Interview Questions: Modern Black Cartoons and Cartoonists

In regard to this assignment, I wanted to provide a brief bit of background. I had planned my interview initially to involve reaching out to professionals in the industry. However, I found this process to be more daunting than initially expected. Not only was it harder to reach out than I thought, I had a hard time crafting questions. Hopefully in the future I can highlight a creator directly, but for the time being I altered my questions to be able to be asked to anyone who has engaged with animation. While this falters in not containing industry insight, hopefully it demonstrates the importance of representation and the current lack, even with the strides made in the past ten years.

With that, here are my interview questions:

1. When you think of Black or African American cartoon characters, which characters first come to mind? How many can you think of?

2. When you think of Black or African American cartoonists and animators, who comes to mind? How many can you think of?

3. Within the comics industry, Rebecca Wanza notes in her book The Content of Our Caricature the negative stereotypes black people would be portrayed with in comics. This connects to early racist depictions in cartoons from Warner Bros or MGM. Have you seen cartoons like this produced in the modern day?

4. Jeff Brown writes in his book on Milestone comics the differences between the first black characters created by DC and Marvel and the characters of Milestone Comics, a comic production company founded by black creatives. With modern cartoons you know, is there a distinction between creative like this?

5. Thinking of portrayals of black characters in modern animation, are there any stereotypes that stand out, racial or otherwise? Are there trends in portrayals of black cartoon characters that differ from those of media in general?

6. According to Zippia, a job demographics analyst site, as of 2020 4.3% of animators in the animation industry are black. Do you think that this number changing would impact the kinds of characters seen in cartoons today?