Loose Cruse: The Weblog

"It is a very complex allegory that revolves around the difference in various people's ability to face reality, and the fact that there is no rationale to the selection of those who have the capability."

"The play also pictures truth as lying totally in concreteness. The metaphor is metamorphosis. Manchester Wintergray is transformed to "concrete" man through moral pain and physical death."

[The ghost of Manchester Wintergray injects from his grave: Such concerns in a 22-year-old boy! And this was a year before the kid took his first LSD, for God's sake!]

Young Cruse continues tellingly:

"I had been nervous earlier about [Drama Department Chair Arnold Powell's] reaction because there is an undercurrent of homosexuality running through the whole thing. But as the play came out, the queer stuff is fairly stylized and functions mostly as an ever-present force under the surface; consequently, its effect tends to be subconscious rather than conscious."

Dream on, Howard! Probable response of audience-members when the play was staged the following spring: Somebody drag that poor playright out of the closet QUICK!!

Meanwhile, in the present: At Popimage.com the second page of "My Hypnotist" is unveiled.

My drawing skills had a way to go back then and so did my coy-title-detector. These guys lived in a hollow tree, y'see, one above the other. An arborial duplex of sorts. The squirrel at the top of the tree was the one named Tops. The squirrel at the bottom of the tree was named — what, Bottom? No, that would be too obvious. How about Button?

The thing is, there were plenty of duds during the run of that series, but I have no apologies. It was a learning time for me and I got better as I went along. And the thing I liked best about the feature was the way it played with words. Their sounds. Their vibes. Their small, intersyllabic surprises.

People who visited my web site during its earliest incarnations (1998 or so, I think) will remember that I resurrected some Tops & Button panels for whatever amusement they might provide, and examples from the series have occasionally surfaced in published interviews as examples, fortunate or otherwise, of my earliest efforts to break into cartooning. But for the most part the series has lingered only in the fading memories of Birminghamians unaware that a budding underground cartoonist was hiding behind some funny animals who had appeared out of nowhere in the columns of their morning paper.

The new versions exist, so why not share them? So brace yourself for the occasional Squirly & Earl episode in these blog entries of mine.

The humor is soft — definitely not guffaw material. But in this hectic, overheated world we live in today, it pays to slow down occasionally and smell the yard rodents.

I call them my "Ker-chunk Days" because back then (and for twenty years thereafter until my eyes were opened by Arlen Schumer of Dynamic Duo Studio in 2003) I was at the mercy of the moods and mechanical crudities of my Kodak Carousel Slide Projector.

I shouldn't be unfair. Those little projection devices from the pre-digital era of film transparencies in cardboard casings served me well during many an evening of book-promotion in assorted cities and venues, from Los Angeles to London. With experimentation and practice I put together a nice little "dog-and-pony-show" (to use a term picked up from my early days as a paste-up artist in Birmingham's advertising agency world) that always got a warm response.

Then I attended an illustrated lecture by Arlen promoting his book about comics in the 'sixties in New York that showed me how a slideshow should be done.

And I knew it was time for me to move on beyond Kodak.

I would tell you more right now but I'm racing out the door to teach my QuarkXPress class in Pittsfield. Tomorrow, maybe I'll be able to explaim why Arlen and his presentation changed my way of doing things.This topic is on my mind right now because I'll be giving an illustrated lecture tomorrow morning to students in a Graphic Novels as Literature class (how times have changed) at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

And I'll be doing it the non-Ker-chunk way.

The slide sequences flowed smoothly, and the only thing that went "Ker-Chunk" were our first fumbling efforts to coax my Apple PowerBook and the classroom's PC-acclimated audio-visual set-up to make friends with each other.

We thought we had taken every possible precaution to avoid technical glitches. Carl Villanovia of MCLA's Media Center had invited me to the campus a week earlier so we could assure ourselves in advance that the projector would play well with my Mac. It had taken a little fiddling with connectors and clickers, not to mention the desktop PC sitting nearby that is customarily charged with telling the projector what to do with its light beams. But from all appearances, by the time I had left for home Carl and a few other individuals who chipped in with advice and suggestions had demonstrated beyond doubt that the set-up could proceed smoothly. All I would have to do when I returned to address the class would be to plug in a plug and turn things on.

Nevertheless, our best-laid plans did today what best-laid plans are famous for doing. It was balking time in machine-land. Images on my laptop screen just sat there looking back at me instead of slithering along through cables and lenses onto the big screen on the wall behind me.

A call went out to Carl to please return and reprise his magic from the week before. A few minutes later all was well, with my presentation's beginning being only slightly delayed.

