VISUAL ARTS: Cartoonist Howard Cruse

Howard Cruse lives in a two-family house perched atop one of the steep hills that make up many of the residential neighborhoods in North Adams, Massachusetts. The house doesn’t lack for space, but Cruse, who has spent three decades of his career working from a succession of cramped New York City apartments, makes do with a smallish, neat, box of a room for his studio. In addition to a large-screen iMac for digitally editing cartoons, a drafting table, and a ceiling-high cabinet full of drawing supplies, the studio contains several sets of vertical and horizontal files, each drawer labeled in Cruse’s precise cartoonist’s handwriting.

Cruse’s thirty-five-year career can be traced in those files—his work in underground comics from the 1970s and ’80s; cartoons for publications such as the Village Voice, Playboy, Artforum, and the gay and lesbian newsmagazine the Advocate; children’s book illustrations; and his acclaimed 1995 graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby.

Cruse, who has a ruddy, open face, an easy laugh, and slightly rounded shoulders that suggest many years spent hunched over his drawings, opens one of the flat-file drawers and carefully pulls out a black-and-white panel. It’s page seven from Stuck Rubber Baby, his 210-page loosely autobiographical magnum opus. The book follows a young white man in 1960s Alabama as he comes to understand and accept his homosexuality against the backdrop of the civil rights movement. There are still traces of the artist’s whiteout Cruse used to make some minor corrections. Cruse, 65, is a consummate perfectionist, but he doesn’t mind selling slightly marked-up originals. For one thing, they still make him money. For another, he says, in a soft accent that still carries traces of his Alabama upbringing, “It sort of lets the viewer in on the creative process.”
 

Not that an inked original is some half-baked draft. Cruse, in his characteristically meticulous fashion, spent four years planning, writing, and drawing Stuck Rubber Baby, which critics hailed as one of the most thoughtful and sophisticated graphic novels of the genre and which went on to receive some of cartooning’s most prestigious awards. (The playwright Tony Kushner, whom Cruse had come to know through the gay artistic community in New York, wrote the introduction.)

Cruse, who was a drama major and had done some work as a playwright, blocked out each scene and piece of dialogue in a working script before beginning the illustrations—painstakingly shaded, realistic renderings that reflect the novel’s serious themes and fraught moral universe. The society he was trying to evoke, one where Christian generosity and kindness mixed with racism and homophobia, and where whites and blacks forged friendships despite prevailing mores, was, as he puts it, “far more complex than just black and white, good and evil.”
 

“Almost anything I do has to be generated to some extent from something in life that stirs emotions in me—anger or things I feel are ridiculous,” Cruse says, sitting in his living room, stroking his eight-year-old Dalmatian, Lulu, whose black ears remind Cruse of the black topknots worn by the 1930s and ’40s cartoon character Little Lulu. “The ideas have to sort of generate themselves,” he adds. “This is probably why I’m not more prolific. If I could just knock things out because there was a market, I’d probably finish a lot more.” He has an admittedly low threshold for boredom.
 

Cruse moved to North Adams in 2003 with his partner, Ed Sedarbaum, a former community organizer and lifelong New Yorker who had a hankering to escape the city. They had been together for nearly twenty-five years when Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, but they wed anyway, having decided, Cruse says, that “it would be fun to be part of history.”

Cruse settled into the burgeoning North Adams artist’s community, and, since 2006, he has been teaching cartooning courses at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). His work, which has been exhibited in San Francisco, London, Spain, and elsewhere, has also been showcased locally, both in galleries in North Adams (MCLA Gallery 51, Eclipse Mill Gallery), and in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (Storefront Artist Project Gallery), as well as in the major exhibition on graphic novels (November 2007 to May 2008) at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
 

Cruse also blogs copiously about his life and work, maintains an online store of his animated merchandise, and works on transforming old inked drawings into digital files, for display on his wide-ranging website. Last year, feeling that New Englanders’ propensity for discretion and politeness could use some shaking up, Cruse also launched a free humor publication called North County Perp, modeled after the cheeky underground newspaper from his college days at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. The first issue came out in 2006, a second, funded with a grant from the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshires, came out in December, 2008.

Despite his many side projects and a longtime practice of piecing together assignments to pay the bills as any frenetic freelancer must, Cruse has been trying lately to take Sedarbaum’s advice and be pickier about the projects he takes on.
 

Cruse is often described as one of America’s preeminent gay cartoonists, and, indeed, much of his work deals with gay themes. Before he embarked on Stuck Rubber Baby in the early 1990s, he edited a pioneering underground comics series called Gay Comix, wrote a popular 1980s comic strip called Wendel for the national Advocate, and contributed frequent cartoons to the Village Voice on topics ranging from the controversy over “outing” gay celebrities to the homophobia of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Cruse’s earliest work dealt covertly with gay issues, but he credits his decision to accept editorship of Gay Comix, and, hence, coming out to the underground comics community, for allowing him to do more creative, honest, and probing work.
 

