You’ve probably seen Rupert Kinnard’s smile if you’ve passed the downtown Portland mural on NW Couch at Broadway. A wheelchair user since a car accident in 1996, Kinnard sits between Kathleen Saadat and Lynn Nakamoto, two other icons of Portland’s queer history. Look closer, to the bottom of the mural, and you’ll see two smaller figures who look like they might’ve just beamed in from Saturn—the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé, the two stars of Kinnard’s Cathartic Comics.

Gay, Black, and proud of it, the Brown Bomber and the Diva helmed Kinnard’s comic that ran for about a decade in the pages of alt weeklies and queer newspapers in the ’80s and ’90s. Like the protagonists of contemporary comics Doonesbury and Dykes to Watch Out For (and later The Boondocks), the Brown Bomber and the Di

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