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Please bring back 'Curtis'
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Each year, cartoonist Ray Billingsley lets the characters from his daily comic strip, "Curtis," take a multi-week break while he spins a Kwanzaa fable. Will I seem like a jerk if I say he ought to keep his regular characters in the mix during the holiday season?
Look, the nation's newspapers routinely foist whitebread comics pages on us every day. There are very few nods to different cultures - it seems that for every "Curtis" or "Jump Start" there are about four or five "Hi and Lois's" or "Henrys." That's obviously the result of a decades-long resistance to modernizing and contemporizing the newspaper and one of the reasons so many of these media entities are facing such tough times. So I applaud Mr. Billingsley's efforts to lace culture and ideas from a decidedly little heard populace into his comics-page space.
At the same time, when I turn to "Curtis," that's exactly who I want to see. I expect to get a daily dose of Billingsley's impish protagonist trying to put the moves on Michelle, avoiding romantic chatter with Chutney, fighting with little brother Barry and testing the limits of his father's patience. So I have to admit, I don't read "Curtis" during holiday season, because I don't turn to the strip for a tale of Kwanzaa featuring characters that don't normally appear.
The same thing would happen, I suspect, if I turned to "Dilbert" and got a two-week tale of characters other than Dilbert and his downtrodden office mates making the most of Christmas. Or if I turned to "Cathy" and was given a story about an elderly matriarch named "Consuela" trying to spread Hanukkah cheer to her brood.
Perhaps there's a compromise. Let's see Curtis and his oddball pal Gunk in a story that teaches us about Kwanzaa. Or let's have Chutney do something that tells us more about the holiday and the tradition from which it sprang. I'm not trying to dampen Billingsley's creativity. I'm just trying to come up with a method that keeps me coming back to the strip while allowing the cartoonist to achieve his goals simultaneously.
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