When Eddie and I woke up this morning, Eddie said, "Say, it’s our fourth wedding anniversary, isn’t it?"

"Oh, yeah, it sure is," I said, offering him a sleepy kiss. "Happy anniversary!"

And we proceeded with our morning.

I know that sounds pretty unromantic. Eddie and I do feel nice about being legally married in the first state where that has become possible. We should be able to be married. It’s an equal justice issue.

The fact is, though, that Eddie and I are very clear on when our real anniversary is, and it’s not July 25, no matter how heartfelt a ceremony of re-commitment we had before a gathering of our family and friends on that day four years ago. Like most long-term gay and lesbian couples who have exchanged marriage vows in Massachusetts, Canada, and now California since same-sex marriages became legal in those places, Eddie and I have a strong sense of dual anniversaries. And for us, the one to take special note of will come around next April 15, when we will have been together thirty years.

Such thoughts do send one spiraling back through time to the days when our relationship was new. So today I’ll share with you a photograph from Eddie’s and my first year, when we attended the very first national March of Washington for gay and lesbian rights.

It was exciting—but also a true test of endurance, as is suggested in a sketch I later drew based on that photo in which you can see what we were thinking when that photo was taken.

There have been three LGBT Marches on Washington since that first one in 1979, and the organizers learned an important lesson from that first one. That lesson was: if you’re going to hold a massive, all-day outdoor political demonstration, go for warm weather. And for God’s sake, don’t do it on a rainy, overcast day in October when frostbite begins competing with bladder overload for the attention of participants who would rather be thinking about loftier matters.

Such as what seemed an almost impossible dream in 1979: that someday the gays sloshing through the icy puddles on that field would no longer be frozen out of a major social institution that heterosexuals have been taking for granted for as long as anyone can remember.

Bumping into Arizona author Steve Ringgenberg recently in deepest Facebookland after decades of zero contact with him took me back to 1984. That’s when Steve sat me down for the long interview that ultimately appeared in issue 111 (September 1986) of the Comics Journal.

Being a Flash Gordon fan, Steve invited me once our interview was finished to commit my personal take on the classic comic-strip space-opera hero to paper, which is how the spoof above (which ended up running in TCJ as part of my interview) came into being.

Bite-Sized Morsels

Eddie thinks I snore weirdly in a worrisome way, so I spent a night in Pittsfield this week getting checked out for sleep apnea. I won’t know what the story is for a while, since there are all kinds of charts and data to be analyzed, not to mention night-vision videos of me tossing back and forth with wires attached to various parts of my body like spaghetti that’s wrapped around the prongs of a fork. All in all, it’s not as bad a way as you might think to catch forty winks.

Besides that, I began applying myself seriously this week both to editing some submissions that have come in for issue #2 of the North County Perp and to chipping away at a comic strip of my own that I plan to include.

Tying Up the Line

Back in the ’90s, when Eddie and I lived in Jackson Heights, it took endless agitation to get our building management to install the wiring necessary for DSL connections on our phone lines. Until that was accomplished, none of the tenants who weren’t cable TV subscribers could access the Internet while their apartment mates were using the telephone.

I did this drawing for a flier agitating against this blatant injustice.

What exactly is
going on here?

This experiment in watercolor and felt tip marker adorability dates back to my college days, as best I can recall. It’s a stylistic experiment that I clearly didn’t pursue.

Why is the little girl holding her dress aloft, and is she wearing panties? This is an uncomfortable line of inquiry best left unpursued, I think.

Bad New for Auto-Workers

Robots seem to be ruling in this Detroit nightmare. My best guess is that it’s an illustration for a Starlog piece, but I can’t swear to it.

I notice that two whole blogless weeks have passed in HowardCruseLand since my last post. This gap in updates on my life must surely have distressed you.

What can I say? Sometimes daily life is just too scattered to sum up easily. Still, rather than leave you any longer in the lurch, maybe I’ll take the Twitter approach today and feed you some undigested tidbits about my recent endeavors so you won’t lose faith that I’m still among the living.

Preparing for Spain

With a free trip to Spain comes great responsibility. Being a guest at the upcoming Vinetas Desde O Atlántico Comic Con in A Coruña this August means, in part, having forty examples of my comic strip art placed on display while the convention is underway, which means I’ve been (a) sifting through my numerous flat file drawers; (b) selecting which pieces from the last thirty years of my professional life will be exhibited; (c) preparing lists of said selected pieces for the insurers and descriptions of them for the printed catalog; and (d) getting ready to pack them all up to be shipped overseas. Meanwhile, Eddie and I have been corresponding with friends in Spain and southern France whom we hope to visit and working out which roads we’ll need to travel in order to do so.

Drawing

On my drawing table this week has been a pen-and-ink portrait of the legendary Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founding father of DC Comics, that will be used as packaging art for an audio-book recording of one of the man’s short stories, which is being released on CD by BMA Audio in anticipation of an appearance by the Major’s granddaughter (and my longtime friend) Nicky Hearon at this summer’s Comic-Con International in San Diego.

More Exhibits on the Horizon

My artwork will be popping up in three different North Adams venues this fall, which means that selections have to be made and drawings have to be mounted for display. Members of the Fine and Performing Arts faculty at MCLA will be mounting a group show in September at Gallery 51 on Main Street (for that I think I’ll put the original artwork for Why Are we Losing The War on Art? on the walls); I’ll be mounting my own separate exhibit for this year’s North Adams Open Studios in October; and some yet-to-be-selected pieces of mine will be included in a month-long show called What’s So Funny, opening on September 5 at the Eclipse Mill Gallery under the curator-ship of Charles Giuliano of Berkshire Fine Arts. Like the exhibit in Spain, these involve preparations that don’t translate easily into interesting blog-prose. Hence my recent silence online.

Creating Comics

I’ve got new two comics stories germinating: one for the North County Perp and the other for, well, somewhere yet to be determined. What sort of stories? That kind of info I don’t blog about while the works are still percolating! Hence my additional silence.

Walk Hard

When the need for visual distraction has arisen during this blogless stretch, I’ve been able to contemplate the wanton destruction (at Eddie’s and my behest) of our front walkways, whose replacement has become unavoidable with the passing of years thanks to the cracks brought on by the mountain winters that have made our existing concrete walks ever more hazardous to life and limb.

Below: Ray Carpenter (right insert immediately below) and Joe Champney (back to camera in bottom picture) of Champney Masonry clear away concrete rubble and hoist attractive new bluestone panels up from street level for installation.