Queer comix pioneer Howard Cruse died in November 2019, at the age of 75, but his monumental graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby lives on in this splendid 25th-anniversary edition. With a foreword by his partner, Ed Sedarbaum, as well as a new introduction by Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), this is a volume for the ages.
Toland Polk is a closeted white boy in the Jim Crow South. Milquetoast and directionless, he begins hanging around the local civil rights crowd as a means to impress Ginger Raines--a deeply involved member and the kind of white girl he thinks could be an answer to his prayers. They protest together, haunt the town gay bar together and awaken to the clear and present danger of white supremacists threatening the lives of the Black people around them. Toland and Ginger make quite a pair, even though her passion for the cause and the emerging fact of his homosexuality often throw them out of sync.
Stuck Rubber Baby is fiction, but it draws heavily on Cruse's experience growing up in Alabama. And to read it again in 2020, as protests against police brutality and racial discrimination arise again nationwide, is to be uncomfortably reminded of how much and how little has changed since. It is a profoundly ambitious work, in form as well as content. "Many of the pages are so finely cross-hatched that they appear to have a nap," Bechdel marvels, "as if they'd feel like velvet if you ran your hand over them." With a soft, self-deprecating touch, Stuck Rubber Baby continues to deliver hard, urgent truths. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness