Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 30, 1993 TAG: 9309230282
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MELANIE S. HATTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lydia, 33, is a single mother who owns her own business. (She would be married, but she hasn't found the right man.) Lekesia, a social and political activist, is in her mid- to late 30s and single. And there's Sonya, Judy, Alisha, Jackie and Monica; all single.
Meet "The Girls."
They're the nine homegirls of Barbara Brandon's "Where I'm Coming From," a syndicated weekly comic strip that reflects the world through the eyes of black American women. It starts today monday and will run Mondays in the Extra section.
The cartoon is steadily growing in popularity and at last count runs in 65 newspapers across the country. Brandon released her first book in April and is working on a second. Plans are also under way to market her girls' faces on T-shirts and coffee mugs.
The panel is filling a void, Brandon said in a telephone interview from her Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, where she works. "Black women haven't had a voice in this kind of format, ever."
Some men have complained that the strip is anti-male because of it's all-women format, but Brandon says, "I wonder if they're really reading it?" The strip pokes fun at women too, she says.
One strip has Judy ribbing Nicole for the way she treats her new man. Nicole says she's sick of him. "Why don't you tell him you need your space?" Judy suggests.
Nicole says: "I would, but I don't want to hurt his feelings."
The girls talk about boyfriends and relationships but hit on some heavy topics, too, like the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Rodney King verdict and the Mike Tyson rape trial.
Lekesia laments, "Did he [Tyson] actually think he could violate someone and not be punished? Who does he think he is? William Kennedy Smith?"
"A lot of the things I try to talk about are pretty universal," Brandon says. As a result, her readers are not only black women. Brandon said she recently received a letter from a 60-year-old white woman from Ohio who said she loved the comic strip.
The characters are heads talking to the reader or to each other. Bodies are deliberately not included.
"It's so old. You turn on the TV and all you see is cleavage and behind," she says. "Young men coming up don't give us any credit for having a brain and a thought."
Her ideas are drawn from her own experiences and discussions with her girlfriends about their lives.
She was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island with her parents, Rita and Brumsic Brandon II; and older siblings, Linda and Brumsic III.
She earned an allowance helping her father produce his popular cartoon character, "Luther," which was nationally syndicated from 1968 to 1986. Barbara Brandon colored in silhouettes and drew borders on her father's strip, about the adventures of a black child. ``I've been in training to be a cartoonist for a long time and didn't realize it,''she says.
She says she learned a lot from her father - not only the mechanics of drawing a comic strip but the discipline involved to regularly produce a strip. Brandon, who studied illustration at Syracuse (N.Y.) University, discovered that "my father has a particular sense of humor" that has shaped her own.
Her characters "kind of reflect me and my friends and the people I'm close to," Brandon says. She loves them all, but, like friends, she doesn't agree with everything they say. Their voices are "either what I'm feeling, or showing how I think how peculiar [a] point of view is."
"Where I'm Coming From" first appeared in June 1989 in the Detroit Free Press. The idea started in the early '80s when she was commissioned by Elan, a black women's magazine, to do a black comic strip. But the magazine folded before her work was published. From there, she went to Essence, another black fashion magazine. Though the magazine's editors liked her idea, they had no space for her cartoon and instead hired her as a beauty and fashion writer.
For Brandon, the title of the strip is literal.
"I can't be a spokesperson for black women," says the 33-year-old cartoonist, but people assume she is. "If you have a little bit of a voice you become a voice for all people. That's absurd."
Brandon is the first nationally syndicated black female cartoonist and the eighth black cartoonist to reach syndication. She was picked up by Universal Press Syndicate in November 1991.
"I did a talk to the Coalition of 100 Black Women, and I talked about how proud I am of this distinction," she says. "It's an incredible thing to have made history. ...[But] I really shouldn't be the first. I should be the 15th."
On the other hand, the status is encouraging, she says, because it paves a path for others to follow. Her cartoons reflect what she thinks black women are enduring today. In American society, she says, black women have two strikes against them: being black and being women.
"Our perspective comes from ... being down on two angles," she says. "That's something you have to deal with all the time: racism and sexism. It's fun for me to put it in such a way that it's not as heavy as it can be.... I think that's where comics are headed, covering more socially relevant issues, not just slapstick humor."
Brandon says she's more interested in making people think than having them double over with laughter. She simply wants people to see where she's coming from.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB