Sue Hyde, a longtime activist, and Lisa Keen, a longtime writer about LGBT legal matters, are the authors respectively of Come Out and Win and Out Law, two books that, had they been available when I was young, might have inspired me to devote some of the time I wasted being consumed by adolescent depression doing some good in the world instead.

By way of contrast, what did I have to turn to for help in knowing how to feel about my sexual orientation (or my "sickness," as most authorities described it back then) at a tender age? David R. Rubin’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), a 1969 sex manual touted by mainstream reviewers as irreverently "modern" at the time of its publication. Naturally I turned to it for enlightenment, only to encounter its breathtakingly ignorant and homophobic chapter on homosexuality, which might well have sent me in search of a noose with which to dispatch myself had I not already come to know some real-world gay people by the time I read it and could thus see Rubin’s take for the bullshit it was.

Of course, ignorance about gays was pretty much to be expected from straight "experts" in 1969. To my shock, however, this vile tome was reissued in 1999 and can still be purchased by the unwary.

(If you find the book’s title irresistably catchy, for god’s sake catch the amusing Woody Allen movie of the same name instead of Rubin’s book. Content-wise, they’re not even kissing cousins.)

Excuse my side trip into Rubinland. Contemplating these new books from Beacon pushes some old buttons of mine by reminding me how much more humane a world awaits LGBT youngsters these days than was once the case, despite the best efforts of Rev. Fred ("God Hates Fags") Phelps and his ilk to keep intolerance alive.

Kids, thank your lucky stars that you’ve got authorial mentors like Hyde and Keen (not to mention Beacon’s Stonewall Award-winning series editor Michael Bronski), available to guide you safely through the thickets of society’s intractable antigay prejudice and show you how you can respond to it productively instead of fearfully.

HOWARD TO DAVID: Say no more, David. I’ll be happy to take you more slowly through the steps I took to achieve the effect in the image below.

—New York Times, April 24, 2008
Michael R. Gordon reporting

Quick thinking, George. Struggletime Presidents don’t get to shred the Constitution, ignore the balance of powers, and make hash of civil liberties the way that Wartime Presidents do.

Yawn.

(Just kidding. I love accolades!)

Dolmen Editorial has a lot to be proud of, apparently, since Jaume points out that its books won four other awards in the competition as well.

I’m not personally able to read any of the non-English versions of Stuck Rubber Baby, being embarrassingly monolingual except for the smattering of French I absorbed and then forgot four decades ago. Nor can I read any of the online commentary about the translations that may be tucked away on the Internet. (Google, bless its heart, struggles nobly to generate its automated translations upon request, but the results rarely inspire confidence, since their syntax tends to resemble sentences spoken by someone who is being repeatedly kicked in the head by a horse while translating.)

Evidence suggests, though, that SRB has been fortunate in its succession of translators. Diego Garcia clearly deserves credit for doing my novel proud with Dolmen’s Stuck Rubber Baby: Mundos Diferentes, since this is the third distinction garnered by the Dolmen edition. (It won a Comics Critics Award back in September and earned a 4+ rating at the comics blog La Cárcel de Papel.)

In France, Jean-Paul Jennequin was the translator I credit with copping a Pris de la critique for Un Monde de Différence at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2002. And I’m grateful to Andreas Knigge for the Luchs literary award that greeted his 1996 German translation Am Rande des Himmels, which was issued in a gorgeous oversized format by Carlsen Verlag.

And even though nobody sent word of any awards accrued by Enrico Salvini’s 2001 Italian translation Figlio di un Preservativo Bucato, a reviewer compared it to works by John Irving, and that that ain’t chopped liver! So here’s to you, too, Enrico!

During that period my day job was doing paste-ups (and, once in a blue moon, an unsigned advertising illustration) for Luckie & Forney, which was the Magic City’s largest ad agency at the time.

