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Theatrics on Main Street

Monday, February 8th, 2010

There’s Something Magical…

…about an empty stage that’s going to have a play on it soon. Especially when you’re one of the actors who’s going to be performing in the play.

The play I’m going to be acting in is a short but diverting absurdist piece called "We Appear To Have Company" — one of several one-act plays that will comprise this year’s Second Annual Short Play Festival, the showcase for new work that’s produced yearly by Main Street Stage (57 Main Street), one of our ace community theatre companies here in North Adams.

Below: Me (at left) standing with my fellow cast members Andrew Davis (also standing) and Jackie DeGiorgis (left, seated) and the play’s director, Sarah Rae Brown (on the right, seated)

Performances will take place on Friday and Saturday, March 5 & 6, and again the next weekend on March 12 & 13. I’ll provide more details as the dates get closer, or you can keep your eye on the Main Street Stage web site and Facebook page.

Say good-bye to my Benjamin Franklin hair-do, by the way. It’ll be hitting the barber shop floor soon, since it doesn’t quite gibe with my character’s station in life.

Gonna Be Near Amherst, MA, on March 2?

Then drop by Room 227 of Herter Hall at 4 PM on the UMass campus there, where I’ll be on a panel about graphic novels along with underground comix veteran Gary Hallgren, whom I would definitely travel miles to see even if I wasn’t going to be sitting next to him on the stage.

It’s part of a weeklong celebration of the life and works of the late comic book legend and graphic novel pioneer Will Eisner. Eisner saw the literary potential of comics for adult storytelling at a time when most of the world dismissed them as disposable pulp for children.

Above: An illustration I drew for the 6th issue of Comic Book Artist, which was devoted to commemorating Will Eisner

For that reason (as well as for the bounty of straightforward pleasures Eisner provided with his many books and comics), a generation of comics creators have viewed him as a major mentor and inspiration

Assistance from Overseas

My pal and fellow blogger from faraway Toulouse, François Peneaud, sprang into action when he read of the troubles I’ve been having with typography since I began composing my blog posts with Adobe Dreamweaver instead of GoLive. Thanks to François’s help, all seems to have been resolved for now. Click here if you need to be reminded what I’m talking about.

Posted in Housekeeping, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | No Comments »

From Headrack to Clawboy

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Tired of having to depend on RSS feeds to know when I’ve updated this blog? Just email me and say so to get added to the list of folks who get notified by me whenever I add a blog post—or you can forego my personal involvement by filling in the "Subscribe to Email Updates" field that’s provided by WordPress.
Hey, here’s Stuff of Mine
That You Can Buy!

…and click here to visit my
Cruse Goodies merchandise shop

Since he founded the blog in March of this year, Larry has been busily keeping us LGBT residents of the Bay State’s non-Boston end apprised of everything a culturally aware gay person in our area needs to know, reminding us along the way that, despite the lesser population density here in the Massachusetts mountains, our segment of the human community is holding its own as a vital part of the local mix.

Larry also writes regularly about the regional art scene for the Berkshire Fine Arts web site, by the way. Many thanks for spotlighting From Headrack to Claude, Larry.

Adapting Wendel For Slideshows

Way back in 1983 I began presenting slideshows featuring my comics and career history before interested audiences in various cities. This was way before advancing technology allowed me to transition from presentations using Kodak’s clunky old carousel slide projectors to the more versatile, digitally empowered Powerpoint software I use today. (I wrote at some length three years ago about my felicitous switch from Kodak to Powerpoint in a 4-part series of blog entries called "Moving On From Ker-Chunk".)

Things are different in the digital era. Transitions between images can be seamlessly fluid and it costs nothing to prepare almost-but-not-quite-identical images using Adobe Photoshop. The practical effect of this is that balloons only appear when I’m damned well ready for them to appear, as simulated in the Flash animation below. (If you can’t view the image below, by the way, it means you need to download the newest version of Flash Player from Adobe.com. Don’t worry; it’s a free download.)

Above: Presenting my slideshow for a London audience in 1990.

I’m mentioning my slideshow sideline here in an effort to tell you a little bit about what’s occupying my time these days. Other, perhaps more interesting projects are also afoot, it’s true; but these are too unformed and tentative to talk about, yet my need for blog fodder is unending. Fortunately, my preparation of new slideshow images requires no veil of secrecy.

Invitations to present my slideshows have tended to be extended of late by educational institutions (Southern Connecticut State University and Ocean County College hosted me most recently, you may recall), so my slideshows have taken the form of illustrated lectures, usually featuring background info about Stuck Rubber Baby’s creation. But in earlier times my shows were created primarily to entertain (and, of course, to hawk my books), and to that end they featured adaptations of my existing comic book stories, with me reading aloud the contents of balloons contained in a succession of individual panels.

A down side of the old Kodak mode was that (a) each image I created cost money to photograph, which ruled out the willy-nilly use of subtle variations; and (b) an obtrusive moment of blankness accompanied each change of images as the slide projector plucked one physical slide from its position in front of the lens and deposited a new one into that slot; which made any kind of smooth transition impossible.

