23 June 2021

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (No. 86)

Stuck Rubber Baby (1995)
by Howard Cruse 

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Stuck Rubber Baby, published in 1995, was a big surprise for anyone who had followed Cruse's comic book career. The first surprise was its size - Cruse, who had up to this point specialised in short stories and strips, produced in Stuck Rubber Baby a novel of 210 very dense pages. Furthermore, Cruse's work had always been fairly light-hearted - for instance, Barefootz and his strips for Snarf and Dope Comix. But there are hints of what was to come - "Safe Sex", "Billy Goes Out" and especially the powerful "Jerry Mack" - three stories from Gay Comix, which Cruse founded and edited for several years.

Stuck Rubber Baby is the story of a young gay white man who comes out while becoming increasingly politicised by his town's civil rights movement. The town is Clayfield (a stand in for Birmingham, Alabama), and Clayfield has its own Bull Conner, Chopper Sutton, and its own Martin Luther King, the Rev. Harland Pepper. Toland starts off as a bit of a blank state in this massive bildungsroman, which is told as a flashback by the present day Toland. The structure is complex - within the larger flashback are more flashbacks and flash forwards. Toland's social conscious is awakened through a relationship with Ginger Raines, an idealistic and spontaneous folk singer / civil rights activist. Toland falls in love with her, and it's through his love for her that he both acquires a social conscience and admits (to himself and to the world) his homosexuality. Describing Stuck Rubber Baby makes it sound horribly didactic - but it's not. None of the large cast of characters is an idealised stereotype or a token, and the complexity of the plot makes any simplistic reading of Stuck Rubber Baby impossible.

Cruse's drawing took a giant leap here. His work, always very clean and leaning towards the cute end of the spectrum, is dark and dense. Cruse crams as many as 16 panels per page, giving the story a claustrophobic undertone - which is amplified by the tight, dark stippling. The drawing is all his own, but one can see elements of classic strip draftsmen like Milton Caniff and Al Capp in Cruse's drawing. In Stuck Rubber Baby, he achieved that level of graphic mastery. This, combined with the moving, well told story, make Stuck Rubber Baby a classic.


ALISON BECHDEL:
The everyday activism of principled people is an ongoing force for good in this country. And Howard Cruse’s visceral, visual account of America’s recent past is a testament to it. Stuck Rubber Baby contributes with grace and force to the vision of a just world.


READ THIS BOOK:
The 25th anniversary edition of Stuck Rubber Baby was released in 2020 by First Second Books.


FURTHER READING:
Howard Cruse TCJ Interview (1995)



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