The Juicy Mother "queer comix" anthology series is the brainchild and pet project of cartoonist Jennifer Camper, who put together the first installment a year ago and is now back with more, thanks to Manic D Press, who stepped into the breach when the first volume’s publisher was forced to scale back its commitments.

With the new book hitting bookstores now, it’s time to party! And as I’ve learned from experience there’s nobody more fun to party with than Ms. Camper, whose been a best buddy of mine since her comic strip "She’s My Two-Timin’ Truck-Drivin’ Mama" popped over the proverbial transom while I was putting together the second issue of Gay Comix in 1980.

So it you’re in or near the Big Apple on Saturday the 13th, hie thee downtown to Bluestockings (172 Allen Street) so you can meet a bunch of the Juicy Mother contributors. Not all of them can be there, of course, but some who will reportedly be making the scene are Diane DiMassa, Ivan Velez, Jr., Joan Hilty, Victor Hodge, David Hooper, Fly, Michael Fahy, Katie Fricas, and Chitra Ganesh.

Meanwhile, if you pick up the book you can also spend quality time with comics by the other JM cartoonists who, like me, can’t make it to Bluestockings this weekend (or if they can, are keeping it a secret so they can make a splashier entrance). They are Alison Bechdel, Tristan Cowen, Jamaica Dyer, Leanne Franson, Justin Hall, G. B. Jones, David Kelly, Robert Kirby, Carrie McNinch, Erika Moen, Sara Rojo Pérez, Karen Platt, Carlo Quispe, Lawrence Schimel, Ariel Schrag, Serpilla, Scott Treleaven, Robert Triptow, and Stephen Winter.

The are more Juicy Mother 2 events to come in other cities, by the way, so mark your calendars if you’re gonna be in Boston on November 4 (4 PM at the Center for New Words) or in Philadelphia on December 1 (at Robin’s Bookstore; check locally for the exact time). I can’t make it to the Philly signing but expect to be at the Boston one (along with Jen and Dianne).

Specifically, I see that my pal and cartooning colleague Mikhaela Reid, whose political cartoons have recently been collected in book form under the title Attack of the 50-ft. Mikhaela, is making a public appearance in Cambridge tonight (that’s September 28) in the company of her husband and fellow ‘tooner Masheka Wood.

Be prepared to be blinded by Mikhaela’s dazzling red hair as well as her dazzling intellect. (I haven’t yet met Masheka, but I’m sure he’s no slouch when it comes to hair color and intellect himself.)

And now to explain what Books In My Bookcase is all about.

The Friendly Impulse

Many of my friends are, like me, authors. Periodically they publish new books (usually with far greater frequency than I do), and when that happens my impulse is to do what I can to help make the reading public aware of their newborn offspring.

Ignoring the fact that my blog has significantly less clout when it comes to spotlighting new literary works than does, say, Oprah’s Book Club, I choose to behave as if a mention of the book in this space can make a small difference in a work’s commercial fate.

Ideally I would prefer to swing into action soon enough after a new book’s debut to contribute to its initial marketing push (maybe even provide a quotable blurb when my admiration for the book inspires me to compose blurb-level verbiage). Unfortunately, I have such difficulty finding time to simply write blog posts, much less digest entire books, that I inevitably fall behind the marketing curve when I manage to write anything at all. This is a source of great chagrin to me and I shudder to think how many friends I’ve let down over the years by failing to step up to the plate fast enough to conceivably be of some help.

In the past, of course, my uselessness as a volunteer publicist has been aggravated by the fact that I have lacked access to a publication that was itching to help me get the word out about anything, be it books or politics. But now I have my own blog, so what’s to stop me from doing what I can, even if it’s done tardily, to help the world know about what my talented friends are up to? Nothing. So there!

The Compulsion

Whenever I visit someone’s house, be they friend or foe, I can’t stop myself from drifting innocently toward any available bookcase. Having strategically positioned myself, I will stand and chat as if no ulterior motive were at play until my host leaves the room to fetch a beverage for me or see if an entree needs to be plucked from its burner. Once the coast is clear, I go into bookshelf-scanning mode.

