’s a problem. It’s fine if you’re okay with being an amateur or with devoting the lion’s share of your days holding down a day job, but if your goal is to become a full-time professional, it’s a tough row to hoe. Unless you have a spouse who’s willing to support you. I had a go at doing a webcomic adaptation of my Barefootz series for Webcomics Nation back in 2002. It was called Barefootz: The Web Incarnation. It was an interesting project because it gave me a chance to redraw and color Barefootz strips from the 1970s that I particularly liked and do it in what I felt was a looser, more Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

dynamic style, using everything I had learned about drawing in the previous 30 years. It was fun, but I dropped the project because there wasn’t much evidence that it was building enough of an online readership to justify the time it took. These days, when I get the itch to do a strip, I post it in my web site’s Occasional Comix section and plug it on Facebook. That usually brings in enough of an audience to make them feel worth doing when the mood strikes.

CBC: And you’re no longer a New Yorker.

Howard: That’s true. Eddie and I moved from New York up to the Berkshires in 2003. We love being near lots of mountains, and when same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, we decided to get officially hitched. We knew marriage wouldn’t make any real difference in our relationship, but it was fun to feel like part of history. And as you get older, legal spousal benefits start looming larger as a consideration. Eddie got a job working at a community organizing non-profit in North Adams, which is where we lived until we moved here to Williamstown in 2011, and for several terms I taught cartooning part-time at MCLA [Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts], a local college that was like a five-minute drive from our home. When I hit 62 and qualified for Social Security, I left teaching behind and went back to spending all of my time on personal projects. So I’m sort of semi-retired. I do drawings and strips when I feel like drawing them and post them online, but I like not living with deadlines.

CBC: What did you have to say to your cartooning students about their prospects?

Howard: When they would come up to me and ask for advice about getting their careers off the ground, I’d have to tell them that there’s no way they could do it the way I did. Everything’s different. Underground newspapers are gone, and even alternative weeklies that will run non-syndicated strips are few and far between. Even an institution like Jules Feiffer got dumped by The Village Voice. If I was a young, as75

piring cartoonist trying to start my career now, I’d probably do a webcomic and do my best to promote it and build on it, even though webcomics don’t pay for sh*t! But it’s a way to make people aware of your talents, at least, and to develop those talents with practice. When you’re young, living on the edge of poverty is viable if it gives you room to be an artist. Later on in life, having no money put away for emergencies starts being more problematic.

CBC: Do you think there is gonna be pay for webcomics in the future? Do you think it’s gonna shake out or… ?

Howard: There’s a chance that stuff that’s designed for the iPad and other devices will break the working-for-free barrier, since comics fans are getting a little more used to paying money for apps that let them access content.

Some webcomics have tried to support themselves with pay walls. Some may be doing that successfully, but it rarely works.

Online cartoonists are almost never paid anything like what the work deserves. Or print cartoonists, for that matter.

CBC: Do you get income by selling your originals?

Howard: At various times people have bought my originals. The demand comes and goes. When Wendel was appearing regularly in The Advocate, I had a fan base that liked the idea of having a Wendel episode framed on their wall. But I’ve never been a “fan favorite,” which means I’ve never big draw for collectors.

When I finished Stuck Rubber Baby I did the arithmetic and figured out that every page — not counting the writing; just the drawing — represented five days of full-time work for me on average. Based on that, what I can sell my originals for now is so far below minimum wage, it’s laughable! Still, you can only get what the market will bear. It’s not just me. Unless you’re a big money-maker in mainstream comics, doing super-heroes or something like that, or an underground legend like Crumb, people just don’t want to shell out anything that’s remotely commensurate with the amount of labor that’s required to draw those pages.

CBC: Do you mull over ideas of characters and concepts? That’s the engine that’s always run comic strips, the characters themselves. Little Lulu…

Howard: Yeah, at various times I’ve given thought to creating characters that I could possibly build ongoing features around. In my most recent collection, The Other Sides of Howard Cruse, there are two examples of that: Bleaktime Laffs and Evey on Teevee. I was really hot to do an Evey on TeeVee series when I first got the idea years ago. It was a strip that parodied TV genres by having two kids doing puppet show versions of them.

