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161 Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference —Gary Richards In any number of ways, Stuck Rubber Baby, Howard Cruse’s 1995 graphic novel, is a mesmerizing text that broke new ground, particularly with its unique marriage of genre and content. A gay cartoonist who, since the 1970s, has created such iconographic series as Barefootz and Wendel, Cruse again deploys the graphic form in Stuck Rubber Baby to explore a set of tensions surrounding the racial and sexual politics of the Deep South in the 1960s.1 To do so, via something of an updating of Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch, Cruse creates as narrator and central protagonist Toland Polk, an apparently middle-aged white man now displaced from the South whose reminiscences delineate his youth in the fictional Clayfield, a major southern city based on Birmingham. (For understandable artistic, personal, and even, one suspects, legal reasons, Cruse adamantly begins commentary appended to the novel by asserting that“Stuck Rubber Baby is a work of fiction , not autobiography. Its characters are inventions of mine, and Clayfield is a make-believe city”[213]; however,he immediately clarifies,“That said,it’s doubtful I’d have been moved to write or draw this graphic novel if I hadn’t come of age in Birmingham,Alabama, during the early ’60s” [213].)2 As Toland recounts his southern childhood and early adulthood in the Kennedy era, he foregrounds his hesitant, vexed radicalization to liberal political activity during the Civil Rights Movement. The process’s starting point, Toland emphasizes, is one saturated with white racism within both his particular household and the broader cultural spheres of the post-World War II decades. The evolution subsequently includes his gradual introduction to political activism and its array of practitioners, his residual disinterest in and distance from this world, and ultimately his anxious immersion into a cycle of politicized violence that results in a series of martyred individuals. Gary Richards 162 Intricate though this narrative already is, Cruse provocatively complicates Toland’s identity—and southern history—by weaving into these reminiscences the protagonist’s equally anxious negotiations of sexual identity. These elements include his recurring early moments of homoeroticism that most typically remain unacknowledged until much later; his largely abortive attempts as an adult to enact heterosexuality,ones that nevertheless lead to the birth of his daughter, the baby tangentially conceived because of the defective condom of the novel’s title; and his adult sexual experimentation with other men. These negotiations culminate, as suggested through the frame narration’s brief glimpses of Toland’s current same-sex partnership, in his full acceptance of gay identity. With this unique focus, Cruse not only boldly takes the graphic novel into largely uncharted territory but also simultaneously positions his text within at least two established sub-genres of southern literary production and calls attention to the absences within those sub-genres. On the one hand, Stuck Rubber Baby exemplifies what southern intellectual historian Fred Hobson has termed the“white southern racial conversion narrative.”In But Now I See, he argues that this form arose in the 1940s and, through the autobiographical works of Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, James McBride Dabbs, Willie Morris, and others, became a codified sub-genre that persisted throughout the twentieth century. All these persons, Hobson clarifies, penned “works in which the authors, all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society, confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment” (2). Drawing upon but significantly revising a long tradition of religious narratives, these works centralize “a recognition and confession of the writer’s own sins and the announced need for redemption ,as well as a description of the writer’s radical transformation—a sort of secular salvation” (4). This trajectory is precisely that of the anxiously “redeemed” Toland, who confesses his transgressions both within the narrative—“And I’m talking about the really frightening words that all the habits of a lifetime were screaming at me to hold back and leave unsaid” (193)—and, more important , through the narrative itself. Indeed, the first page of the novel features Toland’s face dominating the other panels, bleeding to the page’s edges, and staring somberly and squarely at readers, all elements that underscore the importance of the telling of the narrative about to be recited. Here and throughout the novel, Cruse has Toland conspicuously foreground the narrative as the evidential...

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