Among the practical effects of these limitations was that, when a comic strip panel projected on the screen contained several word balloons (as in the one shown below), I had no way of preventing my audience from jumping ahead of me while I was reading. This offended my need for dramatic control.

Back in 1986, as I prepared to give my slideshow at A Different Light bookstore in Los Angeles (which was shuttered, sad to say, earlier this year), a Wendel enthusiast in the front row held aloft an adorable kitten dressed in a superhero cape. She and her partner had named the kitten "Clawboy," she told me, in honor of the feline sidekick of "Branman," who was little Farley Chalmers’ superhero alter-ego in my Wendel series. (Click here to read Clawboy’s 1983 debut episode.)

The women gave me Clawboy’s cape to take home with me. (Understandably, I suppose, they did not give me the kitten as well.) That cape remains a valued memento that I continue to keep near at hand in my workspace.

Below: Clawboy’s cape. All it needs is a kitten.

It may look simple, but no small amount of work is required to adapt comic strip panels in this way. So if you want to visualize what I’m doing in odd moments when I’m not working on new projects or partying at one of North Adams’s glittery discos (yuk yuk!), imagine me hunkered down in front of my iMac adapting a sequence of ten pages from Wendel All Together for Powerpoint, panel by panel.

Sidebar: A Favorite Slideshow Incident

My new book was honored with a generous write-up in the December 10 installment of Larry Murray’s Gay in the Berkshires blog.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »

Here We Go Again!

Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Above: A pre-winter preview of coming attractions. Sigh.

My Dr. Seuss Letters of Note

An unexpected side benefit arising from the posting in my last blog entry of more correspondence between the late, great Theodor Seuss Geisel and myself was the discovery of a great blog called Letters of Note, whose editor, Shaun Usher, wrote from his web perch in the UK to ask if he could reproduce the letters that Dr. Seuss sent to me in his December 4 installment.

Regular readers of this blog have already had a look at my treasured Dr. Seuss letters. But those of you who wander further afield in Usher’s blog will most likely find it as dangerously addictive as I have, what with its scanned letter composed by the 1923 version of Walt Disney, a disturbing eight-page-long combination j’accuse and cri de coeur from the distressed father of Brian Wilson to his Beach Boy son, and at least two letters from J. D. Salinger (one concerning the inappropriateness of Catcher in the Rye for film; the other a courteously withering response to a young aspiring writer with a typewriter-ribbon deficiency).

Detroit’s Linocut Whiz

"Those silly boys, breaking their backs shoveling snow out there!" thinks Lulu. "Don’t they know that if they just sit by the window looking beautiful like I’m doing, somebody will go outside and do it for them?"

Last week Eddie and I received this year’s round of holiday cards from my pal from Detroit John Benson, whose beautifully crafted linoleum-cut prints have been adding to the atmospheric majesty of Michigan’s Renaissance Festivals for years and whose artistic contributions to AIDS-related causes have saluted AIDS activists and commemorated those lost to the disease since the epidemic’s early days. As the link above indicates, John’s cards can also be found among the many gems offered by the Biddle Gallery in Wyandotte, Michigan.

I’ve been intending to call attention to John’s work in this blog for quite a while, and since he’s on my mind as I write this, let’s make it today!

In keeping with sensibilities John has borrowed from centuries past, he doesn’t maintain his own independent web site, which makes me feel a little guilty about tantalizing you with tidbits of his work here without being able to link you to a lavish presentation of his prints. But if you want to learn more about the range of his artistry, just email him directly and express your interest.

Below:
Much as I appreciate the cathedral-ready symmetry of many of John’s prints and cards, the perverse side of me loves it when he gets grisly!

At left:
Just for fun, John and I collaborated in 1993 on this limited edition print depicting two angels in a state of, uh, sublime arousal.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »

Zipatone, Hair, and Really, Really Lengthy Avalanches

Saturday, March 21st, 2009
Thanks to the arrival of the Internet and an impulse on Tony’s part to visit my web site and say hi, he and I have renewed our acquaintance by email and swapped info about our respective lives, as they have unfolded during our (gulp!) fifty-year gap in communications. Tony, it seems, has worked as a television news anchor and radio journalist in a number of cities (Huntsville; New Orleans; Springfield, MO) during those years but now devotes himself full-time to collaborating with and managing the career of his wife, singer-songwriter Carrie Beason. The two of them presently reside in the Ozark Mountains, Tony tells me.

Anyway, one of the ways in which I whiled away my pre-pubescence was writing horror novels like Creeping Doom on the old family Underwood, by which I mean our typewriter, by which I mean (for the benefit of younger readers) a now-obsolete mechanical contrivance what writers of my generation made do with while waiting for humanity to get smart enough to invent computers.

Lacking access to professional publishing venues, I used to share my novels chapter by chapter with a few of my Springville schoolmates. Tony was among these indulgent early samplers of my literary oeuvre, he reminds me now, and somehow or other it seems that I inadvertently left a portion of Creeping Doom in Tony’s care when my family moved out of town late in 1960.

Tony had forgotten about the manuscript himself until he discovered it by accident decades later while rummaging amid his life’s debris. And now, having located me via the Internet, he has been kind enough to bundle up the pages for my perusal me in all their aging and yellowed glory.

