Jerry Craft Has Issues! Black Comic Strips Do, Too
Black Panther, Luke Cage, Falcon, Black Lightning and Black Goliath are in studio at a talk show taping. Though seated, sweaty faces, fidgeting fingers and shaky knees betray their nervousness. Why? Because they’re appearing on a segment called ‘Confronting the Black Superheroes of My Youth,’ and cartoonist Jerry Craft is cutting them no slack.
He slams them on wack origins (ex-convict), pathetic abilities (faster than a jungle cat!), corny outfits (a helmet with an afro wig on top? really?) and excessive chest exposure, then sums up his real beef: They didn’t have any real powers, so young black kids wouldn’t think, even through their comic books, that they could grow up to wield any power either.
As the flash animation on www.mamasboyz.com says, Jerry Craft has got issues, but he’s working them out with a pen and a pad.
Craft is more well-known for Mama’s Boyz, a family-oriented comic strip that follows the lives of single mom Pauline Porter and her two sons, Yusuf and Tyrell.
In a graphic novel world of compromised heroes and fiends, Mama’s Boyz can look deceptively soft. Characters have semi-colon eyes, sport high-top fades, and the humor is never as caustic or biting as, say, Boondocks.
Jerry Craft says that’s all according to plan. The gentle-voiced 46-year-old, who has two young sons of his own, believes it takes more balls to try to help kids do the right thing than shock jaded Gen Xers.
“Of all of the black strips, Boondocks is definitely more political and hard-hitting and more, uhm, you know, there’s a lot of cursing, and that tends to sell because it’s what’s expected of us,” Craft explained. “Whereas the family-type style of what I do would really take someone bold enough to say let’s see if we can break some ground and have something with a moral connection catch on.”
But the Porters aren’t the Cosbys: sometimes money is tight and Pauline worries about male role models for her sons. Craft is portraying a family that wasn’t dealt perfect cards, but is functional and successful anyway, and he feels that’s more important than reflecting his own two-parent background.
“When I was coming up, most of my friends were being raised by a mother or grandmother. I was one of the few of my friends who had both parents living at home,” said the native New Yorker. “Pretty much, the dads were nonexistent, so I wanted to do a comic strip that paid homage to these strong moms who were raising these kids, as bad as me and some of my friends were.”
Jerry’s first book, Mama’s Boyz: As American as Sweet Potato Pie, came out in ‘97. He tried to follow the Fat Albert school of comedy, where there’s a lesson in the humor without beating kids over the head with it.
Craft spoofs Where’s Waldo on the book’s back cover, with Yusuf asking readers, “Can you tell how many people are watching me and my brother Tyrell as we try to shop?” The sketch is filled with undercover officers peeking over counters and around doors. The title? Where’s Security. It’s indicative of Craft’s work: a seven-year-old would just count the number of guards and laugh, but a 12-year-old might start making connections between their own profiling encounters.
It’s that kind of gentle, intelligent humor that wins Craft fans. He was named in GreatBooks for African American Children, with the unusual designation of being recommended for ages 8-19. That’s because initially, he’d written for adult comic book lovers.
“Because I had an adult audience in mind, I didn’t dumb down the humor. So as a kid reads it at eight, then he reads it again at 15, he [notices] other things…As a result, I’ve had moms say ‘I bought that book for my son when he was eight years old and I gave away all of his other books, but he will not let me give away Mama’s Boyz. He’s 17 now and he still reads it’.”
Craft published Mama’s Boyz: Homeschoolin’ in 2007 with an effort to be more kid-friendly and educational for young aspiring artists. The humor is still multi-layered, but there’s a section on how he draws, a flipbook of Yusuf dancing in the corner, notes in the margins about his thought process with certain comic strips, and other extras.
The over-arching theme of Homeschoolin’ is to talk about the things kids learn outside of school.
For example, in one of the first stories, the boys’ grandfather is teaching them about Martin Luther King Jr. But instead of giving a long, preachy sermon, he takes them on a bus trip. While they’re on it, he talks about having to sit at the back of the bus, and even makes Yusuf give up his seat to a white man so they feel the range of emotions he’d dealt with daily; later, they go to a lunch counter, where in years past they wouldn’t have been served. It’s the history not communicated in school, and the whole point of Craft’s second book: that our kids need a fuller sense of the past, self esteem, ethics.
At the back of Homeschoolin’ is a 10-page series of strips that sparked the biggest controversy of his career. It starts out innocently enough. A group of teen girls are in line to see an R-rated movie, and the ticket clerk turns them away, because no one under 17 can be admitted without a parent. The view pulls back to reveal all of the girls pushing strollers, pregnant, or holding babies. “But we are parents!” one of the girls shouts.
