Nothing on the Net has made me smile as much lately as my discovery that the wonderful cartoonist Howard Cruse has a website and blog up and running.

Howard and I have never laid eyes on each other, but in that odd way of people who ride on the many and vaguely-related tentacles of “the arts,” we’ve kinda-sorta known each other for about 20 years.

We first intersected shortly after the random events that led me into comics, but our dealings with each other back then had nothing to do with the business. At that time, I was making a living doing theater and had been invited to take part in what had become an annual AIDS-awareness benefit performance.

This was around 1990. Coming out of the Reagan “ignore ‘em and maybe they’ll all die off” years, efforts like that benefit were grassroots attempts to circumvent the apathy of the Gipper Gang by raising money for research and treatment and giving a human face to the sufferers. What some of us were doing in those days, with our little shows or pamphlets or marches, was pitifully inadequate – but when the government that should have been protecting its citizens was doing little more than simply pretending the problem didn’t exist, we did what we could.

This was my second year to perform in the benefit, and again my job was to provide a spoken-arts interlude in the midst of a show that was otherwise all song and dance. I’d done an abbreviated version of a terrific Harvey Fierstein play the year before, and wanted something equally memorable for the new show. Somewhere I came across a magazine article about Howard that mentioned a drama he’d written called About Scott.

His play had been given a low-budget workshop production in Birmingham, but it had never gotten the full-scale mounting that it cried out for. I was donating my own time and working with zero budget, so I had even less to offer in terms of remuneration or production values, but the play sounded to be exactly what I wanted and I knew I’d kick myself if I didn’t try. So I crossed my fingers, tracked down Howard’s address and sent him a letter.

He didn’t know me from Adam, but he graciously agreed to let me cut his big multi-media play to ribbons and reduce it to a 10-minute monologue cobbled together from the Howard Cruse character’s narration. Having already waived royalties, he showed even more generosity by throwing in a handful of the slides that had been created for the original production. They added just the right element of simple spectacle, lifting the experience beyond that of watching some guy droning on and turning it into a genuine, if brief, dramatic work.

I didn’t even know what Howard looked like in those days, so for the physical part of my characterization I opted to suggest the way he drew himself in his autobiographical strips: glasses, jeans and a simple plaid shirt. Since he came from Alabama, I added a hint of a Southern lilt to my delivery – one which Howard doesn’t have, as I learned later. Howard, of course, had come out several years before and made his sexuality public – a pretty brave act for the time and place. Since I was essentially playing him, I’d mentioned early in the process that I was straight, and asked if he had a problem with my pretending to be something I wasn’t while speaking his words. His response was a quick and direct “That’s what actors do,” which in the theater is always the right answer.

The result was an intimate, funny, and very moving slice of theater. Even boiled down to the ultimate Readers Digest version of itself, Howard’s remembrance of the life of a friend who’d succumbed to the then-mysterious virus had the audience in tears by its conclusion. It had been a privilege to deliver his message…and over the years since then, I’ve been both surprised and gratified to discover that the memory of About Scott has remained with some of those who were in the audience.

On more than one occasion, strangers have approached me to express how much that 10-minute monologue had meant to them. A couple of them even remarked mistakenly on the industry I’d shown in finding a talented artist to draw a caricature of myself for the slides: testament to the power of a simple plaid shirt.

Howard and I maintained a sporadic correspondence in the years after that, and I’ve done my best to keep up with his career. His Wendel stories remain among my very favorite comics, his savage take on former attorney general Ed Meese’s anti-pornography crusade still makes me chuckle, and his ahead-of-its-time 1995 Stuck Rubber Baby remains one of the finest graphic novels any American has ever created.

I lost track of a lot of people when Kate died, and hadn’t spoken to Howard since shortly after her funeral. So I’m delighted to see him online, to have a new chance to get reacquainted, and to recommend that everyone else check out his site and pick up some of the new work available there.

And I’m equally delighted to see that Stuck Rubber Baby has been slated for republication next year, sporting gorgeous new cover art. A lot of people weren’t ready for it in 1995, but in 2010 there’ll be no excuse not to pick it up and let one of the too-often unsung masters of the craft show you how it’s done.

filed under Craft