Blondie, Meet Herb And Marcy

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

For years, the funny pages have been no laughing matter for blacks and other Americans of color. They seldom saw themselves in newspaper comic strips, which were as segregated as the society whose goings-on they caricatured. Suddenly, however, the color barriers are falling down. As rap music goes mainstream and movies by black directors like Spike Lee and John Singleton become mass-audience hits, African-American cartoonists are tickling the public fancy in newspapers across the country.

Four of the artists have joined the big leagues of national syndication within just the past three years. The most successful is Ray Billingsley, 34, of Manhattan, whose Curtis strip follows the adventures of a youngster growing up in an inner-city neighborhood; the cartoon appears in 200 papers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. Jump Start, by Robb Armstrong, 29, of Philadelphia, chronicles the day-to-day experiences of Joe and Marcy Cobb, a young working-class black couple, in such papers as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Dallas Morning News. Stephen Bentley, 37, of Duarte, Calif., has developed a following for Herb & Jamaal, a former professional basketball player and his childhood buddy who decide to run an ice-cream business together. This month the trio will be joined by Barbara Brandon, 32, of Brooklyn, N.Y., the first black female cartoonist to get nationwide exposure. Brandon draws Where I'm Coming From, a Feifferesque view of life seen through the eyes of a group of black female friends.

The young cartoonists sketch situations and issues that affect people of any race, but they treat them with a distinctively black sensibility. Says Brandon: "A lot of what I deal with is universal, but I do it the way we talk about it." Thus when Brandon's character Lydia is considering a name for her baby daughter, her friend suggests African-sounding names like Imani and Shafiq before Lydia decides to pay homage to the soul-and-gospel singer Aretha Franklin. Bentley's Herb wakes up with the universally shared problem of "morning breath" -- and the specifically black hassle of "morning hair."

More serious concerns also work their way into the strips. "My editors wanted me to keep all politics out," says Billingsley. "But I couldn't do that. Too much of black life is politics." Last summer he tackled the issues of drug abuse and teenage pregnancy in a series of panels in which Curtis' younger brother discovered a crack baby abandoned in a Dumpster by its 14- year-old mother. Curtis' father takes the baby to the hospital and, with Cosby-like wisdom, reminds his sons -- and the readers -- of the horrors of drug use.

Such realism is a long way from the days when blacks showed up in comic strips primarily as demeaning stereotypes. "At the most extreme," says Steven L. Jones, a Philadelphia-based researcher in black popular culture, "they used an eight ball for a face, with large eyes and a line for a mouth with a shadow around it to represent oversized lips." The crude caricatures gave way to less offensive images during the civil rights movement. A black playmate, Franklin, joined the Peanuts gang in 1968; the Afro-wearing Lieut. Flap became the resident militant in Beetle Bailey in 1970. Subsidiary characters popped up in other strips. The movement got an even more important boost when editors drafted black cartoonists and illustrators such as Morrie Turner and Brumsic Brandon Jr., Barbara's father, to create new strips like Wee Pals and Luther, in which blacks were the main characters.

When racial concerns fell out of favor during the 1980s, black faces faded from the funny pages as well. Wee Pals, which once appeared in 109 papers, is now carried in fewer than 50; Luther ended an 18-year run in 1986. In the '90s, however, a growing number of editors at major urban dailies have begun to look at black comics as a way to attract new readers in a time of changing demographics and declining readership. "My community happens to be largely black, and we know young readers turn to the comic pages," says Marty Claus, an editor at the Detroit Free Press. Claus is credited with igniting much of the renewed interest in black strips; three years ago, she actively solicited submissions from black artists for the newspaper, and now includes four black cartoonists among the 32 strips she carries. "If young black people see no black faces, we're sending a message that we may not intend," she says.

Just putting Blondie in blackface isn't enough. Today's readers expect truly authentic slices of the black experience -- and at the same time are more sensitive than ever about how that experience is portrayed. Nervous editors often urge artists to do stories that avoid prickly issues. "They really don't want a black strip. They want a Peanuts in Coppertone," gripes old- timer Turner, who says he has softened the attitudes of some of his Wee Pals characters to appease the powers that be.

The younger generation is far less conciliatory about making such changes. "The early complaint from the syndicates was that my strip was all women and it was black," says Barbara Brandon. Rather than alter her work, she waited two years until she found a syndicate that would let her do it her way. Now she routinely treats issues like color differences within the black community and the tensions that exist between black men and women.

Some resistance remains: many newspapers are still reluctant to run more than one black comic strip an issue, even though black artists cover the same gamut of styles and story lines as their white counterparts. "You have to fight a certain amount of response that we already have a black strip," says Sarah Gillespie, director of comic art at United Feature Syndicate, which distributes Jump Start. But the favorable response to the breakthrough artists is having a ripple effect. Earlier this year, Gibson Greetings began marketing a line of cards featuring Armstrong's likable Joe and Marcy. Barbara Brandon is discussing plans with manufacturers to put her characters' faces on coffee mugs and T shirts. "Comic strips are the best visual barometer of the culture," says comics historian Jones. "They reveal the pulse and the heartbeat of what the country is about." Increasingly, the beat has some soul to it.