Will I let you read any of this treasure from my past? How cruel it would be of me not to! But why not milk the suspense by saving that treat for the end of this blog entry?

How Have I Been Occupying Myself
Since My Last Post?

I’ve been letting my hair grow pathetically out of control, for one thing.

Thanks to an archaeological find rivaling the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a childhood friend of mine has sent me the concluding 53 pages of a horror novel I wrote when (as best I can deduce) I was roughly twelve years old.

(I even embellished my manuscript with an appropriately dread-inducing illustration, displayed herewith.)

My friend’s name is Tony Beason. He and I played together during our grammar and junior high years in rural Alabama but lost touch once my folks switched me from Springville’s school system to Indian Springs, a boarding school south of Birmingham.

Call it my "second childhood," if you will, or an embarrassingly self-indulgent reversion to my youthful "flower-child" identity. Maybe it will pass and I’ll go respectable again soon, hair-wise. But for now I figure that since I have less hair by the minute on the front of my head, I may as well compensate by beefing up my stash of strands in back.

Other Activity of Note

First some background. If you’ve ever peered closely at the "gray" tones in newspapers and magazines or are generally savvy about mass reproduction processes, you know that what appear to be different shades of gray are really just rows of tiny black dots separated by the areas of white paper still showing between the dots.

It had to be thus, since there no gray-colored inks are used for most printing. Fortunately, the black dots are small enough that, when seen from a foot or two away, they blend with the areas of white paper to create an appearance of gray. The smaller the black dots, the lighter the gray. (If the gray gets dark enough, the field becomes white dots on a black background, but the optical principle remains the same.)

In times past, a cartoonist who wanted to include gay tones in his cartoons without asking his publisher to opt for more expensive "halftone" reproduction modes would usually put sheets of Zipatone (or Zip-a-Tone) to use.

Above: Tony and me as Alabama lads in 1958, courtesy of the 1958 Springville High School yearbook (which amazingly I was able to locate today without too much burrowing around). Obviously, I’m the dorky-looking, big-eared one on the right.
Recently, though, I discovered a different approach that works. It turns out that heat from a hair-dryer will cause the adhesive from even well-burnished Zipatone to release its grip.

And that’s why I’ve been brandishing a hair-dryer for hours on end during the past week, without once pointing it in the direction of my aforementioned locks of ever-lengthening tresses!

The obvious if dauntingly tedious solution would be to manually detach each of the dozens of bits of Zipatone screen, large and small, one by one from each of the pages of artwork to which they were so lovingly applied thirty years ago. With the Zipatone discarded, the pages could be scanned like any other drawings and new gray tones applied digitally with Adobe Photoshop that, unlike their Zipatoned predecessors, would look beautiful when printed. Anyone who happens to have both Wendel on the Rebound (my 1988 Wendel collection) and Wendel All Together, its 2000 successor, can compare their contents to see what I mean. The latter’s digital screens are clearly a huge improvement over the former’s Zipatoned ones.

But removing Zipatone from old artwork is no easy matter. That adhesive backing on the film just doesn’t want to let go of the paper it has been stuck to for decades, particularly if it was rigorously burnished when it was laid down — and boy! Was I one industrous little burnisher! Try too hard to pry the stuff off and you end up with objectionable scars on the drawing’s surface.

Colleagues with whom I’ve discussed the problem have suggested that I use rubber cement thinner to dissolve the adhesive. Many adhesives are no match for this magic fluid, which is usually safe to use on artwork because it doesn’t affect india ink or leave a residue. Unfortunately, I have discovered to my regret that rubber cement thinner does dissolve the ink that was used to print the dots on the Zipatone, resulting in ugly dark smudges being left on the drawing when the film is lifted.

It’s still a tedious process, but at least it works!
Below: A new scan of a de-Zipatoned panel from "Gravy on Gay," along with the same panel after new gray tones have been added with Adobe Photoshop.

Below: From Zipatone to grayscale to the new (and more perfect) screen that Photoshop generates with ease. Stages 1 and 3 look similar, I know, but trust me: the Photoshop screen will reproduce as smooth as silk, with nary a moiré to be seen, when the image is printed on paper.

Zipatone, which refers to sheets of transparent, adhesive-backed film with half-tone dots of varying sizes printed on them that you could buy at any art-supply store when my career was young, was the tool I turned to back in 1974 when Stan Lee suggested I add gray tones to the Barefootz comics I was drawing for Comix Book, the underground-overground hybrid that Denis Kitchen was editing at that time for Marvel. Stan thought that the toneless Barefootz stories I had been turning out for underground comix prior to ‘74 had too much of a "coloring book" look. They needed gray tones, he thought, to break up the areas of pure black-and-white.

I complied, and for a while thereafter I became enamored of the "Zipatone look" for my comix. Little did I know how much I would come to regret that infatuation. True, many years would pass before the arrival of the digital age, when all professional print media would switch from the photographic reproduction of artwork to digital scans. By that time I had lost my enthusiasm for mechanical tones and used them sparingly, choosing instead to employ more labor-intensive but satisfyingly hand-crafted techniques like crosshatching when I wanted to add tones to my drawings.

