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For this, he reached out to Howard Cruse for some quotes and in return, grateful for the coverage, Howard asked if he knew any cartoonists for a list he was working on for the new issue. He managed to persuade the editor to let him write a feature on it. His journey to becoming the editor was a peculiar one, starting when he noticed a review copy of the publication in the bin while working at the Bay Area Reporter. He experienced publishing under both Kitchen Sink Press and Bob Ross. Robert Triptow, a cartoonist and writer from Utah, edited the magazine from 1984 until 1988. I sold him the trademark, the only thing I owned, since the copyrights, like all undergrounds, were retained by the respective creators.” “I connected with Bob Ross, who owned the Bay Area Reporter which was a weekly gay paper in San Francisco, and when he expressed interest in acquiring the title in 1984 it seemed like a good match. “I increasingly felt that Gay Comix would best benefit from being with a gay publisher who knew that specialty market far better.” It was this mindset that cemented Denis’ decision to sell the title. “It was also difficult, if not impossible, to stretch my limited advertising budget to effectively promote Gay Comix to its primary reader base when everything else I published could be efficiently promoted and pushed via the comics industry’s ‘Direct Market’ system,” he says. After five years of printing, Denis found that the cost of producing Gay Comix was disproportionately higher than any of the other titles that he published, in part due to the complex distribution system and distinct mailing devices that were entirely separate from the other comics under the Kitchen Sink Press umbrella. The publication went through quite a turbulent journey over the course of its 18-year run. Rather than specifically suggest the content they wanted, editors would instead give illustrators the freedom to input whatever it was they wanted to explore or discuss, which ensured the collection had a wide range of diverse stories that touched every corner of the LGBTQ+ community. Flipping through its pages, it perfectly captures and successfully satirizes much of the sociopoltical queer issues that were taking place at the time. It also gave him a platform to address many subjects which directly affected his community, including AIDS, gay rights demonstrations and gay bashing.įor many, Gay Comix became not only a source of entertainment, but a place where you could find vital information about gay life in the ‘80s. It was the first instance in which he had openly addressed his own sexuality in his work, and led him to create the acclaimed strip Wendel (for gay publication The Advocate), which told the story of a gay man and his partner Ollie. Having established himself as a budding cartoonist in the ‘70s, Howard utilized much of his own personal experience and embedded it into his stories for the publication. Howard Cruse (who sadly passed away in 2019) was arguably the backbone of the Gay Comix.
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Paraphrasing, I said, ‘Howard, no offense intended, but might you be gay?’ In those pre-internet days I wrote to Howard, who I think was still living in Birmingham, Alabama, deep in America’s Bible Belt. “I had noticed a gay artist named Headrack appearing in Barefootz, and it occurred to me that Headrack might be an autobiographical element. “I had been publishing Barefootz Funnies by Howard Cruse and for some years he’d been a regular contributor to my anthologies like Snarf, Bizarre Sex and Comix Book,” he says. Now 74, he still retains his passion for comics despite his publishing house closing at the end of the ‘90s. “As a publisher in a field dominated, like so much, by white men, I encouraged work from women and minority cartoonists but by the late ‘70s it was still very rare to see work by openly gay cartoonists,” Denis explains. It proudly brandished the tag line: “Lesbians and Gay Men Put It On Paper!” At the time of its inception, it was distributed by Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press, a publisher based in Wisconsin responsible for putting out underground comics including Bizarre Sex and Bijou Funnies. Simply named Gay Comix (the X was a connotation for the underground culture), it had exclusively queer storylines and was produced almost entirely by gay men and women. But back in the ‘80s amidst the AIDS crisis, there was one underground comic book that was seeking to turn the tide on the ever-present lack of representation.