Hobbies always help when you need to take your mind off of a soul-crushing loss. One of my hobbies is playing around with Final Cut Pro, and I just recently put together a demo reel for my wife, Laura Bustamante, a beautiful and talented actor whose done voice-over work (in English & Spanish) for everyone from Spielberg to Kaiser Permanente. She also hosts & reports for a TV show about Latino culture, among other things. She just recently finished a run as Diana Morales in the 6th Street Players production of A Chorus Line. Oh, and she’s also the inspiration for Susan Garcia. For a break from the madness, here’s the demo reel. It’s mostly in Spanish, but you’ll enjoy it anyway.

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Some mention about this on the Web. From the Tribune’s Letters to the Editor section:

I’m disappointed in the Trib’s decision to cancel the comic strip “Candorville,” by Darrin Bell (“Meet our new comic characters,” Tempo, Jan. 2). This strip was one of the few highlights of the funny pages, and one of the more consistently funny strips I’ve seen in almost 30 years of reading them. The characters were fully fleshed out and very relevant. Please bring it back, as I have spoken to many others who feel the same way!Fred NicklArlington Heights

That thread also includes a typical comment about how Candorville “always” attacks conservatives, which – also typical – ignores Candorville’s caustic treatment of Hillary Clinton, Ray Nagin, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Oprah Winfrey, etc… People all along the ideological spectrum, from left to right, have an amusing habit of ignoring countervailing evidence when it might get in the way of a good hate.And then there are the obscure blogs (even more obscure than this one, if that’s possible). From M. Rittle at Random Social Thoughts:

We are lucky if a comic strip in the newspaper depicts non-white characters, much less characters of multiple races and classes in the same strip. Candorville accomplishes this social reality with finesse. I read Candorville because the strip breaks racial stereotypes of poverty through depiction of white homeless men. I read Candorville because the highest paid character in the strip is Latina. I read the comics page in the hope to find a humorous depiction of everyday life realities, and no comic strip satisfies this goal as well as Darrin Bell’s Candorville.

***Edit – Rest of the post removed for… oh hell, it’s Midnight Friday after a long week, I’m too tired to keep typing. Let’s just say it’s been removed for the hell of it.***

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“Be to my faults a little blind, Be to my virtues very kind.”I’m not sure who originally wrote that phrase. I’ve seen it attributed to various people from John Lennon to Ben Franklin, and I have yet to come across a definitive account of its origin. Maybe that’s because I haven’t spent too much time looking, but I’d like to think it’s also because it’s such a universal desire that it actually goes back to the dawn of time. Maybe when the first doomed nucleic acid was spit out by a primordial chemical system, it’s last words were “remember me well.”The desire to be remembered as a positive force once we’re gone is probably as instinctive as it is universal. Every saint and every dictator wanted to leave behind a legacy they thought positive. And because we all want the same thing, we routinely, wilfully, whitewash people’s lives once they’re gone — hoping that someday, when our time comes, the world will return the favor. Some believe that pays tribute to the departed. Perhaps most believe that. I believe the opposite. I believe that by sanitizing someone’s effect on the world and their history, you don’t pay tribute to that person, you pay tribute to some phantom you’ve created in their stead. When it’s a person of historical significance, you run the risk of erasing history. And we all know the other saying about what happens to people who forget their history.Here’s today’s Candorville, followed by a representative response to it from a Candorville reader:Today’s stripReader feedback

Dear Darrin Bell,My paper just picked up your comic strip on the first, and I was okay with it. It was mildly funny, and I could relate to some of it. However, today, you published the comic about James Brown “explaining” about what he didn’t do, while you showed Gerald Ford running away. I now refuse to read your strip. If you want to attack a person, at least do it while they’re alive. 

My response

Thank you for writing. That’s exactly what tomorrow’s comic strip deals with — the notion that we should only speak well of the departed. You really shouldn’t judge a comic strip by one edition of it, or you might miss out on something you’d otherwise come to enjoy. The reason the strip is called “Candorville” isn’t because I think I know the Truth. It’s my promise to always say exactly what’s on my mind, regardless of what everyone else is saying. It’s my suggestion that honesty is always the best policy, even when it involves sacred cows. When the war in Iraq was popular, Candorville pointed out its counterproductivity. When Barak Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were being idolized as phenomena by the Media a couple years ago, I pointed out that they’d done nothing more than anyone else could do, and the only reason they were seen as exceptional was their race (What has Obama accomplished, really?). Everyone loves Oprah Winfrey, but I’ve commented on how she seems to regularly invite celebrity guests in order to fish for compliments from them, and I’ve pointed out that every single issue of her magazine features HER on the cover (which strikes me as a bit egotistical, even if it is good business sense). Not all these observations are equally important, but they’re all candid assessments.I “attack” people who are living 99.99999999% of the time, but I see no reason to sanitize someone’s past just because they’ve died. And when the rest of the Media, from left-wingers on Air America to the mainstream media to right-wingers like Limbaugh, are ALL refusing to mention a person’s drawbacks once they’re dead, I believe in the case of a public official, that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to ignore history, to sanitize it out of sentimentality. So I point out that the person isn’t a saint, that his affect on history hasn’t been as uniformly positive as the Media is telling us it has. I say “hold on a second, stop canonizing someone who has such a checkered record.”If you want to hear the sanitized line on issues, the rest of the Media provides that. If you want to hear candid opinions and truthful depictions of modern Americans and their actions & discussions, Candorville tries to provide that. If you’re offended by that sort of candor, then perhaps Candorville isn’t the strip for you, but I thank you for giving it a chance up ’til now. Thanks again for writing, and I hope you have a happy New Year.

