Sunday's Comic Strip Protest Round-Up

At the bottom of this document are links via sample art to various individual efforts in yesterday's comic strip protest, where a group of cartoonists created variations on the same script in order to point out how they believe their are perceived and purchased: as interchangeable members of a minority strip category.

* the big news in terms of this story may have come on Friday, when Editor & Publisher called attention to a February 8 posting by Karisue Wyson at the Washington Post Writer's Group groupblog where they offered up some of their numbers about strips that feature minority characters. Those numbers are brutal, including one that indicates several states don't have a single newspaper running any of these strips and another that 76 percent of newspapers overall fail to run any such strips.

* This article explaining Sunday's protest to readers of the Detroit Free-Press notes that Robb Armstrong and Nate Creekmore did not participate and allows that several other cartoonists expressed sympathy with the protest but could not participate because of deadline issues. Here's the Honolulu Bulletin coverage of the protest.

* I would imagine there will be a very good discussion on this issue at Alan Gardner's Daily Cartoonist. Maybe someone there will defend the mustache from the overall beating it took yesterday.

* my own position is roughly the same as it was when the protest was first announced. I'm sure this happens, and it sucks, but I'm not certain there's any strip in this category that is so overwhelmingly well done and broadly appealing that given a marketplace made magically free of biases via a wave of a wand it would perform extraordinarily well. In fact, given the Wyson numbers, I think it can be argued that if every newspaper took seriously the idea of running strips to satisfy a demographic group, the involved strips as a group might very well gain more clients than they would in a strict meritocracy.

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Cafe Con Leche, Charlos Gary

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Candorville, Darrin Bell

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Herb and Jamaal, Stephen Bentley

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Housebroken, Steve Watkins

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Keith Knight

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Mama's Boyz Jerry Craft

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Tim Jackson

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Watch Your Head, Cory Thomas

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posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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