Race, Skin Color, and Stone Soup

Starting Monday, July 27, I’m going to be inserting some flashbacks into Stone Soup.

With Val about to marry Phil (we hope!) after years of on-again, off-again courtship, it seemed appropriate to go back to how they met in the first place. How time flies… Phil first came on the scene in 1998. He was a kind, “zen” cop who had just finished sensitivity training. He pulled Val over on a hectic Monday morning and the rest is Stone Soup history. But many newer readers don’t know, or remember, how the story started.

I wrote Phil in as a character while I was at the beach with family. They were out having fun and I stayed behind on the beach house deck to write my week of strips. With no significant ideas at hand, I started with the first day being Monday… “What lousy thing could happen?” Well, I had been pulled over myself a few times while racing to work, late again, kids and lunches and oversleeping getting the better of me. So getting pulled over for speeding seemed pretty plausible. I intended to use Phil just for the day, but he insinuated himself into the strip the next day, and the next, and before I knew it, he’d made himself part of the cast. How brazen! And how lucky for me!

Like all of us, Phil looked a little different back then. He was a little pudgier (he’s defied the curse of aging by getting slimmer instead), and, although I defined him in an early strip as being multiracial, I did not originally give a tint to his skin.

I did this partly because, in those good old days, I didn’t have control over the color that was put into my strip for newspapers that ran color dailies. There was a disaster with Phil’s Aunt June the first week she appeared, when minions unknown to me added a dark brown tint to both her hair and skin, on top of the gray tint I put in her skin for black-and-white printing, making her look like a smear of chocolate instead of the white-haired lady she is. It was the first week that my local paper decided to publish the daily funnies in color, so I got to experience the horror as soon as I picked up the paper off my front porch. 

Besides her sickly greenish-brown hair, notice that the flowers in front of June are green instead of some flower color, Val's hair is a much more vivid orange than usual, her skin way too pink...and who in their right mind would put her in fuschia pants????

I was appalled and rushed to figure out how to send specs to those minions, but the daily color done by others continued to be problematic for a while.

Thankfully, Stone Soup and other comic strips soon went high tech, with we cartoonists using Photoshop to color our own comics and submit them digitally. No more rushing to make FedEx deadlines with shipments of original artwork to Kansas City and beyond.

Along the way, my studio assistant started to lean on me to add tint to Phil’s skin. I had created him as multiracial and she did not think that this point was carrying through. I agreed, especially since I could now closely control all the color. So, magically, Phil began to sport the darker skin color I’d always intended.

One of my early fears had been that there might be a backlash against the idea of Val and Phil dating. In a better world, “mixed” couples would attract no particular attention. But as we know from tragic recent events (sadly yet another one today, as I write this), racism is alive and well in the U.S. It didn’t take long before a few racists revealed themselves as being part of my readership.

“I’m never reading your strip again! And I’m telling everyone I know to quit reading!” Well, good. Please go, and please take all your ugly friends with you.

“Lose the nappy head!” Seriously. Disgusting.

And then early one morning a friend called, yelling into my answering machine: “Call your syndicate! There’s something vile on your website!”

 Sure enough, on GoComics in the comments section under my strip, someone had posted something extremely vile. I won’t even approximate it here.  Others commented after him “Dude, that’s rude!” “Get a grip!” and more. Thank you, cyber community, for calling the creep on his garbage. I phoned my editor and, with the hand of God, the offensive comment instantly disappeared. “Dude’s gone!” the others posted with relief.

With Phil and Val now approaching matrimony I am happy to report that no fresh jerks have surfaced, but I took my email out of the strip years ago so they could not contact me directly. 99% of my email was delightful, but an ugly email stays in your head for months.

Enjoy the flashbacks --they start on Monday, July 27 and continue for a couple of weeks. It was a lot of fun going down memory lane...so much fun I think I'll do more. 

Stone Soup, amazingly to me, celebrates 20 years this fall. Thanks for reading!

Comments

[Charles Brubaker]

Oh yeah, internet comments are a mixed bag, some worse than others. Glad they took that comment out, tho! Woot!

Looking forward to how this goes, and congrats on the 20th anniversary!

[Shirley Dickey]

Love your Stone Soup.

[Kavita]

I am one of the readers who knows each detail of the strip's history and story line, pretty well.Have gone back on the GoComics page and read every one of the earlier strips.

[Prargall]

Hi Jan

You resolved a question, I had for years. Good to know Phil (Bill) then was suppose to be as he is today. But the fact, it was done in phase probably helped for his acceptance. Earth as small as it is today still hold too many prejudices for evey walk or race of life. Extremist of everything hurt all of us.
You brought to life that people are people regardless of colors of skin.

Thank you for the small each day! Enjoy your vacation and see you in September.

[Jennifer R]

Dear Jan,

Funny to say my favorite shows, comics, and movies all have interracial relationships. I have enjoyed reading knowing Phil was multiracial since 2000 when we moved to a newspaper that carried Stone Soup. I went looking for it when I moved away online. NEVER did I think it would be an issue.

Strangest part about it most Americans are mixed somehow. Not so much chocolate, vanilla mix as my friend terms it. But Vanilla, Moca, Banana, Strawberry, Carmel. She terms it as foods colorings for the P.C. issues. She finds it funny that I am Moca while my sister is Vanilla. Myself, I've come to the conclusion I'm an American Mutt due to all the different backgrounds.

Keep up the good work.