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Thursday, September 2, 2010
We are Family:
Jerry Craft and Mama's Boyz
In the competitive environment of comic strip syndication, for every mainstream strip that appears in your local daily newspaper, there are many more that operate on the fringes, in papers with lower circulation numbers, that not only survive but thrive. For over a decade, Jerry Crafthas self-syndicated his family comedy strip Mama’s Boyz and has slowly built a network of support from papers around the country and even abroad, acquiring critical success that has translated into many commercial opportunities.
Craft, a New York native, grew up reading Marvel comics, and attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) hoping to major in cartooning. However, the cartooning classes filled up quickly, so he was forced to consider other options, such as advertising, specifically, copywriting. He liked copywriting enough to major in it, and graduated with an advertising degree.
But the cartooning bug never completely left him. “When I was still in SVA,” he says today, “there was a local newspaper where I grew up, in Washington Heights, and my father used to always bring [it] home. And it had this cartoon panel that used to drive me crazy. I used to criticize it all the time, like, ‘Oh, Dad, this guy’s terrible.’ And he’s like, ‘Hey, he’s published and you’re not. How can you criticize him?’ The way my personality is, I was like, alright, he’s got a point. So I worked up samples of a comic strip called The Outside View. It was sort of a rainbow coalition of teenagers. I guess they were like Wee Pals grown up: black, Hispanic, guys, girls. I did some samples and I called up that paper and I made an appointment. I went in, met with the guy, and he’s like ‘Hey, this is good. We can run you.’ And about two weeks later, I was in an issue. I was waiting anxiously, and I got it, I went home, showed it to my father and I said ‘Hey, here I am – right next to the guy who I hate. I’m published too; I can criticize this guy!’”
The ad market dried up upon graduation, so Craft switched to cartooning and found himself working at Marvel after all – but instead of drawing childhood favorites Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, he worked on comedy books Sweet 16 and Yuppies From Hell with writer Barbara Slate. The duo also produced a comic for Harvey based on the boy band New Kids on the Block. In 1990, he reworked The Outside View, taking a pair of brothers from the strip and making them the stars of a new one called Mama’s Boyz. He sent it out to a number of African-American newspapers nationwide and was picked up by a few, including ones in New York, Houston, and San Antonio. He even worked as an intern at King Features, learning about the industry while waiting for the chance to get picked up by them. In 1995, they did just that – and the strip suddenly gained a much wider audience.
Mama’s Boyz is centered around a family, with the focus on a pair of rambunctious yet lovable brothers, the studious Tyrell and the trendy Yusuf. Pauline, the eponymous Mama, is the owner of a black bookstore. She raises her sons on her own and does her best to keep them on the straight and narrow path. Other characters include Pauline’s ladies-man brother Gregory, and their father, a retired chef.
Craft’s stories generally revolve around the brothers’ adolescent growing pains, but every so often he’ll tackle more serious subjects. “Occasionally, I’ll get in trouble because if I’m doing something about drugs, drinking, or something like that, I tend to want to show the effects of it. I think it’s much more effective. If I’m doing something about drinking, I’m actually showing someone in the strip who’s passed out or drunk or something like that, as opposed to just in the confines of the living room – Mom going, ‘Gee, Yusuf, I don’t think you should drink because of blah blah blah.’”
One story arc dealt with teen pregnancy in the black community, which led to a Maryland paper pulling the strip permanently after hearing from an irate reader (Later, when the arc was put on the website, Craft received numerous positive e-mails). Craft believes part of the problem in depicting real world subject matter stems from unrealistic expectations imposed by the readership. “If someone in the family goes to the doctor, the doctor’s black. If they go to a lawyer, the lawyer’s black. Mom owns a bookstore, she’s an entrepreneur; she’s black. But if I draw something like the pregnant teenagers, [the readers] are like, ‘Oh, you shoulda drawn them white!’ Why? I don’t draw too many white people in the strip because [the setting] stays in that community, and I don’t want it to be like, if Mom goes to the doctor, all of a sudden all the doctors and professional people are white! Stick with me. This is what I do, and every once in awhile, there’s gonna be something bad, but I usually have something that balances it. I wouldn’t have Yusuf and his friends go out drinking and having fun and not suffer any kind of consequences. So if I ever did a story like that, something would happen. Yusuf would get caught, or someone would get sick, or they get in some kind of trouble and didn’t realize what they did was wrong.”
Protecting the integrity of Mama’s Boyz as an Afrocentric strip has always been of paramount importance to Craft. “I would like to think that anyone could read it. Especially with the black cartoons – it’s like, you can read a strip about being in the army, about being a Viking, about being a dog or cat, without being a Viking, or dog or cat, or in the army! But I know a lot of newspaper editors still think that only black people would read Boondocksor Curtis or Jump Start or Herb & Jamaal or Where I’m Coming From. So it’s like [they say] ‘Oh, we’ve got one, we don’t need another ‘cause we’ve taken care of that black niche!’ I think that’s more the editors in newspapers that do that more than newspaper readers. I would have a hard time thinking that a reader would read Garfield and Blondie and then just see the black characters and skip over it.”