Dr. Raskin's students remained totally patient throughout and never once resorted to banging silverware again tin plates to express displeasure. I appreciated that. All went well once the curtain rose, the the only regrettable consequence of my late start was that no time was left at show's end for me to field questions and exchange views with the students. I regretted that.

Dr. Raskin says there may be an opportunity, however, for me to return to the class another day so that some real discussion can take place in response to my words and images — and, of course, the book itself.

But I promised in my last blog entry to share what I learned from Arlen Schumer several years ago about how to leave my beloved but klunky Kodak slide projector in the dust and take my slideshow into a new and more satisfying realm.

I will keep my promise — but tomorrow, not today. Blog entries shouldn't go on and on and on any more than slideshows should.

But long before helping me get a grip on digital graphics, Hutch had been my chief slideshow enabler.

Hutch's availability as a photographer made my first slideshows possible. No way could I have borne the cost of putting together the ambitious series of unendingly-evolving presentations I offered to audiences between 1983 and 2003 had I been forced to pay commercial rates for the photography involved. And God knows I didn't have the equipment or skills to shoot the damn slides myself!

In the beginning Hutch insisted on shooting my slides for free. Eventually, as the number of images I put together for his camera expanded into the hundreds, he finally yielded to my guilt-induced insistence that he accept small payments of cash or pages of my original artwork in return for his camerawork. With his encouragement I continued to periodically revamp my show with dozens of photocopied panels from my comics that I pasted onto construction paper with lung-rotting spray adhesive. Whenever I had stockpiled enough slide adaptations of my stories to merit a new photo session, Hutch was ready to go.

The reality of how fortunate I had been to have Hutch's help hit me fully after his death, when I was forced to engage a professional photography service to provide the half-dozen or so new transparencies it took bring my slideshow up to date for an appearance at the Alternative Press Expo. Those few slides set me back a small fortune by comparison to the modest tokens of appreciation Hutch had been willing to accept from me! Minus my friend's assistance, my slideshow was forced lay fallow for a while: the lack of anything but the most fleeting references to projects that I had concocted subsequent to Stuck Rubber Baby's completion made it increasingly, embarrassingly out of date.

Then Arlen Schumer's illustrated lecture at the New School showed me how to liberate myself from transparencies, slide carousels, and noisy machinery along with the creative limitations they had been imposing on me without my realizing it.

Yeah, the rap number was an even earlier surprise, come to think of it, but that was just Arlen wowing the crowd with a dramatic device I was unlikely to emulate, given my personality. The cross-fades, though, were something else.

I knew going in that Arlen was going to use PowerPoint, and everyone knows that PowerPoint is awash in transition options — and there's not a slide projector-ish ker-chunk to be heard in any of them. In glorious silence you can wipe this way and that as you glide from image to image, up, down, left or right, or diagonally from an unexpected corner. One frame can burst from the middle of frame before it bounded by a circle, square, or diamond, and for all I know the most recent upgrades will let you amaze your audience with galloping pinwheels of sequential pie charts. Mere dissolves are the tamest arrows in the application's quiver.

The picture didn't change, or seemed not to, but a new element was added to the scene at the exact moment when Arlen was ready for it. More than could ever be true with old fashioned slides that announce every change with a brief blackout and a great clanking of apertures, Arlen had become the master of his audience's attention.

I imediately saw this as a great step forward for fluid storytelling in slideshows. But despite the fuss I'm making about it here, that was not what made the biggest difference for me personally.The old-style slides were costly to photograph and process, so (without Dave Hutchison's skills and generosity to fall back on) I had to be so economical, even stingy, in introducing new ones that my presentation's ability to evolve and grow was hobbled.

But I can make new PowerPoint images for free, sitting at home in front of my Mac, and this has made it possible for me to expand beyond the single, self-promotional divertissement I had started with when I first performed my Kodak slideshow twenty-three years ago.

In the last two years I have presented a digital adaption of my original slideshow to students at the Ringling Schjool of Art & Design and gave an illustrated lecture about the evolution of my drawing style at a conference at the University of Florida. At Brown University in Providence I showed students in Paul Buhle's class on "The Sixties" how Stuck Rubber Baby grew out of my memories of the Civil Rights strife in Birmingham when I was young; at the School for International Studies in Brattleboro my slideshow called "Racism & Brain Debris" related SRB to a broader examination of the way prejudices get imbedded in our minds. And in mid-March I'm going to give my new slideshow adaptation of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth a trial run at the Topia Arts Center in nearby Adams.

It takes work to create all of these varied programs, but not money. For a cartoonist who still has to hustle to get by, that's important. And it's PowerPoint that has made it possible for me to venture into this new territory, and I'm having a ball.

But when I lived in Birmingham it was two cats named Flower and Thumper who helped me survive the breakup with my first love Don and achieve reasonable serenity on the Magic City's southside.

