We’ve selected a comic strip to replace Dilbert, and one reason we chose it is the number of you who said we should have looked for a new voice when we replaced Funky Winkerbean with Beetle Bailey. The new strip is called Crabgrass by artist Tauhid Bondia. He describes it as a “strip about childhood friendship with all its peaks and valleys.” Exploring the daily travails of characters named Kevin and Miles “connects to the old and the young without alienating either.” It is set in the 1980s, when Bondia was growing up, before the age of cellphones and the internet. Crabgrass has grown rapidly since it started in 2019 because it is a high-quality comic. It has tinges of the impishness that were central to the popularity of longtime reader favorite Calvin and Hobbes, but the voices in Crabgrass are unique. We selected the comic because it is great, but given the reason we dropped Dilbert, I can’t help but mention some other reasons that make it an appropriate replacement. Crabgrass is a comic strip about a multiracial childhood friendship by a Black artist. We dropped Dilbert because its creator, Scott Adams, went on a racist rant in a video that circulated widely. Crabgrass portrays the very opposite of Adams’ hateful advice to white people that they get away from Black people. When I wrote about the Beetle Bailey decision, I mentioned that Pearls Before Swine is the only comic strip I read these days. After reading about 30 examples of Crabgrass, I’m pretty sure I’ll be a devoted reader. It has a lot of what people liked in Calvin and Hobbes, with Kevin and Miles jousting with parents and a teacher -- and having no end of unsupervised neighborhood adventures. According to his biography, Bondia grew up in Kentucky as a big comics fan, reading them for hours in the local library. He attended Murray State University for a while and became a graphic designer, producing corporate logos by day and comics – published on the web – at night. He decided to end his best known comic in 2019 and developed Crabgrass, which distributor Andrew McMeel selected for development. Bondia has said in interviews that he originally based Miles on himself, but as the strip developed the characters came to have their own personalities. The connection to Calvin and Hobbes is not coincidence. Bondia told the Miami Herald Calvin is one of his favorites, but he noted it never included a Black character. “It was important for me to have a Black character in my comic strip because I am Black and I think it’s an important voice to have out there,” he said. I feel certain I will hear from many of you about your agreement or disagreement with this choice. I’m still receiving emails about the Beetle Bailey selection two months ago. Many people agreed with that choice, but many did not, suggesting other replacements. The most popular alternative you mentioned was to give Baby Blues a daily presence, rather than just on Sunday. We’ll work on finding space for Baby Blues, but Crabgrass feels like a once-in-a-generation comic strip, one that readers will come to adore. I’m excited to bring it to you. Monday will feature the first of five strips that introduce the characters. Give it a few weeks, and let me know what you think. I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com Thanks for reading. | 