Blondie, Meet Herb And Marcy

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.