Download or read book Stuck Rubber Baby written by Howard Cruse and published by Titan Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s American South a young gas station attendant named Toland Polk is rejected from the army draft for admitting 'homosexual tendencies' and falls in with a close-knit group of young locals yearning to break free from conformity through civil rights activism, folk music and attending gay-friendly nightclubs.
Download or read book The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse written by Andrew J. Kunka and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for the 2022 Eisner Award - Best Academic/Scholarly Work The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse tells the remarkable story of how a self-described “preacher’s kid” from Birmingham, Alabama, became the so-called “Godfather of Gay Comics.” This study showcases a remarkable fifty-year career that included working in the 1970s underground comics scene, becoming founding editor of the groundbreaking anthology series Gay Comix, and publishing the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, partially based on his own experience of coming of age in the Civil Rights era. Through his exploration of Cruse’s life and work, Andrew J. Kunka also chronicles the dramatic ways that gay culture changed over the course of Cruse’s lifetime, from Cold War-era homophobia to the gay liberation movement to the AIDS crisis to the legalization of gay marriage. Highlighting Cruse’s skills as a trenchant satirist and social commentator, Kunka explores how he cast a queer look at American politics, mainstream comics culture, and the gay community’s own norms. Lavishly illustrated with a broad selection of comics from Cruse’s career, this study serves as a perfect introduction to this pioneering cartoonist, as well as an insightful read for fans who already love how his work sketched a new vision of gay life.
Download or read book No Straight Lines written by Justin Hall and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2013-08-03 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Straight Lines showcases major names such as Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, and Ralf Koenig (one of Europe’s most popular cartoonists), as well as high-profile, crossover creators who have dabbled in LGBT cartooning, like legendary NYC artist David Wojnarowicz and media darling and advice columnist Dan Savage. No Straight Lines also spotlights many talented creators who never made it out of the queer comics ghetto, but produced amazing work that deserves wider attention. Queer cartooning encompasses some of the best and most interesting comics of the last four decades, with creators tackling complex issues of identity and a changing society with intelligence, humor, and imagination. This book celebrates this vibrant artistic underground by gathering together a collection of excellent stories that can be enjoyed by all. Until recently, queer cartooning existed in a parallel universe to the rest of comics, appearing only in gay newspapers and gay bookstores and not in comic book stores, mainstream bookstores or newspapers. The insular nature of the world of queer cartooning, however, created a fascinating artistic scene. LGBT comics have been an uncensored, internal conversation within the queer community, and thus provide a unique window into the hopes, fears, and fantasies of queer people for the last four decades. These comics have forged their aesthetics from the influences of underground comix, gay erotic art, punk zines, and the biting commentaries of drag queens, bull dykes, and other marginalized queers. They have analyzed their own communities, and their relationship with the broader society. They are smart, funny, and profound. No Straight Lines has been heralded by people interested in comics history, and people invested in LGBT culture will embrace it as a unique and invaluable collection.
Download or read book Wendel All Together written by Howard Cruse and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join Wendel Trupstock and his significant other, Ollie Chalmers, as they navigate gay life in the '80s. Howard Cruse's Wendel ran in The Advocate during one of the most tumultuous periods in gay history, and the lives of his characters are a snapshot of that era -- from the bar scene to long term commitments, from AIDS to activism, from Reagan to right-wing homophobia. Big issues and everyday life mingle in this strip with hilarious results. And Cruse is a master with pen and ink! Wendel All Together brings readers this classic comic strip complete in one volume for the first time ever!
Download or read book Al Capp written by Michael Schumacher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be a household name. But at the height of his career, his groundbreaking comic strip, Li'l Abner, reached ninety million readers. The strip ran for forty-three years, spawned two movies and a Broadway musical, and originated such expressions as "hogwash" and "double-whammy." Capp himself was a familiar personality on TV and radio; as a satirist, he was frequently compared to Mark Twain. Though Li'l Abner brought millions joy, the man behind the strip was a complicated and often unpleasant person. A childhood accident cost him a leg-leading him to art as a means of distinguishing himself. His apprenticeship with Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, started a twenty-year feud that ended in Fisher's suicide. Capp enjoyed outsized publicity for a cartoonist, but his status abetted sexual misconduct and protected him from the severest repercussions. Late in life, his politics became extremely conservative; he counted Richard Nixon as a friend, and his gift for satire was redirected at targets like John Lennon, Joan Baez, and anti-war protesters on campuses across the country. With unprecedented access to Capp's archives and a wealth of new material, Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen have written a probing biography. Capp's story is one of incredible highs and lows, of popularity and villainy, of success and failure-told here with authority and heart.
Download or read book Howard Cruse written by Janine Utell and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-03-02 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Cruse tells the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher’s kid from Alabama who became “the godfather of queer comics,” Cruse (1944–2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists. His comic strip Wendel, published in The Advocate throughout the 1980s, is considered a revolutionary moment in the development of LGBTQ+ comics, as is his inaugurating the editorship of Gay Comix with Kitchen Sink Press in 1979, which furthered the careers of important artists like Jennifer Camper and Alison Bechdel. Cruse’s graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, fictionalizes his own coming out in the context of the civil rights movement in 1960s Birmingham and was a significant forerunner to contemporary graphic novels and memoirs. Howard Cruse draws on extensive archival research and interviews and covers Cruse’s entire body of work: the cute and zany Barefootz, the unexpected innovations of the Gay Comix stories, the domestic intimacies of Wendel, and the complexity and power of Stuck Rubber Baby. The book places Cruse’s art in the context of his life and his times, including the historic movements for gay rights and against the AIDS crisis, and it celebrates this extraordinary and essential figure of LGBTQ+ comics and American comics art more broadly.
Download or read book Comics and the U S South written by Brannon Costello and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, backroads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.
Download or read book Love Sex Gender and Superheroes written by Jeffrey A. Brown and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impossibly muscular men and voluptuous women parade around in revealing, skintight outfits, and their romantic and sexual entanglements are a key part of the ongoing drama. Such is the state of superhero comics and movies, a genre that has become one of our leading mythologies, conveying influential messages about gender, sexuality, and relationships. Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes examines a full range of superhero media, from comics to films to television to merchandising. With a keen eye for the genre’s complex and internally contradictory mythology, comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown considers its mixed messages. Superhero comics may reinforce sex roles with their litany of phallic musclemen and slinky femme fatales, but they also blur gender binaries with their emphasis on transformation and body swaps. Similarly, while most heroes have heterosexual love interests, the genre prioritizes homosocial bonding, and it both celebrates and condemns gendered and sexualized violence. With examples spanning from the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics up to recent works like the TV series The Boys, this study provides a comprehensive look at how superhero media shapes our perceptions of love, sex, and gender.
Download or read book The Best of Comix Book written by Denis Kitchen and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2013 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1974, legendary Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee approached underground pioneer Denis Kitchen and offered a way for them to collaborate. Their resulting series was called Comix Book and featured work by many of the top underground cartoonists including Joel Beck, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman (first national appearance of Maus), Skip Williamson, and S. Clay Wilson. The Best of Comix Book showcases 150-pages of classic underground comix (printed on newsprint, as they originally appeared), many never before reprinted.
Download or read book Underground Classics written by Denis Kitchen and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Underground Classics" provides the first serious survey of underground comix as art, turning the spotlight on influential and largely under-appreciated artists, including Gilbert Shelton, Kim Deitch, and Trina Robbins. Illustrations throughout.
Download or read book Tough Love written by Abby Denson and published by Northwest Press. This book was released on 2006-06-13 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by shounen-ai manga—melodramatic Japanese comics by girls about gay boys—Tough Love is a teen romance and coming-out story about a shy boy named Brian. More realistic than Japanese manga, this story centers on the relationships Brian develops with the boy he likes, Chris, and Julie, the girl who befriends him. Serious issues like gay bashing, suicide, and coming to terms with one’s own sexual identity are depicted with an honest, gentle touch. Socially relevant, fun, immediately accessible, and a bit of a soap opera, Tough Love helps gay teenagers to be more comfortable with themselves and less troubled, especially when they’re feeling alone and misunderstood.
