What’s Black, white and a comics-page delight in the Free Press?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/03/2023 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a not-so funny truth about the comics you read in the Free Press.

While we call them the black and white on weekdays and the colour on Saturday, the reality is the characters portrayed on our funny pages are almost always white and almost never of colour.

On Monday, we will turn the page by introducing a new strip chronicling two boys growing up in the 1980s and what it meant to be friends in a time before cellphones, the internet and so-called helicopter-parenting.

One of the boys, Kevin, is white, while Miles is Black. The creator of the Crabgrass strip is Tauhid Bondia, who grew up loving Calvin and Hobbes, the popular strip that did not include a Black character.

“That wasn’t something that I didn’t quite question until I got much much older,” Bondia said in an interview with the Miami Herald last year. “So it was important for me to have a Black character in my comic strip because I am Black and I think it’s an important voice to have out there.”

When I first considered Crabgrass as an addition to our comics, the visual storytelling caught my eye while the strip’s childhood-sense of wonder and mischief reminded me of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes — my all-time favourite strip.

But there’s also a broader context to our comic calculus, given the reason for the vacant space on our pages since we dropped Dilbert late last month.

The decision to end the popular satirical strip on office life came after its creator, Scott Adams, made comments about Black people widely condemned as racist. The decision to replace it with a strip centred on two boys of different colour who are so close they become blood brothers strikes me the best way to counter what Dilbert’s creator had been spouting.

As editor, I’ve learned the hard way that making changes to our comics page is never a laughing matter. However, I hope you appreciate why the Free Press was one of many newspapers to drop Dilbert. I also ask that you give some time for Crabgrass to grow on you.

— Paul Samyn is the Free Press editor

paul.samyn@freepress.mb.ca