Howard Cruse

The first biography to tell the life story of one of the most important figures in LGBTQ+ comics. A preacher’s kid from Alabama who became ‘the godfather of queer comics’, Cruse (1944-2019) was a groundbreaking underground cartoonist, a wicked satirist, an LGBTQ+ activist, and a mentor to a vast network of queer comics artists.

Janine Utell is author of several books, most recently Literary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and Intimacy , and editor of The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In , published by University Press of Mississippi, and Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English . Utell serves as editor for "Orientations," a forum dedicated to queer and feminist modernist studies for Modernism/modernity . She also currently serves as president for the Modernist Studies Association.