I can’t help it. I like seeing what other people choose to stock their personal libraries with.

(By way of reassurance to any of my friends who are becoming alarmed at this point, let me add that there are limits to my nosiness. I would never, for example, go furtively burrowing in bedroom sidetables or under mattresses to see what the household’s preferred varieties of porn are. Your secrets in that arena are safe.)

But to return to a more elevated plane, I suspect that I’m not the only bookcase snoop running loose. So as a service to readers of this blog who share such proclivities, I’ve decided that I will occasionally pluck volumes randomly from my own bookcases and share a remark or two about them with you. Some of these will be books I’ve recently acquired; others will have followed me since my high school days. Some will be ragged; some pristine. Some I have kept because I actively cherish them; some are just too weird or impossibly bad to throw away.

Some of you will find this kind of indulgence entertaining. If enough of you beg me to stop, I will.

Illustrating Steve’s post is his copy of Wendel on the Rebound, an early compilation of strips from the series that was published in 1989 by St. Martin’s Press. Unfortunately, any of Steve’s readers who are inspired enough by his generous comments about my work to try and track down that particular book will have to haunt dusty used book racks (like this online one), since it and its predecessor (Wendel, Gay Presses of New York) have been out of print for a dozen years now.

I’m happy to report, though, that everything that was first collected in Wendel, Wendel on the Rebound, and Kitchen Sink’s 1990 Wendel Comix has subsequently been reprinted in Olmstead Press’s 2001 omnibus collection Wendel All Together, which can still be purchased online and (very) occasionally even at bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Besides assembling the entire Wendel series from beginning to end, the latter collection comes (to adopt DVD-Speak for a moment) with "Special Features" and — as Wolf Blitzer enjoys saying on CNN — "much, much more!"

Even more gratifyingly, rather than sitting quitely in Ithica pondering his comics in solitude, Stephen shares his observations regularly in his blog Attempts (which I’ve just added to my permanent blogroll because, well, it’s so reliably interesting).

Anyway, this Thursday Stephen chose to expend more than 4,000 words describing in incredible detail how a single page from my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby works. Here’s a direct link to his analysis.

Furthermore, when you visit Stephen’s blog you’ll find that this is but a single installment of a massive project that’s been underway since March. It’s called "100 Great Pages." and so far Stephen has given the Frug treatment to pages by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick, Robert Crumb, and other similarly distinguished creators. And many more installments are clearly in the pipeline since, y’know, his take on page 131 of Stuck Rubber Baby is only #11 in the series! (Stephen invites his readers to nominate their own favorite pages, by the way.)

A final note: This isn’t the first time that Stephen has cast an eye on SRB in his blog, I’ll mention in all immodesty. Check out his November 28 entry for a lengthy description of his experience teaching my graphic novel in the classroom, or my own December blog post describing his blog post. And for any of you who’re scratching your heads thinking, "What the fuck is a Stuck Rubber Baby, anyway?" I’ve got a whole section of my web site devoted to the book.

Yes, Amazon.com carries it, in case you’re wondering….

Or "in romance." Or at least horny.

Well, whichever term applies, they are all (along with many other similarly hormone-driven youths who are depicted by assorted artists in a range of fascinating drawing styles) sharing space now in a brand-new, full-color, 368-page anthology from Tim Fish’s Poison Press called Young Bottoms in Love.

Many writers and cartoonists had a hand in YBIL’s successive tales during its online run, but the gay romance comics series as a whole was the brainchild of cartoonist/writer/editor Tim Fish. And fittingly, Tim’s own keenly crafted comics dominate the book’s aesthetic landscape. He drew the book’s cover art (shown below, along with one of Tim’s cute-guy-just-popping-out-of-the-shower drawings) and he either wrote, drew, or was the sole creator of many stories within it.

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.

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.

Arthur didn’t yet exist, of course, when I first met Martha and John at a Cartoonists Guild gathering a year or so after my 1977 move to New York. They were then co-editors of a magazine called Comedy, a publication that, alas, didn’t last remotely as long as it deserved to.

