Getting Political
It was such fun publishing my first comic book that I was soon itching to do it again. In 1976 Denis and I agreed that we would co-publish a second issue of Barefootz Funnies under the same terms as the first.

Barefootz #2 gave me a chance to follow through on my plan, formed early in the decade, to eventually reveal that Barefootz's artist pal Headrack was gay. This would be my contribution to the movement toward gay visibility that had been gaining steam since the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, to which I had been a serendipitous witness. (See My Night At the Stonewall in the Comics Vault.)

Unexpectedly volatile pent-up feelings came to the surface while I was drawing "Gravy on Gay." When a friend read it she said, "I've never seen you do such an angry strip!"

That pleased me because drawing an "angry" strip felt more "underground" than I had felt before. It ran counter to Barefootz's reputation as being too innocuous to be part of the comix movement. But I also felt uncomfortable about the strip's shift in tone away from more "cosmic" humor. I began suspecting that Barefootz's mock-cuddly surface style might grow ever more limiting if I took its content further toward social grittiness.

"Gravy on Gay" was an adrenalizing step forward for me as an artist and as a gay man, but in retrospect I can't say that, as a work of art, it's all that comfortable in its skin.