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Rupert Kinnard was a guest speaker during my freshman English course at Portland State University a decade ago. The legendary artist and former Willamette Week associate art director highlighted his life’s work, including Cathartic Comics. The four-panel black-and-white comic strip introduced the world to the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé, the world’s first weekly syndicated comic featuring openly gay Black superheroes. Seeing this presentation early in my career as a young artist of color inspired me to try my hand at sequential arts and was instrumental in my decision to study visual arts. In a queer art landscape inundated with white gay male references like REX, Tom of Finland and George Quaintance, Kinnard’s work feels like a breath of fresh air, and is arguably now more important than ever.
A successful fundraising campaign allowed Kinnard, now 71, to release Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics (Stacked Deck Press, 282 pages, $34.95), which acts as more than just a visual showcase of his magnum opus. Kinnard reveals a glimpse into his world within the pages of Ooops…I Just Catharted!, covering his prolific career and storied life in vivid detail.
Parts biography, visual retrospective and graphic novel, Ooops…I Just Catharted! pulls back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of Kinnard’s brain, his humble upbringing, artistic journey, and the witty humor he employed to make sense of it all. Split into six sections, readers follow Kinnard through his childhood and early career in Chicago, to his stint as a student at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, to his time living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, and finally to Portland, where he resides to this day with his partner.
In the book, Kinnard—who uses the pen name Prof. I.B. Gittendowne in print and while DJing—serves up a taste of his personal life, teasing juicy bits from his undergraduate days where the Brown Bomber (modeled and named for boxing legend Joe Louis) was first inked. Perhaps the cherry on top of this delectable feast lies in the preliminary drawings and sketchbook pages he chooses to show, scratching the itches of comic nerds, longtime fans and casual readers alike. The succulent main meal, though, is in the treasure trove of names Kinnard drops throughout the book, showcasing the array of friends he’s made along his journey, as well as aspirational figures, who include fellow artists, writers, musicians, athletes and activists, giving context to his work and a chance for readers to do some research of their own. Never one to shy away from controversial subjects or touchy topics, Kinnard also used his comic strip to publicly call out his college’s president, as well as to lampoon local conservative, homophobic politicians of the late ’70s, like Drew Davis and Gordon Shadburne. According to Kinnard, this fraught time in conservative American politics provided bottomless material to ridicule and satirize.
Ooops…I Just Catharted! opens a voyeuristic view into Kinnard’s professional career as cartoonist, editor, freelancer and writer. Told through a showy, gleeful and borderline exhibitionist perspective, the book holds nothing back. It offers, for the first time, the chronicles of Kinnard’s storied career. He began as a Chicago Sun-Times clerk, then became an illustrator for his college newspaper the Cornellian. It covers his time at the San Francisco Sentinel, and even his three years at Willamette Week. There are morsels of local queer history littered throughout the book, with mentions of now-defunct queer publications he worked with, like Cascade Voice, NW Fountain and Just Out. The book also mentions cult classic underground anthologies like Gay Comix and Meatmen.
More than 150 Cathartic Comics strips with Kinnard’s commentary run in Ooops…I Just Catharted!, including several that haven’t been seen since their original publication more than 40 years ago. The Brown Bomber was a way for Kinnard to speak on pertinent social and political issues of the time. His adventures show readers the importance of terse humor and clever wit in dealing with heavy topics. Cathartic Comics’ secondary cast, like the Vanilla Cremepuff—a stand-in character used to represent self-important, pompous gay white men—unfortunately still feels relevant to issues in the queer community.
Kinnard shares frank pearls of wisdom throughout his memoir, dispensing sage advice in between his drawings. “The main reason you can’t judge a book by its cover,” he writes, “is because most people wear dust jackets.”
