Join Portland artist Rupert Kinnard on Saturday, June 21 to celebrate the release of his historic new book, Ooops…I Just Catharted!: 50 Years of Cathartic Comics. Rupert will give a presentation and talk about his work, followed by a Q&A moderated by local author and comics scholar Andy Mangels.
Ooops…I Just Catharted!: 50 Years of Cathartic Comics is a collection of Rupert Kinnard’s long-running comic strip, Cathartic Comics. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Cathartic Comics made its way from the Cornellian, the student newspaper of Cornell College, to the queer-focused alternative weekly newspapers that popped up in communities across the country. Along the way, readers delighted to the exploits of the Brown Bomber, comics’ first black and gay superhero, and Diva Touché Flambé, master of the ancient practice of Slapthology. These two satirized the political and social mores of the age, touching not only upon the divide between liberal and conservative or gay and straight, but also between Black and white in the queer community and beyond.
Cathartic Comics was steeped in the queer, Black experience, long before the word “intersectionality“ was on every social justice advocate’s lips. This strip also played with the medium of comics itself, poking affectionate fun at everything from white, straight superhero fare to newspaper comic classics such as Doonesbury. Cathartic Comics gave Black and queer comics fans something that finally spoke to their experience and put the rest of the world on notice.
The man behind Cathartic Comics is artist Rupert Kinnard, who turned his youthful love of superhero comics into a way to hold a mirror up to the world. He and his work have been featured in numerous places along the way, including the documentary No Straight Lines, chronicling the history of queer comics, and the recent comics anthology We Belong, celebrating queer Black voices.
Ooops…I Just Catharted! now not only serves as the most comprehensive collection to date of Kinnard’s work, but it’s also a personal and creative biography of the man who held the pen. This book includes his earliest work as an artist finding his vision, experimental illustrations, and commercial pieces that he did as his work began to draw attention outside the world of comics. Along the way, Kinnard shares his life experiences from growing up in Chicago to the tragic accident that left him paraplegic to the present day.
WHO: Rupert Kinnard and Andy Mangels
WHAT: Ooops…I Just Catharted! release party and presentation
WHEN: Saturday June 21, 5-7pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 1223 Lloyd Center
Rupert Kinnard has served as a keynote speaker at the Comics and Medicine Conference in Seattle and at the Comics Studies Society Conference at the University of Northern Texas. He has been a presenter at the Queers and Comics conferences in New York and San Francisco. His Cathartic Comics were featured in the Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum and has original artwork included in the archives at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, OH.
“If Rupert Kinnard were a superhero, he’d look a lot like…well, Rupert Kinnard. The man may have three perceived strikes against him, but in this compassionate, compelling collage of his life and work, he hits it out of the park.”
—Alison Bechdel, best-selling author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and the critically acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home.
