Howard Cruse

From Philosopedia

Cruse, Howard (1944- )

Cruse was a preacher's son raised in Springville, Alabama. He attended Birmingham-Southern College, where he studied drama, and had a brief career in television. In 1977, Cruse moved to New York City, where he met Eddie Sedarbaum, his life partner.

His work was interrupted for four years while he created his masterpiece, Stuck Rubber Baby in 1995. This 210-page graphic novel takes place in the South during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and sensitively depicts a saga of coming to terms with sexual identity, racial prejudice, and political conflict. It is the story of Toland Polk, a young man growing up in the American South in the 1960s, and his growing awareness of both his own homosexuality and the racial injustice of American society.

Cruse's cartooning first attracted nation-wide attention in the 1970s, when he contributed to underground comix publications. His best-known character from this period was Barefootz, the title character of a surreal series about a good-natured, well-dressed young man with large bare feet. Although dismissed by many underground fans as overly "cutesy, others found it a refreshing change of pace from "edgier" comix.

Starting in 1979, Cruse - who had been open about his homosexuality throughout the 1970s, but never acknowledged it in his work - edited Gay Comix, a new anthology featuring comix by openly gay and lesbian cartoonists.

For much of the 1980s, he created Wendel, a strip (1-2 pages per episode) about an irrepressible and idealistic gay man, his lover Ollie, and a cast of diverse urban characters. It was published in the gay newsmagazine The Advocate, which allowed Cruse substantial freedom in terms of language and nudity, and to address content such as AIDS, gay rights demonstrations, gay-bashing, closeted celebrities, and same-gender relationships, with a combination of humor and anger. Three anthology volumes of these strips have been published.

Cruse briefly wrote a column in a comic book review magazine under the rhyming masthead, "Loose Cruse".

Asked in 1999 about his religious views, Cruse responded to Warren Allen Smith:

Exiting from Christianity came at about age fourteen for me. The final crisis was prompted by reading Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. That was my first full-scale realization that art can change lives.

I don’t subscribe to the belief systems of any organized religion I’ve encountered; don’t believe there are any Higher Powers who worry about whether I masturbate or not; definitely don’t believe in the concept of cosmically-ordained sin or post-life punishment; and will be quite surprised if my individual consciousness survives death, though I allow myself fantasies of playing around in the “tunnel of light” for a few minutes before disbanding my psychic molecules to go where they will.

I think they call people like me agnostics, since I make no pretenses to certainty about any of this. But agnostic is such a dry, unpoetic term. The very idea of agnostic cartoons sounds like a real yawner!

Correspondence

Cruse discussed his agnosticism in e-mails with Warren Allen Smith.

{WAS, 18-19 April 1999}