To be the cartoonist I wanted to be, I eventually had to abandon Alabama to settle in New York City, where there were publishers aplenty if not decent barbeque establishments. It broke my heart to leave my cats in the care of others, but it had to be done.

I recently happened upon this flier, composed in December of 1976, and memories came flooding back.

CIRCUMSTANCES REQUIRE that I find a new home for my two female cats, Thumper and Flower. Sisters from the same litter, they are accustomed to an indoor existence complete with lots of affection, which they return lavishly once they have determined its sincerity.

Though they would consider it indelicate to mention themselves, they have both been SPAYED! Despite this they remain graced with a larger share of femininity and sensuality than many human beings who have never been under a surgical knife.

Thumper is a slender, sensitive calico, predominantly gray with washes of orange and white. Flower is a robust (might we say chubby?) black-and-white of gregarious temperament, with an Oliver Hardy black "moustache" on her white muzzle.

They both enjoy stalking any cockroaches that invade their domain, evidently inducing fatal heart attacks in the bugs through a process of terrorization that I have never witnessed first-hand.

They are very loyal to their litter box as long as the Hartz brand is prominantly displayed. They are ambivalent about Litter Green and make no promises.

They are accustomed to roaming freely about their home at velocities that vary accordiung to their moods and the time of day. They consider the sofa to be their furniture, too, very good for sleeping. Tops of refrigerators, obscure bookcases, closet shelves and window ledges are also employed regularly for siestas.

They are no strangers to the conjugal bed, though it is recommended that they not remain there while anyone is conjugating.

They do not like to be lifted. Sometimes Flower likes laps. Thumper, on the other hand, rides around on shoulders sometimes. Though Thumper is the more timid of the two, they are both excellent conversationalists when the impulse strikes (which is practically never) and both are unusually knowledgable about cartooning and comic books.

I am aware that many people are open only to the idea of raising cats from kittenhood. Yes, friskiness is fun. There is something to be said, though, for the more mature companionship of cats with already formed personalities and a certain graceful reserve.

If you think you might like to adopt Thumper and Flower, please contact me.

[EPILOGUE: A friend did take my kitties to live in her home in a forested suburban development on Birmingham's outskirts. Thumper adjusted well, but Flower was soon seized with wanderlust and escaped into the trees, never to be seen again. My friend was distressed, but it was not her fault.

By the time of Flower's disappearance I was far away in New York, soon to be art directing Starlog magazine.]

I happened today upon the following chastizing letter a friend apparently wrote to me more than forty years ago. It is unsigned and undated, but the other letters it was tucked in with place it in 1963. I'm pretty sure I know who must have written it.

It's harsh but on target, prompted probably by one of my many depressed letters I wrote in my adolescence, despair-drenched missives in which I flirted compulsively with the romance of suicide. I quote his response to me in its entirety, unedited.

oh howard, will you stop this shit? the last time I wrote a thing like yours i was ready to die. je(a)sus god, before you go lose your soul, your poor ofay soul, in prussian square come talk to me. look man, I laid a few on your head, but i didn't know what was comin off. you know the word, man, but you jest so hung up. dont be so dumb. please play it cool for me, God, and the Fat Lady. for me. for mine and everybody's goddman [sic] petty banal life. for the lovers you never had. for yourself you hate so bad.

i don't give a shit about the dribble b------- is going to write you or the good word from b--, i don't care about being bound in your hang ups. man, i am bitter about you. when are you going to give up this abstract image of yourself - your body mind dichotomy - and live with your body? don't go and blow your cool. HEAR ?

The writer of the foregoing himself died by his own hand a few years later. That doesn't invalidate his rebuke to me; it's a wonder he lasted as long as he did, that his hands didn't fall off his arms before he graduated from high school from all the razor slices he had applied to his wrists. His own daily pain was ten times as bad as mine has ever been. (Bipolar disorder is what they would call it today, I believe.) For a time he and I were like two people sinking side-by-side in quicksand, each trying to prevent the other from sinking. Ah, those wonderful high school years!

I was thinking about this friend when I wrote the following song lyric in 1976:

They'd say:
Good-bye, Jimmy Joe.
It's a bummer you've gone to stay.
We'd like you back
For the songs you'd sing
And the melodies you'd play.
You made us cry
But the tears were sweet
And they made us feel alive.
Now your bad trip is over,
Your bones are dry,
And I guess we'll all survive.

He wrote out a beautiful note
from his heart.
He wrote how the misery
and pain of life,
they could tear a boy apart.
How the only friend he had
Was a razor blade of steel.
And he laughed a bit,
'cause he knew damn well
how the folks back home would feel.