I submitted Evey to Nickelodeon magazine but they didn’t bite. I thought I maybe had a shot because the magazine’s editor, Chris Duffy, had once been a student of mine at SVA and was still a friend. Chris said he advocated for the feature, but that other people who were in decision-making positions weren’t comfortable with the sibling relationship in the strip. The sister was a budding impresario who bossed her younger brother around a lot. I thought that made the strip’s dynamic interesting, but it didn’t fly at Nickelodeon.

I especially regretted that one of the Evey episodes I did preliminary sketches for became unpublishable before it had a chance to see print anywhere. It was a parody of the Siskel and Ebert movie-reviewing show that I thought was especially funny. But soon after I did my sketch for it, Gene Siskel died of a brain tumor, which made it awkward to publish, and by now Roger Ebert is dead, too.

CBC: About the history of gay comics in America. What impresses you since the days of Wendel? What do you think has been important?

Howard: I can’t comment on the current state of things very intelligently because I’m way out of the loop these days. Where I live now is nowhere near a comics shop, and the whole gay-newspaper infrastructure that used to support individual cartoonists in different cities has practically evaporated. Alison Bechdel self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For for many years, but the gay papers that used to carry it have been decimated, like everything else, by the Internet. Happily, Alison has been able to migrate to the graphic novel format with great success, but not everyone can pull that off. I run into terrific LGBT strips online sometimes. There are far too many for me to keep up with, and that’s a good thing. More power to them, I say.

I stay aware of some cartoonists’ work simply because they’re friends or 76

fans and they mail their stuff to me, but that happens too sporadically for me to have a good overview.

Essentially, I’m out of the loop unless something just happens to fly into the loop unbidden. [Jon laughs] CBC: You were a guest of honor at MOCCA Fest a couple of years ago, and you gave a keynote speech at the Queers & Comics Conference at CUNY. That says something.

Howard: Yeah, I get handed laurels to rest on from time to time. That feels good. There is a set of people in the world who have liked my work over the years. They appreciate it when I put things up on Facebook. They click the like button. Who doesn’t like collecting likes? A lot of times I post old stuff on Facebook, little quirky things from my files that nobody would remember existed unless I remind them. Some people find those old artifacts interesting. Most of my comics stuff has been compiled in books in recent years. Besides Vertigo’s 15th Anniversary reissue of Stuck Rubber Baby, in 2010, there’s been The Other Side of Howard Cruse, The Complete Wendel, From Headrack to Claude, and Felix’s Friends. I self-published these last two through lulu.com because I got tired of waiting for some publisher to decide there was money to be made from them. I just wanted to be able to hold them in my hands.

CBC: [Rummaging through Howard’s flat files] This is nice.

Howard: That’s the first gay cartoon that I ever published. Ralph Blair, who I mentioned earlier, asked me to do a feature for the academic journal he was launching in 1974, the Homosexual Counseling Journal. Ralph was a cartoon fan and he thought my cartoons would help his journal be less dry. So I did cartoons for the first and second issues, after which he told me that his board of directors thought that cartoons were inappropriate for an academic journal. So it was a brief run. But it still gave me a chance to get my feet wet in terms of being openly gay in my work.

CBC: And you said you only did the first five issues of Gay Comix?

Howard: I only edited the first four. When Robert Triptow took over as the second editor, I contributed my story “Cabbage Patch Clone” to his first issue, but keeping Wendel going made it too hard to be a frequent contributor.

CBC: Is everything you’ve done in these big books?

Howard: All of the gay stuff is in From Headrack to Claude except for very recent strips that I’ve drawn since that was published.

CBC: Obviously the way that society reacts to certain people is the same in comics because comics is a reflection of the greater community. Where do you stand in the comics community and the larger world?

Howard: Well, I always had a tenuous connection to the mainstream comics industry. It was totally an anomaly that I should get to do something for DC. That happened because of Piranha Press’s special mission.