That was all well and good when the time came to print my newer, post-1970s comics, but it still left about three years of my comics — those heavily Zipatoned ones from the late-1970s — all but unanthologizable. To put it bluntly, scanners hate Zipatone screens, in large part for the reasons my cartooning colleague Jay Lynch offers in this online post on the subject. Unless the sheets are aligned with a uniform precision that no human hand can hope to achieve, scanned Zip-a-tone screens are infuriatingly moiré-pattern-prone, even at very high resolutions.

And there are other problems. In general areas of Zipatone that have been cut to size, applied carefully, and burnished thoroughly so that the adhesive binds thoroughly to the surface of the paper underneath it, will stay put for quite a long time. But with the passage of years, shrinkage can cause its shape to change perceptively so that it no longer fits exactly with its drawing. Also, if a bit of the film gets damaged from handling (as in the old Barefootz drawing below), there is no way to patch in a replacement Zipatone patch that isn’t glaringly apparent to any reasonably sighted reader.

So what’s the upshot of all this? Thanks to a lowly hair-drier, the inclusion of my very first gay-themed comic book story ("Gravy on Gay," from 1976’s Barefootz Funnies #2) in a new compilation of all my short gay-themed comics from the last three decades has become a possibility, even in this scanner-happy digital age.

Horror in a Cave

Now, speaking of new exposure for very old works of art, here’s the thrill you’ve been waiting for since this blog entry began. (NOTE: In the interest of authenticity — and because once one starts, y’know, where does one stop? — misspellings and other errors in the foregoing excerpt have not been corrected.)

CREEPING DOOM

by Howard Cruse
(written at age 12 or thereabouts)

Due to the continuing AWOL status of my manuscript’s opening pages, we shall of necessity join the boys’ story already in progress.

After what seemed like hours of exhausting work, Bobby and Monty lay breathless on the rock floor of the tiny cave, blood oozing from thousands of tiny cuts. They were covered with bruises, and Freddy would have been unable to look at them if he were not in nearly the same condition.

The boys did not relax for long. Soon they were all pulling together, hoping that they could save Gene. But when the bloody form lay before them, they saw that the rescue had been too late.

Gene McCoy, their buddy, had been battered to death.

And the avalanche was not over. More and more huge boulders roared past the hollow. The three survivors, after placing Gene in the back of the hole where they wouldn’t have to look at him, sat and looked at the falling destruction. This was the only avalanche on Mount Infinity that had ever been recorded. Probably the danger had built up over the years so that a mere sand slide could trigger the inevitable landslide.

For half an hour the slide continued, slowly lessening in force. By now it was night, and the boys were hungry. They had no idea how they would get out of the tiny hollow.

Even in the cave, the avalanche left its mark. The three adventurers were startled when the whole back wall crumbled to reveal a giant, round stone, enclosed by slabs of rock. It was a very queer specimin, for its sides were as smooth and round as an eggshell. Even this discovery did not relieve the monotony in the tiny place, and soon, in spite of all the excitement, everyone was sleepy. They agreed that they would have to spend the night in the hole anyway, so Bobby suggested that they try to get to sleep early, so that the next morning they could figure a way of escape.

An hour passded. All was black now, except for the twinkling stars in the evening sky. Bobby and Monty were asleep. Freddy was still wide awake.

After deciding that sleep for him was impossible right away, Freddy decided to look around a little more. He got up, and tip-toed back toward the curious stone.

Something about that stone made him uneasy. An air of mysteriousness moistened the atmosphere, an eerie hollowness which caused Freddy’s heart to speed up. Freddy had had that feeling each time he neared the stone. Something…something he couldn’t describe, made his blood run cold. The very silence cried out “Danger!”

The boy ran his finger over the surface of the rock. Smooth. Smooth as an eggshell.

Freddy had made this comparison before. Eggshell. Common-sense told him that it was a rock. And yet…

WAIT!

His pulse quickened. He ran his finger over the place again and again. Yes, it was no mistake. THERE WAS A FAINT CRACK IN THE STONE.

A long crack. A crack which Freddy felt sure had not been there earlier in the day. Freddy ran his finger along the length of the break. Strange…

Suddenly, as his fingers touched the tiny crack, it widened jerkily to the width of about a fourth of an inch. Freddy jerked his hand away in horror. Before his eyes, more and more breaks appeared, and the original one widened again to an inch. The boy drew away, staring at the opening which revealed darkness within. Again and again the opening increased, until the space was fully a foot wide.

Freddy gasped. He saw movement inside the stone. Stone? Freddy’s heart sank as he realized that it was no stone. The avalanche on Mount Infinity had somehow uncovered a long-buried egg. Yes, egg! An enormous egg. Freddy gulped. An enormous egg undoubtedly contained an enormous creature. A monster.

And there was no doubt in Freddy’s mind that the monster, whatever it was, was a creature of darkness…of evil…of death…

Freddy stood transfixed as the egg from a black age hatched. Once again he saw movement, then a faint glimmer of reflected light. Becoming more and more clear in the darkness, Freddy saw the brightness come into focus, and recognised it as a large, yellow eye.

An eye. The eye of the monster. Peering into the hollow at the humans trapped in the mountainside.

Its first victims.

