Let's back up to around 1974. Setting: Crestline ultra-hip bohemian pad with assorted characters and misfits, intelligentsia and academics, dead-heads, pot-heads and pin-heads, and just plain Heads.
One of the nicest and most talented people I ever met was Howard Cruse, the cartoonist, who was from Birmingham (later moved to New York). Howard was just publishing his Barefootz comic books. He was a starving artist at the time, so I gave him $50.00 to do a large piece of cartoon art. It was splendid. It had a strange conglomerate creature looking rather bewildered at the top of an existential staircase that opened up into a universe of everything imaginable and then some. I managed to hold on to that maserpiece all these years until my son begged it from me to put on his wall in his own Southside apartment. That was the last it was seen. I guess it is only fitting that it has disappeared on the Southside. I can only hope that it is still hanging on the wall in some ultra-hip bohemian pad being admired by various characters and misfits that one always finds, even to this day, on the Southside of Birmingham.
One of the nicest and most talented people I ever met was Howard Cruse, the cartoonist, who was from Birmingham (later moved to New York). Howard was just publishing his Barefootz comic books. He was a starving artist at the time, so I gave him $50.00 to do a large piece of cartoon art. It was splendid. It had a strange conglomerate creature looking rather bewildered at the top of an existential staircase that opened up into a universe of everything imaginable and then some. I managed to hold on to that maserpiece all these years until my son begged it from me to put on his wall in his own Southside apartment. That was the last it was seen. I guess it is only fitting that it has disappeared on the Southside. I can only hope that it is still hanging on the wall in some ultra-hip bohemian pad being admired by various characters and misfits that one always finds, even to this day, on the Southside of Birmingham.
