Howard Cruse is considered by many to be one of the great modern American cartoonists, though he’s drawn few comics in the past two decades. A noted underground creator before becoming the founding editor of the anthology “Gay Comix” in 1980, Cruse has a reputation for tackling head-on a topic that had been largely taboo. Throughout most of the 1980’s, he wrote and illustrated a comic strip for “The Advocate.” “Wendel” began as a light-hearted sex comedy, but quickly became something more as the titular character started a long term relationship and the strip depicted the gay community in a way that had rarely been seen before. After he ended the strip, Cruse created the graphic novel “Stuck Rubber Baby,” released in 1995 through DC Comics and re-released in a new hardcover edition last year from by Vertigo. Compared favorably to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” at the time of its release, “Stuck Rubber Baby” told the fictional account of a young white man coming of age in the Civil Right era, though much of it was informed by Cruse’s own experiences growing up. The Universe imprint of Rizzoli has just released “The Complete Wendel”, collecting Cruse’s strip from “The Advocate” with additional material and a new strip detailing where the characters are now. This is the first time the entire comic strip series will be collected and widely released. There was another collection in 2001 titled Wendel All Together, but due to the collapse of Olmstead Press (a division of the LPC Group), there are very few copies to be found.
Wendel was, simplistically put, a comic strip. Yet it was so much more than the average comic strip. It had gay people! Still, comic strips with gay characters and content weren’t new. The Advocate magazine itself had run two gay strips previously, and a smattering appeared in other venues, as well as gay and lesbian stories in a few pioneering underground comix. According to Cruse, the Advocate initially offered no long term commitment, ordering strips one at a time. Other cartoonists might let that kind of uncertainty affect their narrative, but Cruse happily busied himself with lovable red-headed Wendel and fleshing out his world first with supportive friends, first with supportive parents, best friend Deb, and boyfriend Ollie, who — surprise! — had a young son named Farley (AKA Branman when he was in his superhero disguise), Farley’s mom Carol whose off panel high maintenance presence threw barbs, and Ollie’s oddly named friend Sterno who inadvertently changed Wendel and Ollie’s relationship. What makes them feel alive and memorable is that Wendel, Ollie, Deb, Tina and the rest of the ensemble cast members were just everyday people trying their best to live life while dealing with everyday problems. You might have a friend like one of them or you might be facing a similar problem (ever have a friend overstay their welcome or lose a job?), and if neither were true for you, you could appreciate the humor and hijinx (either wacky or romantic/sexual or both) that Cruse infused in their lives. They were human and that was their charm and appeal.
Today, a gay character in comics doesn’t seem that odd. Just last year, Archie Comics introduced Kevin Keller, Riverdale High’s first gay student, with hardly an eyebrow raised. But in the 1980s, life was very different for the homosexual community. So, when Howard Cruse wrote and drew his groundbreaking comic strip Wendel, it was revolutionary. In her introduction to “The Complete Wendel”, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, creator of the critically acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home and a friend of Cruse’s, explained why, in its time, Wendel was so unique. “You’ll find virtually no discussion of gay marriage in the pages of Wendel,” wrote Bechdel. “The issue that has now become practically synonymous with LGBT civil rights was not high on the homosexual agenda in the eighties. Yet Wendel and Ollie’s loving, committed relationship is a paragon of stability,” Bechdel wrote. “They parent a young boy, negotiate with Ollie’s ex-wife, have loving exchanges with Wendel’s parents, and come out to co-workers. They don’t live in a parallel universe like Chelsea or Castro, they’re ‘the gays next door,’ integrated for the most part seamlessly into the broader community,” Bechdel explained.
The significance of this may seem lost today but take into account that at the time conservatives labeled gay people sexual perverts much louder than today and with dire consequences (legislation and funds for AIDS was stingy) while simultaneously there was the widespread mystique of sexual freedom and reveling in being a sexual outlaw, sodomy being illegal in many states, let alone the reality of same sex marriage. The strip looked through a largely humorous prism at the lives gay people led during the Reagan-Bush era, when homophobia was rampant in the public sphere and the AIDS epidemic added life-and-death concerns and the need for political activism to the more mundane aspects of everyday life. The strip gained a lot of popularity among gays during its run. By now, of course, a couple of younger generations of gays have never been exposed to it—which makes a compilation of the series in book form a logical step to take. Rizzoli is typically known for fine art and coffee table books, but Robb Perlman, the Universe editor who brought in the project, feels that Wendel is important enough that it will hold its own on a list heavy with works on classic and cutting-edge contemporary art and design. “What (Howard Cruse) did was so incredibly groundbreaking when it happened. It was an important thing that happened in comics and cartoon art but it was also an important thing that happened in history and in American media,” said Pearlman. “I thought his characterization, his style, the sincerity with which he worked and still does work, sort of set the tone for a lot of other artists and a lot of other art. It was an important piece of history that needed to be remembered and out there.” “It really is a period piece. It is life as it was once lived and not life as it’s lived now,” said author Howard Cruse on the relevancy of Wendel for a modern audience. “Obviously the success of the book with younger generations will depend on how interested they are in stretching their imaginations to imagine a time when things were very different than they are now,” said Cruse. “It was much more threatening to be gay because of the level of discrimination and stigma that was coming down from the government and religious leaders to just general public figures that were dismissive to condemnatory to gay people,” he said. We’ve come a long way since then, but both Cruse and Pearlman expressed that the stories Wendel told, while dated, are at their core, so universal, that a modern audience will still be able to learn from the strip. “People who are not necessarily gay, but who are interested in what the world looks like from the perspective of gay people, those are the people who we hope will take interest in this book, which you don’t have to be a gay liberationist to enjoy,” said Cruse.