They'd say:
Good-bye, Jimmy Joe.
It's a bummer you've gone to stay.
We'd like you back
For the songs you'd sing
And the melodies you'd play.
You made us cry
But the tears were sweet
And they made us feel alive.
Now your bad trip is over,
Your bones are dry,
And I guess we'll all survive.

Under the editorship of an enterprising editor named Eugene Breckenridge, our student newspaper, the Hilltop News, had begun breaking BSC tradition by practicing more serious journalism than the fraternity/sorority-oriented student body was accustomed to. But for my quasi-bohemian crowd something a little more edgy was called for to make campus discourse even less predictable.

"Arf arf!"

"Yerp!"

"Bow wow! Grrr!"

These reactions summararize the results of a recent informal poll by Granny investigating the incidence of underground dog-kicking on the Birmingham-Southern campus.

It is estimated that 25% of the students at BSC have kicked or are planning to kick a dog in the near future, though only 18% have actually admitted or have been seen in the process of kicking and only 13% of the campus dogs have been kicked on an ascertainable 3% of their available anatomy.

Most students make a point of kicking dogs off-campus. although. a significant minority have been seen lurking on the boundaries kicking them back on again.

All students agree that dogs are readily available if you just know the drummer at the Smokey Bar & Grill. Or, if you prefer, you can follow the 'Southern students' example and order a fresh puppy from Miles Kimbell of Oshkosh. If that doesn't work, you can follow other 'Southern students' examples and trot back down to the Smokey Bar & Grill and kick drunks. "Man, like the fuzz can be a real hang-up," comments a jivey practioner, irritated at the stubborn dog hairs lodged in his cuffs. But all save a vocal canine minority agree that the lack of' a hangover make it preferable to drinking and more edifying than drowning cats or the communal roachsquashes that were the rage at this time last year.

Granny feels that dog-kicking contributes to a disunified and fragmented campus — particularly when the practice escalates to actual dismemberment. Granny plans to publish a series of articles on other illegal activities on campus such as miscegenation among Dr. Bailey's lukemic mice, child molestation, euthenasia, banana highs in the snack-bar, plus a shocking, first-person report on the incidence of statutory rape in the sculpture lab. In the meantime, Granny appreciates the invaluable help given her by her many informants among the dog-kicking set. And now. . .

"I do not consider this example of so-called "satire" to be ONE BIT FUNNY!!!"

One is a drawing of the legendary folk-singer Odetta; the other is a group caricature of the Mamas and Papas. Both drawings date from my undergraduate days at Birmingham-Southern College.

Odetta played a concert at MCLA here in North Adams last winter. A fierce blizzard that evening discouraged Eddie and me from getting to the show, but Odetta herself did not let the snowfall deter her from making the long drive from Boston so the show could go on.

Friends who saw her perform reported that the frail, elderly woman who appeared on the stage was in sharp visual contrast to the robust figure who knocked my Birmingham crowd dead forty years ago. The power of her voice and personality, though, remain as formidable as ever.

Time takes a toll on all of us, but some have a gift of seeming somehow undiminished by whatever the passing years can deal out.

I drew the Mamas and Papas during the 1967 "Summer of Love." My heart was in San Francisco that summer but my body was stuck holding down a summer job in the art department of the Birmingham News. My main duty was retouching wedding photographs for the paper's society section, but once or twice a week the art director would throw me a small spot illustration assignment.

The Mamas and Papas drawing stood out from all my other illustrations that summer, both for the prominence of its display (it was cover art for the paper's Sunday-supplement magazine) and its subject matter. Although I had taken a mere puff or two at that point on the stray marijuana cigarettes that passed my way and although my first LSD trip still lay several months in the future, my soul was already awash in the utopian euphoria that came with membership in a counterculture that was just then reaching the Bible Belt and was feeling its oats. Love of the Beatles from 1964 onward had been my first experience of feeling aligned with my generational peers instead of alienated. The zest and soaring harmonies of the Mamas and Papas represented everything that was spiritually liberating in that period. I relished drawing their faces, and if I had had a way to take part in the summer's pilgrimage to San Francisco, you can bet I would have happily worn "a flower in my hair" (as suggested in Scott McKenzie's hit single) without feeling the least bit silly.

Instead I remained in the Magic City, retouching photos and executing small drawings (plus that cover art) for the News. For a while I allowed myself to imagine that this grunt work might somehow open the door to drawing an actual comic strip for the paper — a strip whose success locally might conceivably lead to national syndication and fame. Maybe if I kept thoughts of hippie rebellion at bay I could manage to join the company of cartooning heros like Al Capp, Walt Kelly, and Charles M. Schulz.

When I mentioned such dreams to my boss, however, he quickly squelched them.

