From Jonathan: At the risk of finding myelf the butt of another sarcastic strip, I find the question very odd. Your characters have other recognizable physical indicia of ethnicity; Jewish nose; Afro hair; whatever. Whats the big deal over skin pigmentation? Even in the real world (I know I'm asking for it here) I think skin pigmentation has long since taken second place to other markers of social, economic and cultural identity as a subject of interest and controversy. On a purely aesthetic basis, color wins hands down.

From Henry: Um, I dunno dude. I think I like the color strip better, because it's not so damn political and it looks better. They're just characters, and as such, you rob them of a part of their identity by taking away their color. No matter what statement you think it makes or doesn't make. You could also default and make them all plaid. It's the same thing. Fact is, the strip's in color. Get used to it.

From Phil: Y'know, it's funny, I just noticed that very thing today. It finally dawned on me that nobody had any color to them intentionally, but thinking back, I definitely thought of them as white. I like the idea of making them colorless or "alabaster" but maybe you need to make it a little more obvious - maybe make the images on T.V. or newspaper have skin tone, so the characters stand out, or make only the main couple and the baby colorless, and give the supporting characters skin tone. I don't know. Or give everybody skin tone. That works, too.

From Masha: I don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other. Aesthetically, I had sort of gotten used to the white skin color (which isn't really like anyone's skin color) so the colored-in version looks odd. But I'm sure I would get used to realistic skin colors too. Politically, I actually had been wondering why you made the [all the characters] white. But race hasn't been an issue in the strip, so it didn't matter (to me, anyway, though I can see how it might matter to others).

From Nancy: why not? the change looks good to me. if you feel that's what you ought to do, it's what you ought to do! don't guide your aesthetic judgments by polls....you won't want to live with the result long-term.

From Flynn: i definitely prefer the skin colored in. presumably it's not extremely tedious to fill in those spaces? racially speaking, if you don't use color to delineate people looking different from each other (ie, distinguishable as different characters) then you might exaggerate facial features which, to me, is a more insidious result of stereotyping than skin color. btw, your strip rocks, i hope you become the next suburban torture.

From Bob: I vote for the color. But can't you ease up on the four-letter words
without losing verisimilitude?

Dear Readers:

I have always chosen to make my characters' skin the only colorless regions in my strips. The hope was that I could get away from all the awkward treatment of race in cartoons, and in the media in general. However, it has recently been suggested that, by defaulting to colorless (which, in web terms = white), I have in fact once again supported the status quo by making white the normative color. Maybe there's no way out of this bind because we are all products of our time and place, and overly conscious of these kinds of details.

Anyway, I did a little experiment. Below are two frames from the same strip -- one with skin color and one without. Please let me know what you think, aesthetically and otherwise. Your feedback will be most welcome: info@alabastercity.com.