***UPDATE***Looks like I spoke too soon. The above feedback was representative of a handful of e-mails early in the morning, but the vast majority of the feedback since then (all of it, in fact) has been positive. Here’s another note which is more representative of the feedback for this strip:

I have been a fan of Candorville since the git go. As a afro-cubano who was raised in Pasadena I can relate to Susana and the entire cast of characters. Since I was a teen in the mid-60s listening to KGFJ 1230am, I have been a fan of James Brown, I also lived the stain of Tricky Dick’s scandal and the behind the scenes arrangement he made with Ford to get pardoned, all the while I was on the front lines of the struggle, freedom fighting and protesting the Nam conflictYour Jan 8th strip with the Godfather at the pearly gates hit home and if not your best, fo sho it is in your top 5 im my book…

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Mail keeps coming in from Chicago readers upset about the Tribune’s decision to cancel Candorville. Curiously, many in Chicago seem to have assumed it was my decision to pull Candorville out of the Tribune, or that Candorville has ended. For instance:

Dear Mr. Bell,I suspect you must receive a ton of complaints from Chicago when you criticize the government, but that is no reason to pull Candorville out of the paper like The Boondocks did. Maybe you don’t realize that a lot of us read Candorville every day and appreciate your take on current events and look forward to reading what you have to say about modern life. The comics aren’t the same without Candorville. Please bring it back. 

Just to clarify for Chicago readers, I haven’t ended Candorville, it was cancelled by the Tribune. I have no control over whether Candorville appears in the Trib. If you’d like to see it return, e-mailing me won’t do it (although I appreciate it). If you’d like to make your feelings known to those who make the decisions, I would suggest you contact the Tribune directly and tell them what you think.It’s been an honor to appear in the pages of the Tribune for this long, and I hope those of you from Chicago will continue to follow Candorville online, perhaps in one of the other Chicago papers should they choose to pick up the strip, or in book form.

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Candorville’s been nominated for a Glyph Award. Awards are ridiculous popularity contests signifying nothing. Unless Candorville wins, in which case awards are proof of quality and merit. Here’s the list of nominees, as reported by Editor & Publisher and The Comics Reporter:

“Best Comic Strip”Candorville, Darrin BellThe K Chronicles, Keith KnightTemplar, Arizona, Spike(th)Ink, Keith KnightWatch Your Head, Cory Thomas 

Smart money’s on an upset by Ziggy.

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Readers are writing in today to ask why they don’t see Candorville in the LA Times. They also note that La Cucaracha and Mallard Fillmore have been dropped. Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on and neither does my syndicate. We weren’t informed of any change in status, and usually when papers make such a change, they do us the courtesy of informing us beforehand. If you’d like an answer today, or want to talk them out of whatever madness is going on, you’re going to have to contact The Times directly.

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From today’s In the Loop column (Washington Post):

Speaking of the House oversight committee, it’s not often that someone below the rank of Cabinet member can merit a cameo appearance in a syndicated cartoon. But General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan, apparently to the amusement of some folks at the GSA, has won that unusual distinction, becoming a thinly disguised amnesiac in the cartoon Candorville.

Doan won the high honor after she repeatedly told the committee on March 28 that she could not remember details of a Jan. 26 videoconference presentation for top political appointees at her agency by White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings, who works in Karl Rove’s shop.

LA readers are continuing to write to the paper and myself asking how they can follow Candorville. Some have sent passionate e-mails, some have sent poems, which I truly appreciate. Some have threatened to cancel their subscriptions (which I think is a bad idea – not only do papers not listen to non-subscribers, but there’s no point in cutting yourself off from a news source). I wish I could thank you all personally, but if I do that I wouldn’t have time to write the strip.Please keep writing or calling (calling is best, because it lets them know you’re a real person) if you want to read Candorville in the Times, and keep in mind it sometimes takes months, or even years, for a paper to change its mind. In the meantime, if you’d like to continue following the strip, you can try writing or calling other papers you might be reading in the LA area (Daily News, Daily Breeze, OC Register, etc. – which are all open to running Candorville depending on reader requests). In the meantime, you can follow it online, at the Candorville website. You can sign up for a daily e-mail notifying you when a new comic has been posted.Thanks again, everyone.

