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Writers and cartoonists talk about
Stuck Rubber Baby Stuck Rubber Baby is cut-to-the-bones honesty. It's about people who are bonded by their differences. It's about the acceptance and compassionate understanding that only exists between the greatest of friends. This novel, like an electro-surge, cuts and heals at the same time. I didn't want it to end.
Stuck Rubber Baby is a remarkable achievement, a story so richly drawn -- in both senses of the word -- that it will pull you, headlong, into a bottomless world of hopes, fears, dreams, and the all-too-real prejudice witnessed by its author. It may be fiction, but every frame of Howard Cruse's epic graphic novel rings unforgettably true. Highly recommended.
In this tale that we might call Maus meets Giovanni's Room, Howard Cruse takes graphic storytelling to a new level. Stuck Rubber Baby distinguishes itself by its honesty, maturity, self- criticism of its own self-pity, in short by being complex as well as complicated. It's at least as sad as it is funny, while grappling with the largest themes in America: Race, sex, the South, the whole vexed question of how and why we love those we love (and how we fail them). In all these ways, Stuck Rubber Baby reads more like a novel than any other graphic story I've ever read.
In this book, Howard Cruse explores the structures of racism and homophobia with a complexity that resonates in his astonishingly intricate drawings. Reading Stuck Rubber Baby is an acutely sensuous experience, from its powerful visuals to the virtually audible jazz lyrics and freedom songs that weave in and out of the narrative. With unflinching honesty and meticulous craft, Cruse brings the confusion and exhilaration of social upheaval to vivid life.
Harvey Pekar in the Chicago Tribune: Barren of superheroes or talking animals, Stuck Rubber Baby certainly isn't standard comic book fare. The people most likely to enjoy the book will be enthusiasts of good contemporary fiction, although most of them are unused to shopping for comics. But those who do seek out Stuck Rubber Baby are in for an edifying experience.
What a difference a location makes! I was around in those very early 60s that Howard Cruse so beautifully delineates in Stuck Rubber Baby, but my 60s and his were worlds apart. Marching for civil rights, attending vigils for slain civil rights workers, was easy in the Los Angeles of 1963. No police dogs tore at marchers, no fire hoses washed us out. Our liberal churches were in no danger from bombs, there was no Klan to fear. But Howard's visual epic brought home to me a South I'd never experienced, made me realize the reality of what we marched for in safe Southern California. [Stuck Rubber Baby is] a real novel that just happens to be told in pictures!...Whether they are loosely based on his own memories or those of friends, or even taken from the collective memory of the South in the early 60s, the cast of Stuck Rubber Baby is living, breathing flesh and blood. --
Stuck Rubber Baby is the new Comic For Folks Who Never Touch The Stuff! Howard Cruse is the coolest cartoonist ever! This book rivals To Kill A Mockingbird! If James Baldwin could crosshatch, he'd have done Stuck Rubber Baby!
Some of the reviews The next time you encounter a troubled gay teenager (or anyone troubled about sexual orientation, for that matter), thrust into his or her hands a copy of Howard Cruse's comic book novel, Stuck Rubber Baby. For many, the '60s civil rights movement marched in step with the search for self. Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby shows how heavy those steps sometimes were. [Stuck Rubber Baby] is bravura storytelling...made specific, pungent, and singular by its setting in the Movement-era South. --Artforum International A strange and wonderful graphic coming-of-age novel. [Cruse is] a natural-born storyteller, gracefully juggling more than a dozen major characters and a rich, intricate plot that spans years, with a command of the visual vocabulary and capabilities of comics that his earlier work has only hinted at. --College Music Journal [Cruse's] revisionist history provides both an activist blast from the past as well as a fresh artistic take on the intersection of sex and society. Maus, move over; as a great graphic novel, you've met for match. Told in the tradition of the Southern Gothic imagination, [Stuck Rubber Baby] is at heart deeply spiritual and, like the work of Flannery O'Connor, approaches its subject with dark humor and compassion, finding the deepest meaning -- even political and personal destiny -- in the details of ordinary life. [Stuck Rubber Baby] is Americana on a par with William Faulkner and Horton Foote, and it packs the kind of epic sweep and historical resonance that Forest Gump can only wish it possessed. PARADOX PRESS SOFTCOVER ISBN 1-56389-255-3 Wanna buy a signed copy of Stuck Rubber Baby |
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