The Graphic Novel We Need Today Came to Us Decades Ago

An appreciation of Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby

It was sad enough to hear that gay cartoonist, author and activist Howard Cruise had died last Tuesday. Sadder still that it happened over the holiday week, which meant that his obituary over at The Comics Journal was only published this Monday, one day after World AIDS Day. This isn’t a criticism, just a depressing observation. The Journal was the one comics periodical that gave Cruse great attention when his seminal work Stuck Rubber Baby was released in 1995. Now even tribute pieces such as this one feel too late and too short in advancing the momentum for the upcoming 25th anniversary re-release of Cruse’s book in 2020 from First Second Books. When this semi-autobiographical story of a closeted gay white male in the midst of the civil rights movement was first published, there were exactly as many American graphic novels like it as there were graphic novels of Jewish mice being led to genocide by Nazi cats. Today there are a far greater number of openly LGBTQ voices in comics and media all over; but in today’s scary and politically supercharged world, new readers can be better informed about today’s uneasy political climate with Cruse’s story, which is sadly proving timeless.