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My wife and I decided to move back home to LA (after 14 years in the SF Bay Area), and then just a few weeks before we drove all our worldly belongings down the I-5 in a rented Penske truck, the LA Times canceled Candorville. We got a great apartment overlooking Griffith Park, and then just days before we move in, Griffith Park burned down. I was beginning to sense a pattern.But as my Grandfather always says, “it’s important to have faith. Everything works out in the end. And why isn’t my cable TV working?”In any case, as I was pedaling along the Santa Ana River yesterday, losing myself in the lazy dips and rises of the bike path and the warm desert breeze, thinking about faith, I realized one thing: I didn’t know where the hell I was. So naturally, I kept going. This is the Southland, after all, I was sure to run into something that’d be familiar: a Carl’s Jr., a Honda dealership, a mugger — Something. Faith. Then it caught my eye…A big halo fifty feet in the sky, and the familiar International Orange-colored “A” holding it up. Angel Stadium was just ahead, like a big, dilapidated anchor on the horizon. I crossed over the freeway overpass and looped down to the other side of the river-bank, and headed straight for the big A.I’d been riding for nearly two hours, and as I sat under a tree next to the A, I began to relax. I began to think. I thought about how the last time I’d seen the Big Red A in person, I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. We’d driven down to catch an Angels game, and managed to lose our car. My dad, my brother and I wandered around the huge parking lot in the middle of the freezing night with no jackets, no light, and – for me at least – no hope. Hours later, when all the other cars had left, we saw ours, parked right under the Big A. I thought about how important it is to believe everything’s going to work out, because it usually does unless you sabotage it yourself with doubt and anxiety (And if not, it just wasn’t meant to be). I thought about how someday Griffith Park would be just as beautiful as it was three days earlier, when I’d hiked from Fern Dell Road to the observatory. I thought about how it’s not a good idea to sit on a nest filled with red ants.After shaking my clothes out and shrieking like a little girl, I crossed the river and headed for a restaurant I’d spotted earlier. Acapulco, by Century Theaters in the City of Orange. I ordered my shrimp enchilada and then checked my e-mail on my phone. There was a message from Sherry Stern the LA Times’ Deputy Features Editor. The header read “Good news!” After nearly choking on my chip con guacamole, I closed the phone. I opened it again, fully expecting the message to have disappeared – it had to be a hallucination brought on by the Anaheim sun. It was still there. I closed the phone again and looked at it to make sure it was mine. I opened it again, expecting the message header to read “Just kidding.” But it didn’t. The LA Times had reconsidered its decision to cancel Candorville, she said. Candorville would return on Monday, with Sunday strips to return on or after June 3.I resisted the urge to hug the waiter as he delivered my beans and enchiladas.Someone else at the Times told me a couple weeks ago that the response from readers had been tremendous. Hundreds – maybe billions (but probably closer to hundreds) – of readers wrote in, called, and voiced their opinion about the cancelation. I’m sure that made all the difference. “Thank you” isn’t enough, but then I know it wasn’t for me. People didn’t want Darrin Bell back, they wanted to continue to hear a young, dissenting voice in their newspaper – something Candorville provides with annoying regularity.Score one for patriotic dissent, zero for the corporate media’s dastardly plan to silence alternative viewpoints. Well, I guess that would be score 289,975 for the corporate media, and one for patriotic dissent, but you get my meaning.As I waited at Acapulco for my wife to pick me up with the bike rack, sipping my Sierra Mist and downing a forkfull of sautee’d vegetables, I thought about faith. I thought about how hard it was to leave the SF Bay Area, the friends and the life we’d made up there. I thought about LA, the city where I was born and raised, and about how the city seems to have welcomed us back home. And I knew everything was going to work out in the end. Then I checked my socks for red ants, just in case.

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For some unknown reason, Elayne Boosler, guest hosting the Stephanie Miller Show on Jones Radio Network (& aired on many Air America affiliates), decided to spend a few minutes interviewing yours truly this morning. I didn’t post about this beforehand or tell friends or family because it would scare the hell out of me knowing that people were actually listening to me live. “They” say most Americans fear public speaking more than they fear death, and for a cartoonist who’s used to spending his days alone, half-naked in a tiny studio with only his characters to keep him company, death would be #3. #2 would be having to wear pants.Still, I sit for interviews whenever I’m asked because, hell, this is a dream come true for me — creating cartoons that strangers (who don’t owe me anything) spend a few precious, irretrievable seconds out of their days to read — and when someone asks me to talk about that on the radio or TV or a panel discussion, it’s a reminder that it’s actually happening, that that little kid who “wasted time” drawing Optimus Prime and Snoopy in his textbooks actually became what he wanted to be.Here’s the interview. Behind this buffer of time, it isn’t so scary. From today’s Stephanie Miller Show:

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