Robb ARmstRong I

At one point in 1987, United Feature Syndicate had suggested bringing back the dad who was a cop, but with a white partner. This is, of course, very much like the current JumpStart. I worked on the idea, spending long hours sitting with [friend] Jimmy West’s retired-cop father, talking and listening to him. Then I created a strip called Cherry Top (a nickname for police squad cars). I can’t say that United Feature ever liked what I created, but their criticism became less and less severe.

Cherry Top featured an older Black cop as the main character. By then I was closing in and getting personal notes from syndicates. One thing they said was, “You’re a young guy. Why write about old people?” I decided to go back to what I had done in college, write about myself, people like myself. I set Cherry Top aside and created Off Duty, a strip about a younger cop and his nurse wife. In stages, I wrote about a cop, then added his life, marriage, wife, then kids.

I was now meeting the better demographic — two young professionals at work and at home — and their respective jobs required specific and easily recognized clothing. No need to explain what a nurse does. Or a cop. They have uniforms. But I still wasn’t getting offers.

Once again, I found myself wondering if racial bias was raising its ugly head. Well, this much I do know: both individual newspapers and the big syndicates had the attitude that one Black cartoonist at a time was all that a newspaper could carry. Even later, when I was finally syndicated, the syndicate had to struggle to get me into some papers. Editors wouldn’t even look at the strips or content. They just shrugged and said, “We’ve already got a Black guy.”

They actually said that to me. And they still do. I’m now on the other side of the line but now they tell other Black comic strip writers,

“We’ve already got JumpStart, why do we need another strip about some Black family?”

I doubt that it was (or still is) intentional or overt racism. Comic strips take up a lot of “real estate” on the page, and editors make tough decisions as to what to use. But, underlying all that was the unspoken belief that white readers didn’t read strips full of Black characters. One was enough to meet the “diversity” requirement, and that was that. I didn’t think that was true then, and nobody thinks that’s true now.

I soon became frustrated with coldmailing samples and getting nowhere. So in 1987, I walked into the Philadelphia Daily News. I had met Richard Aregood, then the assistant managing editor, back when I was at [The] Shipley [School], when I had interned with Signe Wilkinson. He sat me down and looked at my samples. “This work is good,” he said. “But you can’t make money selling one comic to one newspaper. You have to syndicate. I know a Black cartoonist who can help you.” He gave me Morrie Turner’s phone number.

This was a surreal moment. Turner was the first African-American to have a comic strip (he created Wee Pals) adapted into a television show (Kid Power). He was a childhood hero of mine. And I had his phone number! I went home in disbelief. I was just an art director at an ad agency, not some established cartoonist.

I immediately abused the phone number privilege by calling Morrie at 6 a.m. his time and waking him up. He was in Sacramento, and, as hard as this might be to believe, I didn’t know anything about time zones. Luckily for me, he didn’t hang up on me. I told him that I was trying to become a cartoonist. The only thing he said was, “Let me call you back.” And he did. He knew what this meant to me; he was just that kind of guy. He asked me to send him some of my “stuff,” as he called it. When he talked, he sounded like a jazz musician: “yeah, man” and “it’s cool” and talk like that.

He called me back after reading my stuff. “This is hot, man. This is hot!” he said. “You don’t mind if I show this around, do you?”

Mind? Mind? Morrie Turner thought my Cherry Top strip was hot. Morrie Turner wanted to “show this around.” I was ecstatic.

He got results quickly. I got a call from Mark Cohen, a well-known comic-strip collector. I had actually met Mark before, through the ad agency. He liked my stuff too and invited me to Ohio, where he was putting together a syndicate for Black cartoonists.

I flew to Dayton, where we all met in a hotel and put together a plan. It was a heady experience for me, to be included in this group.

We were seven or eight Black cartoonists. I can’t remember all of them now, but I recognized one or two from the comics page in Ebony magazine. I also recognized Buck Brown. He had created a character for Playboy magazine called Granny, X-rated and horny, really “blue” semi-porn stuff for a cartoonist. The art in that comic was stunning. Real “art.” Small paintings that looked like each one took a week to complete. I had always thought Buck Brown was a white man because Granny was white. He laughed it off, saying, “Everybody thinks I’m white. I couldn’t care less. The money is green.” (Robert “Buck” Brown died in 2007.)

But then my hero Morrie Turner called me some days after I returned to Philadelphia. “Look, man,” he said. “You don’t want to be part of what we’re doing, man. It’s better for you not to be.”

“I’m getting kicked out of the group?” I said.

“Your work’s not like ours,” Morrie said. “It’s better than ours. You should be a regular syndicated cartoonist.”

This may seem like it was more rejection. But I wasn’t that surprised. Or disappointed. It’s true that I was “peacocking” around, telling everyone that I knew those famous cartoonists. I was star-struck by them. But when Morrie said that to me, I agreed.

By this time, in late 1987, I was starting to feel more confident. Even people I worked with in the advertising business were saying that I should be nationally syndicated. I was feeling it. It was coming. I was no longer the doe-eyed kid, and I felt ready. So much so, in fact, that on a visit back to Shipley to give a talk to the kids, I actually introduced myself by saying, “I’m soon to be a nationally syndicated cartoonist.”

Then Mark Cohen, the collector who had first asked me to join his group, called. “You have an ability, a gift,” he said. “I want to send your stuff to United Feature Syndicate.” I had already sent them my samples, but I kept my mouth shut. He had more authority than I did, and so maybe they would look twice at my work.

So he did. And they did. And Sarah Gillespie, an editor for United Feature back then, called. She was not as gung-ho as Mark Cohen had been, but she worked with me. She really chopped it up. We faxed back and forth almost every day (as this was before e-mail). Eventually Off Duty got me a development deal. They would pay me, and I would stop sending the strip to anyone else. In six months to a year, and if they liked what they saw, they would syndicate it.

I was happy to get that first check. It was the first money I’d made from drawing comics since I was a teenager doing odd drawings for the Philadelphia Tribune. And, just as then, the paycheck validated my dream. Now the trick was to deliver, to make United Feature decide they wanted me to continue. I set to work to do just that.

In just two or three months, they called me and asked me to find a lawyer and come to New York City. Lucky for me, [family-andlongtime-friend] Isaac Clothier was not just a surrogate father figure, but he was also a partner at a prestigious law firm in Philadelphia. I could never have afforded him under normal circumstances. Isaac came with me, and we signed a contract with United Feature Syndicate.

United Feature didn’t like the name Off Duty, though. They wanted more emphasis on the young Black couple and less on the cop aspect. They eventually came up with the name of JumpStart. I asked them what it meant and was told that it didn’t mean anything but that it was upbeat.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“You don’t have to like it. The salesmen have to like it. The newspapers have to like it. Charles Schulz didn’t like Peanuts and always wanted to call his strip L’il Folks. We’re the ones who came up with Peanuts.”

Well, if they can order Charles Schulz to change his strip’s name, I guess they could do the same to me, too. And over time, the name grew on me; I like it now. The strip was launched on October 2, 1989. I was still working for an ad agency, but I was planning on being rich. I was not aware of how long it would take to be accepted as a cartoonist. But at twenty-seven years old, I was, at that time, the youngest syndicated cartoonist in the country. My dream, dating from that cool little red book [with “artist” as a career option] mom had given me twenty-four years earlier, had become a reality.

Fearless – A Cartoonist’s Guide to Life is available through the usual book outlets.