Ooops…I Just Catharted!
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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.
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.
Tim Tran for Willamette Week profiles Rupert Kinnard and the fifty year history of his Cathartic Comics.
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.
Further reading: Portland Design History and Wikipedia:
In 1972, teenage Kinnard noticed that not only were all of his favorite superheroes white, but even the comics characters he’d created himself didn’t reflect his racial identity, and responded by creating Superbad, a Black-militant figure inspired by boxer/activist Muhammad Ali.[4][5]
In 1976, he enrolled at Cornell College in Iowa. In 1977, he created Brown Bomber, a less aggressive African-American character, modeled after boxer Joe Louis (who was also known by that nickname).[3] The character was featured in a comic strip published weekly in the Cornellian, the college newspaper.[2] After the character became popular on campus, Kinnard wrote a strip which identified the character as gay.[5]
He graduated from college in 1979, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he began working for alternative newspaper Willamette Week, eventually as associate art director. In 1983 he co-founded Just Out, Oregon’s first LGBT publication. In 1984, he created the lesbian African-American character Diva Touché Flambé and featured her with Brown Bomber in the strip “Cathartic Comics”.
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