At this year’s MoCCA Arts Fest, cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft sat down to discuss her groundbreaking career as the first syndicated Black woman newspaper comics artist in the US. She talked about the origins of her weekly strip, Where I’m Coming From, its growth and reception, and its contemporary resonance and recent recognition as historically important.
Recognition for Brandon-Croft’s work is on the rise. In an energetic and enthusiastic discussion with Publisher’s Weekly’s Calvin Reid, she talked about the start of her career through its heyday and the recent resurgence of attention, most recently in a new collection of strips of Where I’m Coming From, published by Drawn and Quarterly this year.
First, Brandon-Croft talked about her experience growing up in Newcastle, Long Island, a Black community where a wide range of Black experience was grouped together due to how racially segregated Long Island was.
Her father was Brunswick Brandon, Jr, the cartoonist for Luther, a newspaper strip noteworthy for showing Black kids. She talked about the way his work patterns shaped the household’s life, because as Calvin Reid put it, “funny is hard work.”
After she went to Syracuse to study art, taking whatever college classes interested her, she created a portfolio of comics for the magazine Elan, which unfortunately folded before she was able to be published in it.
Then, she began a career in journalism as a fashion and beauty reporter for Essence, and in 1989, her dad was asked if he knew any Black cartoonists and he put her name forward to become a cartoonist for the Detroit Free Press. She used the same portfolio of comics she’d created for Elan years previously, and her comic was picked up.
Her comic, Where I’m Coming From, was a weekly strip that showed topical conversations between Black women, illustrating only their faces and hands. While each strip showed only one or two of the women, it was clear from reading the strip week after week that they are all in a community together and know and support each other. Brandon-Croft noted, “there’s a seed of me in all of them, but a lot of the characters are based on my relationships with my friends.”
Brandon-Croft discussed how her decision to just show heads and hands was inspired by Jules Ffeifer, and she noted that it was a particularly conscious decision for a strip that featured Black women, because women’s bodies have been “hyper-sexualized,” and the distillation down to a woman’s head and hands keeps the focus on “what’s on her mind.”
It was an incredible moment for Brandon-Croft to then wonder aloud if she was talking too much. Reader, she was not. Calvin Reid then reminded her, “you’re not talking too much. This is your panel. It’s literally your name.” And encouraged her to keep telling us what was on her mind.
Because of her experience with journalism, and her knowledge of newspaper cartooning from her dad, she knew that drawing a cartoon for one newspaper would not pay the bills. She created a press kit for Where I’m Coming From and sent it around to cartoonist syndicates, one of which, Universal Press Syndicate, gave her a development deal. They encouraged her to add hands and arms to her heads to be more expressive, and Where I’m Coming From was able to reach a much wider audience. She explained, “I did create it with a Black woman reading it in mind, but I talk to everyone the same way.”
Brandon-Croft’s strip addressed sexism, racism, the history of slavery, colorism, motherhood, abortion, hair politics and white resentment for a broad US audience every week. Calvin Reid noted how current many of the strips still feel, and Brandon-Croft replied, “Thank you. My dad always said the job of a cartoonist is to observe, interpret, and record.”
The strip, which ran 1991-2005, received a lot of fan affirmation, but also complaints that Brandon-Croft was “anti-male” or “anti-white.” Brandon-Croft explains she was not put off by these complaints: “When someone was upset with what I did, I was like, ‘Nice. This is good.’” Luckily, Brandon-Croft felt consistently supported by Universal Press Syndicate, who “weren’t trying to change” her, as Calvin Reid put it.
After her strip ended in 2005, Brandon-Croft got a job as a fact-checker. In recent years, however, she’s been approached by museum and gallery curators to participate in shows highlighting the role of women cartoonists, and her own and her father’s contributions to the form. Her conversation with Calvin Reid concluded with a discussion of the light currently being shed on her work.
For instance, cartoonist Jillian Tamaki saw her work in a show at the Library of Congress and told her contacts at Drawn and Quarterly about Brandon-Croft’s work. They then contacted Brandon-Croft about gathering and publishing a collection of strips of Where I’m Coming From.
I’d say that the rest is history, but the truth is that Barbara Brandon-Croft’s entire career has been making history.
