Tim Barela is an award-winning artist and one of the many early pioneers in the field of Gay cartooning. He is best known for his popular comic strip, Leonard & Larry. The feature appeared in Gay Comix, The Advocate, and Frontiers Magazine from 1984 to 2002.

Mr. Barela, himself, will be turning 67 the same year that the one-volume compilation of his Leonard & Larry cartoons finally sees print in 2021. Tim was born in Los Angeles in 1954 and has been a resident of the Southern California town of Temecula for over thirty years.

Barela is a venerable, old Spanish name, and Mr. Barela’s family has deep roots in the state of New Mexico. Barelas first arrived with the earliest settlers to the upper Rio Grande valley in the 1600s. There they met the other side of the cartoonist’s ancestry, the Indigenous Tiwa tribe.

The Tiwa were a pueblo people who were thoroughly appalled with the Spainiards’ arrogance and atrocities. They rebelled, tossed the invaders out, and sent them packing back to Mexico. Fortunately, some three hundred years later, well after the Spainiards’ return, the tumultuous days of New Mexico’s inception were far enough in the past for the two branches of Tim Barela’s family to unite. The result was a queer cartoonist who returned the favor by creating Leonard & Larry.

Tim Barela’s formal art training was limited. Whatever noteworthy that appears in his creations and the pages of his books is mostly the result of natural talent and old-fashioned pigheadedness. A lot of pigheadedness.

That stubbornness was present throughout his life, but really came to bear when Tim Barela attended high school. The cartoonist attended Lynwood High, a prestigious public learning institution whose hallowed halls produced the likes of Weird Al Yankovic some years after Barela graduated in 1972. He attended art classes at Lynwood but had significant artistic differences with one of his teachers. Differences so sharp, he was kicked out of that class for ignoring assignments and “cartooning.”

But all ended well the following year when, at the annual school art show, that same teacher was forced to publicly present Tim Barela with the top awards for painting and drawing. Mostly cartoon drawing, not insignificantly. Revenge is a dish best served with an audience.

After high school, Tim Barela could have attended art school, but didn’t. Instead, he freelanced as an illustrator and graphic designer, learning from the school of practical experience and hard knocks. Practical experience when his first published cartooning jobs gained him access to magazine art departments later in the 1970s.

Those jobs and that experience would eventually lead to Tim Barela’s most popular and enduring creation, a comic strip that first appeared in the 1980s and was named for its two main characters, Leonard and Larry. Ultimately, the cartoonist would produce over 300 episodes of Leonard & Larry, 4 books, and now a single-volume compilation.

Along the way, the cartoonist’s work has garnered praise and recognition. In 1995, Leonard & Larry received a British prize, the Comics Creator’s Guild Award for “Best Strip in a Periodical.” And in 1997, Tim Barela was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Humor for his second book, Kurt Cobain and Mozart Are Both Dead.

So, what’s next for the cartoonist and author? Who knows. But Tim is definitely enjoying the ride.