Posted in Life & Art, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »

Face Time Online

Friday, January 30th, 2009
I have an uneasy relationship to Facebook. I migrated to it after MySpace’s interface became impenetrably complex and for now have settled in, despite misgivings.

Eddie tarried there briefly but fled the realm once he realized how uncontrolled and intrusive the ever-expanding web of contacts can become. I totally understand his quick retreat. If someone was his real-world, present-day friend with a desire to be in touch, he or she would probably have Eddie’s email address already. Where was the need to send messages via Facebook?

I’m more at ease with propelling myself out into the world willy-nilly. As a cartoonist and writer whose career is potentially enhanced if large numbers of people know that I exist and may conceivably be moved to purchase my creative wares now and again, my default impulse is welcome a wide range of humanity into my world, be they cherished friends or strangers. Facebook, along with this blog and my web site, lets me do that without having to serve anybody coffee.

Facebook visibility can get strange, though. I first realized this when, out of the blue, I began getting email announcements that someone was "poking me." How startling!

As egotistical as this may seem, it actually feels more natural to me than overseeing my own regular Facebook page. I’m a cartoonist, after all, and hawking my brainchildren to a fickle public comes with the territory.

As does a certain amount of tedium and guilt about the time being devoted to self-promotion, whether at a convention hall or in cyberspace, when I could be at my art table drawing. Conflicts dog me perpetually about these issues, but they all share the comfort of familiarity. Convention attendees may engage me respectfully or ignore me totally; both are common experiences from the few "bricks-and-mortar" conventions I’ve attended in my time. Real-world comic-con attendees are usually too focused on getting an autograph from Frank Miller to bother throwing cupcakes or monkeys at me. That’s a plus. Still, there’s something to be said for sharing space with interesting people, whether in the flesh or through Internet concoctions.

In either venue I can sit around chatting with strangers who stroll by, calling out to the occasional friend or colleague who shows up, and hobnobbing with readers who’ve got questions to ask about Stuck Rubber Baby or who want me to know that they read Barefootz way back when.

That’s fun. And in a refreshing break from normal Facebook weirdness, nobody’s presenting himself or herself as a "friend" except for, well, my friends.

Facebook’s satellite interactivity applications subsequently surfaced, and they have multiplied ever since like swarming locusts. These days getting "poked" from a distance seem like a lost era of social reticence, now that I’ve begun getting hugged, "hi-fiiived," spied on, karate-chopped, tickled, hypnotized, provided with beer, and engaged in pillow fights, all the while getting cakes, cream pies, strawberries, sombreros and monkeys flung at me.

And don’t even get me started on "Walls," "Fun Walls," and "Super Walls"! Didn’t I hear the Facebook was created by college students? Was scrawling on walls their preferred mode of communication, as opposed to, say, strolling down the hallway and knocking politely on a dorm room door? Did they throw cupcakes and monkeys at each other there at Harvard? What has higher education been coming to sinced my days of civilized acid-tripping at Birmingham-Southern?

Sputter! Fume!

Despite Facebook’s weirdnesses, I appreciate the way it has facilitated renewed contacts with some of my long-lost friends. And by this I mean some actual friends, people I know and have warm feelings about. To say that these are the crême de la Facebook crême is not, however, to devalue that other variety of beings imprecisely called one’s "Facebook friends," examples of which range from professional colleagues I may or may not have ever met; members of my extended family; readers of my comics; friends of friends who in general seem like reasonably good sorts; friends of "friends" who (judging by their roster of "friends") I have at least a little something in common (comics; Alabama roots; similar senses of humor; shared libidinal tastes); and a host of additional "friends" whose interest in me as an individual is probably non-existent but who I suspect make a hobby of soliciting the "friendship" of anyone anywhere who dares to make his or her presence known in Facebookland.

As of right now Facebook says I have 466 friends. That’s fine. I genuinely know many of them and these are fine folk indeed. Furthermore, I’m sure that most of the ones I don’t know from Adam would provide me with delightful conversation should we find ourselves sharing space in a movie line. Or chatting at a comic book convention.

Which brings me to the online comic book convention called the Facebook Comic Con, within which I was persuaded this week by its founder, fellow comics professional Michael Netzer, to install myself in a "virtual booth" dedicated to myself and my wonderfulness as a comics creator.

Posted in Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | 3 Comments »

Our Plane to Spain…

Friday, August 8th, 2008
…will fly mainly in the rain (according to the local weather predictors). Actually, it’ll be our plane to Philadeplphia getting rained on, most likely. Who knows what weather our connecting flight to Spain will encounter as it traverses the Atlantic tomorrow!

Anyway, this is the last blog entry I’ll manage to scrape together before leaving, so brace yourself for a catchall melange of this-and-thats that have been accumulating lately. Like, f’rinstance…

Partying with Joe Staton in Pittsfield

And a special bonus pleasure is getting a glimpse of Sergio Aragones, creator of Groo the Wanderer and a million cartoons you grew up seeing in the margins of Mad magazine, standing in the background. Sergio is not only one of the most talented cartoonists in the world, he’s one of the nicest ones. You always brighten any room you enter, Sergio.