Download or read book Rebuilding Story Worlds written by Jan Baetens and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collaboration between Belgian artist François Schuiten and French writer Benoît Peeters, The Obscure Cities is one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website. Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics.
Download or read book The Art of Living written by Grant Snider and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous, uplifting look at mindfulness, from beloved illustrator Grant Snider “Find a quiet spot away from all distraction / Listen to your breath / Watch your thoughts float past you / Forget the obligations of today / Try not to consider your eventual decay / Let yourself drift away / Arise, connected with the Earth / Awakened to the Universe.” In The Art of Living, cartoonist Grant Snider, author of The Shape of Ideas and I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf, has created an all-new collection of one- and two-page comics that map his inner thoughts, poetic observations, and frequent failures at living mindfully. With both humor and a touch of reality, The Art of Living centers on mindfulness, but also empathy, relaxation, gratitude, and awareness—evergreen subjects that are more important and relevant now than ever. With a striking package, The Art of Living is an extension of the themes of Snider’s first two books—which explored the creative process and the love of reading—and is the perfect gift for those in a need of reflection, commiseration, hope, and a little extra self-care. Above all, Snider's cartoons will inspire and encourage a more thoughtful way of experiencing the world.
Download or read book Stuck Rubber Baby 25th Anniversary Edition written by Howard Cruse and published by First Second. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painstakingly researched and exquisitely illustrated, Stuck Rubber Baby is a groundbreaking graphic novel that draws on Howard Cruse’s experience coming of age and coming out in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama. This 25th anniversary edition brings this rich and moving tale of identity and resistance is back in print—complete with an updated introduction from Alison Bechdel, rare photographs, and unpublished archival material that give a thorough, behind-the-scenes look at this graphic novel masterpiece. As a young gay man leading a closeted life in the 1960s American South, Toland Polk tries his best to keep a low profile. He’s aware of the racial injustice all around him—the segregationist politicians, the corrupt cops, the violent Klan members—but he feels powerless to make a difference. That all changes when he crosses paths with an impassioned coed named Ginger Raines. Ginger introduces him to a lively and diverse group of civil rights activists, folk singers, and night club performers—men and women who live authentically despite the conformist values of their hometown. Emboldened by this new community, Toland joins the local protests and even finds the courage to venture into a gay bar. No longer content to stay on the sidelines, Toland joins his friends as they fight against bigotry. But in Clayfield, Alabama, that can be dangerous—even deadly.
Download or read book Strange and Stranger written by Blake Bell and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2008-07-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is an art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to his own (and Randian) principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 55 years.
Download or read book Young Bottoms in Love written by Tim Fish and published by Northwest Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young Bottoms in Love compiles a sampling of the acclaimed webcomic anthology and includes more than 40 creators, from award-winning comics professionals to top amateur talent. Featuring comics by Abby Denson, Adam Dekraker, Adam Leveille, Andy Swist, Ariel Guzman, Bill Roundy, Craig Bostick, Dave Ortega, Dave Roman, David Kelly, Decker, Fábian Álvarez López, François Peneaud, Frank Muse, Gregory Lockard, Howard Cruse, J. Brett Hopkins, Jack Lawrence, Jay Laird, Jeff Krell, Jen Van Meter, Jim Gladstone Jr, Justin Hall, Kyle Cummings, Lynx Delirium, Martin Schneebalg, Melody Nadia Shickley, Michael J. DiMotta, Monica Gallagher, Nate and Mike K., Noel Miciano, Paige Braddock, Phil Good, Rachel Millar, Randall Kirby, Richard Ruane, Robert Kirby, Roger Zanni, Stephen Sadowksi, Steven Walters, Ted Manning, Theo Bain, Tim Fish, and Tim Piotrowski. Proceeds from the sale of this digital book benefit Prism Comics, a nonprofit organization supporting LGBT comics, creators and readers. "Amazing! I love Young Bottoms in Love." — Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Are You My Mother) Released digitally by Northwest Press, which has been publishing quality LGBT-inclusive comics and graphic novels since 2010.
Download or read book 7 Miles a Second written by Romberger and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
