PrideScape Podcast

PrideScape is the official podcast of Pride Northwest, home of the annual Portland Pride Waterfront Festival and Parade and much more. Each month we will be bringing you the latest Pride Northwest updates, and important news and information affecting Oregon and SW Washington's LGBTQ+ community.

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Newest Episode

Rupert Kinnard, cartoonist and community-builder

Published 8/20/2024

Join us as we spend some quality time with cartoonist and community-builder Rupert Kinnard, to talk about his journey and latest project "Ooops...I Just Catharted!: 50 Years of Cathartic Comics!"

Rupert Kinnard is an American cartoonist who is best known for creating the first ongoing gay/lesbian-identified African-American comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber (a teenage superhero) and Diva Touché Flambé (his ageless lesbian partner). Originally from Chicago, aside from a seven-year stint in San Francisco, Rupert has made Portland his home since 1979. In addition to becoming the first African-American person to serve on the Portland Town Council, Rupert was instrumental in the early years of Just Out and was a founding member of Brother to Brother, a social organization for African-American queer men.

Rupert's latest project, "Ooops...I Just Catharted!: 50 Years of Cathartic Comics!", is a collection of Rupert Kinnard's long-running comic strip, Cathartic Comics. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Cathartic Comics made its way from the Cornellian, the student newspaper of Cornell College, to the queer-focused alternative weekly newspapers that popped up in communities across the country. Along the way, readers delighted to the exploits of the Brown Bomber, comics' first black and gay superhero, and Diva Touché Flambé, master of the ancient practice of Slapthology. These two satirized the political and social mores of the age, touching not only upon the divide between liberal and conservative or gay and  straight, but also between Black and white in the queer community and beyond. Back this Project on Kickstarter.