CBC: And your relationship with Martha Thomases while she was publicist for the company.

Howard: Right. And the fact that Mark Nevelow happened to like my work. But my real entry point into comics is basically gone. Let’s face it: I’ve aged out. Other things in life are important; I’m not willing to keep working like a dog as long as my hand can hold a pen, the way Will Eisner did. Denis stopped publishing Snarf and the other underground comix decades ago.

Those were the comics I would still probably be part of if they were still going. I can express myself through my Occasional Comix when something’s on my mind.

CBC: Is there any thought to chipping away, doing like a page every couple of weeks?

Howard: Actually, that’s how Occasional Comix got started. A couple of years ago I toyed briefly with the idea of doing a regular strip again, and I sort of had an open door. I contacted Tom Tomorrow, the great political satirist who’s the comics editor for the Daily Kos website, and he was open to having me be one of his regular contributors. I thought I’d like to do something that was the equivalent of a full comic book page, like the Tom the Dancing Bug strips that Ruben Bolling does. But Tom Tomorrow said the Kos cartoonists have to commit themselves to turning in a strip every week, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that I didn’t want to be under that kind of deadline pressure again at this point in my life. It’s #12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

one thing to have a strip idea when an idea happens to come, and another thing to feel like, “Oh god, I’ve only got two more days and I haven’t thought of an idea yet.” And the Daily Kos strips are mainly political. I admire good political strips and like to do them sometimes, but I’m not into doing only political strips. More often I like to do strips that are personal. So, although I was almost a good fit for the Kos and the Kos was interested, I ended up thanking them but saying I just didn’t think I could do the regular contributor thing again. But the experience did make me think more about what kind of cartooning I really liked doing. My strip that’s called “If I Had a Comic Strip,” which was the opening strip at Occasional Comix, grew out of that thinking.

CBC: You’re a pioneer in gay comics. There’s just no denying that. You’re part movements of both gay and lesbian and autobiographical comics, important in the history of comics!

Howard: Well, somebody needed to play the role that I played and I was particularly well suited to it for several reasons. One was my own drawing. I mean, I was committed to the gay movement, but I also had worked at having developed a professional drawing style. I had also always enjoyed the process of putting out publications. That’s why I enjoyed art-directing Starlog. When I was a kid, I used to study magazine layouts and see how people made pages look good. I did my own little MAD magazine imitations that only my friends saw. If I could be several people, one of them would be a publisher or an editor. I’d create my own magazine, the way you’re doing.

But you have to make choices in life. In 1969, around the time I was deciding I needed to get out of New York to get my head together, I did a job interview with an animation studio. The guy who ran it seemed to like me, and I had to make a decision: “Should I go ahead and leave town, or stay and maybe get into animation?” I ultimately decided that, for the sake of my psyche, I needed to be in a calmer world than New York City, and so I went back South. But who knows? What if I had stayed and become an animator? How different would my life have been? Or what if I had stuck with my old ambition of being a playwright or a director? These questions are unanswerable. There are times in your life when you just have to make choices.

CBC: Do you think you’ll ever return to your trademark characters, Barefootz or Wendel?

Howard: I suspect not. One time, Deni Loubert invited me to revive Barefootz for Renegade. It was in 1985, I think, around the time that she did the collection of Barefootz stories from Comix Book. She suggested I do a new Barefootz comic book series, one that I would draw new stories for. And I realized my head was just not in the Barefootz place anymore. It was a nice time to remember. I had been into so-called “cosmic consciousness” when Barefootz was my main project, from all the tripping I was doing. It was a mellow state of mind to be in, perfect for low-key cartoons like Tops & Button and Barefootz. But, by the time Deni made her suggestion, I had moved on. I was a different person. To produce a comic or any other kind of expressive work, I need to be drawing about things that I care about emotionally, which the gay movement obviously was for me during the 1980s. And I also need to be covering new ground if I’m going to stay interested. I said most of what I had to say about the gay world in Wendel; there’s no point in hanging around just so I can draw the character some more. Sometimes I’ll still draw something gay for a project I’d like to support, but my concerns don’t begin and end with being gay. And they never did.