Young folk entering the field of print graphics today will most likely stare back blankly if you throw the term "doing paste-ups" at them. Once integral to the preparation of any publication reproduced by offset lithography rather than letterpress — oh, dear, I sense the need for more definitions circling in the air but I REFUSE to yield to it — physically pasting together the elements of printed pages has become an obsolete craft in our digital age. Suffice it to say that "pasting things up" was once an important part of publishing and it involved playing with swatches of paper that had wax or other sticky substances applied to their backsides and cutting bits and pieces of things together with sharp, pointy X-Acto knives that would impale themselves painfully in your foot if you accidentally knocked them off your drafting table.

Occasional foot-injuries aside, I enjoyed doing paste-up work because I could lose myself in the process of arranging photos and pictures and lining up headlines and columns of type pleasingly within a predetermined space while my mind drifted. It was like building model airplanes for a living. Days passed swiftly, and I enjoyed bantering with the other nut cases that had been corralled by the agency suits in the zoo we called an art department.

There was no need to give a damn about what the ads I was laying out contained in the way of information or allure. Caring about ad content is what art directors do, and that was a post that I fended off passionately whenever it was offered, since accepting such a promotion would have forced me to get creative about, say, making Birmingham Trust seem a sexier financial institution than its banking competitors. I preferred to quietly exercise my paste-up skills while hoarding my true creative energy for use in drawing underground comic books at home.

Every now and then I would be asked to draw ad illustrations or storyboards. Those endeavors called more of my real cartooning muscles into play than did paste-ups. Still, they asked far less of me than did the cosmic comic book fables I was writing and drawing at home. The words and ideas in advertisements were generated by account executives and art directors. They had nothing to do with "making woof, not warp" (to cite my absurdist Barefootz riff on my generation’s "Make love, not war" slogan), so I didn’t get emotionally involved.

A time finally came during my Birmingham paste-up days when my longtime dream of publishing a "solo" comic was realized with Barefootz Funnies #1. That where the Mark Martin connection comes in.

Mark, y’see, reminded me when we met last month that he had been a contributor to Southern Style, the long-gone Birmingham arts weekly then edited by one Ben Burford. Under Ben’s editorship, Southern Style did me the great favor of running a article and interview (written by David Orange, Jr. — are you out there anywhere, David?) about Barefootz Funnies when my comic was first hitting the head-shop comix racks in 1975.

Remembering how desperate I was for hometown acknowledgment back in 1975, I asked Mark to put me back in touch with his old pal and my one-time benefactor so I could re-express my gratitude for the career-boost (and morale-boost) Southern Style gave me three decades ago. And while I was waiting for Mark’s response, I Googled "Ben Burford" to see what I could learn about the guy’s present-day doings.

I discovered that he has been creating some mighty fine works of art, like the examples you can peruse at his "Burf" web site. Mark classifies Ben’s dazzling eruptions of color to me as "digitally-cobbled photographic giclee prints." It’s a term I’ve never heard before, but then I’m way out of the loop when it comes to today’s cooler ways of manipulating photography. (I feel smart just Photoshopping pimples off of a photographed face!)

I mentioned my personal aversion to advancing from paste-ups to art direction during my long-ago Luckie & Forney days. Ben’s temperament is different from mine, I found.

"Yeah, I’m senior art director and partner here at DavisDenny, and loving the absolute shit out of it. Being ADD and loving to do a hundred things at a time, it’s great to take Adderall and crank out art all day long. What could be better?"

Since my last post I’ve finished drawing Episode 14 of Mark the Art Guy, which will bring this Adobe-sponsored webcomic experiment to a close. There’s some "post-production" work still to do, like incorporating some minor revisions for a projected 16-page printed version of the series. If all goes as planned you’ll be able to pick up one of these comics handouts if you’re the sort who attends Macworld Expos and the other digital technology gatherings where Adobe tends to set up product booths. Also, I still have to draw cover art for this promotional funnybook.

After that I’ll be taking a breather from touting Adobe’s graphics software for pay.

Which doesn’t mean you won’t continue to hear words like Photoshop and Illustrator tripping off my tongue in this blog, since I was already using and sharing online tips about these tools in my site’s Cartoonists Corner long before anybody at Adobe Systems figured out that I existed. I can’t think of any reason why they won’t continue to crop up when I’m moved to talk shop with you in the future, since I continue to use them daily.