"I'll never let one of my staffers draw a regular feature," he informed me. "It would turn into some kind of "star" situation and the other staffers would be jealous."

As soon as he said that I knew that, while having a summer job was handy and retouching photos was not that abhorrent a way to pull in a buck, my future as a cartoonist clearly did not lie at the Birmingham News.

You see, I wanted to be a star.

Bill and I lost touch with each other after graduation, but through ISS alumni newsletters I learned as years passed that he was devoting his working life to service as a Presbyterian minister in Tennessee. Having retired from that noble endeavor now, he has moved on to a second calling as a teller of tales on the storytelling circuit.

Recently (thanks to the good offices of Google) Bill reestablished contact with me and I learned that he has produced an array of CD recordings of his accounts of life experiences that are regularly performed live before audiences around the country.

Which brings me to today's topic. There is a bit player named "Howard" who is cited in passing in his tale of a long and long ago canoe trip Bill undertook with fellow ISS students in Quetico Provincial Park, a wondrous Canadian wilderness preserve north of Minnesota. That "Howard" in Bill's story would be me.

Listening to Bill's CD put me in a nostalgic mood, in the throes of which I have dug out the diary I myself kept during the same summer adventure described by my storytelling friend (who carried a more high-tech memory aid than I did into the woods: a trusty 8mm movie camera). I share with you today one of my journal's anecdotes about our trek through the roadless lake country up north.

July 12, 1961

On about the second day out, Jay Holekamp got a little too close to the water while drinking and fell in. I didn't see this; but it was described as a very dramatic immersion, with Jay fighting for balance while slowly slipping in; and everyone regretted that Bill Jones had not been nearby to capture the scene with his movie camera. Ever since, the action of accidentally falling partially or wholly into the water has been dubbed as “pulling a Holekamp," and Jay has pulled at least two more of them since.

Somehow out of this grew a game which several of the campers are continually playing. Any unfortunate and embarrassing accident wins a number of "points” for the victim, the value of points being obscure yet the collection of points being a matter of pride. The value of "pulling a Holekamp" varies with the degree of the mishap — slipping and wetting a foot is worth a paltry 5-or-so points, while a grand total of from 50 to 100 goes to the lucky fellow who plunges headfirst into the lake with a kettle of chicken soup. (Yesterday it was unanimously agreed that anyone dying on the trip would win the game. In the event of multiple deaths, the most points would go to the one who suffered the most!)

At the moment, to my knowledge, Jay himself is in the lead, but John Terry is not far behind. John got a big boost in points when he stepped in a cherry pie this morning.

I both treasure the memory and would never dream of asking my body to do that much paddling, portaging, and aching again!

But that doesn't mean that the cry of a loon or an unexpected moose sighting won't always get my wilderness-loving juices flowing.

Hands off ANWR, Mr. Prez!

Eddie and I aren't in New York City today so the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered throng, accompanied by the parents, cousins, friends, soulmates, and companions in civil rights activism who feel that the statement made by mass queer visibility every year remains an important statement to make, will have to fill up scores of blocks of Fifth Avenue without our physical assistance.

I have no doubt that New Yorkers will be up to the task.

But frustratingly, I have no time available to compose any of these today.

So I will have to let the photograph above, taken in June of 1979, serve as my symbolic Happy Gay Day greeting as well as a placeholder for commentaries I hope life lets me write in the future about the place of LGBT Americans in George W. Bush's America — no to mention the place occupied by our LGBT cousins in various countries around the world.

The snapshot above, snapped by our friend David Hutchison at the Gay Pride Parade that took place a mere couple of months after Eddie and I first met, brings back a host of memories. Of youth. Of righteous zeal. Of excitement and camaraderie. And of the scores of friends not seen in this photograph but who were also marching on Fifth Avenue that day.

Many of them we hadn't met yet on the day Hutch snapped this photo. Too many subsequently died in the AIDS epidemic. Hutch has died too — although it was pancreatic cancer that got him before his HIV had time to.

But many more of our friends from both that era and eras since remain alive today — to the consternation no doubt of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, "Rev." Fred Phelps and his less obviously vicious fellow homophobes.

Those surviving friends who are still in New York and those in any number of other cities large enough to host demonstrations of this kind are likely to be participating today in the fleeting creation of temporary cities within cities in which, if only for a few exciting hours, it will be the heterosexuals who are in the minority and the gays who fill the straight folks' fields of vision.

And we will be saying loudly once again what we seem to have to say over and over again no matter how tiring it gets to have to repeat the obvious decade after decade: We're here. Qe're queer. Get Used to it.

