Howard Cruse is best known as the creator of the 1995 graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. Here he chooses six favorite books that also employ the comics format.
Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking by Dan O’Neill (out of print). An adventurous 1969 inquiry into the nature of life, God, and magic cookies, this delirious offshoot of O’Neill’s newspaper strip Odd Bodkins expanded both my mind and my view of comics at an impressionable age.
Gertrude’s Follies by Tom Hachtman (out of print). Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and their art-world pals were transformed into wacky downtown cartoon characters in this brilliant 1970s slapstick-cubist riff.
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Seven Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz, art by James Romberger (Reed Press, $17). An almost unbearably intense mixture of fever dreams and rage, scripted by an incendiary artist besieged by HIV. After Wojnarowicz’s 1992 death, it was completed by his illustrator friend.
Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner, art by Frank Stack (Four Walls Eight Windows, $18). Pekar, the keenly observant comic book chronicler of mundane life in Cleveland who was recently portrayed in the celebrated indie film American Splendor, here joins forces with his accomplished wife to co-chronicle the family’s far-from-mundane battle with disease. Illustrated with spare visual power by underground comix artist Frank Stack.
Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York by Samuel R. Delany, art by Mia Wolff (Juno, $14.99). The story of a love affair between Delany, an esteemed author, and a New Yorker who was homeless at the time they met. The book’s moving trajectory, lustily visualized by Wolff, soars across class barriers to alight in uncharted romantic territory.
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