Still Not Ready for Prime Time

So Eddie sez to me the other day, "Are you aware that hunks of stray HTML code have started showing up at the beginning of your blog entries?"

Well, no such thing was happening when I viewed my blog on my Safari browser — or my Firefox browser, for that measure. But it was a different story with the Internet Explorer browser on Eddie’s Dell computer at the other end of our house, as you can see from the screen capture below that Eddie sent me, which I’ve juxtaposed with the identical blog entry as seen on my iMac.

Nobody loves digital technology more than I do when it behaves itself and does what it’s instructed to do by we humans who are supposed to be its masters. But when it goes off on odd tangents as a result of secret strategy sessions between software, hardware, and browsers that dorks like me aren’t invited to participate in, I want to run screaming back to the age of cave paintings!

Ken, I learned last week, was one of those who politely listened to my words of wisdom on the night in question. Since then he has made an impressive name for himself with his Dancing Bug series and is now on the roster of the same syndicate that distributes Doonesbury and For Better or For Worse — which clearly demonstrates that the way to achieve cartooning success is to heed the words of Howard Cruse….or maybe just to spend your youth hanging out in Manhattan bars.

Nicky on YouTube

Looky looky! It’s a video showing my friend Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown at this year’s Eisner Award Ceremony where an Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award was given posthumously to her grandfather, the illustrious Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founder of DC Comics.

So what’s going on? Don’t ask me! Such mysteries of the Web might as well be ghostly appearances by the Virgin Mary as far as non-geeks like me are concerned, since we of the digital-doofus class can’t tell the difference between HTML code and Latin aphorisms and are therefore totally dependent on web-authoring software to make anything happen on the Web.

Keen deductive reasoning tells me that my recent decision to switch from the now-orphaned Adobe GoLive (with which I’ve been operating comfortably for years) to its heir-apparent Adobe Dreamweaver as my tool for composing these blog entries has had unintended consequences. Dreamweaver, for whatever reason, seems not to be playing as well with either WordPress or Internet Explorer as one would like.

Is a puzzlement! For now I’m fleeing back to GoLive until somebody tells me why my so-called WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) software is throwing me curves.

Cruse-’Toons-on-Walls News

The original art for all seven pages of Purchaser’s Clearing House, my 1986 illustrated song lyric spoofing a certain magazine-hawking, Prize-Patrol-dispatching sweepstakes operation that for all I know may have made one of you a millionaire by now, will be on the walls of the Eclipse Mill Gallery on Union Street here in North Adams. It’s my contribution to the What’s So Funny group show that’s scheduled to run from September 5-October 5. If the gods of technology smile we’ll also have a DVD player running my Flash-generated video version of the song on site continuously.

Scooby Doo! Batman! E-Man! Name the comic strip character and chances are Joe Staton has drawn him (or her). Well, maybe that’s slightly overstating his roster of credits (he’s never drawn Wendel, for example), but this cartoonist has definitely been all over the comics field during the last 37 years. And if you were at the right place at the right time last week (that being the Storefront Artist Project at 124 Fenn Street in Pittsfield, MA), you could watch him sketching away at the opening reception for the Art of Joe Staton show currently on the gallery’s walls.

And if you attend the right parties, as I sometimes do, you may find yourself getting to chat unxpectedly with cool cartoonists like Ruben Bolling (creator of Tom the Dancing Bug) — as I did.

It turn out that Bolling (whose secret identity is Ken Fisher) and I met years ago in a dark bar. No, not that kind of bar! I was invited a decade or two ago to speak and show some of my drawings to a bunch of up-and-coming young cartoonists who gathered frequently in a Manhattan tavern.

The opening party will be from 6 until 8 on Friday, September 5, so stop by and say hi if you’re in the neighborhood.

Newsletter News

Hey, the tenth issue of my Cruse Art Newsletter came out a couple of weeks ago, at a time when I was too busy to celebrate with any bloggish fanfare. So here’s a belated plug for the benefit of any of you who might like shopping in my original-art bargain basement.

NOTE: Because of our trip to Spain, I’ll won’t be able to process art purchases or to be added to the newsletter’s subscription list until our August 25 return, so don’t feel neglected if you don’t hear back from me before then. Any inquiries awaiting me on the 25th will be acted on in the order in which they arrived in my email inbox.
Above: Ruben Bolling, who frequents well-lit art galleries these days.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | 1 Comment »

Of Granny and Belle and Phyllis and Felix

Friday, May 30th, 2008
If you were living in New York City in 1969, you may have seen press coverage about a procession of horse-drawn Hanson Cabs that paraded down Fifth Avenue one day, my college friend Julie Brumlik perched in the forefront.

With the flair that anyone who has ever known Julie has come to expect, the youthful entrepreneur from Alabama successfully made the jaded journalists of the Big Apple take note. She was launching a new alternative tabloid called Granny, and did she have a publicity stunt for them!
On page 12 of that first issue of Granny was the premier installment of a comic strip called Muddlebrow, drawn by yours truly. Ms. Brumlik, you see, was in the habit of providing showcases to her creative friends whenever she had the power to do so.

