Rupert Kinnard

Rupert Earl Kinnard (born July 21, 1954, Chicago, Illinois) is a pioneering gay Black cartoonist, illustrator, and art director based in Portland, Oregon. Growing up on Chicago's West Side, Kinnard began drawing from childhood and created his first superhero character — Superbad, a Black militant superhero inspired by Muhammad Ali — in 1972, at age 18, after noticing that every superhero he read was white.

In 1976, while attending Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Kinnard introduced the Brown Bomber — a nonviolent teenage superhero inspired by boxer Joe Louis — in the college newspaper. The Black student organization sold 300 Brown Bomber t-shirts to raise scholarship funds for Black students, and shortly after, Kinnard released strips depicting B.B. coming out as gay. In 1984 he created Diva Touché Flambé, an ageless Black lesbian character and B.B.'s partner. Together they starred in "Cathartic Comics," which ran as a weekly strip on the editorial pages of the San Francisco Sentinel, SF Weekly, and other alt-weekly and queer publications throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The strip was collected and published as B.B. and the Diva (Alyson Books, 1992).

Kinnard co-founded Just Out in 1983 — Oregon's first LGBTQ publication. He served as art director for the San Francisco Sentinel and multiple other Bay Area publications. He was the first African American to serve on the board of the Portland Town Council, the state's first LGBTQ organization, and founded the African American Lesbians and Gay United and helped establish The Diversity Alliance. Two of his publications received National Gay Press Association awards for best overall design. Original panels from "Cathartic Comics" are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum. His characters were performed on stage in Out of the Inkwell at Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco in 1994. He is featured in the documentary No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (2021) and is honored in a permanent mural in downtown Portland. He has been a wheelchair user since a car accident in 1996.

Ooops… I Just Catharted!: Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics (Stacked Deck Press, 2025), edited by William O. Tyler, collects five decades of his work and was published to celebrate his extraordinary legacy.

In 2026, the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards celebrated its most diverse nominee class in the 38-year history of the awards, with a historic number of Black creators nominated across categories. Kinnard received a 2026 Eisner nomination for Best Archival Collection/Project — Comic Books for Ooops… I Just Catharted!: Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics (Stacked Deck Press).