NOTE: Ye Ed extends grateful thanks to Howard, Eddie, and Molly for their gracious hospitality.

coming attractions: cbc #13 in the summer

Michael W. Kaluta & Ramona Fradon!

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13 presents career-spanning, in-depth interviews with two legendary ALSO IN THIS ISH:

artists. First up, an astonishingly comprehensive chat with Michael William Kaluta, late

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of “The Studio” and one of the most accomplished illustrators to come from the early 1970s era of the “Young Turks.” From his days as fan artist, early association with Bernie Wrightson, Al Williamson, and Frank Frazetta; emergence as fan-favorite delineator of The Shadow and “Carson of Venus”; time with fellow Studio-mates Wrightson, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Barry Windsor-Smith; decades of work on Starstruck with co-creator Elaine Lee; and up to the present day as premier Vertigo cover artist, CBC lets you know what lurks in the heart of this talented man. Plus, in a revealing conversation about her 65-plus years in the comics business, RAMONA

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FRADON discusses her work on Aquaman, Metamorpho, and SpongeBob SquarePants, plus her amazing life as activist, author, and daily comic strip artist, with a surprise tribute by special guest-stars! If that’s not enough, underground comix legend JAY LYNCH gives us a thorough look at the WACKY PACK MEN, the extraordinary cartoonists who contributed to the initial series of those Kurtzman-inspired Topps bubble cards, with the Bijou Funnies bigwig sharing a brand-new 01 1

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illustration! We also include the hilarious HEMBECK and other features.

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also: THE AMAZING RAMONA FRADON: A CAREER-SPANNING INTERVIEW and more!

Comic Book Creator • Spring 2016 • #12

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Golden Age great IRWIN HASEN spotlight, adapted from DAN MAKARA’s film documentary on Hasen, the 1940s artist of the Justice Society, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Wildcat, Holyoke’s Cat-Man, and numerous other classic heroes—and, for 30 years, the artist of the famous DONDI newspaper strip! Bonus art by his buddies JOE KUBERT, ALEX TOTH, CARMINE INFANTINO, and SHELLY MAYER!

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AL PLASTINO: LAST SUPERMAN STANDING

AL PLASTINO worked uncredited on Superman from 1948-1968 (co-creating Supergirl, Brainiac, and the Legion of Super-Heroes, and drawing the first appearance of Kryptonite. This bio features a near-century of insights shared by Al, his family, and contemporaries, and paints a portrait of Plastino’s life and career through a wealth of illustrations and interviews.

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“Bronze Age Adaptations!” The Shadow, Korak: Son of Tarzan, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Worlds Unknown, and Marvel’s 1980s movie adaptations. Plus: PAUL KUPPERBERG surveys prose adaptations of comics! With work by JACK KIRBY, DENNY O’NEIL, FRANK ROBBINS, MICHAEL W. KALUTA, FRANK THORNE, MICHAEL USLAN, and sporting an alternate Kaluta cover produced for DC’s Shadow series!

“Eighties Ladies!” MILLER & SIENKIEWICZ’s Elektra: Assassin, Dazzler, Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), Lady Quark, DAN MISHKIN’s Wonder Woman, WILLIAM MESSNER-LOEBS and ADAM KUBERT’s Jezebel Jade, Somerset Holmes, and a look back at Marvel’s Dakota North! Featuring the work of BRUCE JONES, JOHN ROMITA JR., ROGER STERN, and many more, plus a previously unpublished cover by SIENKIEWICZ.

“All-Jerks Issue!” Guy Gardner, Namor in the Bronze Age, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, DC’s Biggest Blowhards, the Heckler, Obnoxio the Clown, and Archie’s “pal” Reggie Mantle! Featuring the work of (non-jerks) RICH BUCKLER, KURT BUSIEK, JOHN BYRNE, STEVE ENGLEHART, KEITH GIFFEN, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more. Cover-featuring KEVIN MAGUIRE’s iconic Batman/Guy Gardner “One Punch”!