Granny’s life on the city’s cluttered newsstands was flashy but brief — too brief for all of the Muddlebrow episodes I had at the ready to actually see print. Tucked away amid my batch of orphaned strips was a two-part tale featuring an annoying little girl named Belle who, thanks to an unlikely birth defect, would float helplessly into the sky if not constrained by a string held by some grudgingly dutiful friends. Muddlebrow itself was never revived, but I had trouble turning loose of that particular story-within-a-story.

I decided, roughly a decade thereafter, to see if Belle’s story could be expanded into a satirical picture book. True, its comedy might be a bit black for some sensitive tykes, but that didn’t stop me from thinking that the snarkier branch of America’s youth — the branch that waited breathlessly for each successive issue of Mad magazine — might find my fable amusing. And if the pictures, narration, and dialogue were entertaining enough, some grown-ups might take to it, too.

My enthusiasm was stoked by a cheery book agent from Louisiana who was certain that she would be able to find a suitable publisher for my book. Buoyed by her optimism, I set about creating a newer, bigger fable fueled by the same premise as Muddlebrow’s brief, unpublished version.

In an early draft of the new text, Belle’s name was changed to Phyllis because of the euphony thus lent to my projected book’s title, Phyllis’s Friends. Then I got nervous about gender issues. Were there unconscious overtones of misogyny at play when I chose to hold up a chubby, unlikable female to ridicule? Yikes! (True, the real-life person whose behavior was the model for Felix’s excesses had indeed been both female and chubby, but still…)

To take that touchy issue off the table, Phyllis’s Friends became Felix’s Friends before Phyllis ever got a chance to get drawn. Still euphonious, but less likely to provoke feminist ire.

Below: Belle and Felix. (My title character never made it onto paper during her Phyllis stage.)
I wrote and drew the book in its entirety on spec, with no contract having been signed. Hey, in those days I had more free time than I do now! My agent gathered up photocopies of my illustrated manuscript and set off to work her marketing magic.

At least, magic-working was what I imagined to be happening during the lon-n-n-ng stretch of time that unfolded before I discovered — first from other of her clients and eventually from my own experience — that I had apparently hitched my fortunes to a likable flake who, after many excuses, would cease returning phone calls without offering evidence that my book had actually been viewed by a single editor.

Strung along by an agent wannabe who talked big! Darn! I was no happy camper when I withdrew my book from her custody.

It was a set-back, but Belle’s literary descendant still found a future of sorts several years after the aforementioned fiasco, when I decided to rearrange its pages into a comic-like format for inclusion in Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels, the 1987 St. Martin’s Press collection of my strips and stories that (with a few exceptions, Felix among them) had previously appeared in underground comix and elsewhere.

Below: Felix’s tale reconfigured into a four-pictures-to-a-page, comic-booky version appropiate for a comics collection.
As relieved as I was that Dancin’ Nekkid could finally usher Felix into print in some fashion (no other avenues being apparent in 1987), the reality nagged at me that an anthology largely occupied by uncensored underground comix wasn’t the best platform for a story that itself was fair game for adolescents and younger kids of a snarky bent. And I was frustrated that Felix hadn’t managed to star in a stand-alone book of his own, darn it! But I had first Wendel and then Stuck Rubber Baby to distract me, so life went on.

Within a few years the dreaded out-of-print axe fell on Dancin’ Nekkid, thereby ending the public’s access to Felix while Toland Polk was busy agonizing about his sexual identity on my drawing board. Neither the softcover version issued by St. Martin’s Press nor the hardcover, limited-edition twin simultaneously produced by Kitchen Sink Press, have been anywhere near a bookstore shelf since then, and Felix’s Friends has been re-consigned to limbo.

But maybe not forever. I began thinking a short time ago about the tantalizing new options that have arisen within the publishing realm — options that are especially viable when making big money isn’t an author’s prime motivation.

Which brings me to the modest new 64-page trade paperback you see below (a few samples pages of which can be found by visiting my web site’s Felix’s Friends section).
OK, I’ll admit to still hoping that Felix’s Friends will someday be a "real" book, the way Gepetto hoped Pinocchio could become a "real" boy.

But neither Blue Fairies nor enthusiastic agents have been able to work that magic so far. The "real" publishers at whom I’ve dangled the book in recent years have told me they wouldn’t know how to market it.
I understand where they’re coming from. Like so much that I have produced over the years, Felix’s Friends just doesn’t quite know what genre (or section of Borders) to assign itself to.

But fortunately, these days I can do more than twiddle my thumbs while waiting for Felix’s stars to align. Inexpensive POD (print-on-demand) self-publishing has arrived.

As has my Lulu.com edition of Felix’s Friends. The investment has been trivial (as will be any money made from it, probably), but who cares? Putting out a book just for fun — what a concept!

This is Felix’s tale told in the format I’ve wanted it to have for twenty-five years. Belle and Phyllis would be pleased.

Or not. Taking pleasure in anyone’s enjoyment but their own hasn’t come easily to any of Felix’s successive incarnations.

But I would, on general principles, order comp copies for them from the Lulu Marketplace if my brainchildren existed anywhere outside of my fevered imagination. That being impossible, I’ve ordered one for myself.

Postscript: the New York Granny is not to be confused with Julie’s and my undergraduate project Granny Takes a Trip, about which I’ve blogged before.

