Rupert Kinnard (b. 1954, Chicago) has spent five decades making comics history. As a student at Cornell College in 1977 he created the Brown Bomber — and in an era when it was genuinely dangerous, wrote him as openly gay, making B.B. and his cosmic companion Diva Touché Flambé the first ongoing Black, LGBTQ comic-strip characters in the world.
After moving to Portland in 1979, Rupert co-founded Just Out, Oregon's first LGBTQ publication, designing its award-winning look. He went on to serve as art director for the San Francisco Sentinel and SF Weekly, while Cathartic Comics ran in queer publications nationwide. His 1992 collection B.B. and the Diva carried a foreword by filmmaker Marlon Riggs.
A 1996 automobile accident left Rupert paralyzed; his activism never slowed — co-founding Portland's Brother to Brother chapter and working for marriage equality. He appears in the documentary No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics (2021) and received Cornell College's Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award in 2022.
His fifty-year retrospective, “Ooops… I Just Catharted!” (Stacked Deck Press), was nominated for an Eisner Award in 2025.