As featured in September 1996
Beyond Laughter
Cartoonist Brings New Quality to the Funny Pages
By Vincent F.A. Golphin
Cartoonist Robb Armstrong wants to be a hero to youngsters. His constant message to adults is about the importance of family and why children are a precious asset. The West Philadelphia native is making high marks on the daily newspaper comic pages, a white-male bastion where even the sight of dark-skinned fictional characters is rare. Yet the biggest struggle he faces goes on inside himself.
Armstrong is one of four African Americans, among dozens of cartoonists, whose talent for humor and drawing have earned a spot in the funny pages of U.S. daily newspapers. All Armstrong needed was a Jump Start. That's the name of his widely read comic that has opened ever-wider opportunities for him in publishing. At the same time, Armstrong says the visibility pits him in an ongoing struggle for acceptance among African Americans. Black critics call his daily strip The Cosby Show of U.S. newspapers, a flight from black realities.
"I believe there are criteria placed on black people that is unfair,
by other black people," Armstrong says. "I never hear the criticism
of not being black enough coming from white readers. It's usually black
readers who say things like that. Their expectations of blackness are very
specific. My characters are very deep emotionally, but their humanity runs
on many different levels. They're not obsessed over one or two quote-unquote
black issues all the time."
In 1989, Armstrong became the third in a current set of black cartoonists to gain national syndication--after Morrie Turner (Wee Pals) and Curtis creator Ray Billingsley of King Features Syndicate. The fourth is Barbara Brandon, creator of Where I'm Coming From of Universal Press Syndicate
That is no small feat. Very few artists and writers behind today's funnies are non-white and non-male. The color line in newspaper syndication has darkened--the 1990s yielded a bumper crop of black columnists--but newspaper comics remains virtually milk white. The daily comic strip charts the ups and downs in the fictional life of Joe and Marcy Cobb. Joe is a cop, fun-loving and fanciful, a kid at heart. Marcy's a nurse. Together they share a deep devotion to their daughter, Sunny. As Armstrong and his wife Sherry West, a designer of high-priced women's sportswear, the cartoon Cobbs are young, hardworking African Americans with a child. In the strip as in real life, the parents see a bright future ahead and hope their hectic schedules will give them the time to become a strong, loving family.
The daily comic strip bounced his work into the ranks of long-time favorites such as Peanuts, Wee Pals, Nancy, and Blondie. Most of his cartooning colleagues and idols, such as Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz, were well-established decades before the 34-year-old Armstrong was born.
It opened up a major money-maker, too. The average cartoon feature sells at a bottom price of $10 per newspaper, per day, 365 days a year. Cartoonists usually get 60 percent. Jump Start runs in more than 200 papers.
After earning straight A's at William B. Mann Elementary School, on 54th and Burks streets in Philadelphia's Wynnefield section, Armstrong integrated Shipley, a largely-white, all-female prep school in the suburbs. He was one of 12 boys and two black male freshman in 1976. The long hours spent traveling to class outside the close-knit neighborhood caused a rift to form with his black playmates. Eventually, it became a chasm. "I had to wave goodbye to those guys in my neighborhood almost entirely," Armstrong acknowledges. "There was no other way for me to do it. Everybody wants to have their cake and to eat it too. I would love to say yes, I stayed real close to everybody from the 'hood, but it didn't happen." Education and opportunity forced Armstrong to make choices about the old neighborhood. Fame and fortune are foisting tougher choices (and criticism) on him. That's the plight of many rising black stars, such as actor Will Smith, who grew up a block from Armstrong. "I grew up on Diamond Street and he grew up on Arlington Street," recalls Armstrong, who was away at Syracuse University before Smith gained popularity as a rapper.
Characters from Jump Start are no less message-bearers than those in the more political comics such as Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury, which features white liberals, or Barbara Brandon's Where I'm Coming From, about nine urban black, twenty-to-thirty-something, single females. Armstrong said many people consider Jump Start "soft." Those are the folks who don't get it.
Armstrong says he preaches perseverance and hope. The cartoonist says
most readers are drawn to his Cobb family chronicles because they see a
reflection of their lives. It's a subtle form of humor," he explains.
"It takes time. The person is not going to become a huge fan of my
strip after reading it one day."