“Bronze Age Halloween!” The Swamp Thing revival of 1982, Swamp Thing in Hollywood, Phantom Stranger team-ups, KUPPERBERG & MIGNOLA’s Phantom Stranger miniseries, DC’s The Witching Hour, the Living Mummy, and an index of Marvel’s 1970s’ horror anthologies! Featuring the work of RICH BUCKLER, ANDY MANGELS, VAL MAYERIK, MARTIN PASKO, MICHAEL USLAN, THOMAS YEATES, and more. YEATES cover.

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships June 2016

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships July 2016

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Aug. 2016

(84 FULL-COLOR pages) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Sept. 2016

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Summer 2016

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #13 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #14

KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

KIRBY COLLECTOR #68

MICHAEL W. KALUTA feature interview covering his early fans days THE SHADOW, STARSTRUCK, the STUDIO, and Vertigo cover work! Plus RAMONA FRADON talks about her 65+ years in the comic book business on AQUAMAN, METAMORPHO, SUPER-FRIENDS, and SPONGEBOB! Also JAY LYNCH reveals the WACKY PACK MEN who created the Topps trading cards that influenced an entire generation!

Comprehensive KELLEY JONES interview, from early years as Marvel inker to presentday greatness at DC depicting BATMAN, DEADMAN, and SWAMP THING (chockful of rarely-seen artwork)! Plus WILL MURRAY examines the nefarious legacy of Batman co-creator BOB KANE in an investigation into tragic ghosts and rapacious greed. We also look at RAINA TELGEMEIER and her magnificent army of devotees, and more!

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

KEY KIRBY CHARACTERS! We go decadeby-decade to examine pivotal characters Jack created throughout his career (including some that might surprise you)! Plus there’s a look at what would’ve happened if Kirby had never left Marvel Comics for DC, how Jack’s work has been repackaged over the decades, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and galleries of unseen Kirby pencil art!

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Aug. 2016

(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $8.95 (Digital Edition) $3.95 • Ships Nov. 2016

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Now shipping!

(100-page FULL-COLOR mag) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.95 • Summer 2016

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

a picture is worth a thousand words

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words… and sometimes many thousand more. For instance, when that picture is an original model sheet from the greatest prime-time animated adventure cartoon TV show ever — Jonny Quest. Drawn by the show’s creator, master illustrator Doug Wildey. — TZ

from the archives of Tom Ziuko 80

#12 • Spring 2016 • COMIC BOOK CREATOR

TwoMorrows

Proudly Presents George Khoury’s New Book:

COMIC BOOK FEVER

GEORGE KHOURY (author of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore and Kimota: The Miracleman Companion) presents a “love letter” to his personal golden age of comics, 1976-1986, covering all the things that made those comics great—the top artists, the coolest stories, and even the best ads! It covers the phenoms that delighted Baby Boomers, Generation X, and beyond: UNCANNY X-MEN, NEW TEEN TITANS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, LOVE AND ROCKETS, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, SUPERMAN VS. SPIDER-MAN, ARCHIE COMICS, HARVEY COMICS, KISS, STAR WARS, ROM, HOSTESS CAKE ADS, GRIT(!), and other milestones! So take a trip back in time to re-experience those epic stories, and feel the heat of COMIC BOOK FEVER once again! With cover art and introduction by ALEX ROSS.

All characters TM & © their respective owners.

(240-page FULL-COLOR HARDCOVER) $39.95 • (Digital Edition) $12.95 • ISBN: 978-1-60549-063-2 SHIPS JUNE 2016!

TwoMorrows.

The Future of Comics History.

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, NC 27614 USA 919-449-0344 E-mail:

store@twomorrows.com

Order at twomorrows.com

™

Characters TM & © DC Comics. Art © Steve Rude.

No. 12, Spring 2016

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A Tw o M o r r o w s P u b l i c a t i o n