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I'VE HAD IT WITH DILBERT [1]

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Date: 2023-03-01  

This is the cover of the first "Jump Start" book that Robb Armstrong wrote. He's done more since then, and you can read his comic strip every day at GoComics.Com. I do. You should. So should Scott Adams, since he is "separating himself" from African-American people. This strip should make him change his views. If it doesn't, nothing will.

For many years, I’ve read Scott Adams’ brilliantly-written and drawn comic strip Dilbert in my local newspaper and on my regular comics website. Last Saturday, it disappeared from the latter. Baffled, I did the usual web search and found out why.

Scott Adams, who does the strip, had posted a racist rant saying that whites should stay as far away from blacks as possible. Newspapers and websites that run his strip promptly yanked it with varying degrees of anger and fury.

Well, under the First Amendment, Mr. Adams has the right to his opinions, no matter how stupid, and as newspapers and web pages are private organizations, they have the right to pull his strips if they’re offensive. Therefore, I don’t want anyone to whinge that Scott Adams is being denied a platform or a pulpit. If he wants to denounce blacks for idiotic reasons, he can find a webmaster and set up his own page, and that’s his stupid business.

What I find irritating is how he could come up with such a ridiculous idea. If I could, I would invite him to my workplace in Newark. I’ve spent 24½ years on the municipal payroll – to the week – and virtually all of my co-workers are African-American or Latino. In that quarter-century, I have given or received nothing but respect, affection, friendship, and teamwork to and from them.

The only time I ever had “issues” with African-Americans were three sets of muggers (one in 1980, one in 1991, another in 2003), which has more to do with those individuals than their ethnicity. And I quickly recognized that fact.

I’ve also had “issues” when African-American residents seeking municipal solutions to their insoluble problems called me up on the phone. In the course of berating me, they would pause, and ask, “Are you white or black?”

Initially and honestly, I would answer, “Well, I’m white, but what does that matter? I’m a municipal worker.”

That would result in an explosion at the other end of the line about how I “could not possibly understand” their problem. SLAM. After that – and I’ve written about this in my essays – I slip into my mother’s English accent, being diaclectical, and say, “Neither. I’m a New Zealand Maori. Polynesian. I came here as small child.”

That leaves dead silence, and the caller is stuck. Then I ask, “How can I help you?”

They invariably want lower taxes, improved government services, and a job for their useless brother-in-law. My unspoken advice is to take away his plate of potato chips and cable TV access.

Three of my four Mayors were African-American. The fourth was Latino. All respected and respect me. Even though they had differing views and styles, I respected them. They held the rank. I’m the civil servant.

I’ve written at some length about this before. When I was younger, I hung out with African-American New York University students at their parties, eating fried chicken and sweet potato pie (Mr. Adams should try the latter), quaffed Budweiser, and discussed the “issues of the day” with everyone there. I failed to make a connection with any of the smokin’ hotties in attendance, as the girls were all “pinned” by an “ideal black man.”

They had no problems with me nor me with them. It stayed that way through 11 years in newspapers and wire services, eight in the Navy, and 24 in the City of Newark.

So I don’t know what Mr. Adams’ problem is.

Well, actually I do. He’s just another racist, one in a long and seemingly endless line of racists.

He has another problem, though, and that’s one a little less old. My father pointed that out to me when I was a kid.

Dad was an extremely talented cartoonist. He never made much money out of it, because drawing cartoons for profit was difficult for him. He could bat out a cartoon on a napkin for a Chinese restaurant, and they would post it up forever, but when he tried to prepare a package for a newspaper syndicate, he froze up. His best cartoons were charming, warm gags about our own family: a “Hi, Honey, I’m Home” series, in which he’d return home from the office with a different gag each night.

When not drawing cartoons, he studied their history and their art. He passed on interesting tidbits do me: the cartoon character who does the talking is the one most carefully drawn…if a cartoon character reacts to something another one says, that character should face out of the page to the “camera”…and it was difficult to draw African-American characters properly.

