This interview was conducted in 1999 by Josh Latham.

  Howard Cruse is an exceptional cartoonist and an important participant in the underground comic movement. Well known for strips like Wendel and Barefootz. In 1995 he released his now award winning graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby.

Let's begin!
BV: What got you started in comics?

HC: I started off wanting to do newspaper comic strips, but then began using my characters (mainly Barefootz, in the beginning) in longer stories because Denis Kitchen at Kitchen Sink Comix was willing to include them in the underground comic books he was publishing in the early 1970s. Although I continue to do short comic strips from time to time, I've really become addicted to the greater amount of room you have in comic books to develop your stories and characters in subtle, detailed ways.

BV: What comic books did you read when you were younger?

HC: Little Lulu was my favorite comic book series when I first began reading, followed closely by the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories. Batman and Superman were probably next in line, and beyond that were a wide range of comics I enjoyed. Back in the '50s, y'know, comics came in a much wider variety of types and genres, with loads of good funny ones produced for children. The total takeover by superheroes came later.

BV:What do you read now? What do you think about young cartoonist today? Do you have any that you like?

HC: I don't have much time to read comics now or much spare money to buy them, so I'm really out of touch with a lot of what's being produced at present. Occasionally I'll get to spend a little time with cartoonists like Chester Brown or Roberta Gregory or Joe Matt or Peter Bagge or Alison Bechdel or Bob Fingerman or Nina Paley, and those will be the ones that come quickly to mind at that point in time. A week later, I'll wax enthusiastic about others. It's totally haphazard, which current cartoonists come to mind as my "favorites" at any given moment.

BV: What new projects do you have planned?

HC: My present professional relationship with comics is kind of chaotic: I have a history in the field but I'm not really in the field right now, because most of my attention has to be directed toward chipping away at my Stuck Rubber Baby debt. That means that I spend much more of my time these days doing graphic design or digital production instead of drawing pictures. But I still do cartooning on a small scale when I have a chance. I've appeared in all the early issues of Harpoon magazine, and I'm doing a b&w single-pager for Jennifer Camper's forthcoming zine Juicy Mother. And last week the Advocate hired me to do a small spot illustration for one of their columns.

BV: I like the fact that you have such a detailed website, I see this lacking for a lot of artists and illustrators.Do you do everything on your site or do you have someone do it for you?

HC: I do well to keep it from spilling out of the computer monitors into people's laps! If it wasn't for Adobe PageMill, I wouldn't be able to do anything on the web at all.

BV: I didn't start using an HTML programer like FrontPage until this year.I just wrote my own HTML and played with it. I think that it makes you a much better web designer to know what kind of language is behind your page. You understand bugs better and you can control the page better.

HC: I think you're absolutely right. Not knowing HTML is a real deficiency on my part, mainly when I'm getting some bizarre effect and I have no idea why. But so many things are always competing for my time and mental space that if I had waited until I taught myself HTML I would have never made it to the web. And I find working with my cartoons in this entirely different medium to be endlessly interesting (if sometimes frustrating).

BV: Do you ever use computers for creating artwork?

HC: Yes, I spend a lot of time working with both Photoshop 5.0 and Illustrator 8.0. I loved Photoshop as soon as I got my hands on it (I only first ventured into computer graphics about two years ago). It took me some time to warm up to Illustrator, but bit by bit I'm developing a bag of tricks that are pretty handy. For the most part I ink my drawings conventionally and then scan them in and use Photoshop for color. Lately I've been experimenting with some interesting effects by scanning in only a rough sketch, importing it into Illustrator, and tracing the lines with Illustrator's pen tool. I end up with areas of flat color and no black outlines. Then I convert that into a Photoshop file and, selecting each color area individually, apply color in a more subtle way. This would never replace my normal way of drawing, but it expands my pange of visual options.