Stuck Rubber Baby

Stuck Rubber Baby
Creator	Howard Cruse
Date	1995
Page count	210 pages
Publisher	Paradox Press

Stuck Rubber Baby is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Howard Cruse, first published in 1995. Cruse's first graphic novel after a decades-long career as an underground cartoonist, the book deals with homosexuality and racism in the 1960s in the southern United States in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement.

Howard Cruse (b. 1944) was born in Alabama to a Baptist preacher. He earned a degree in drama and worked in television before turning to a cartooning career. From 1971 he published a strip called Barefootz that appeared in a number of underground comix publications, including three issues under its own title—though Cruse's contemporaries gave it little regard, deeming it too cute and gentle compared to the countercultural works alongside which it ran. In 1976, Cruse introduced a gay character into the strip, committing to the gay liberation movement.

In 1979 Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press invited Cruse to edit the comic-book anthology Gay Comix; the first issue appeared in 1980. From 1983 to 1989 Cruse produced Wendel, an ongoing humorous comic strip for the LGBT magazine The Advocate.

Piranha Press, an imprint of DC Comics that published alternative comics, contracted with Cruse, giving him an advance against royalties to cover expenses for the two years projected to finish the book. Cruse ultimately took four years, and when his finances became tight he took time away from the book to raise funds by applying for grants and selling pages from the book before they were drawn.Piranha Press was discontinued in 1994, before Cruse finished Stuck Rubber Baby, so the book was instead published by DC's Paradox Press imprint in 1995, in hardcover.

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