He found a solution when he did re-enlistment strips for the US Air Force, and he used an overlay of little mechanical dots on faces and hands, clipped to fit his art, to create African-American service members. Bingo.

In the meantime, I flipped through his books on comic strip history and watched TV cartoons and movies to be at first entertained, and later to study how African-Americans were depicted.

The comic strip we know and love was first developed in the 1890s, with a Hearst cartoon called “The Yellow Kid,” who was a bald-headed boy who spoke by having his words on his gown. He was a snaggle-toothed, barefoot kid, living in Manhattan’s Hogan’s Alley, amid squalor and odd characters, drawn and written by Richard F. Outcault. As soon as Hearst could roll Sunday color comics sections, The Yellow Kid was one of them.

From a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came thousands of comic strips, to the present day.

Outcault created a black character in 1900: “Pore Li’l’ Mose,” who had his own strip. African-American characters followed in various standard archetypes that I would rather not rehearse, replete with physical caricatures, occupations, and manners of speech.

Mandrake the Magician started solving crimes in 1934 with the support of his African companion – and I mean African – Lothar. He started off wearing a fez, short pants, and a leopard skin, spoke in the usual accent, and was called a slave. In 1965, a new artist took over, and put Lothar in a suit, improved his English, and gave him a promotion. In the strip, he provides the muscle to match Mandrake’s skills of hypnosis and legerdemain.

As far as I can tell, the first “mainstream” African-American superhero was Black Panther, a member of Marvel’s Fantastic Four. I was never a big fan of superheroes, so I’ll take Wikipedia’s word for it. I like funny strips better. Hence the name, the “funnies.”

African-Americans did not take offensive comic strips sitting down, of course, and created their own: All-Negro Comics in 1947 was the first, starring Ace Harlem, who fought “zoot-suited, jive-talking muggers.” In the 1950s, the Pittsburgh Courier printed a Western called the Chilsom Kid, in which Lobo battled bad guys. Incidentally, in the real “old West,” interracial marriages were quite common, due to the shortages of non-Native American people in the “pioneering period.” And even then, wasichu (Sioux for “white men”) would marry Native Americans.

Today, there are more comic strips that have African-American characters in leading roles, some of which address serious issues, including the Tuskegee Experiment. All of this led to the brilliance of the Black Panther movie series, which in turn is probably leading kids to try to locate the fictional “Wakanda” on their maps of Africa. I hate to tell them: Timbuktu is real, “Wakanda” is not. Would that it were.

However, it’s apparent that Scott Adams has no ability to comprehend very much from or about people, and he hasn’t read the strong and powerful adventure strips in which ordinary African-Americans (Dick Tracy’s cops in that strip) or superheroes (Black Panther) save the world from dangerous criminals or supervillains.

Being a poor grade funny man, maybe he can learn from funny comics.

I’ll offer three. My favorites.

First is Beetle Bailey. It’s always been one I enjoy, being former military. Mort Walker was a World War II Army officer, who dreamed up the strip in 1951. At first, Beetle was a lazy college student, but he was drafted – hilariously – in 1951, and has served at Camp Swampy ever since.

In 1970, Walker expanded the ethnic reach of the strip by “re-assigning a returning combat officer” to Camp Swampy, and Lt. Jackson Flap, originally in an Afro hairstyle and beard, arrived at the base. He is the opposite of the very young, apple-polishing, white, and extremely incompetent Lt. Sonny Fuzz. Incredibly, the military’s official newspaper, Stars and Stripes , censored the strip until critics complained.

I find that incredible, as that was amid the Vietnam War, and who fought the war? African-American conscripts. They deserved to have a role model – even a comic role model – in that strip.

Actually, Lt. Flap has done very well over his 50 years at Camp Swampy. He adjusted his hairstyle to Army regulations. One early strip has him complaining to Sgt. Snorkel about being bitten by the Sarge’s dog Otto. Does Otto have it in for blacks? No, says Snorkel, Otto dislikes all officers.

