Black Female Cartoonist Is Ready to Jump Into the Media Mainstream : Comics: Barbara Brandon follows the path of her father, creator of ‘Luther.’ Her ‘talking heads’ speak about relationships from a different perspective.

Lydia cradles the infant Aretha, born on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Lydia and her friend, Cheryl, speculate about the future of one born so auspiciously.

“The sky’s the limit. She can change the world if she wants to,” Cheryl says. “She can go wherever her heart takes her.”

“Yeah,” says the new mother, “let’s make sure it’s not Arizona, huh?”

Arizona, where lack of a paid holiday to officially celebrate the civil rights leader’s birthday has been a controversy, is the punch line offered by Lydia, one of the recurring characters in a comic strip that is about to launch Barbara Brandon as the first black female cartoonist syndicated in the mainstream press.

“I’m thrilled,” the 32-year-old artist says with a laugh. “It’s about time. It’s only 1991. How long have newspapers and comic strips been around?”

She would be the eighth black cartoonist to reach mainstream syndication, according to cartoon archivist Steven L. Jones of Philadelphia, one of whom was her father, Brumsic Brandon Jr., the creator of “Luther,” which ran for 17 years starting in the late 1960s.

Next month, Universal Press Syndicate plans to release Brandon’s “Where I’m Coming From.”

“Obviously we are both hopeful and optimistic,” said Lee Salem, Universal’s vice president and editorial director, adding that executives are looking for a fresh perspective as they were when Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” and Gary Larson’s “Far Side” were first published.

“And we hope they are ready for Barbara. I think the humor is certainly different. The perspective to my knowledge is not one that appears in many newspapers.”

Brandon had early training in cartooning while in junior high school, earning her allowance by putting dots, shadows and other touches on “Luther.”

Inspired by her father and Jules Feiffer’s use of characters talking to the audience, Brandon tried a strip in 1982 for Elan, but the woman’s magazine folded before publishing her work.

“The only reason I thought I could do a comic strip was because I had seen my father do it most of my life,” Brandon said.

The next year she sent her work to Essence magazine, whose editors were impressed. But they instead hired her as a fashion and beauty writer, a job she held for 5 1/2 years.

For the last two years, Brandon’s gang of talking heads, all black women, have appeared Sundays on the lifestyle pages of the Detroit Free Press, making her the only black woman cartoonist at a major paper.

She uses only their heads, and an occasional hand, feeling that women’s bodies are displayed enough in the comics and on videos.

The strip started as a forum about relationships: Judy and Claudette on Claudette’s decision to marry a man she recently met; whether Victor’s dozen roses mean he’s seeing another woman.

But she’s not “Cathy,” who talks nonstop about relationships in her syndicated strip. And she’s not white.

“I’m telling it from a black woman’s perspective,” Brandon said. “I’m just trying to let a lot of these women know they are not experiencing these things by themselves.”

Thus, Brandon has occasional mentions about matters concerning skin color preferences among black Americans and some flat-out political statements about King’s birthday and fighting oppression.

With the encouragement of Universal, during a yearlong developmental contract, Brandon became more political. One strip noted that in 1991 it’s still possible to be the “first black” in some field.

Or there’s the strip that took note of the hostages once held in Iraq and those held in Lebanon. “Don’t they know how to really rile this country?” a woman in that strip asks. “Find someone who’s tone deaf and have them sing the national anthem at the top of their lungs.”

There also were eight installments about a woman choosing to have a baby out of wedlock. When she sent it in, Brandon wasn’t sure what the Free Press’ reaction would be.

“I kind of sat back and waited. It was a testing, doing something different,” she said. “They paused a minute, but didn’t decide not to do it.”

Brandon also has a sly side. When mother speaks about little Aretha not going to Arizona, baby pops open a wary eye. Another character has dollar signs for pupils when talking about what she values most in men.

Most reader response is positive. “You really know what’s going on with the mind of black women-men,” one woman wrote.

“She’s very close to the way we live,” said Marty Claus, the Free Press’ managing editor for features and business. “What I like about her strip is not that it’s a knee-slapper but that you see two women interacting and by the end of the sequence you are smiling yourself because you’ve seen it happen before.”

One reader, though, thought Brandon was a male basher. Brandon wrote back, saying that while she was not anti-male, she was “delighted my work has pushed your buttons. It means I’ve done my job, provoked some thought, probably even initiated some dialogue.”

There have been dozens of syndicated black cartoonists in the black press, including Zelda Jackson “Jackie” Ormes, whose debut in syndication in 1937 made her the first black woman to achieve that distinction. Her “Torchy Brown” appeared in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, among other papers.

“She was intelligent, sexy, self-motivated,” said Jones, an archivist of black cartooning. She also fought racism, sexism, warmongering and environmental pollution.

“In terms of some of the issues Barbara raises, it is in the tradition that Jackie Ormes started. Barbara is continuing that kind of hard-hitting tradition like her father and like Jackie Ormes,” Jones said.

Brandon’s now 64-year-old father used inner-city children to speak truths no black adult cartoon figure would dare say.

Their names were “Luther” (named after King), “Hardcore” (as in unemployed) and “Oreo” (as in black person with an inner white personality). And they had a white teacher, “Miss Backlash.”

“He certainly was the most biting, the most hard-hitting, sort of the most ‘right-on’ strip we have seen in the mainstream press,” Jones said.