Howard Cruse is not just a legend in the gay comics world, he’s a legend in comics period. The writer/artist of Wendel All Together and the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning Stuck Rubber Baby spoke with us about what he’s crrently up to these days.
Editor’s note: This interview with Cruse was originally done for Prism Comics and appeared in the organization’s LGBTQA Guide To Comics in 2023.
GL: You’ve been working on a new project, an illustrated book called The Swimmer With A Rope In His Teeth. What can you tell us about it?
HC: It’s a totally different sort of project from any I’ve published before. Swimmer is a short illustrated fable that has no gay angle and isn’t a comic book. Nor is it a children’s book, even though it can easily be confused with one because visually it has that children’s-book feel to it, being made up of full-page drawings accompanied by small blocks of text. A kid wouldn’t suffer any harm from reading it, of course, but the allegory’s implications would probably go right over a small kid’s head — unless he or she is especially precocious. Prometheus Press will be publishing the book, but I don’t know a publication date yet.
Jeanne E. Shaffer will be listed as the author, by the way, because the original story is hers. I will be credited as the story’s adapter (since the actual text is mine and I added lots of details) and as its illustrator.
Swimmer has been a back-burner project of mine for over three decades, literally. I was a theatre major in college in 1968 when Jeanne first contacted me. Jeanne was and still is a composer based in Montgomery, Alabama, which is not far from Birmingham, and in 1968 she got the idea of making Swimmer the basis of an opera. She needed a librettist for the project and was referred to me because I was doing a lot of playwriting at the time.
I liked her story and agreed to give it a try. After working on it for a couple of months, though, I realized that I was in way over my head. I had written books and lyrics for a couple of stage musicals by then, but I had no real familiarity with the opera form and realized that I was unqualified to give Jeanne what she needed. So I begged off with many apologies, which she accepted graciously.
I lost touch with Jeanne when I graduated, and after college I drifted away from theatre and toward cartooning. But I never forgot her Swimmer story, which I thought had a lot of wisdom for a tale so simple. Then sometime in the early ’80s I suddenly realized that Swimmer could be told effectively as a comic book story using silhouette imagery. Telling it in silhouettes was an important key, because this is a story about how societies behave, not individuals. Normally you try to populate fiction with vividly individualized characters that the reader can identify with, and that was how I had tried to approach my abortive stage version. But with Swimmer what was needed, I belatedly figured out, was to de-emphasize individual characters so that group behavior takes center stage. Silhouettes could do that because, with silhouettes, you don’t see faces and aren’t tempted to bond with any one character in particular.
This insight got me all excited and I started trying to figure out how to track Jeanne down after all those years. Fortunately, Jeanne still lived in Montgomery and I was able to find her phone number. She said that no, she had never done anything with her Swimmer story and she was quite open to the idea of letting me do it in comic-book form.
It took me another dozen years to get the damn thing onto paper, since this was a labor of love that invariably got shoved aside by time-consuming professional commitments like Wendel and Stuck Rubber Baby. By the late-’90s I had the text ready and had drawn a few sample illustrations. Then the 9/11 attacks happened and New York went into a kind of temporary paralysis. I had no work or income at all for four months. To keep myself from sitting around going nuts, I used all that unwelcome free time to complete Swimmer. That gave me something more finished to pitch to publishers. Eventually Prometheus Books made an offer.
GL: Why were you drawn to Swimmer?
HC: It’s a sardonic but not cynical look at religion, and I’m a preacher’s kid with a million ambivalent feelings on that topic.
GL: How is illustrating somebody else’s story similar or different to past projects?
HC: In this case it doesn’t feel different at all, because I’ve lived with Jeanne’s story for so long that it seems like my own. I’ve had to make sure that Jeanne was comfortable with my interpretation, of course, and here and there she has suggested changes that I’ve incorporated. But on the whole Jeanne has given me a free hand to bring my own perspective to her fable. So I haven’t felt like a creative subordinate at all.
