The Six Chix Contretemps

We're having a conversation in cartoonist circles about Six Chix this week. It's a daily newspaper comic strip which six female cartoonists take turns drawing. Last Tuesday's episode by Bianca Xunise provoked such reader outrage that several newspapers immediately dropped the strip from their comics page and demanded an apology.

"Six Chix" by Bianca Xunise, for King Features Syndicate, July 28, 2020

I was preoccupied with family matters that day, but I did notice the cartoon showing up on Facebook. Knowing nothing about where it came from, I passed it off as the sort of thing some Trump fans in my Facebook feed might think was pwning some libs. It didn't strike me as particularly humorous; dang near none of the anti-BLM and anti-mask memes do.

Once the Daily Cartoonist started reporting on the controversy, I learned that Xunise is a black woman, and that she meant the cartoon to be critical of the white woman speaking to the woman in the "I Can't Breathe" t-shirt. I also learned that Xunise apparently doesn't understand how anyone could misinterpret her cartoon, even though I am clearly not the only person who did.

To put it another way, let's rework the cartoon I posted last week.

I'm not going to pretend that there wasn't any room for improvement in this cartoon, but I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who mistook this as a cartoon in defense of citizens' rights not to wear a mask in public.

The cartoon is loaded with cues that are intended to combine to portray the maskless guy in a negative light. He is grotesquely distorted; there are little red dots spewing out of his mouth; the store employee is blown back by the force of his shouting; and to top it off, there's another character telling the reader that Mad Whitey is full of crap and dangerous to boot.

Here's the same cartoon, redrawn in the tone of the July 28 Six Chix strip:

Casual readers probably would not be able to tell which of the two characters in the cartoon they were supposed to sympathize with. Take out the first two sentences of the dialogue, and readers might assume that the cartoon is critical of officious millennial store managers.

If you have visited my blog before, you know generally where I'm coming from on most issues. If you've met me in the past four months or so, you've seen me wearing my mask in public.

But readers who pay little attention to the editorial (or back) pages where my cartoons appear, or who happen to see my cartoon shared or retweeted by some peripheral on-line acquaintance, don't know anything about me. The pink triangle gives a clue, but I could be a Senegalese woman with a poster of Glenn Beck in my bedroom and a basement full of guns for all they know. They have no reason to know what they are supposed to read into a cartoon other than what is in it.

It's not like I've never drawn cartoons that have been misinterpreted. That usually happens when I've stewed over and played with an idea so long that I forget that the reader hasn't been thinking along the same lines as me before seeing my cartoon.

The point is to learn from one's mistakes, apologize as necessary, and move on to make completely different mistakes.

On the internet, nobody knows when you're only kidding. No wonder the sarcastrophe is such an immensely popular punctuation mark.

At any rate, I'm not saying that Ms. Xunise needed to turn Mrs. Take That Silly Mask Off into a screeching homunculus. I imagine that's not her style. But I do think her cartoon would have been immensely improved and would still be running in those short-sighted editors' papers if she had allowed the woman in the mask to have a witty rejoinder.