Indeed, Craft believes comics and cartoons still have a long way to go to achieve any level of ethnic diversity. “Now there’s [the animated series] Static Shock, and it’s good, but I still can’t go to Toys ‘r’ Us and buy a Static Shock doll for my kid… My kids aren’t Asian, but they like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, so why can’t a white kid get a Static Shock doll? Why doesn’t that cross over? I think it’s that deep-rooted stuff that people don’t actually realize…It’s not the kids that wouldn’t buy a Static Shock doll. I’ve seen people and heard of people who have gone into stores and their little girls pick up a black doll and their mothers are like, ‘Oh! Yeah…Suzie, wouldn’t you prefer that one over there?’ ‘No, Mommy, I want the brown one!’ And then you see the beads of sweat coming down… ‘Well, Suzie, you know your father and I would prefer…’ You know? Even with shirts…I’ve had Mama’s Boyz shirts for seven years, maybe; sold a bunch of them. I’ve sold maybe five to people who were not black and many of them were people I knew, [and I’d say] ‘Oh, are you gonna wear it?’ ‘Oh no, I put it up in my closet ‘cause I don’t want anything bad to happen to it…’ They won’t wear it out in the street. There’s still this little stigma attached to it. So what’s that about? It’s all connected.”
Craft, however, also finds fault with black audiences for not doing enough to support quality work, which goes back once again to inflated expectations. “I think we give ourselves a hard time, because I think that there’s a lot of unwarranted pressure on a Dwayne McDuffie (Static co-creator} of ‘keeping it real’ and not selling out and all that. I don’t hear that with other races. I don’t hear other races equating success with disappointing your culture… If Static Shock gets the opportunity to have a full length movie or dolls, is he supposed to say no, to keep it real? Maybe if he makes it that big and we support him, then he can help someone else. Maybe he can be in a position where he can greenlight projects… but if you just pull him down, and then [the black comics imprint] Milestone goes under, it’s like, now what?” (Kids WB did not pick up the show for a fifth season.)
“A lot of times, when there are a bunch of [black] creators together, we don’t even buy our own books,” Craft continues. “If I’m not buying Solid or Witch Doctor, how can I expect them to buy Mama’s Boyz? How can I expect anyone else to buy them? I would like to see stuff where we can cross-promote and help each other out on a smaller scale. I think that a lot of the publishing companies do need to open up their narrow spectrum and include more stuff. But by the same token, if HBO says, ‘We wanna do a Mama’s Boyz 2-hour movie,’ have I sold out? There’s a whole lot of pressure coming from all different ways that I think makes it increasingly harder for a person of color to succeed in this industry, because I think you get it from all over and you’re forced to try and represent everyone.”
Despite all of this, Craft has done well for himself. In 1997 he put out a Mama’s Boyz trade paperback, subtitled As American As Sweet Potato Pie, with a foreword by For Better or For Worse’s Lynn Johnston. His strip has appeared as part of supplemental features in the New York Daily News commemorating Harlem Week, Kwanzaa, the West Indian Day Parade, and even an AIDS awareness supplement. Most notably, though, the strip is used in conjunction with the American Diabetes Associationand are that organization’s official spokescharacters. Craft joined with the group after reading about the disease and its widespread effects on the black community in particular.
It also added some depth to the strip. “I had never shown Dad in the strip,” says Craft. “I had never explained why he was gone. I knew that I did not want it to be like a typical black sitcom, where Dad is a deadbeat: ‘Oh, yeah, Dad went out for cigarettes 22 years ago and we haven’t seen him since!’ or he’s got this new family or something like that. So I wanted Mom to be a widow, and when I started working with the ADA, I was like, well, that’s perfect – [and] I had Dad passing away due to complications due to diabetes. So that sort of grounded the strip, it gave me a whole new thing to work with. It made it more realistic, so it wasn’t just gags all the time. It explained why Mom was sort of – watchful? – over the kids, y’know, what they eat. I had Grandpa as a retired chef back in the days of Harlem, so all of his stuff is heavy creams and pork and fried stuff. So that adds a little tension between Mom with her healthy diet and Grandpa with his old school soul food.” In addition, the strip can be seen in books like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Comedy Writing and the forthcoming Chicken Soup for the African-American Soul, and Craft’s illustrations have appeared on Afrocentric board games. Currently he works as senior online producer for Sports Illustrated For Kids, making Flash cartoons for the website and hosting a radio show.
By finding the balance between being accessible for all audiences and celebrating its Afrocentric nature, Craft has made Mama’s Boyz a success. “I wouldn’t want to be someone who said oh, it’s just [about] a family and has nothing to do with being black. I mean, my book is called As American As Sweet Potato Pie because usually [the saying] is ‘as American as apple pie,’ and y’know, some people like sweet potato more, some like it less, but it’s a different flavor. And that’s sort of what I like about this.”
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
