Howard Cruse (1944–2019)

Such a powerful work. Howard Cruse's comics always sneak up on me; his art style isn't one that I would normally enjoy and that same style always makes me think his stories will be slight; and then suddenly I realize how powerful what I'm reading actually is. Amazing stuff.

The story of a gay white man growing up in the South in the 1960s. He gets involved in the civil rights struggle and comes out to himself, and later others, as gay. It's interesting territory, but I hated the art. It looks outright ugly to me, the characters are nearly impossible to distinguish from each other, and the framing is so cramped that it's nearly impossible to read, there's no white space, and there's so much cross-hatching...I felt my eyes start to hurt trying to read this. I show more don't feel like the art really added anything to this story--if anything, the difficulty of figuring out who was who made it harder. I started skimming about a third of the way through. show less

This book took me a long time to get into, but has gotten deeper under my skin than I expected--it's dense and nuanced and incredibly historically rich.

Really loved this, surprisingly long graphic novel, dealing with a young man growing up in the deeply conservative South, immersed in a progressive community that is fighting for rights for blacks and other minorities. He is also trying to fend off the possibility that he may himself be be gay. Astonishingly honest and beautifully drawn, I have never read anything quite like this.