I’ve been pretty lucky on those rare occasions when I’ve illustrated stories written by others. In general, though, I got addicted to being my own writer during my early days in underground comix. It was satisfying to work with Jeanne on Swimmer, but unless my career takes an unexpected turn, I don’t think drawing other people’s stories is gonna be the next big trend for me!
GL: Is it true that Wendel and Ollie will begin talking to each other in French soon?
HC: It looks that way. Jean-Paul Jennequin’s French version of Stuck Rubber Baby that Vertigo Graphic put out (under the name Un Monde De Difference) was well received and won an award at the Angouleme festival, so now there’s interest in translating the entire Wendel series into French. They will most likely not be compiled in a single book like Wendel All Together, however, but rather in a series of four smaller albums.
GL: Wendel and Ollie must live on to some degree in your imagination. Have they changed much?
HC: I always assume that they have continued floating around somewhere, experiencing whatever the rest of us have experienced the way they did when the strip was appearing regularly in The Advocate. Unlike me, of course, they are magically able to refrain from aging.
GL: Did they take a trip to Vermont and have a civil union ceremony?
HC: That definitely seems like something they would have thought about. Whether they would have decided to take the plunge isn’t a foregone conclusion. If somebody had recruited them to be the test case that might force the U.S. Supreme Court to make full-fledged gay marriages legal, they would have jumped at the chance. But of course, for that gambit to work you would have to have a Supreme Court with a majority that actually gives a damn about reading the Constitution fairly instead of the jokers who are holding the Court hostage at present.
GL: Given the relative ease that many people have in being out today it can be equally difficult to understand the risk you took with your career when you came out. What motivated you to you to come out professionally?
HC: When I made that decision in the 1970s, I did so because I believed in gay liberation and felt it was my civic duty to step forward and be part of it. Staying in the closet can give us a false sense of individual security — I say “false” because a person with a secret is much more vulnerable to having his or her life abruptly turned upside-down than somebody who has nothing to hide — but it is hugely damaging to others. It perpetuates a society riddled with falseness and ignorance.
It was only after I took the step that I discovered how much my own art would be strengthened by ditching the last remnants of a straight facade. Being honest about myself freed me up to draw comics that reflected the life I was leading without being compromised by a million obfuscations. I don’t know of any artist who has taken the step and hasn’t found that to be the case.
GL: Will you talk some about the early days of Gay Comix and your place in underground comix?
HC: Well, the jury’s still out on my “place in underground comix.” As far as Patrick Rosenkranz’s new book Rebel Visions is concerned, I scarcely existed. I was always off on my own trip in the undergrounds, and I have some sympathy for those who couldn’t relate to that trip in the beginning. The Barefootz stories that dominated my underground work before 1976 was a pretty odd animal next to the aggressively transgressive stuff that the ZAP dudes and the other underground stars were putting out. After 1974 I began gradually pushing my own personal envelope in Barefootz strips that ran in Marvel’s “underground-ish” newsstand magazine Comix Book and in stories like “Dolly Gets the Universal Bughood Blues” and “Gravy on Gay” in Barefootz Funnies 2. And I also started testing my limits in non-Barefootz stories like “Hell Isn’t All That Bad” and “Big Marvy’s Tips on Tooth Care.” I was doing lots of experimenting and I knew that the time was coming when I would have to leave Barefootz behind.
“Gravy on Gay,” of course, was my first time to address gayness head-on, even though it was my character Headrack’s gayness, not my own, that was getting addressed. Publishing that story in 1976 was a big step for me, even though I stopped short of completely coming out of the closet. Any dunce could tell that there had to be a gay person behind it, but I didn’t officially say the words in public until Denis Kitchen asked me to edit Gay Comix in 1979.
Editing Gay Comix gave me a way to announce that I was gay as part of a positive professional action. There weren’t any “confessional” overtones to it.
GL: Even with ground to make still, did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams there would be so many queer characters in comics and out people working in the industry as there are today?