Posted in Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 1 Comment »

Perp Talk

Thursday, February 7th, 2008
Last summer I nudged the long-awaited debut issue of the North County Perp out of its birth canal and onto the streets of North Adams.

Ushering my ‘zine out into the world after its lengthy period of gestation was great fun for me, despite the fact that in order to avoid the editorial inhibitions that come from courting advertisers I had to personally fork over the bucks to get it printed. It was a financial indulgence I’m not in a position to make a habit of, but it was worth it this time just to get a little dust stirred up in this sleepy town and to provide a looser-than-normal platform for creatively-inclined locals whose interests and points of view aren’t easily accommodated by the handful of existing publications in these parts.

Stacks of Perp #1 were up for grabs for a short while on counters at Papyri Books, North Adams Antiques, and Cup and Saucer here in North Adams and a lively launch party was hosted by MCLA Gallery 51 on Main Street. A gratifying level of enthusiasm was forthcoming from the local folks who picked up copies before they ran out, and even after the paper copies printed by Becks Printing were long gone, curious would-be readers from around here and from distant climes have continued to download it for free from the Perp’s web site as a PDF document).

In other words, in its small way, Perp #1 seemed to be a home-grown "hit." I offer as evidence of this the question that people have persisted in asking me ever since the first issue’s debut: "So when is Perp #2 coming out?"

Well, predicting an actual publication date for #2 is as iffy a proposition at this point as it was during the year it took to pull #1 together, but I can now say with confidence that the Perp is officially poised to return, thanks to a $2,144 grant the project has received from the Cultural Council of Northern Berkshire.

My job now will be to once again start speading the word. So all you writers and cartoonists scattered in nooks and crannies around Berkshire County thinking oddball thoughts that you’ve never felt able to share with your neighbors should take note: the time is now to get your creative juices flowing.

You will soon start seeing fliers seeking your involvement as a Participating Perp, but you don’t need to wait until you come across a flier to get in touch with me. I’m right here.

Posted in Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | 1 Comment »

My Dubious Cubism

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

"The only thing I regret in my life is never having made comics."
—Pablo Picasso (according to an unsourced quote found online)

Assuming that the foregoing Picasso quote is legit, I feel reassured that the master cubist would not have minded the liberties I’ve taken in building the cartoony image above, which is my riff on one of his paintings and which was my reponse to an invitation to create promotional art for this year’s edition of North Adams Open Studios.
At right: my inspiration for the Open Studios promo image
I’d love to cite the original painting’s title and date of creation here, but no such info was anywhere to be seen on the web page where I found it. Maybe one of you Picasso buffs out there will help me fill in those blanks. [NOTE: And as swiftly as any earnest blogger could wish, Ed Carson, one of our Open Studios artists, has informed me that Picasso called the 1935 painting in question La Muse.]

Anyway, I think you’ll see why the painting above struck me as the perfect springboard for a cartoon by yours truly that would be promoting a 21st Century celebration of North Adams artists. For one thing, it depicts an artist in the act of creation. How appropriate is that for advertising a citywide art show? Also, the sheer prescience manifested by the Spanish genius (who died 34 years ago) in showing an artist who’s watching a giant flat-screen TV while drawing even though such electronic wonders had not yet been invented when he created the painting fairly takes my breath away! (Admittedly, whatever show is airing must be less than riveting, since it seems to be making the artist’s companion doze off.)

But to leave speculations about Picasso’s technological clairvoyance aside, you can probably tell that I’ve incorporated into my own cubist-lite ‘toonery a patchwork of snippets from the works of several of the dozens of local artists who’ll be taking part in Open Studios this fall (October 13 and 14, to be specific). If you want to see work by the artists whose art I snipped in more dignified contexts, check out the links to their portfolios and web pages below.

North Adams artists included within my drawing, all of whom will be showing their stuff during the North Adams Open Studios weekend, are: Borkowski; Ed Carson; Sharon Carson; me; Martha Flood; FocoLoco; Karen Kane; Joan Kiley; Cynthia Lewis, Melissa McGorty; Danny O, Debi Pendell, J. Richards, Jr.; River Hill Pottery; Susan Rose; Robert Schechter; Norm Thomas; and Thor Wickstrom. Five galleries (MCLA Gallery 51; Brill Gallery; Eclipse Mill Gallery; Kolok Gallery; Northern Berkshire Creative Arts) will be hosting group shows in addition to the downtown spaces being converted into temporary venues for the weekend.

Posted in Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | 5 Comments »

The Ithican Observer

Saturday, May 19th, 2007
Stephen Frug of Ithica, NY, is a graduate student in Cornell University’s history department. He also loves comics, and pays attention to their inner workings with a level of attentiveness that is dazzling—and profoundly gratifying to those of us in the field who wonder, while crosshatching our fingers to the bone, whether anybody out there in readerland will ever notice all the tiny strategies we employ in hopes of making each and every page of a given comic do its job.

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.
That Stephen thinks a page of mine "works" is pleasant news for this affirmation-hungry author in itself. But to have him spend so much time explaining exactly how he thinks it works is downright breathtaking!

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….

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk | No Comments »

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