Cartoonists of Color keeping it real in today's funny pages

If you are regular reader of the funny pages, you may or may not have noticed that some of your favorite cartoons might look a little different today.

Eleven cartoonists of color are staging a "sit-in" of sorts by protesting racial quotas many U.S. newspapers have about having more than one or two comic strips that are minority-drawn. They will do this by drawing cartoons that appear today portraying some variation of a white reader complaining about a minority-drawn strip, complaining that it's a "Boondocks" rip-off and blaming it on "tokenism."

From The Washington Post

Plans for the protest began with Cory Thomas, a Howard University grad whose strip, "Watch Your Head," deals with college life at a predominantly African American university. Thomas, Trinidad-born and D.C.-bred, says he was frustrated by the number of times his strip was turned down by newspapers that didn't feel the need to sign him up, because, well, they already had a black comic strip. Most editors, he says, only allow for one or two minority strips, viewing them all as interchangeable. Never mind that his strip is a world away in sensibility from the scathing sociopolitical musings of Darrin Bell's "Candorville" or the family-focused fun of Stephen Bentley's "Herb and Jamaal."

So Thomas drew a strip addressing that, and then enlisted the help of Bell. From there, they got others to agree to participate: Bentley, Jerry Craft ("Mama's Boyz"), Charlos Gary ("Cafe con Leche" and "Working It Out"), Steve Watkins ("Housebroken"), Keith Knight ("The K Chronicles"), Bill Murray ("The Golden Years"), Charles Boyce ("Compu-toon") and editorial cartoonist Tim Jackson. Alcaraz, who says he found out too late to meet his deadline, will be chiming in on Feb. 11.