He didn't hold up the purchase of our house on their account, but neither did the inspector sugar-coat reality. Eventually — by which he meant significantly sooner than Eddie's and my bank account would prefer — the aging, crumbling cement steps in front of our house were going to have to go.

So inexorably has their decline continued in the two years since we assumed ownership of our home that desperate measures have recently been called for to protect public safety. Specifically, since last winter Eddie and I have had to keep two flower pots permanently and conspicuously placed so as to steer visiting friends and pizza deliverers away from the most dangerously eroded portion of the ascent (see the top left photo below).

The worst was accomplished in less than an hour. Now, thanks to the expert carpentry of Lance Howard (seen above midway through his construction job), newer and decidedly better wooden steps are materializing to make the climb to front-yard level a breezier experience.

Our flower pots served us well and for that we are grateful. But it's time now for them to move on to more conventional uses.

A "trip" (of the LSD variety) is what I and some friends were winding down from on a June night in 1969 when, while wandering through the streets of Greenwich Village and admiring the undulating colors of Tiffany lamps in store windows, we happened upon the Stonewall riots in progress.

And this weekend I learned that, by a quirky coincidence that is of no consequence in the least, a young actor named "Trip" (or Trip Langely, to be specific) will be portraying my trip in a production of Carol Polcovar's stage docudrama My Mother Told Me I Was Different: Voices From The Stonewall Rebellion, which will be playing at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex in Manhattan through the weekend of July 21-23 under the direction of pioneering gay playwright and director David Gaard.

I met David when we both participated in the Chip Deffaa Invitational Theatre Festival several summers ago and we've kept in touch since then, so David alerted me to the fact that my serendipitous and acid-soaked brush with the historic Stonewall riots has been woven into a corner of the larger tapestry of more important first-person accounts that make up Carol's stirring (to judge by the script, which David emailed to me on Saturday) montage of testimonies.

Mine is a but the tiniest of threads in the play's tapestry — and rightly so, given my fringe standing as the hallucinating observer of a cultural revolution in the making those many years ago. Had I been courageous enough to leap into the fray and hurl a flaming garbage can or two, I would have given Trip a little more drama to work with.

But it's always nice to be included, and I wish Trip and the rest of the play's cast the best as they bring to fresh life an evening in my personal history that remains indelible (if shimmeringly indistinct in its down-to-earth details) in my mind.

Below: Playwright Carol Polcovar and director David Gaard confer backstage.

The new steps are blessedly sturdy, serviceable, up-to-code, and each riser is actually the same height as the ones above and below it,which is a major improvement over their stumble-prone crumbly-concrete predecessors.

The bank on each side has been re-seeded and will, we've been assured, someday be green again.

I use the term "warped" in the most complimentary way possible, since GPK exposure at an impressionable age apparently generated cartoonists with appealingly perverse comedic outlooks as copiously in its day as did exposure to the Kurtzman-era Mad magazine a generation earlier.

If you want to see what the creative upshot has been for Jeaux, pay a visit to his Jeauxland website or watch him chat about the orphaned pirate spawns in his Peg-Leg Orphanage. But Jeaux's charming work is not really the topic of the day. Instead, let me clear something up about me and those Garbage Pail mutants spawned by Topps Chewing Gum.

In his first email Jeaux complimented me for being a card-carrying contributor to the GPK phenomenon. He is far from the first to do so, and I am not above basking occasionally in the reflected glory that comes with that history. But I really should put this matter into perspective once and for all.

My involvement in the GPK scene was truly marginal and brief. Other cool cartoonists (including my friend and fellow underground comix veteran Jay Lynch) also had a hand in the GPK series before it ended. They did themselves proud and we all had fun.

But that being said, the true glory for GPK illustrations should rightly and almost exclusively go to John Pound, whose brilliant paintings (as exemplified by the sample card on the left below) set the standard for the series and merit comparison to the hilarious work that Will Elder did with Kurtzman in their best collaborations.

This is not to denigrate my own drawings. They are perfectly good Howard Cruse drawings that I don't at all disown. I'm especially fond of the certificate border that I drew for these cards — inspired as it obviously is by the manic Kurtzman borders that wrapped around the first few issues of Mad after it metamorphosed from comic book to magazine.

But let's face it, I've never pretended to have the painting chops called for if you're going to play in John Pound's playground.

Still, I was happy to have the gig, which was the last of a string of cartooning assignments that came my way during the early days of my career, beginning shortly after I moved from Birmingham to New York City.

Maybe I'll talk about some of those other Topps jobs (including my stint drawing Bazooka Joe comic strips) in some future installment of this blog.

Now here we are on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. If ever there was a day for considered reflections on the state of things, this is it. But no. Cartooning deadlines call.