African-American critics are harsher. "I've had people say, 'Yeah, your characters are not black enough,'" he explained during a telephone interview from his home in Dresher, Pennsylvania, an upscale Philadelphia suburb. "I've had that criticism all the time. I think that's because my characters are actually based on my own experiences, based on my own marriage, my own child, and stuff like that; I'm not really creating fiction necessarily. It's based on true human emotion."
Armstrong says he wanted to erase the stereotypical bonds of race, religion, gender, and other social factors with Jump Start. That meant creating a comic reality closer to his own. That was the advice given by an editor at United Media, his distributor.
His prior efforts to syndicate two other comic strips had failed. The first was Hector, a character that railed at the world, developed from the sadness and rage the artist felt after his mother died of cancer during his freshman year of college. The comic became a fixture in Syracuse University's Daily Orange campus newspaper, but bombed as a commercial item. Cherry Top, a strip about a policeman, was turned down too. Editors said it lacked life.
In 1988, a United Media editor suggested Armstrong do a character more like himself. Within a year, Armstrong came back to United Feature Syndicate, the branch of United Media that handles his work, with From the Hipp, about a cop and his nurse wife. Everything clicked except the name.
"There was a combination of a legal problem with another cartoon, an unsyndicated strip, which was called that, and people just didn't like it," he relates. "They put together a list of names. I wanted to call the strip Off Duty. That got an equally numb reaction. They said, 'We like the name Jump Start.' But I said I didn't know what that means. They said, 'Nobody knows what it means. It doesn't mean anything. Your work is good and eventually people will like it.'"
Armstrong says his idol Charles Schulz went through the same thing with United Features a half-century earlier. The comic strip that featured Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy, was originally called Little Folks. In both cases, fans paid more attention to the characters than the names.
"I was deliberately trying to fill a void at the time," Armstrong says. "There were no strips about cops back then. I realized that newspapers only reacted to what they didn't already have. Second of all, I said I wanted to do a strip about a cop because that would at least get people's attention. I could see myself writing on that subject for a long time with the cop-oriented material in the mainstream media."
Hallmarks of Armstrong's success are seen in Jump Start's inclusion.
The American Diabetes Association used the characters to urge the public
to take the diabetes risk test. They became boosters for the American Cancer
Society's "Great American Smokeout," an annual effort to stop
smoking. Gibson Greetings features them in a line of cards. The Cobbs made
it to television in The Fabulous Funnies, a CBS special on the history
of comics about three years ago. In 1995, the Religious Public Relations
Council honored them with a Wilbur Award for the communication of family
values.
The West Philadelphia native said he saw a lot of unstable families growing up. He claims he wasn't one of them, despite the fact his father walked out on them about the time Armstrong was born. His mother, Dorothy, a seamstress, raised five children alone. The resentment still runs so deep he refused to have his father's name mentioned in this article. "He made his decision 34 years ago," the artist stated.
"Everyone owes it to their children to remain involved in their lives," Armstrong said. "If you have kids, for example, your main responsibility in life, above and beyond everything else, is to love and provide for them. And if you have kids, it doesn't matter whether or not you can go out and speak to groups of kids or not, your main responsibility is still to your own offspring. If you have something to offer kids, like good values, and a good work ethic, it doesn't matter whether your career is necessarily exciting to them. I think they can benefit greatly from talking to you and you talking to them. For the most part, young people are craving the guidance that many are not getting."
The cartoonist's latest bid to reach young minds is through the printed word. Armstrong has signed a four-book deal with HarperCollins to write and illustrate a young readers' series. Again, he's the key character named Drew, who exposes readers to the fears and rejections Armstrong faced in Wynnefield and during his days at Shipley. Drew and the Bub Daddy Showdown, about neighborhood bullies, was released earlier this year. Drew and the Homeboy Question, about a black boy who loses friends when he goes to an all-white school, is coming in the fall. The third book will be called Drew and the Filthy Rich Kid.
Drew's fictional older brother, Kyle, is a role model and best friend. Armstrong patterned the character on his brother, Billy, who was dragged to death by a subway train at age 13 when Robb was 6. His other siblings are also featured in the books as they were as children. Today, Cheryle, the oldest, manages a convenience store. She is 44. Mark, 39, moved to southern California, became a Muslim, and changed his name to Khabir Matin. He owns a taxi service. Judy, second to the youngest, is a beautician in Haines City, Florida, near Orlando. Clearly, Armstrong has many more experiences to share.
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