I was thinking about Curtis - the comic strip about the black kid in Washington DC encountering problems like trying to get your dad to stop smoking, having the barber forget your name, and getting in trouble at church because of ladies' funny hats. Curtis, written and drawn by Ray Billingsley and syndicated by King Features, is a bit of a pioneering historical footnote - the first major syndicated strip centered around black characters, it addresses questions of black identity in America by mixing it into generically non-racial Funny Pages hijinks. Here's a typical strip, dated 4/21/09:
Bland, generic, ridiculous, but thoroughly grounded in lived experience. The success of Curtis doesn't lie in its humor, which is often unfunny, but in its approachability and likability. Billingsley's view is a uniquely African American one - a yearly series of strips around Kwanzaa time relates a moralistic African folk story - but the very blandness of his work democratizes a medium that's known for its conservativism and stodginess. We're just like you, Billingsley tells his white readers. We are not The Other.
Except that, in a unique turn on conventions in racial representation, Curtis presents us with a character who is the very definition of 'the Other.'
Gunk, who is caucasian and has bizarrely crossed eyes, comes from Flyspeck Island, which has a unique cultural heritage entirely separate from the rest of the world. As Billingsley puts it, in an interview:
There was a group of students who liked the character Gunk, who comes from Flyspeck Island, which is at the northeastern tip of the Bermuda Triangle. We don't see the island because it's usually clouded over and has escaped detection. It's almost a paradise. Gunk is visiting the United States. I guess you'd call him sort of a a foreign exchange student, since he came here to go to school. He's always talking about things that happened on Flyspeck Island. Basically I use him as a storyteller, especially if I'm trying to get a moral across. Gunk is one of the easygoing characters in the strip. Nothing seems to faze him, he has a charming and engaging personality, and he's become Curtis's best friend.
There are certain unique things about Flyspeck Island, such as its soil, which is the most fertile in the world. Anything organic that you plant in it will grow. Gunk has brought a packet of Flyspeck Island soil to the States with him, and it doesn't mix well with American soil. I did a sequence where just a pinch was added to an ivy plant: the clinging ivy started growing like wildfire, and Curtis was in danger of being suffocated. So Gunk had to battle the plant to save Curtis. With this sequence I was trying to get over the following point: If we Americans latch on to something, especially if its a natural resource, we tend to overdo it. We keep taking and taking until it's almost destroyed.
As a point of further discussion, here are two strips involving Gunk. In the first, Gunk is relating Flyspeck Island mythology similar to the story of Noah and the Biblical Flood:
This is a very strange and depressing Sunday strip:
Odd, isn't it? Whereas the majority of Curtis is dedicated to life in the inner city, the Gunk sequences are flights of fancy in which our protagonist is taught morals by a strange-customed (and indeed, given that Gunk is the strip's only caucasian, racially 'different') character. A character defined in relation to the uptight, anxious protagonist as 'relaxed' and 'carefree.' A character who possesses, as the Sunday strip affirms, magical powers unique to his race. Gunk appears to be a racially inverted 'magical negro' character - a magical honky? - whose presence in the strip normalizes and serves the development of Curtis as a character.
What does this mean? In the above interview, Billingsley seems unaware of the strange racial quality to Gunk, so I can't approach the character as some sort of 'parody' of racial typing. Indeed, much of how Gunk is described is entirely in keeping with certain real-life stereotypes: the easy-going Caribbean, the differently-abled child with magical powers. Billingsley, in his design to integrate African American culture into the mighty white comics pages, seems to have therefore internalized the magical negro trope. It comes out in a bizarre form here, and in a manner that is relatively harmless. After all, Flyspeck Islanders are a non-existent ethnicity, and though the comic reinforces the idea of the national/racial Other, it does so in a way that allows Gunk to retain a degree of humanity.
Flyspeck Island and ‘The Other’
I was thinking about Curtis - the comic strip about the black kid in Washington DC encountering problems like trying to get your dad to stop smoking, having the barber forget your name, and getting in trouble at church because of ladies' funny hats. Curtis, written and drawn by Ray Billingsley and syndicated by King Features, is a bit of a pioneering historical footnote - the first major syndicated strip centered around black characters, it addresses questions of black identity in America by mixing it into generically non-racial Funny Pages hijinks. Here's a typical strip, dated 4/21/09:
Bland, generic, ridiculous, but thoroughly grounded in lived experience. The success of Curtis doesn't lie in its humor, which is often unfunny, but in its approachability and likability. Billingsley's view is a uniquely African American one - a yearly series of strips around Kwanzaa time relates a moralistic African folk story - but the very blandness of his work democratizes a medium that's known for its conservativism and stodginess. We're just like you, Billingsley tells his white readers. We are not The Other.
Except that, in a unique turn on conventions in racial representation, Curtis presents us with a character who is the very definition of 'the Other.'
Gunk, who is caucasian and has bizarrely crossed eyes, comes from Flyspeck Island, which has a unique cultural heritage entirely separate from the rest of the world. As Billingsley puts it, in an interview:
As a point of further discussion, here are two strips involving Gunk. In the first, Gunk is relating Flyspeck Island mythology similar to the story of Noah and the Biblical Flood:
This is a very strange and depressing Sunday strip:
Odd, isn't it? Whereas the majority of Curtis is dedicated to life in the inner city, the Gunk sequences are flights of fancy in which our protagonist is taught morals by a strange-customed (and indeed, given that Gunk is the strip's only caucasian, racially 'different') character. A character defined in relation to the uptight, anxious protagonist as 'relaxed' and 'carefree.' A character who possesses, as the Sunday strip affirms, magical powers unique to his race. Gunk appears to be a racially inverted 'magical negro' character - a magical honky? - whose presence in the strip normalizes and serves the development of Curtis as a character.
What does this mean? In the above interview, Billingsley seems unaware of the strange racial quality to Gunk, so I can't approach the character as some sort of 'parody' of racial typing. Indeed, much of how Gunk is described is entirely in keeping with certain real-life stereotypes: the easy-going Caribbean, the differently-abled child with magical powers. Billingsley, in his design to integrate African American culture into the mighty white comics pages, seems to have therefore internalized the magical negro trope. It comes out in a bizarre form here, and in a manner that is relatively harmless. After all, Flyspeck Islanders are a non-existent ethnicity, and though the comic reinforces the idea of the national/racial Other, it does so in a way that allows Gunk to retain a degree of humanity.