I’m starting to wonder. I’ve received strange reactions from newspapers when I’ve inquired about Café Con Leche. The response is nice enough, but, in the end they just don’t buy it. Looking around, I remember reading something about another cartoon about a bi-racial couple that didn’t find much success. I remember a comic strip called “Color Blind” by Orrin Brewster and Tony Rubino. It ran from 1998 to 1999. Like Café Con Leche, it was also about a bi-racial couple. It was gone in less than a year.
One of my favorite cartoons is “Candorville” by Darrin Bell. There is also a bi-racial couple in Darrin’s strip, though that isn’t the main focus of the Candorville. Its doing well, but isn’t widely distributed. Then there’s the new “Maintaining” strip by Nate Creekmore about a bi-racial student. So far, it hasn’t taken off like, say, “Lio” did last year.
What’s up with that? Is it that comic editors at newspapers just want to ignore the subject or do they just go with their “2 minority-based cartoons per newspaper” trend that I’ve been seeing? I think American tastes are changing and some places might just be ready for cartoons like ours. All we need is that chance.
3 comments:
Isn't there a biracial couple in Boondocks?
Anyway here's an Interview excerpt from Universal Press Syndicate editor:
ANDELMAN: We just have a couple more. I promise I am not going to take you through the whole list. “The Boondocks.”
SALEM: Well, “The Boondocks,” for a long time we had been looking for a strip by an African-American cartoonist, and nothing really leaped out to us as saying this is a Universal-type strip, and then “The Boondocks” landed on our desks, and one of our editors in Chicago spotted it. He sent in a submission to us about the same time. Everyone had a very similar response that this was a breath of fresh air, and it proved out to be a wonderful strip for us.
Truefaux:
Thanks for the comment. However, the couple that you're referring to in "The Boondocks" (Tom and Sarah) are not the main characters. As a matter of fact, I don't even remember seeing Sarah in the strip.
My blog entry was pertaining to current syndicated comic strips whose main characters are biracial.
BTW: I met Lee Salem some time ago at a cartoonist convention. Very nice guy...
I came across this through Google, while I was googling pictures of biracial little girls (haha, hoping and dreaming about my future-children). I used to read the newspaper every day and I was really pleased when Cafe con Leche came in. I really liked it, and I love reading strips about interracial couples because sometimes they make perfect clips for my fridge (I'm in an interracial relationship).
Anyway, soon after this, the newspaper did a poll on what strips the public liked. Everybody had to vote on each strip, love it or hate it, online. When the results came in I realized that all but one of the minority-based strips were the most hated strips in the paper (besides Sylvia, which I think got last place). Cafe con Leche was soon taken out of the paper, to my disappointment, and replaced with a really stupid strip about a boring family. Boo.
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