HC: Things have certainly changed. When Andy Mangels published his landmark two-part article “Out Of the Closet and Into the Comics” in Amazing Heroes, since by then I was too thoroughly out to scramble back in even if I had wanted to! But pretty soon I had company. Eric Shanower came out at the first of Andy’s “Gays In Comics” panel in San Diego, and P. Craig Russell and Clive Barker came out in magazine interviews. Meanwhile, a steady stream of cartoonists that weren’t part of the comic book scene at all started surfacing in local and national publications — cartoonists like Alison Bechdel and Tim Barela, for example. By now the lineup of gay talent is so strong I can’t keep track of everybody.
I can’t say that I “never imagined” today’s level of gay presence in comics, since that was one of my goals in starting Gay Comix. But it’s certainly satisfying to be reassured that the goal wasn’t just a pipe dream!
GL: You’ve been in a relationship since 1979 with Ed Sedarbaum and you’ve mentioned how your life with Ed inspired you to put Wendel in a relationship, which was a radical idea at the time. Have there been other instances in which your relationship influenced your work in some way?
HC: Anybody who is curious about my life with Eddie, of course, can read Eddie’s interview in Blake Bell’s book I Have To Live With This Guy! It’s a long interview and I wouldn’t even try to retrace all that ground here, but the short answer to your question is that when an artist is lucky enough to spend 24 years sharing his life with someone as smart and perceptive as Eddie — not to mention someone who spent ten years as a professional book editor, as Eddie did — he would be an idiot not to use that partner regularly as a creative advisor and sounding board. Eddie doesn’t intrude on my creative process, however; he only gives advice when I’m ready to ask for it. As a rule I don’t give much about what I’m up to while a project is cooking. Sharing an idea verbally instead of waiting to share it artistically is a good way to kill it prematurely. But once I’ve brought a project near enough to completion to safely let Eddie look it over, I value his input and often make changes based on his criticisms and suggestions.
Beyond that, Eddie is simply my most reliable source of emotional support, and I try to play the same role for him. Both of us have opted for career paths that get really rocky and dispiriting at times, so supplying emotional support reliably to each other is no small matter!
GL: You’ve been working on a new project, an illustrated book called The Swimmer With A Rope In His Teeth. What can you tell us about it?
HC: It’s a totally different sort of project from any I’ve published before. Swimmer is a short illustrated fable that has no gay angle and isn’t a comic book. Nor is it a children’s book, even though it can easily be confused with one because visually it has that children’s-book feel to it, being made up of full-page drawings accompanied by small blocks of text. A kid wouldn’t suffer any harm from reading it, of course, but the allegory’s implications would probably go right over a small kid’s head — unless he or she is especially precocious. Prometheus Press will be publishing the book, but I don’t know a publication date yet.
Jeanne E. Shaffer will be listed as the author, by the way, because the original story is hers. I will be credited as the story’s adapter (since the actual text is mine and I added lots of details) and as its illustrator.
Swimmer has been a back-burner project of mine for over three decades, literally. I was a theatre major in college in 1968 when Jeanne first contacted me. Jeanne was and still is a composer based in Montgomery, Alabama, which is not far from Birmingham, and in 1968 she got the idea of making Swimmer the basis of an opera. She needed a librettist for the project and was referred to me because I was doing a lot of playwriting at the time.
I liked her story and agreed to give it a try. After working on it for a couple of months, though, I realized that I was in way over my head. I had written books and lyrics for a couple of stage musicals by then, but I had no real familiarity with the opera form and realized that I was unqualified to give Jeanne what she needed. So I begged off with many apologies, which she accepted graciously.
I lost touch with Jeanne when I graduated, and after college I drifted away from theatre and toward cartooning. But I never forgot her Swimmer story, which I thought had a lot of wisdom for a tale so simple. Then sometime in the early ’80s I suddenly realized that Swimmer could be told effectively as a comic book story using silhouette imagery. Telling it in silhouettes was an important key, because this is a story about how societies behave, not individuals. Normally you try to populate fiction with vividly individualized characters that the reader can identify with, and that was how I had tried to approach my abortive stage version. But with Swimmer what was needed, I belatedly figured out, was to de-emphasize individual characters so that group behavior takes center stage. Silhouettes could do that because, with silhouettes, you don’t see faces and aren’t tempted to bond with any one character in particular.
