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February 10 Comics Sit- In
This Sunday, syndicated African-American cartoonists throughout the nation will be participating in a demonstration to protest the under-representation of minority artists in national newspaper comic slots.
Creators Syndicate cartoonists, Charlos Gary of Café Con Leche and Working it Out and Stephen Bentley of Herb and Jamal, along with about eight other African-American cartoonists, will be taking part in the comic page action organized by Cory Thomas (Watch Your Head) and Darrin Bell (Candorville). In an effort to satirize the seemingly widely held belief that minority artists are interchangeable, the participating comics will duplicate one another, essentially, by drawing different renditions of the same strip originally created by Thomas.
Darrin Bell explained the comic- page action to Dave Astor of Editor and Publisher who originally broke the story on January 8:
"Many editors and readers consider different 'black comics' to be interchangeable," explained Bell in the article. He added that the interchangeability perception is among the reasons newspapers allot only one or two spaces to African American and other cartoonists of color, regardless of how many strips and panels compose a newspaper's comics section.
Although the action is in response to what many perceive as a tendency to use race, rather than actual comic content or quality, as a factor in selecting which cartoons to run, Bell is reticent to call the day's demonstrations a protest per se, uncomfortable at such a strong word being applied to the sit-in.
The misconception that is a motivating factor behind Sunday's sit-in is that African-American cartoonists' work is interchangeable. Bell explained to Astor that comics by black cartoonists vary from each other in the same way that comics from white cartoonists differ from one another: "Some are political, some are about friends, and some are about family." Bell told Astor
After Editor & Publisher broke news of the comic page action, other leading publications followed suit, including The Washington Post, where in an interview with Teresa Wiltz, Creators Syndicate CEO, Rick Newcombe, expounded on the issue:
"In defense of newspaper editors." Newcombe told Wiltz, "it's only natural to buy [comic strips] according to categories … but I agree with the cartoonists: It should be colorblind."
In a sense, Newcombe's position is what Sunday's participating cartoonists are fighting for - that comics be represented by categories, rather than race, i.e. as Newcombe put it, "one according to sports, or one according to office etiquette or work." If this, rather than minority affiliation were the motivating factor for comic publication, African-American and other minority cartoonists might be less likely to find themselves competing for the same two spots in every newspaper and might average more than 15 (estimated by Astor) amongst the 200 working cartoonists in the country.
As the Washington Post article points out, Herb and Jamal does not equal Wee Pals and Café Con Leche does not a Working it Out panel make.
This sentiment, and the call to arms originally put forth by Bell and Thomas was reiterated across the web by the Daily Cartoonist and St. Petersburg Times TV/ media critic, Eric Deggans, just to name a couple. Editor and Publisher followed up its original article in an interview piece with Creators Syndicate cartoonist, Stephen Bentley, wherein the Herb and Jamal creator expressed hope that Sunday's action would lead a few newspaper editors to allow cartoonists of color to compete for all their comic slots, not just one or two.
In an interview with Newsweek Magazine as well as in the original Editor and Publisher piece), Bell elucidated the point with a bit more poignancy:
"It's like a weather forecast of mostly sunny with patches of racism."
Creators Syndicate will be supporting these cartoonists by featuring our minority cartoonists throughout the day.
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