Stuck Rubber Baby 25th Anniversary Edition

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Description

Set in Alabama in the 1960s, Stuck Rubber Baby tells the story of Toland Polk, a young man who is deeply in the closet and hell-bent on "fixing" his homosexuality. Toland is not prone to making waves, but he finds himself drawn to a lively group of civil rights activists. With his new friends, he starts frequenting sit-ins and gay bars. This raises the ire of local bigots and quite literally brings the Klan to his doorstep. This painstakingly researched and exquisitely illustrated graphic novel draws on Howard Cruse's experience as a young gay man in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama. Both deeply personal and epic in scope, Stuck Rubber Baby is a rich and moving tale of identity and resistance.

Reviews

"The everyday activism of principled people is an ongoing force for good in this country. And Howard Cruse's visceral, visual account of America's recent past is a testament to it. Stuck Rubber Baby contributes with grace and force to the vision of a just world." --Alison Bechdel, author or Fun Home

"Cruse's distinctive visual idiom builds an absorbing world featuring a rich intergenerational ensemble of characters.... Stuck Rubber Baby chronicles both the crushing pervasiveness of discrimination and brutality in the Jim Crow, pre-Stonewall South, and also myriad forms of mourning and resistance." --New York Times

"[Stuck Rubber Baby] is a rich, complex work examining the intersections of race and sexuality." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Timelessly involving ... Stuck Rubber Baby emphasizes the turbulence of the times, and how people perpetually strive to remake themselves from within the safety of a group..." --AV Club

Maus, move over; as a great graphic novel, you've met for match. --Booklist

"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." --Shelf Awareness

"All the characters in this novel are so rich, deep, and captivating, even the ones who are immensely dislikeable... This is rightly a landmark of a book and it is so very timely, given that the racial issues from back then are almost the same ones as today." --Sequential Tart

Author Bio

Howard Cruse's career as an underground cartoonist was launched during the 1970s, and in 1980 he served as the founding editor of the groundbreaking Gay Comix series. His comic strip Wendel was serialized in The Advocate through much of the 1980s. Stuck Rubber Baby, his most widely known work, was the winner of Eisner and Harvey awards in the U.S. and (in translation) a Comics Critics Award in Spain, a Luchs Award in Germany, and a Prix de la critique at the International Comics Festival in Angouleme, France. He has also provided humorous illustrations for numerous mainstream magazines.