What are your thoughts on why there is such a small number of African-American female "indie" cartoonists? Or are we just not hearing about them?

No, I think that the number is actually just really small. It bothers me so much. I’ve looked and looked but I’ve only found a handful of African American women cartoonists. I haven’t even been able to wager a solid guess as to why we see so few black women doing comics.

It is obviously a cultural problem of some kind. In our kind of comics, there isn’t anybody to overtly prevent anyone from participating. There are no cultural gatekeepers to exclude or dissuade black women from participating in indie comics. So the question of why black women are not nearly as represented in indie comics seems to be a question of access or exposure.

This ties into my yelling about public comics such as newspaper strips, poster-comics and the like. If comics as an art form are contained to a cyclical ecosystem, we need to intentionally break comics out of that ecosystem. Explore new venues to put this work into the grasp of all people, everywhere. If some groups of people don’t frequent places where comics are found, then find those people and bring comics TO them.

That’s how I feel about what should be done to cultivate a more widespread interest. But I’m still terribly hazy on the initial question of how it came to be this way in the first place.

@darrylayo