“Fine dog you have there,” Flap responds, with a supporting pat on the shoulder.

Another strip I like has the gang in a camp football game. Beetle, Killer, and Zero are watching in the first panel, and Beetle says, “Watch Lt. Flap carry that football!”

Killer adds, “I hear he was a great halfback in college.”

Zero finishes, “Watch Sarge get him.”

Second panel: Sarge zooms by Flap, who shouts, appropriately, “Hah! Missed me!”

Final panel: Sarge is on the ground, and Flap is spinning through the air in something you can only do in the visual gags comic strips can handle.

Beetle says, “But the turbulence got him.”

What happens in the strip could happen to anybody who has the misfortune to play football with the hefty Sgt. Snorkel, but there are several positives in there:

1. Lt. Flap is a college man.

2. He was a great halfback in college.

3. He wasn’t tackled – he just had to cope with Sgt. Snorkel’s windy nature.

4. Nobody got hurt.

5. Flap still has the ball.

6. He’s just one of the guys at Camp Swampy.

In recent years, Walker and his sons, who took over the strip on his death, added an Asian, Cpl. Joe Yo, a hard-working fellow, Sgt. Louise Lugg, as a love interest for Sarge, and Chip Gizmo, the techie.

The strip has also addressed another serious issue – sexual harassment. Mort dropped making jokes about General Halftrack’s lustful urges towards his female secretaries and sent him and other officers at the camp to sexual harassment training. General Halftrack emerged from these serious strips to apologize to his female staff and show his respect.

Since then, those gags have stopped. Miss Buxley, the female civilian secretary, dates Beetle. Since the comic is mostly a “gag-a-day” strip, with very few extended plots, they aren’t likely to get married soon.

Next up is that great strip, Charlie Schulz’s Peanuts. He hated that name. It was inflicted on him. The best he could do was call the Sunday strips, “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown,” the round-headed kid who was based on him. Charlie Brown was not bald, I have read, but blond.

Anyway, we all know the history of the strip: Charlie Brown as the world’s greatest loser, Lucy Van Pelt dispensing psychiatric help for five cents, Linus and his “security blanket,” Snoopy pursuing the Red Baron.

On April 15, 1968, a Los Angeles schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote to Schulz, urging him to include a black character in the strip. This came 11 days after the test of an unmanned Saturn 5 moon rocket at Kennedy Space Center, on April 6. More importantly, that same day, (April 6) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

Schulz saw the point. He wrote back that he didn’t want to “patronize our Negro friends.” He and Glickman wrote back and forth, and that resulted in Franklin turning up on a beach on July 31, 1968. Franklin and Charlie Brown met on a beach near their town, built a sand castle, discussed their families, and became friends.

Franklin rapidly turned into one of the standing characters in the strip, even though he does not go to the same school as Charlie Brown, for reasons I cannot fathom. He’s in the same school as Peppermint Patty and Marcie. He quotes the Old Testament, has no anxieties or obsessions, and in a TV episode, did some break dancing and played the guitar.

Last year, when Schulz would have turned 100, the US Postal Service put out a sheet of self-adhesive domestic rate stamps depicting Peanuts characters. There was Franklin, large as life.

So that leads to the last and best comic on the subject of African-American life in America. My father, before he died, pointed at it, and said, “This is the single best comic strip I have seen about black people in my life.”

It’s Robb Armstrong’s Jump Start, which was based on one he created in 1982 at Syracuse University for their student newspaper. At that time, it was called Hector. Two young men and a dog wearing glasses starred. It didn’t fly too high, so Mr. Armstrong turned it into Jump Start.

The strip is about Joe and Marcy Cobb, and their children Sunny, Jojo, and twins Tommi and Teddy. Joe is a Philadelphia police officer, Marcy is a nurse, they are an average middle class couple, and they have a supportive family and collection of friends and co-workers. The characters are well-drawn (both artistically and in terms of personal idiosyncrasies), and have clear personal stories. It’s not strictly African-American – Joe’s partner Edmund Crunchy is married to Police Capt. Yolanda Ruiz, for example. Orthodontist Clarence Glover (African-American) married Charlene (white), an auto mechanic. No, she does not look like Marisa Tomei.

