Michael J. Goldberg was an alternative cartoonist known for the exploration of gay themes in his comics. His work was included in Gay Comix. [1]
In 1981, Goldberg published his debut comic strip Clonederella to the Bay Area Reporter . [2] He entered into the realm of Gay Comix after befriending Robert Triptow. [2] He was in 11 out of 25 issues of Gay Comix. Goldberg would also appear in Strip AIDS U.S.A. and Meatmen.
Howard Cruse was an American alternative cartoonist known for the exploration of gay themes in his comics. First coming to attention in the 1970s, during the underground comix movement with Barefootz, he was the founding editor of Gay Comix in 1980, created the gay-themed strip Wendel during the 1980s, and reached a more mainstream audience in 1995 when an imprint of DC Comics published his graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby.
Kitchen Sink Press was a comic book publishing company founded by Denis Kitchen in 1970. Kitchen Sink Press was a pioneering publisher of underground comics, and was also responsible for numerous republications of classic comic strips in hardcover and softcover volumes. One of their best-known products was the first full reprint of Will Eisner's The Spirit—first in magazine format, then in standard comic book format. The company closed in 1999.
Jerry A. Mills was an openly gay cartoonist known for his comic strip Poppers, which is credited as one of the first comic strips to develop multi-dimensional gay characters. Scholars have stated that while earlier comics had relied on stereotypes such as the nelly queen or muscleman, Mills presented his characters with lives beyond the stereotypes. His work is also credited as having helped shape comics for the LGBTQ+ community and its members.
Roberta Gregory is an American comic book writer and artist best known for the character Bitchy Bitch from her Fantagraphics Books series Naughty Bits. She is a prolific contributor to many feminist and underground anthologies, such as Wimmen's Comix and Gay Comix.
Trina Robbins is an American cartoonist. She was an early participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the first female artists in that movement. She is a member of the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.
In comics, LGBT themes are a relatively new concept, as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) themes and characters were historically omitted from the content of comic books and their comic strip predecessors due to anti-gay censorship. LGBT existence was included only via innuendo, subtext and inference. However the practice of hiding LGBT characters in the early part of the twentieth century evolved into open inclusion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and comics explored the challenges of coming-out, societal discrimination, and personal and romantic relationships between gay characters.
Tim Barela is an acclaimed gay cartoonist who is best known for his creation of the comic strip Leonard & Larry. The Leonard & Larry strip first appeared in a 1984 issue of Gay Comix, then were later featured in The Advocate and Frontiers magazines. The comic series has been collected in four volumes published by Palliard Press, and a single volume by Rattling Good Yarns.
Gay Comix is an underground comics series published from 1980–1998 featuring cartoons by and for gay men and lesbians. The comic books had the tagline “Lesbians and Gay Men Put It On Paper!”
Robert Triptow is an American writer and artist. He is known primarily for creating gay- and bisexual-themed comics and for editing Gay Comix in the 1980s, and he was identified by underground comix pioneer Lee Marrs as "the last of the underground cartoonists."
Gerard P. Donelan, known primarily as just Donelan, is an openly gay cartoonist. Part of the first wave of LGBT cartoonists, he drew "It's a Gay Life", a regular single-panel cartoon feature in The Advocate, for 15 years.
Jon Macy is a gay American cartoonist. He began his career in 1990 with the series Tropo published September 1990 – April 1992 by Blackbird Comics. Since then, he has contributed to various LGBT comics anthologies and gay pornographic magazines, but he is best known for his graphic novel Teleny and Camille, which won a 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica.
Carl Vaughn Frick – often credited as Vaughn Frick or simply Vaughn – is an alternative cartoonist known for the exploration of gay, environmental, HIV/AIDS awareness, and radical political themes in his comics. His Watch Out! Comix #1 (1986) was an influential gay-themed comic, one of the first by an openly gay male cartoonist. His work was also included in issues of Gay Comix,Meatmen, Strip AIDS, No Straight Lines, and So Fey, a collection of Radical Faerie fiction.
Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics is a series of paperback books collecting short comics featuring gay and bisexual male characters. The comics included a mixture of explicit erotica and humor. Between 1986 and 2004, 26 black-and-white volumes of the series were published by Leyland Publications, making it the longest-running anthology of gay male pornographic comics.
Rupert Kinnard also credited as Prof. I.B. Gittendowne, is an American cartoonist who created the first ongoing gay/lesbian-identified African-American comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Kinnard is gay and African American.
Kurt Erichsen is an openly gay cartoonist and civil engineer, creator of the syndicated LGBT-themed comic strip "Murphy's Manor," his most notable work, which ran for 1183 weekly strips from the 1980s until 2008 and through strip 1205 in 2019.
Strip AIDS and Strip AIDS U.S.A. are comics anthology volumes published in 1987 in the UK, and 1988 in the US (respectively). They combined short comics with educational and sometimes comedic themes, to educate readers about HIV disease and safer sex, and to raise funds for the care of people with AIDS.
Bruce Billings is an openly gay cartoonist, creator of the LGBT-themed comic strip Castro, which ran in the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco gay newspapers such as The Voice. Castro nominally starred a dog who lived in the Castro Street neighborhood of San Francisco with his owner, and the strip affectionately lampooned the gay male culture of the city. The strips were reprinted in Gay Comix, Meatmen, and Strip AIDS USA. In 1989, Billings and cartoonist Kurt Erichsen co-produced a flip book – a single bound volume with both covers formatted as the "front" – as Between the Sheets! and Under the Covers (Erichsen's). Billings retired to southern Oregon.
Burton Clarke is a gay African-American alternative cartoonist. He is known for his contributions to the rise of LGBT comics and his focus on representing gay men of all races and classes in his art, using a mix of realism and fantasy to tackle complex issues such as internalized racism and homophobia.
Leslie Ewing is an American cartoonist, activist, and breast cancer survivor. Her comics highlight feminist and lesbian themes and her cartoons have been featured in prominent queer comics, including Gay Comix, Strip AIDS, and Wimmen's Comix. Ewing was the executive director for the Pacific Center for Human Growth from 2008 to 2019.
Angela Bocage is a bisexual comics creator who published mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. Bocage was active in the queer comics community during these decades, publishing in collections like Gay Comix,Strip AIDS USA, and Wimmen's Comix. Bocage also created, edited, and contributed comics to Real Girl, a comics anthology published by Fantagraphics.