“It was hugely liberating because I didn’t always have a part of me that was watching out that I didn’t go too far,” Cruse recalls. “I could just be myself. And so I think that everybody would agree that my work got much better suddenly when I came out.”
 

Fellow cartoonists and scholars of the genre are quick to emphasize, however, that to characterize Cruse solely as a gay cartoonist is to oversimplify. “You can’t miss the gay aspect of his work because it’s still quite uncommon,” says Denis Kitchen, a prominent publisher of underground comics who gave Cruse his first big break in the early 1970s and who later asked him to edit Gay Comix. “But to me, he’s just a great cartoonist, period.”
 

Kitchen, who now lives in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, praises Cruse for avoiding both the cheap laughs common in mainstream comic strips and the shock value that pervades underground comics. “He thinks about what he wants to say and the message, and he doesn’t hit you over the head with it,” Kitchen says. “It doesn’t require graphic sex; it doesn’t require something that grabs you by the throat.”
 

Friends and admirers point not only to the subtlety of Cruse’s approach, but also to the universality of his message. Stephen R. Bissette, a cartoonist and writer who profiled Cruse in his 1988 book, Comic Book Rebels, first encountered Cruse’s cartooning through Wendel in the 1980s. Wendel examined issues such as the devastating and terrifying AIDS epidemic wreaking havoc on the gay community in New York City, but did it with Cruse’s characteristic light touch.

“The driving force is young guys in their twenties just trying to make their way in the world, just the way everyone else was. And that made it really accessible for me,” says Bissette, who isn’t gay. “Howard wasn’t on that soapbox that so many [gay] writers and artists were at the time.”
 

Cruse gravitates toward a nuanced middle ground in much of his work, not so much a compromise as a carefully staked-out position that feeds on the tension between two opposing ideas. After all, he notes, life is full of contradictions. Even early in his career, Cruse says, “I was interested in the tension between stuff that was superficially innocuous, but has a subversive undertone. So my early underground work sort of looked like it could have appeared in a daily newspaper, but it had all this subtext of sex and drugs.”

Barefootz, an ongoing feature that ran in underground papers in Birmingham, and later helped Cruse make a name for himself under Denis Kitchen’s publishing imprint, was widely criticized by hard-core underground cartoonists and readers for not being sufficiently edgy—mostly, Cruse and Kitchen think, because of its goofy, bubbly aesthetic. “Howard’s work looked like it was out of the 1950s,” Kitchen says, noting that had the critics looked further, they would have found something much more complex, avant-garde, and, ultimately, very funny.
 

Cruse is probably best known for Stuck Rubber Baby, which has made its way onto lists of the best graphic novels and into college curriculums. At the time it was released, though, graphic novels had only recently begun to gain critical acceptance. Academics and critics praise Stuck Rubber Baby for its frank but nuanced portrayal of Southern society at the end of segregation, but the book appeals beyond both its setting and immediate subject matter, says Paul Buhle, a senior lecturer at Brown University, who deemed the book the “classroom gold standard” for historical graphic novels in a scholarly essay on history and comics. Buhle has taught the book for five years in his course on the cultural history of the 1960s; it is by far the most popular selection in the class. The primary message students seem to take from it, Buhle says, is not about the ethos of the decade, or even the struggle for black and gay equality, but rather that it’s important to be yourself.
 

“Being yourself” can inspire rich material, as Cruse very well knows. But in his own teaching, self-expression doesn’t justify sloppiness. In a recent class at MCLA, Cruse deflects excuses with dry humor and a no-nonsense attitude, encouraging the students to assume the poses they are trying to depict. When a young man at work on a graphic novel confesses he is self-conscious about drawing hands and women, Cruse has him pose and then makes a quick sketch to demonstrate.
 

“This is not hugely complicated,” he says. “I mean, hands are not that difficult. And they’re fun!” The young man remains skeptical. “The first thing you do is you don’t give in to intimidation,” Cruse adds, confessing that for years he avoided cross-hatching, a kind of shading important in cartooning, because he was afraid he’d never do it as well as the cartoonists he admired. “Oh, I love cross-hatching,” the student says, perking up. He starts redrawing the female character. “There you are—you’re on your way to doing a graphic novel,” Cruse says, before moving on to help another student. Then, he adds, wryly, “Good luck with the next ten years of your life!”
 

Cruse is now mulling over a project that could end up dominating the next few years of his own life, which he coyly refers to as “a germinal notion for another book.” Like any savvy artist, he knows better than to disclose the subject matter until he’s confident the idea will materialize. Besides, he says, the anticipation of presenting his finished work is one of his chief motivators, and he doesn’t want to spoil the fun by talking about it. To that end, he’s put blogging on hold and will take a break from teaching after the spring term. “I’m trying to peel off as many complicating aspects of my life as I can,” Cruse says, “so that I can be more …” He pauses and laughs at himself. “An artist in my lair.” (MAY 2009)
 

Kaitlin Bell, a native of Williamstown, Mass., recently received her master’s degree in magazine journalism from Columbia and is now a freelance writer in Manhattan.

THE GOODS

Howard Cruse Central
www.howardcruse.com