This insight got me all excited and I started trying to figure out how to track Jeanne down after all those years. Fortunately, Jeanne still lived in Montgomery and I was able to find her phone number. She said that no, she had never done anything with her Swimmer story and she was quite open to the idea of letting me do it in comic-book form.
It took me another dozen years to get the damn thing onto paper, since this was a labor of love that invariably got shoved aside by time-consuming professional commitments like Wendel and Stuck Rubber Baby. By the late-’90s I had the text ready and had drawn a few sample illustrations. Then the 9/11 attacks happened and New York went into a kind of temporary paralysis. I had no work or income at all for four months. To keep myself from sitting around going nuts, I used all that unwelcome free time to complete Swimmer. That gave me something more finished to pitch to publishers. Eventually Prometheus Books made an offer.
GL: Why were you drawn to Swimmer?
HC: It’s a sardonic but not cynical look at religion, and I’m a preacher’s kid with a million ambivalent feelings on that topic.
GL: How is illustrating somebody else’s story similar or different to past projects?
HC: In this case it doesn’t feel different at all, because I’ve lived with Jeanne’s story for so long that it seems like my own. I’ve had to make sure that Jeanne was comfortable with my interpretation, of course, and here and there she has suggested changes that I’ve incorporated. But on the whole Jeanne has given me a free hand to bring my own perspective to her fable. So I haven’t felt like a creative subordinate at all.
I’ve been pretty lucky on those rare occasions when I’ve illustrated stories written by others. In general, though, I got addicted to being my own writer during my early days in underground comix. It was satisfying to work with Jeanne on Swimmer, but unless my career takes an unexpected turn, I don’t think drawing other people’s stories is gonna be the next big trend for me!
GL: Is it true that Wendel and Ollie will begin talking to each other in French soon?
HC: It looks that way. Jean-Paul Jennequin’s French version of Stuck Rubber Baby that Vertigo Graphic put out (under the name Un Monde De Difference) was well received and won an award at the Angouleme festival, so now there’s interest in translating the entire Wendel series into French. They will most likely not be compiled in a single book like Wendel All Together, however, but rather in a series of four smaller albums.
GL: Wendel and Ollie must live on to some degree in your imagination. Have they changed much?
HC: I always assume that they have continued floating around somewhere, experiencing whatever the rest of us have experienced the way they did when the strip was appearing regularly in The Advocate. Unlike me, of course, they are magically able to refrain from aging.
GL: Did they take a trip to Vermont and have a civil union ceremony?
HC: That definitely seems like something they would have thought about. Whether they would have decided to take the plunge isn’t a foregone conclusion. If somebody had recruited them to be the test case that might force the U.S. Supreme Court to make full-fledged gay marriages legal, they would have jumped at the chance. But of course, for that gambit to work you would have to have a Supreme Court with a majority that actually gives a damn about reading the Constitution fairly instead of the jokers who are holding the Court hostage at present.
GL: Given the relative ease that many people have in being out today it can be equally difficult to understand the risk you took with your career when you came out. What motivated you to you to come out professionally?
HC: When I made that decision in the 1970s, I did so because I believed in gay liberation and felt it was my civic duty to step forward and be part of it. Staying in the closet can give us a false sense of individual security — I say “false” because a person with a secret is much more vulnerable to having his or her life abruptly turned upside-down than somebody who has nothing to hide — but it is hugely damaging to others. It perpetuates a society riddled with falseness and ignorance.
It was only after I took the step that I discovered how much my own art would be strengthened by ditching the last remnants of a straight facade. Being honest about myself freed me up to draw comics that reflected the life I was leading without being compromised by a million obfuscations. I don’t know of any artist who has taken the step and hasn’t found that to be the case.