Everyone in the strip – with the exception of NFL star Marcus Glover, is a middle-class person, which wrecks the stereotypes and tropes. Marcus is one of 12 siblings who was raised by a widower father, Clayton, who is a small, retired, minister. Clayton is a humble, modest, man, who marries Marcy’s widowed mother. So everybody’s all together. As a baseball fan, I would have preferred it if Marcus played baseball for one of my two favorite teams, the Yankees or the Giants, but you can’t have everything.

Parenthetically – and this will be another essay – there is a desperate need for more African-Americans in baseball. Their numbers are dropping. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby put up with a lot of grief to integrate baseball, and without Jackie, there would have been no Civil Rights Era. That’s another story, though.

Jump Start is not a “gag-a-day” strip. It has plotlines. Criminals go straight. Marriages happen. Joe’s father, a retired police officer, returns to work as an instructor at the Police Academy. Joe’s mother, a retired English teacher, corrects everyone’s grammar, while everyone corrects her driving. A kid named Doctor Appleby (that’s his name) treats everyone’s cuts and bruises. Three bullies are seen in shadows but never shown.

Some plotlines are gripping: the birth of kids; Joe being shot; Frank suffering a heart attack that sends him on an out-of-body experience; and Maureen (Marcy’s widowed mother) and Clarence’s relationship.

The latest plotline involved a titanic destination wedding in Hawaii. Earlier plotlines have included the Cobbs going to Africa to discover their history, and Marcy getting support from a millionaire to set up a medical center. You can purchase a book that tells us how Joe and Marcy met, fell in love, and got married. It’s called Jump Start: A Love Story, published in 1996. The major reason I haven’t read it is that I’m up to my neck in trying to figure out a British counterattack at Arras in 1940 for an article due next month.

For me, the best part of the strip is something very clever that Mr. Armstrong does: when the four Cobb kids turn a year older, the “new version” finds his or her way to their home to replace the previous edition. It’s like the New Year replacing the Old Year in cartoons. Well, this is a cartoon.

The really little kids talk in small letters, to emphasize that they cannot be heard by adults – yet. There was a good gag when one of the little kids in day care said some early adult words: the title of the movie The Lion King.

One strip stood out to me: Jojo confronting two possible future versions of himself: one a somewhat wimpy character, the other a stronger person. It was to remind Jojo that he had to get his education and maintain strong moral values.

The entire cast of that strip has strong moral values. Another reason I enjoy reading it.

That’s probably why Jump Start is the most widely syndicated daily strip drawn by an African American in the world. Interestingly, he has written that he was heavily influenced as a child by Charlie Schulz. In return, in 1994, Schulz gave Franklin Mr. Armstrong’s last name, in Robb’s honor.

On what would have been Schulz’s 100th birthday, comic strips across America paid tribute to him, and Jump Start had Jojo and Franklin going off to play football together.

It’s obvious that Scott Adams is a racist fool. Now his strip is being pulled, he’s getting hammered in the media, and his publisher has ditched him. So, he’s backpedaling, saying he’s “to the left of Bernie” Sanders, opposes discrimination, and his ugly remarks were mere hyperbole. Yeah, and some of his best friends are…you know the rest.

Wrong answer, Scott.

The great comedian Henny Youngman once said, “Making jokes about your mother is never funny. Making jokes about your mother-in-law is.” He was referring to Andrew Dice Clay’s material. The Diceman rose fast and fell fast.

Adams rose fast and lasted a lot longer, but the equation remains the same.

Scott Adams is not funny.

Robb Armstrong is hilarious.

So I’m proud to end this entry with a link to Robb Armstrong’s web page.

https://www.robbarmstrong.com/

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