Mark and his imaginary sidekicks may be bidding me farewell, but plenty of other projects are already elbowing their way to the front of my brain pan to make sure I don’t actually get to, like, relax and zone out this summer in the wake of my Art Guy matathon.

(1) I’ve agreed to lead a workshop in comics creation for eleventh-graders at BArT. Now I can feel you becoming confused, so let me explain. The BaRT of which I speak is not San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. My mime performances on subway platforms have been bringing in so few coins that I’ve retired that branch of my art career. No, in this case BArT refers acronymically to the Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter Public School, a cool institution of learning located in nearby Adams, MA, a town that North Adams is located, well, north of. For a couple of hours most schoolday afternoons over a two-week stretch in late-May and early-June I’ll be sharing the secret joys of comics creation with members of the iPod generation. That’ll take some advance preparation, those BArT juniors being a savvy group o’ young’uns.

(2) Collegiately speaking, meanwhile, should they achieve their minimum enrollment I’ll have two, instead of this year’s one, cartooning-related courses to teach at MCLA during the school’s 2007-08 school year. The Spring ‘08 follow-up to the cartooning course I introduced last fall will be created from scratch, so even though it’s scheduled for launch many months from now, it has already begun siphoning off a portion of my mind’s mulling reserves. After all, you can only crib so many ideas from Scott McCloud….

(3) I have long-promised preliminary sketches to get done for a projected children’s book that, if it flies, will be co-authored by my longtime pals Andrew Guerdat and Michele Gendelman. The Michele half of this creative husband-and-wife team, by the way, has recently co-authored (with Ilene Graff and Donna Rosenstein) a fresh take on child-rearing "that won’t make you feel like a complete idiot the way those other parenting books do." Just out from HarperCollins, it’s called What The Other Mothers Know. (Be on the lookout for Michele if her book tour through Chicago, New York, L.A. and Costa Mesa swings your way.)

(4) I still owe Doc Radin some drawings that he commissioned (and has been awaiting most patiently) for his revamped Drury Drama Team web site, my recently completed logo design being only the first step in Doc’s master plan for world conquest and dental supremacy.

(5) Then there’s that new novel I’m itching to get started on and the play I want to write. And oh, yes, the back yard grass is threatening to need mowing again.

You get the idea.

Case in point: two weeks ago Eddie and I drove down Route 116 under a gorgeous, clear sky to join a bunch of Pioneer Valley cartoonists who were converging at ABC, an hospitable tavern in Amherst whose name is an an acronym for Amherst Brewing Company. Did I tell you about it the morning after? Nope. I was too busy getting Episode 13 of Mark the Art Guy ready for Adobe.

But better late than never. Here’s a montage I cobbled together from snapshots that Eddie took.

Yes, it turns out that south Berkshire County and its environs are crawling with cartoonists. And what do cartoonists talk about when they converge and converse?

Mostly things that for the most part are of no interest at all to non-cartoonists, which is why I won’t burden all of you blog readers with details of the evening’s repartee.

I had fun though, and it was great to spend time once again with my underground comix pal and publisher Denis Kitchen, who has begun introducing himself as "Alexa Kitchen’s dad" now that his 9-year-old author-daughter has begun getting more inches in the national press than he or I do.

Another highlight for me was finally getting to meet Mark Martin, a talented cartooning colleague with whose name the alert comics fans among you will already be familiar. I’ve long admired Mark’s hyper-kinetic drawings from afar and you’d think that we would have met face-to-face before now, given that we both hail from Birmingham, Alabama. In fact, Mark was a contributor to Southern Style, a Birimingham arts magazine that published an article about my first issue of Barefootz Funnies when it came out in 1975. (More on that in a separate blog entry to come.)

But despite running in similar circles back then and even though both of us have been making ourselves conspicuous in the alternative comics field ever since, it’s taken us forty years to lay eyes on each other.

Naturally, once under the same tavern roof we did what Birmingham expatriates must always do before moving on to substantive topics: we snickered about that bare butt on the statue of Vulcan that has been mooning the suburb of Homewood from its Red Mountain pedestal for as long as anyone in Mark’s and my age range can remember.