I hope soon to resume more regular posts, but for now let me offer a reprise of my essay called "Two Years, Two Wars, and One Dog Ago." I posted it on my web site on August 9, 2003, as that year's 9-11 anniversary approached. Sad to say, everything that was ominous about the George W. Bush presidency then has only grown more frightening since — and yet the country gave him four additional years to wreck the nation's Constitution by re-electing him in 2004.

Maybe. Depending on what really happened with those Ohio voting machines.

In the wake of 9/11, I was numbed by a mixture of grief for the victims and outrage at the whole human race for not having evolved beyond such savagery, I wrote back then. And I was anxious at the thought of what hay our politicians might be poised to make from the tragedy while a jolted citizenry was preoccupied with private fears. What a golden opportunity to use public anger for unsavory ends!

I would be proud of my prescience if a lot of other people had not figured out Bush's agenda with alarm just as urgent as mine by the time the Decider's administration was two years along. But America, ever vulnerable to swift-boating manipulation, let the steamroller roll on.

My 2003 essay is too long for a blog post, but if you'd like to see what I wrote in its entirety, just click on this link.

It has taken a compliant and largely conscienceless Republican-led Congress to allow things to go as far as they have already. Will America be any smarter at the polls this November than it was in 2004?

Time will tell.

The event was a big success (like, $15,405.33 got raised!!) and lotsa artists drew Wonder Woman in lotsa different ways. I myself drew inspiration for my drawing from the Charles Moulton version of the character who zipped about in glass airplanes during my childhood. I'm out of touch, I confess, with more recent incarnations. Indeed, I jumped off the Wonder Woman train way back in the late-'60s, when someone at DC Comics decided to dress the crimefighter from Paradise Island in a power pantsuit. I never looked back.

Not that there's anything wrong with being butch in a pantsuit. But that wasn't the Wonder Woman with whom I bonded at a formative age. I wasn't ready to go along with any slick fashion upgrades just because some editor at DC Comics had grown weary with pre-feminist retro. By that point I was preoccupied with underground comix anyway. Superheroics were no longer on my radar.

I was moved just now to check Wonder Woman's present-day web site, by the way. (The comic; not the tv show.) I see that the pantsuit look is long gone and that WW's patriotic stars and spangles have been restored. A positive nod to tradition, for sure, although the busty babe now carrying the banner, although stunningly drawn, doesn't quite capture the old ambience for me. The Wonder Woman I grew up with would never have bothered to maximize her cleavage while striking fear in the hearts of evildoers.

Maybe if I hadn't been a gay kid the presence or absence of cleavage would have carried more weight for me. But my head was in a different place. It was Batman who strummed my strings. Ah, to live the life Robin led and reside in a stately manor with a rich, buff, and handsome mentor like Bruce Wayne! Ah, to wear a yellow cape and textured green panties on the streets of Gotham City and not be embarrassed!

Still, Wonder Woman enjoyed a real if muted place in my gayboy heart. She wasn't a scarily alluring sexpot who made me feel inadequate like the girls then reaching puberty among my junior high classmates. And I appreciated the slight stiffness of the ink lines with which her comics were drawn in those early days. They reminded me of the inelegant but earnest strokes I had begun learning to render with the Rapidograph technical pen my father purchased for me once he saw that I was getting serious about my cartooning.

I can't claim that the rendition of Wonder Woman I contributed to Andy's auction is free of sexpot iconography, of course. That's my parodist side being compulsively impudent. But satire wasn't on my mind when I read Wonder Woman comics in my youth. I was a willing receptacle for their fantasy; it was as simple and as indelible as that.

Postcript: I was happy to learn this week that the high bidder for my Wonder Woman drawing in the Portland fundraiser was my cartooning colleague David Kelly. David, besides being a great cartoonist and a friend of mine, is the longtime co-editor with Robert Kirby of the Boy Trouble comics 'zine series. (Selections from that series have recently been collected in book form by Green Candy Press, I should mention in passing.)

Last Wednesday I bade a holiday farewell to the creative MCLA students who have gamely endured my cartooning tutelage for the last three months. They've been a good-humored, hard-working bunch and I will miss their weekly company.

Time will tell whether they'll look back on my Art 207 class as having been a worthwhile expenditure of their tuition money. I hope so. The fact that MCLA's Fine and Performing Arts Department invited me to teach the course at all is in stark contrast to the situation I confronted when I began my college years.

By now I've gotten used to the enlightened attitudes about cartooning fostered by specialized schools like Vermont's Center for Cartoon Studies, not to mention the School of Visual Arts in New York where I first taught at the college level, or the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida, where I spent several days as a guest artist a couple of years ago. If dedicated art schools aren't hip to changing times, who will be? But a cartooning course at a small state college in rural Massachusetts? It's downright refreshing!

