Rupert Kinnard

Rupert Kinnard
Rupert Kinnard, 2008
Born	Rupert Earl Kinnard 1954 Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist
Pseudonym(s)	Prof. I.B. Gittendowne
Notable works	B.B. and the Diva

Rupert Kinnard (born 1954) also credited as Prof. I.B. Gittendowne, is an openly gay African-American cartoonist, who created the first ongoing gay/lesbian-identified African-American comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber (a teenage superhero) and Diva Touché Flambé (his ageless lesbian partner).

Rupert Kinnard was born in Chicago in 1954, and spent his early years living on the West Side. He moved with his parents and four sisters to a 16th-floor apartment in then-new housing projects, then to the South Side, where he attended Morgan Park High and later the Chicago Public Schools' High School for Metropolitan Studies. After graduating, he attended American Academy of Art.

In 1972, teenage Kinnard noticed that not only were all of his favorite superheroes white, but even the comics characters he'd created himself didn't reflect his racial identity, and responded by creating Superbad, a Black-militant figure inspired by boxer/activist Muhammed Ali.

In 1976 he enrolled at Cornell College in Iowa. In 1977, he created Brown Bomber, a less aggressive African-American character, modeled after boxer Joe Louis (who was also known by that nickname). The character was featured in a comic strip published weekly in the Cornellian, the college newspaper. After the character became popular on campus, Kinnard wrote a strip which identified the character as gay.

He graduated from college in 1979, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he began working for alternative newspaper Willamette Week, eventually as associate art director. In 1983 he co-founded Just Out, Oregon's first LGBT publication. In 1984 he created the lesbian African-American character Diva Touché Flambé and featured her with Brown Bomber in the strip "Cathartic Comics". He then became the first African American to serve on the board of the Portland Town Council, the state's first LGBT organization, and helped to establish The Diversity Alliance, a multicultural LGBT group.

Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986, Kinnard served as art director for the San Francisco Sentinel, where "Cathartic Comics" began running as a weekly strip featured on the editorial page. In 1989 the strip began running in S.F. Weekly, and also appeared in gay publications in other major cities. A collection of the strips was published in 1992 by Alyson Books as B.B. and the Diva with a foreword by Marlon Riggs. After leaving S.F. Weekly, he became art director of Out/Look, a queer journal.