Woodstock was only thirteen years in the past when I drew these coming strips, after all. That’s only a couple of weeks in LSD years!

Soon I’d be drawing Ollie and Sterno instead of Cliff and Trev gnawing on those old Sixties bones. Listen, folks, the heady utopianism of that era had a big impact on me, and I had a lot of stuff to work through even after a decade’s passage, what with Reaganism in the ascendancy and cynicism fast rotting the soul of our republic.

In those days the surreal drawings of Walter Gurbo regularly appeared on the paper’s back cover, which lured me into fantasizing that some decision-makers in the Voice’s editorial hierarchy might tune into the sneaky way that Trev toyed with reader expectations.

George graciously sent my feature up the chain of command, but it failed to spark any interest. It was a pretty oddball experiment, I have to admit—partly because on the surface it looked so normal. (The ol’ Barefootz syndrome strikes again!)

And lest you be alarmed, I assure you that I am way too opposed to animal abuse to ever indulge in this unacceptable fetish myself!

When you’re illustrating a title like that, ticklish cartoon felines had better beware! (Garfield wasn’t available to be drafted into service, unfortunately.)

Something about this drawing’s mischievousness has made it a persistent favorite of mine during the decades since I drew it, and it has spent time on gallery walls more than once when I’ve been invited to participate in group shows.

But now I must bid it a fond farewell, since a longtime reader and supportive friend recently discovered it among the treasures in my web site’s ongoing Garage Sale and PayPal-ed me the money to make it his own.

Bye-bye, kitty. You’ve given me many a chuckle over the years — though not near as many as that fuzz-bodied, rubber-armed, top-hatted sadist with a cane has given you.

Meanwhile, new artwork has been added to the Garage Sale to replace my beleaguered cat. Below see Alan Moore doling out comics-writing advice to Batman, depicted as the late Charles M. Schulz might have drawn the two of them.

Eddie’s mom Evelyn, being only 94, felt like hitting the road anyway. So with Harold’s blessing she has been spending the week here in Massachusetts with Eddie and me. She says the relatively dry New England air is great for her arthritis.

Evelyn was seven at the time. Her mother, back then, was keeping food on the table by rolling hand-made cigarettes for a living. This was an illegal enterprise for which Eddie’s grandmother spent several days in a Warsaw jail, says Evelyn.

Staying put wasn’t a viable family option for the long term, though. Soon after this photo was snapped she and her brother and mother would be crossing the ocean to America.

I can see her point. Under circumstances like these, instruction manuals clearly should be part of the package.

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.

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?"

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.