Whew

We were just moments away from a character being whitewashed in her VERY FIRST APPEARANCE. Yikes!

I created a Laotian character, a very cool one with some long-term plans, and she almost went to print white as hell.

With a colorist who is a POC, himself, as well.  There’s no evil in it, but even with all the safeguards and color requests, sometimes there is just a default to Caucasian that is both sad and disturbing.

Fortunately, we caught it at JUST the last moment. There has to be a way to stop this from happening, no one is doing it on purpose, but it happens so often that it’s insidious. We have a GREAT colorist on this book, an outstanding, dedicated color artist, but somehow the messages about the character’s ethnicity did not get across. Thankfully, he was delighted to fix it, a real pro.

A close call.