This first strip, part of an entire series on black teen attitudes toward early pregnancy, shook Craft’s syndicate, mobilized a movement against him, and got his strip banned forever from PG County newspaper. He published it in its entirety on www.Mamasboyz.com to let readers be the judge.
According to Craft, “I called up the paper and they said, ‘This reading specialist has gotten together a petition’,” complaining about the strip’s portrayal of black children.
Actually, subsequent installations revealed a full story arc: Mom Pauline fears her teenaged son is anticipating fatherhood a bit too eagerly, so she invites one struggling young mother to take a break while she and Yusuf watch the baby for a few days. The girl sleeps the entire weekend, while Yusuf spends his own money on formula, changes diapers and gets no rest from midnight feedings.
Jerry tried to reassure the paper that the story ended in a positive way that would be a teaching moment for kids, but the editors panicked and refused to print the rest of the storyline, then dropped Mama’s Boyz altogether.
“So my response was to put the strips up on my website and ask everyone if they think I was wrong. There were a couple who said I shouldn’t have shown kids who were pregnant—that it makes us look bad. But I’m like, one of the reasons we make the same mistakes over and over is because we don’t talk about them.”
Jerry paused, ten-year-old frustration still evident in his voice.
“I remember this little girl in my old neighborhood in New York. She was 13, and I remember she had a crush on me when I was like 20. I saw her one day and she was pregnant. My jaw just hit the ground. This was a girl I still thought of in pigtails and glasses and watching cartoons and stuff, and I was floored.
So she had the baby, and I remember seeing her and I said ‘So, how’s motherhood?’ And she said ‘I never thought it would be this hard.’
But why wouldn’t you? So what I wanted to do with this story was to show that [teen parenthood]’s not a piece of cake.”
Over the following year, Craft received more than 500 emails from mothers, grandparents, clergy and teachers thanking him for that storyline.
“They were like, ‘Thank you so much, I never knew how to talk to my kids about sex so I downloaded the strip and let him read it, then I mustered up the strength to talk to him, and it’s the first conversation we’ve ever had on the subject.’ That’s when I really knew I had done the right thing. Not everyone’s gonna like everything you do, but in this particular case I definitely stood behind my decision,” Craft said.
Others did too. Craft won a Conversation Starter Award from the Washington D.C. campaign to end teen pregnancy, and raised his profile among other progressive organizations. Comic artist colleagues also took notice.
“I remember reading Curtis, and Ray Billingsley helped out immensely. He invited me over to his house and gave me some tips that I think were very useful,” Craft said.
Other black comic artists weren’t always so welcoming.
“I was hoping that when I met them all, it would be like this big club. But one of the bad things is the way editors pit us against each other. Mine isn’t daily so I’m not quite in this the way they’d put Jumpstart and Curtis and Herb and Jamal against each other, but I would imagine it’s a lot more difficult because the more successful one is, the more it definitely impacts the others. ‘Oh, we already have Herb and Jamal, so we don’t need Curtis or Jumpstart.”
It’s hard for black comics to get picked up on a daily basis, Craft said, because each newspaper syndicate already has their one or two black strips—which do quite well, by the way; each of the aforementioned Big Three have been around over 15 years.
“Editors are still in the mindset of ‘Only black people are going to read a black comic, so if we don’t have a bunch of black readers, then why have a black comic strip?’ It’s not like only black people listen to hip hop or go see Denzel Washington movies. They’re stuck in a 1950s rationale,” Craft says.
Shrinkage in the news industry hasn’t helped. Major metropolitan areas used to boast two or three major dailies, and they would vie for the best comic strips, driving the market up. Now most only have one and that level of competition may never return.
Ethnic media could change the equation. Black newspapers have always carried editorial cartoons, but don’t seem to place the same importance on comic strips.
“If there are 250 black newspapers and I got 100 of them to run Mama’s Boyz each week, I wouldn’t even need a syndicate to make a living,” Craft said.
Craft has three pieces of advice for aspiring comic artists: One of my goals would be to have [a deal like] the Charlie Brown specials with Christmas one and others–I’d really love to have something like that, where four or five times a year there was a Mama’s Boyz special. That would be my ultimate goal, I think.
“Keep practicing… Tell the stories that are close to you, that you believe in, and don’t be afraid to draw people who look like you. If you can make a living doing something you love to do, that’s really fortunate.”
Mama’s Boyz: The Big Picture comes out February 2010.
