Stuck Rubber Baby.

David Frankel 

As a young white male of indefinite but vaguely libertarian leanings growing up in the South of the Civil Rights period, Toland Polk - a vividly descriptive name, though I'm not sure of what - would at best have an anxious adolescence. Toss in the fact that, first, he's also gay, and second, he's struggling furiously to deny it, and you have the scenario of Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby. Cruse, a cartoonist who created the Wendel comic strip that used to run in The Advocate and whose work has appeared in many other magazines, including Artforum, here for the first time tries cartooning's book-length form - a novel in pictures. The result is bravura storytelling, and if the story is a coming-out-and-of-age tate of a not completely unfamiliar kind, it is made specific, pungent, and singular by its setting in the Movement-era South.

Perhaps that will open Stuck Rubber Baby to the charge that it uses African-American history to give weight to the old story of a white boy having trouble growing up. Cruse's reply might be contained in his book, which shows black and gay interests as intricately interwoven in that time and place. Early on, Toland listens to a song: "Somethin' tells me there's a secret in the air ... Nods and whispers among my sisters here and there ... Awkward pauses ... Eyes averted ... Little warnings oddly worded ... Can the truth be all that hard to bear? ... Hell is livin' with a secret in the air." What is the singer talking about? A romance, of course, but also the unspoken social consensus of racial segregation, as well as the closet. The gay bar in Toland's fictional Clayfield is the most racially mixed boite in town; the gay and civil rights communities are seriously in bed together. I don't have the history to know how accurate this is, but I do find it convincing that a Clayfield gay-basher would also outfit his car with a "Keep America White" bumper sticker.

As a writer, Cruse will take the time to mention how Toland's friend's dog loves car rides; as an artist, he'll give you the domestic detail of a cinderblock-and-board coffee table or the patterns of a great variety of printed fabrics, of which he seems quite fond. Economically sketching the aura of a social world, he'll fill an empty corner with a newspaper and its barely legible headline: "Planetarium Announces Lecture on Theology versus Astronomy: What God Has to Say about Mariner 2." Then he'll rupture the reconstruction with a graphically surreal pair of images of a skull disintegrating in fantasy or dream. His language is full of vividness, as in a woman's rueful reflection on her husband: "Most of the boys I had to pick from in high school - well, you couldn't get a good brain out of'em if you boiled all their heads together in one pot!" The cake in which these cherries are set is a story structure of loops in time, all retrospectively established from a '90s present that itself seems temporally shifting. A flashback may begin as a recollection by a middle-aged Toland and end as a '60s Toland's memory of the same event. The artfulness of this layered narrative contributes to Stuck Rubber Baby's sinuous fluidity and flow, which get a visual assist from the pacing and variations in the sizes and shapes of the pictures.

Toland is an accidental activist-more than anything, he's just confused. But he does know he admires Ginger, a Movement girl who's also his opportunity to convince himself and the world he's straight. Cruse isn't soft on Toland, and catches the crumminess of his behavior toward his girlfriend: "OK - I screwed up tonight, but in general I've really been feelin' like I was in love with you. I mean, I am in love with you." The anxiety, guilt, and enduring regret of this pained but far from unrewarding relationship are among the book's most sensitively rendered shadings, it's a pleasure to look at a novel in which the characters are so beautifully drawn.