{"id":5445,"date":"2010-09-05T06:00:39","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T06:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=5445"},"modified":"2010-09-05T17:11:39","modified_gmt":"2010-09-05T17:11:39","slug":"early-barefootz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2010\/09\/05\/early-barefootz\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Barefootz"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Howard Cruse<\/strong> (Fantagraphics Books)
\nISBN: 978-1-56097-052-1<\/p>\n

Howard Cruse’s remarkable cartooning career has spanned decades and encompassed a number of key moments in American history and social advancement.<\/p>\n

Beginning as a Hippy-trippy, counter-culture, Underground Comix star with beautifully drawn, witty, funny (not always the same thing in those days – or these, come to think of it) strips, evolving over the years into a powerful voice for change in both sexual and race politics through such superb features as Wendel<\/strong> culminating in his masterful Stuck Rubber Baby<\/strong> – an examination of oppression, tolerance and freedom in 1950s America. Since then he has worked on other writer’s work, illustrating an adaptation of Jeanne E. Shaffer’s The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Born in 1944 the son of a Baptist Minister in Birmingham, Alabama, Cruse grew up amid the smouldering intolerance of the region’s segregationist regime, an atmosphere that affected him on a primal level. He escaped to Birmingham-Southern College to study Drama in the late ’60s, graduating and winning a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship to Penn State University.<\/p>\n

Campus life there never really suited him and he dropped out in 1969. Returning to the South he joined a loose crowd of fellow Birmingham Bohemians which allowed him to blossom as a creator and by 1971 was drawing a spectacular procession of strips for an increasingly hungry and growing crowd of eager admirers.<\/p>\n

Whilst working for a local TV station as both designer and children’s show performer he created a kid’s newspaper strip about talking squirrels, Tops & Button,<\/em> <\/strong>still finding time to craft the utterly whimsical and bizarre tales of a romantic quadrangle starring a very nice young man and his troublesome friends for the more discerning college crowd he still mingled with. The strips appeared in a variety of college newspapers and periodicals<\/p>\n

He was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153discovered\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by publishing impresario Denis Kitchen in 1972 who began presenting Barefootz<\/strong> to a far broader audience in such Underground publications as Snarf,<\/strong> Bizarre Sex<\/strong>, Dope Comix<\/strong> and Commies From Mars <\/strong>from his Kitchen Sink Enterprises outfit.<\/p>\n

Kitchen also hired Cruse to work on an ambitious co-production with rising powerhouse Marvel Comics, attempting to bring a bowdlerised version of the counter-culture’s cartoon stars and sensibilities to the mainstream via the<\/strong> Comix Book <\/strong>– a newsstand magazine. It only ran to a half-dozen issues and although deemed a failure it provided the notionally more wholesome and genteel Barefootz<\/strong> with a larger audience and yet more avid fans\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

As well as an actor, designer, art-director and teacher, Cruse’s work has appeared in Playboy<\/strong>, The Village Voice<\/strong>, Heavy Metal<\/strong>, Artforum International<\/strong>, The Advocate<\/strong> and Starlog<\/strong> among countless others, and the tireless storyman found the time and resources to self-publish Barefootz Funnies<\/strong>, two comic collections of his addictively whimsical strip in 1973.<\/p>\n

Here in this fascinatingly written memoir of those salad days Cruse movingly recounts those early triumphs and re-presents the strips that began it all, covering 1970-73, and although he has moved on to weightier material since (especially on Gay and Race issues) these splendidly whacky and deliriously charming adventures still stand among his most evergreen creations.<\/p>\n

So here, for your consideration and delectation are the gathered exploits and ruminations of thoughtful, Nice Young Man Barefootz, his way-out friend and confidante Headrack, sexually aggressive and very forceful gal-pal Dolly and Glory: the frog-manifesting \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Thing Under the Bed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, aided and abetted by an ever-changing cast of erudite cockroaches who share his apartment.<\/p>\n

As well as the history and Cruse’s reflections, this terrific compilation includes in stunning and meticulous monochrome a selection of Tops & Button gag-panels, ‘The Head Strip’<\/em>, early strips from campus journal The Crimson-White<\/strong> and The Alternate<\/strong>, syndicated Barefootz from Service Strips<\/strong>, Kitchen Sink single-pagers and the longer stories, ‘Tussy Come Back’<\/em>, ‘Hint and Run’<\/em>, ‘Cream of the Genes’<\/em>, ‘It All Fits’<\/em>, ‘Suffering Celeste’<\/em>, the Paperman strips and ‘The Eclipse’<\/em>, – a classic and unflinchingly engaging treat for any comics fan and grown-up dreamer.<\/p>\n

For further information check out Howardcruse.com<\/a> and track down this and all his other brilliant creations \u00e2\u20ac\u201c before Glory turns you into a frog\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00c2\u00a9 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1977 & 1987, 1990 Howard Cruse. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Howard Cruse (Fantagraphics Books) ISBN: 978-1-56097-052-1 Howard Cruse’s remarkable cartooning career has spanned decades and encompassed a number of key moments in American history and social advancement. Beginning as a Hippy-trippy, counter-culture, Underground Comix star with beautifully drawn, witty, funny (not always the same thing in those days – or these, come to think … <\/p>\n

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