Stuck Rubber Baby

Howard Cruse

Wow. I just skimmed the Amazon reviews for this book, and I feel like the guy who's running around chasing sacred cows with shish kebab skewers. While that is a feeling that I know (and enjoy) all too well, it's certainly not appropriate here. I liked this book. I liked it quite a lot. But I'm going to be the guy who comes in and destroys the book's Amazon rating because I didn't like it that much.

Cruse has quite a tale to tell, and all the praises sung of it in other reviews are spot on. I hadn't realized, until reading one review, the power that the characters being drawn as they are has in the scope of the book, but I read that bit and realized it was certainly a factor. I'll simply quote him: "The people who populate Stuck Rubber Baby do not share the perfection... of characters from other graphic novels." Indeed. They're plain, mostly, often downright homely, with one major exception (which can be excused, depending on how close to autobiographical this book really runs; Cruse's comments dance around the issue). They're real. And it's not just the deep characterization and realistic reactions to situations that makes them real, it's that they look like real people. That's more likable than I had realized, and the more I mull it over, the more I realize it's one of the things that defined the book for me.

While that's a powerful argument for taking a look at this book, the other side of the coin is the retread effect. These days, with eighty-seven Da Vinci Code-inspired books coming out every week, it's kind of hard to knock a book for the retread effect and mean it, but just because the rest of the world is sucking down retreads like candy doesn't mean you have to. How many books have been written about the last days of segregation in the south? How many books have been written about coming of age as a gay man, and the internal conflict that inevitably comes of it? Cruse combines the two, and there's no denying that he does it with an intelligence and sensitivity that's rare. Still, Cruse is treading roads that have been walked many, many times before, and that takes some of the luster off the pearl.

Still, it's all done very well, and anyone with an interest in the subjects at hand is going to enjoy this. Give it a look.