Martha, John, Eddie and I quickly discovered that we were on similar wave lengths and a friendship was born. As for Arthur’s emergence, I fondly remember the phone conversation during which Martha informed me than a new family member was in the pipeline.

"I’m pregnant!" she announced.

"That’s great!" I enthused.

"Glad you like it," she replied. "You can babysit."

As you can see, I’ve had several decades to observe the Tebbel-Thomases household in action. John is a writer who knows more than I will ever know about the history of animation, and Arthur in young adulthood is demonstrating that his parents’ language skills have been effectively passed along by both nature and nurture.

Friendship and collegiality aside, It’s Martha who has had the most concrete impact on my own career. She was well-positioned to do so, being the publicity chief at DC Comics at a critical juncture.

And what a whiz she was at communicating her own enthusiasms to the media. I will always count as one of her signal achievements her success at charming New York Newsday into devoting its complete third page to full-color coverage of the "Death of Superman." That was quite a triumph for me to come upon while page-flipping over my morning coffee. I mean, Newsday was no rinky-dink publication. Bill Moyers once edited it, for God’s sake!

Supe didn’t stay dead, of course (do they ever, these planet-hopping men of steel?), but for a few shining moments, thanks to this and similar coups across the mainstream media landscape, Americans who had scarely noticed the comics shops sprouting among them were suddenly contemplating the uncontemplatable about a fictional being they didn’t even realize they still gave a damn about. Some even bought a copy of the comic book under discussion. Could it really be "true"? Could a superbeing croak?

Superman dead was a seller. I give Martha points for making sure the world knew to buy it.

Martha was also the mole at DC Comics who in 1990 planted a fateful, (if thoroughly counter-intuitive at the time) notion in my mind. Knowing that I was at loose ends creatively with the run of my comic strip Wendel having drawn to a close at The Advocate, Martha suggested, "Why don’t you think about doing a graphic novel for DC’s new experimental imprint Piranha Press?"

Her suggestion led me to compose a book proposal about a self-absorbed gay guy coming of age down south during the civil rights era (I can’t imagine where that idea came from) for submission to Mark Nevelow, who was then the guiding editorial force at Piranha (which later became Paradox Press, but that’s another story). It took months, but my proposal eventually led to a signed contract, after which a certain fringe cartoonist from the underground comix world found himself living on DC’s money while Stuck Rubber Baby slowly wrestled its way onto paper.

It took me years to complete my graphic novel (click here if you wish to immerse yourself in the sordid details), but Martha didn’t wait until publication date was near to begin building buzz at every opportunity. "Howie is working on a graphic novel that’s going to blow you away," was her frequent remark at social gatherings even as half the book still remained to be drawn. And if you consult SRB’s afterword you’ll see that Martha and John were among the Cruse loyalists who came to my novel’s rescue when it looked in danger of being aborted by personal bankruptcy, providing emergency funding by buying original SRB art sight unseen (and often not yet drawn).

Martha also pointed me toward Prometheus Books when I was hunting for a publisher for The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Again, her intuition bore fruit. Martha and John are not mere comics wonks, I should add. Their political passions always on target, they were quick to join the ranks of Eddie’s and my straight allies at gay pride marches and Eddie enjoyed their vigorous support when he ran for the New York State Senate in 1998.

Martha left DC a while back and the comics industry was poorer for the loss of her energetic advocacy. But now she is applying her skills to the online branch of the medium, having signed on as the Director of Corporate Communications for the aforementioned ComicMix, a new web site whose launch coincided with this year’s New York Comic Con. The site, edited by mainstream comics veteran Mike Gold, is now funneling a steady flood of comics-related news and commentary into comic fandom’s insatiable cyber-maw.

Martha herself will write occasional columns for the site (see her first "Ain’t I A Woman" entry), and I discovered while browsing that Arthur Tebbel is going to be chipping in occasionally with columns of his own (see "X-Men strand Gen Y"). Will Arthur’s dad John also join the ranks of ComixMix commentators? Only the Shadow knows.