Howard Cruse’s STUCK RUBBER BABY (First Second, $24.99), a graphic novel about racial violence and gay subculture in the South of the early 1960s, is immediately fascinating — and disturbing.
The first page offers, on either side of the title, an image of the Kennedys, and a racist Southern protest (“Race Mixers Go Back North”).
The narrator-protagonist, Toland Polk — whose adult face looms large as a backdrop, and whose gaze meets our own — then recalls the dead bodies he saw that had “stuck” in his mind as a kid.
The second page takes up the 1955 picture, published in Jet, of the murdered Emmett Till in his coffin — a “gross” image a friend shows Toland, which “permanently blew a fuse” for him.