GL: Will you talk some about the early days of Gay Comix and your place in underground comix?
HC: Well, the jury’s still out on my “place in underground comix.” As far as Patrick Rosenkranz’s new book Rebel Visions is concerned, I scarcely existed. I was always off on my own trip in the undergrounds, and I have some sympathy for those who couldn’t relate to that trip in the beginning. The Barefootz stories that dominated my underground work before 1976 was a pretty odd animal next to the aggressively transgressive stuff that the ZAP dudes and the other underground stars were putting out. After 1974 I began gradually pushing my own personal envelope in Barefootz strips that ran in Marvel’s “underground-ish” newsstand magazine Comix Book and in stories like “Dolly Gets the Universal Bughood Blues” and “Gravy on Gay” in Barefootz Funnies 2. And I also started testing my limits in non-Barefootz stories like “Hell Isn’t All That Bad” and “Big Marvy’s Tips on Tooth Care.” I was doing lots of experimenting and I knew that the time was coming when I would have to leave Barefootz behind.
“Gravy on Gay,” of course, was my first time to address gayness head-on, even though it was my character Headrack’s gayness, not my own, that was getting addressed. Publishing that story in 1976 was a big step for me, even though I stopped short of completely coming out of the closet. Any dunce could tell that there had to be a gay person behind it, but I didn’t officially say the words in public until Denis Kitchen asked me to edit Gay Comix in 1979.
Editing Gay Comix gave me a way to announce that I was gay as part of a positive professional action. There weren’t any “confessional” overtones to it.
GL: Even with ground to make still, did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams there would be so many queer characters in comics and out people working in the industry as there are today?
HC: Things have certainly changed. When Andy Mangels published his landmark two-part article “Out Of the Closet and Into the Comics” in Amazing Heroes, since by then I was too thoroughly out to scramble back in even if I had wanted to! But pretty soon I had company. Eric Shanower came out at the first of Andy’s “Gays In Comics” panel in San Diego, and P. Craig Russell and Clive Barker came out in magazine interviews. Meanwhile, a steady stream of cartoonists that weren’t part of the comic book scene at all started surfacing in local and national publications — cartoonists like Alison Bechdel and Tim Barela, for example. By now the lineup of gay talent is so strong I can’t keep track of everybody.
I can’t say that I “never imagined” today’s level of gay presence in comics, since that was one of my goals in starting Gay Comix. But it’s certainly satisfying to be reassured that the goal wasn’t just a pipe dream!
GL: You’ve been in a relationship since 1979 with Ed Sedarbaum and you’ve mentioned how your life with Ed inspired you to put Wendel in a relationship, which was a radical idea at the time. Have there been other instances in which your relationship influenced your work in some way?
HC: Anybody who is curious about my life with Eddie, of course, can read Eddie’s interview in Blake Bell’s book I Have To Live With This Guy! It’s a long interview and I wouldn’t even try to retrace all that ground here, but the short answer to your question is that when an artist is lucky enough to spend 24 years sharing his life with someone as smart and perceptive as Eddie — not to mention someone who spent ten years as a professional book editor, as Eddie did — he would be an idiot not to use that partner regularly as a creative advisor and sounding board. Eddie doesn’t intrude on my creative process, however; he only gives advice when I’m ready to ask for it. As a rule I don’t give much about what I’m up to while a project is cooking. Sharing an idea verbally instead of waiting to share it artistically is a good way to kill it prematurely. But once I’ve brought a project near enough to completion to safely let Eddie look it over, I value his input and often make changes based on his criticisms and suggestions.
Beyond that, Eddie is simply my most reliable source of emotional support, and I try to play the same role for him. Both of us have opted for career paths that get really rocky and dispiriting at times, so supplying emotional support reliably to each other is no small matter!
Photo: Eddie Sederbaum, Howard Cruse, and George DeStefano taken at a NYC Pride sometime during the 1980s. Provided by Cruse to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Used without permission.