“Rupert Kinnard was born in 1954, in Chicago, Illinois. Kinnard is an openly gay, African-American, writer, art director, award-winning graphic designer, illustrator, and political cartoonist. In 1976, he created the Brown Bomber — a teenage, Black, gay, fairy, superhero — who made his publication debut on the editorial pages of the Cornell College newspaper, The Cornellian, in 1977. The strip ran for two years. After Kinnard graduated, he moved to Portland in 1979. Under the pseudonym “Prof. I.B. Gittendowne,” Kinnard created Cathartic Comics, which featured the first ongoing LGBTQ-identified African-American comic-strip characters—the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé, his ageless lesbian partner. A book of his strips, B.B. and the Diva: A Collection of Cathartic Comics, was published in 1992.
In 1983 Kinnard’s work as an art director won him the first of three Gay Press Association Best Design awards for the publications Just Out, in Portland, and the San Francisco Sentinel. In 1996 Kinnard was involved in an automobile accident that left him paraplegic. That same year he was recognized with Portland’s Spirit of Pride Award.
In 2013 he received a “”Standing on the Shoulders”” Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Arts Foundation, which stated that his “”artistic talent and leadership to reach out to the LGBTQ community honors the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Kinnard served as a keynote speaker at the 2017 Comics and Medicine Conference in Seattle, Washington. He was also the recipient of Portland Monthly magazine’s 15th Annual Light A Fire Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
Kinnard is also one of five artists featured in the full-length documentary No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics and was the recipient of the 2022 Cornell College’s Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, which was presented to him during the opening of the epic exhibit called From Cornell to Cathartica: A History of Cathartic Comics.
Kinnard’s image is included on the massive mural, Never Look Away, as a queer activist (“first public art project in the state dedicated to LGBTQ+ community achievements and progress”) in Portland, Oregon.
Most recently Kinnard was invited to write the foreword to We Belong: The All-Black, All-LGBTQ+ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology and was also honored to have original art on display at the Portland Art Museum’s historic Black Artists of Oregon exhibit.
Presently he shares ownership of the Kinley Manor Guest House with his longtime partner Scott Stapley, in Portland, Oregon.
He is a Guest of The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum