Blondie, Meet Herb And Marcy

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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.