Ok Gents and Ladies,
Our uber-secret public project which is really not a secret is almost upon us - BUT I have one teeny tiny issue. How to create culturally neutral characters? Is this even possible? Do we even dare?
Options:
1. Give them brownish skin?
2. Avoid any really specific hair colors like red or yellow and stick to browns and blacks?
3. Beard? No beard?Gotee?
4. Ambiguity in facial features? Or should they be more specific?
5. Clothing? Are T-Shirts universal? What about shorts? Any type of shoes?
6. What if the side characters are Ranch Hands? Are ranchers different in different parts of the world?
SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME!
Comments
Hey Martin, Thanks for asking, and nope, I don't mind sharing.
My cultural blindness lesson: I'm a science teacher in a 400 student public High school that's roughly 60% Hispanic. The staff has worked hard over a fifteen year period to make sure all students excel, and with that in mind we invited a nationally famous workshop leader to our school: Glen Singleton(about 6yrs ago). Up to this point I had been quite proud of being race and cuilturally "blind" which I would interpet to mean race and culture are non-issues. It was a full-day workshop, and the "cultural blindness attitude" got ripped into as a typical oblivious outlook of a white culture thats on top. Non of the mostly white staff took that real well but when I saw our hispanic staffers nodding in agreement, I started listening a lot more closely.
To paraphrase: I'm white, and I can afford to call culture a relative non-issue because its a non-issue for me. But because my hispanic students and staff think race is a huge issue, I need to put it way up on my radar because I care about them(and I do.) So I've read, talked with, and focused on hispanics a lot, one of the results is the Cal-Mex flavor to my someday strip:Californios 1830. I hope to use this year to promote some of my latino students to post art and writing on the web as well. We have clubs and opportunities for our latino parents and students, and little resentment (so far) from our white families. I use my limited Spanish in science as needed, seek out Latino tutors, talk about Hispanic scientists and science, attend Latino parent meetings...as well as push all my students to push themselves a bit. We preferntially hire latinos and spanish speaking teachers (when we can get them). The gap in state test scores between average Hispanic and white students has gotten smaller, but still continues to hover around 10%.
I think we have whole community support so far because we make sure there's plenty of time, love and learning for everybody. I wonder if thing would be quite so harmoneous, if our time and resources were more restricted(causing more competition) or if some of our key admins and teachers(many of whom are born-again believers) were to move away.
Hope this helps, as you can tell its an issue that I value.
Hi Brien,
From the looks of things the team that jumped in on this did a bang up job...now If I can just get of my buttski and finish my end of the deal, it will be off and to the races.
Out of curiosity, could you delve a little deeper into your tale of "Cultural Blindness"? I'm curious as to what was proposed and how and or why it got shot down. I understand if it's a sore subject and you don't want to talk about it - but I'm curious since I may also be doing additional projects, and in them I might be "borrowing" from a multitude of cultures - but if doing so will cause issues on a larger scale, I may wish to re-think my strategy.
A couple of years ago, I good chewed on(it was a good hurt) for touting the benefits of cultural blindness. The point I took away was: If race/culture is preimmenently important to most of the rest of the rest of the world, I should make it important to me. Possible application to your project: take a really good script and field it to local artists in a number of different cultures, producing individual "Prodigal Son" comics for each culture. Sounds expensive, but people could support this with donations if it was marketed with names and faces.
If you only want to work on one pan-cultural book, you could try Iconic, abstract or anthro styles. By Iconic, I mean using a heavily cartooned style in which the features are so comediacally distorted, they cease being cultural.
God's Speed.
Well, I wanted these to be somewhat "generic" or universal characters. We're going to attempt to make the Prodigal Son - but I didn't want it to be "Too North American" (I'm Canadian) - but I don't really want it to be too anything else either i.e. Too Euro, Too Asian, Too...anything.
So I'm kind of asking for an almost impossible proposition. Distinct characters - but distinctly neutral.
I might just bite the bullet and go with what I know (American/Canadian) sort of something...but if I can get a more universal look, I'll try that instead. Maybe I just change it all to aliens or something.
Hm...if we go with dots for eyes...sort of Tintin...then the character shapes can be more inventive and less restrictive...thus, more "neutral" - ideas?