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Howard Cruse is a gay American cartoonist.
Cruse was raised in Springfield, Alabama in the 1950s, the son of a preacher and a homemaker. His earliest published cartoons were in The Baptist Student when he was in high school. His work later appeared in Fooey and Sick. 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.
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.
Cruse spent the first half of the 1990s creating Stuck Rubber Baby, a 210-page graphic novel published by Paradox Press, a division of DC Comics. 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. Although still somewhat cartoony in the style of illustration, it features Cruse's most detailed and realistic comics art, and his most serious and complex storytelling. It received numerous awards and nominations.
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