And to be fair, in all likelihood the art department of today's Birmingham-Southern College, my own alma mater, has moved beyond rigidity by now. But the suspicion with which cartooning as an academic discipline was viewed back in 1962 was daunting. In fact, a claim that cartooning could be viewed as any kind of "discipline" at all would only draw hoots of derision.

I felt the sting of this prejudice myself while briefly an art major at Birmingham-Southern in the 1960s. A couple of my art teachers were open-minded about my enthusiasm of drawing funny pictures that talked in word balloons, but my relationship with the Art Department Chair was a tense one. The guy was a true believer in the supremacy of abstract expressionism. He had little use for young artists like me who turned to the funny pages for creative inspiration.

Representationalism was dead, he preached. Paint should be seen as mere paint, not a means for communicating pictures. True art was about shapes. Areas of color. Flat patterns. Textures. Cartoons were trivial decorations best suited for disposable cocktail napkins.

I became a Drama/Speech Major.

Fortunately, any desire BSC's head art honcho may have had to show me the error of my ways was a lost cause from the word go. He arrived in my own universe far too late, since I had become irretrievably infected by the cartooning bug long before entering college.

For the most part during my childhood I was forced to learn by trial and error, on my own. I pored over the newspaper comics pages and copied what I saw. I read comic books constantly and absorbed their lessons about story structure intuitively. Actual instruction by an expert was nowhere available.

True, I found helpful advice of a very basic kind in the few Walter T. Foster booklets that addressed the topic of cartooning, but the scope of these amateur-oriented manuals left me hungry for insights with a more professional perspective. My dad had spilled the beans about drawing pictures being a way that some grown-ups earned their livings. Seized instantly by a determination to join their ranks, I was a very impatient little nine-year-old!

Then, by accident, I learned of the existence of the Famous Artists Cartoon Course.

I recounted the circumstances surrounding that discovery in the inaugural installment of a column I wrote regularly for Comics Scene magazine a quarter-century ago. What follow is a portion of that column that describes how the FA Course found its way first into my consciousness and then into my life. (If you'd like to read the entire column — including its description of my visit to Milton Caniff's studio when I was 16 — you can find it elsewhere on this web site.)

Nicky and I first crossed paths as fellow participants (albeit from slightly different collegiate generations) in the Birmingham-Southern College Theatre. After years thereafter spent geographically separated and only barely in touch, we've recently found ourselves neighbors again here in the Berkshires. She and her husband Jason Brown are both blessed with too many talents to enumerate, but prominent among their present family enterprises is BMA Studios, under whose auspices audio books like their most recent offering, Henry James's The Aspern Papers, are lovingly produced out of their impressive basement sound studio in Monterey.

When I first met Nicky she was playing a winsome prostitute named Karen in a one-act play called "The Old Man Dies" that I had written while still an undergraduate. Brief aside: My most influential mentor, BSC's one-time Drama Department chairman Arnold Powell, once remarked in response to a couple of my scripts that student playwrights who have never come close to knowing an actual flesh-and-blood prostitute seem irresistibly driven to populate their plays with them. Point taken.

Anyway, my college days were behind me when Cheryl Thacker (another longtime friend from college, Cheryl has since distinguished herself as a professional lighting designer) chose to direct "The Old Man Dies" as her Director's Lab student project. Naturally, I returned from New York to see it the result.

My eyes mist up when I recall what a cluster of old friends joined forces to mount that little workshop production in 1969. Of course, since they were my friends and not yours, I won't demand that your eyes get similarly misty. But take my word for it, if you had known this crowd you'd be misting up right along with me.

Drawing Nicky's portrait was a perfect way to celebrate her re-emergence as part of my present life. And there's been an interesting sidebar to our catch-up conversations: I had somehow missed learning previously that Nicky's grandfather, the formidably named Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, was a founder of DC Comics, under whose Paradox Press imprint my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby was published. The family lore about Nicky's granddad reveals a larger-than-life historical personage whose exploits ranged well beyond the comics realm. A fascinating biography of this guy is obviously waiting to be written.

*****

I started this blog entry by referencing two portraits I've done lately, so I'll quickly share the second one with you before I go (see below). Its subject, Will Eisner, will be familiar to any of you who have arrived at this blog because of an interest in comics. Much written about and widely admired, Eisner was a giant of the sequential art medium who was still producing new and exciting works when death finally wrestled him away from his drawing board at the age of 87.

Will was a professional colleague with whom I chatted, talked shop, and occasionally argued (always amicably) at the comics cons and conferences where our paths crossed. When he passed away last year, I contributed the drawing below to an issue of Comic Book Artist magazine that was devoted to Eisner tributes.