Wendel: All Together by Howard Cruise
by Benjamin Russell

This volume is a compilation of the weekly strips that Howard Cruse wrote and drew for The Advocate between 1983 and 1989. Previously collected in two parts, Wendel and Wendel on the Rebound, the book is a complete retrospective both of Cruse's evolution from a gag stripper to a more character-based storyteller and of the sexual politics of the decade.

I was twelve, heterosexual, and living adjacent to a dairy farm in 1989, and it wasn't until the advent of Tim Burton's reimagining of the Batman mythos that I began to lift my head out of my complacent consumerism to see the paths that would lead me to an awareness of some of the interrelationships between politics and popular culture, art and adaptation, and the fact that the rest of the world did not resemble my quiet country town. The past is enormous and one has to pick and choose with which aspects of it one will become familiar. And while my choices did not lead me to an immediate recognition of terms of national import like "Stonewall", my liberal education was such that when, as a freshman in college, I ended up living in a dorm hallway seemingly peopled about half and half with gays and straights, that I didn't question it as disproportionate or unusual. College was supposed to be different than where I came from, so the abnormal was normal.

How curious then, that upon reading David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy last year, my greatest criticism was that the world in which the book took place just seemed too open and affirming, that the fact that anyone's sexual choices were as ordinary and varied as one's personal choices of style or clothes. Why might it be that while I found it to be normal to be with a group of friends and acquaintances whose sexualities were part of the conversation but not part of the equation, that a book that posited similar circumstances would have seemed so unfoundedly idealistic? Granted, my dorm didn't have a transvestite star quarterback who could wear a dress to away games without anyone batting an eyelash.

Levithan's novel mentions a community next door that isn't quite as ready for personal and sexual diversity as the town in which the story unfolds, but that town is only there for a small dose of realism and some necessary plot tension. However, part of the author's purpose is to create a grounded fantasy, a practical ideal of openness that doesn't dilute the difficulties of communicating emotion or perspective with another person, but which gets some of the other judgmental barriers out of the way. The Smothers Brothers on my computer right now are asking and answering their own question: "Where's the love? It's there." Boy Meets Boy is fairly standard teen romance, complete with John Hughes or Savage Steve Holland-esque wacky sidekicks and the truest of true loves winning out in the end. Once one recognizes that the structure is exactly the same, it becomes clear what Levithan's agenda is: that the love story is universal, ordinary, and normal, whether between John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga or John Cusack and Anthony Edwards.

How nice it is to see that Cruse was doing the exact same thing fifteen years beforehand. The Wendel strips are rife with wish-fulfillment: the sex is plentiful, juicy, and predominantly safe, and the bodies are nicely idealized without being fetish objects. But the depiction and inclusion of the sex and nudity are mostly part of the attempt to depict a casual ordinariness of gay lifestyle. More often than not, if Cruse is drawing his characters naked, it's because they're showering or waking up or wandering around the kitchen in the morning: the normal state of undress that most people participate in. It occasionally gratuitous and its always deliberate, but it doesn't prevent Cruse's point from being clearly communicated beyond any initial shock value. It's just people.

That being said, it's worth noting that clear communication is not always Cruse's strongest point. There are a number of mystifying compositional choices throughout the book, often caused by the sheer desire to cram as much dialogue and rubbery antics into a small space as possible. During the second half of the book these moments almost entirely disappear, an occurrence that takes place simultaneously with a greater flow of story and continuity from strip to strip and a greater confidence in structure that allows Cruse to begin to soft-pedal the tendency of ending with an overt punchline. In the introduction Cruse mentioned that a friend claimed the second half of the book, the previous Wendel on the Rebound, was "really a novel". Cruse allows the compliment to stand on its own, downplaying it somewhat by comparing Wendel's process to the more massive and deliberate undertaking of Stuck Rubber Baby. Cruse informs the reader that the entire structure of Stuck Rubber Baby was laid out before any illustration began, while Wendel evolved in process, "improvised on the run". Not to offend Cruse's friend, but while the larger goals of the later strips are evident and the lack of traditional punchline-driven structures allowed for subtler and more evocative beats, the free-form nature of the strip never really goes away, and the feeling that some things are being made up from week to week persists despite a number of "To Be Continued" captions that emerge in the final pages.

Cruse mentions the number of storylines that were never fulfilled, and the character and plot threads that were left dangling by the close of the strip or the mere vicissitudes of failing to find the grist for the weekly strip. These echoing impulses help prevent the collection from achieving the vaunted novel comparison, as the reader leaves the volume with a potent sense of issues unresolved. Considering the grounded political awareness of the strip, this is not necessarily a detriment, as the characters lived in a world where their statuses were equally lacking in a firm sense of civil security. What surprises is the disquiet that comes with the close of the collection. When reading the collected hardcover sets of "The Far Side" or "Calvin and Hobbes", one may miss the daily advent of the comic, but it is an intellectual loss, based on that small piece of pleasure that came from having one's expectations challenged.

Wendel, perhaps partially because it was clearly created for an audience that accepted its content and its politics, doesn't hit those same notes. From my relatively progressive seat in the future, the strip doesn't show me -- aside from an enthusiastic use of sound effects -- much that I haven't encountered already. So I am forced to conclude that it is the very existence of those unfollowed skeins of character and situation that I find I am missing and that the characters over time grew real enough that where they were going next mattered to me, the reader. If I sound surprised it's because the renditions of the characters approaches camp on a number of occasions, and camp is a dialect of which I have never been enamored. So to find -- despite stilted situations, high language and broad comedy, and a cast of characters that are evolutionary descendents from the tree of Gumby -- that I had invested myself sufficiently in the characters that I was disappointed in their lack of resolution was, indeed, a surprise. While I consider Wendel: All Together to be more of a document of its time than a contained and complete work, you may also be well surprised at just how affecting that document can be.

Benjamin Russell contributes graphic novel reviews to School Library Journal.


PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.
Official Howard Cruse Website - Wendel: All Together

Reviews Archive - Read past Reviews