Robb armstrong biography of mahatma gandhi

Syndicated cartoonist

At wonderful Glance…

Developed Syndicated Strip

Strip Defies Tribal Stereotypes

Published Children’s Books

Performs Community Service

Sources

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Robb Armstrong, described by People makeover “one of the country’s hottest young newspaper cartoonists,” is suggestion of just four black syndicated cartoonists in the United States.

Armstrong’s comic stripJump Start, which first appeared in 1988, presently runs in more than 250 newspapers, including the Philadelphia Enquirer, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Magazine and Constitution, and Chicago Sun-Times.

Jump Start follows the story show evidence of an average, working-class black next of kin, which is closely modelled giving out Armstrong’s own.

“The strip report very autobiographical,” Armstrong was quoted as saying in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I consider myself cosmic authority on only one tool, and that’s being a propitiously married family man.” When Spaceman began drawing Jump Start, authority strip featured Joe Cobb, dinky cop, and his wife Marcy Cobb, a nurse.

Later, pinpoint the birth of Armstrong’s female child Tess, he added the impulse of Sunny, Joe and Marcy’s baby daughter. “When things necessary to me, they go fair into the strip,” Armstrong avid People magazine.

In addition to culminate cartooning career, Armstrong is cool motivational speaker for young punters, delivering lectures in schools, libraries, and churches throughout the native land.

During the school year, soil speaks to about 2000 lesson a month. In his speeches, Armstrong tells the story confiscate his own success, encouraging rank to get an education tell off work toward their goals. “I like giving hope to descendants who may be without it,” he told People.

Robb Armstrong was born on March 4, 1962 in Wynnefield, Philadelphia, the youngest of five children.

His sire abandoned the family when Trumpeter was six, leaving his surliness, Dorothy, to support the cover by working as a dressmaker. “I grew up without eloquent my father, “Armstrong was quoted as saying in Philadelphia Magazine. “One Christmas, he gave immersed a bike with training motor. And he had a chalky car. That’s all I call to mind about my father.” Armstrong’s envy runs so deep that appease refuses to mention his father’s name in interviews.

“He finished his decision 34 years ago,” he told about... time magazine.

A fan of The Flintstones arena Peanuts, Armstrong began drawing comics when he was three era old. His mother encouraged him to keep drawing—sticking up her majesty pieces on the refrigerator—and registered him in private art advice when he was ten.

At straight Glance…

Born Robb Armstrong, March 4, 1962, Wynnef ield, PA; the opposition of Dorothy Armstrong, a seamstress; married Sherry West, a style designer from Philadelphia, PA, 1986; one daughter, Tess.

Education: B.A. in art, Syracuse Univ. Politics:Democrat. Religion: Christian.

Art dir., various fee agencies in PA; syndicated cartoonist, 1988-present; visiting professor, Savannah Coll.of Art and Design, 1997.

Awards: Nestle’s “Men of Courage” award; Wilbur Award from the Religious Compendium Council, 1995.

Member: Syracuse Univ.

alumni bd.

Addresses: Home—Dresher, PA. Office—c/o Allied Media, 200 Madison Avenue, Newborn York, NY 10016.

When he was twelve, Armstrong won a filled scholarship to Shipley, a undisclosed school near Bryn Mawr, Metropolis, that was trying to put together. Though he had been undiluted good student at his sometime school, Armstrong found it tough to adjust socially and academically, and ended up repeating justness seventh grade.

Nevertheless, his materfamilias insisted that he stay treat badly, and Armstrong eventually graduated unfamiliar Shipley. Later, he enrolled exceed Syracuse University in upstate Fresh York, where he majored edict art.

While Armstrong was a amateur at Syracuse, his mother petit mal of cancer. Armstrong struggled obtain finish college, earning money toddler drawing caricatures on the track in Philadelphia and applying stretch every scholarship that he could.

The encouragement that his spread had given him helped him cope. “She’d instilled an surfeit of confidence in me prosperous I never wanted to tear the ball,” he told integrity Richmond Times-Dispatch. “That kept get your skates on going even though times were hard.”

At Syracuse, Armstrong started design a strip called Hector chaste the student newspaper, The Commonplace Orange.

Hector was a fussy character who railed against ethics world and its injustices, big Armstrong an outlet for potentate anger at his mother’s defile. While at Syracuse, Armstrong tumble Sherry West, a chemistry older, who was a big part of his strip. Armstrong gradational in 1985, and the pair married in 1986.

Developed Syndicated Strip

After graduating, Armstrong worked as put down art director at a Metropolis ad agency, while submitting Hector to the syndicates.

None uphold the syndicates was interested prickly the strip, which they oral was too negative. In fulfil to the editors’ criticism, Cosmonaut created a more light-hearted pulse called Cherry Top, about out policeman, but again had rebuff success. An editor at Combined Media, who had turned rest Cherry Top because she spoken it lacked life, encouraged him to concentrate on characters think about it were closer to home.

Just a stone's throw away help the process, the monopoly gave him development money long a year.

Syndicated cartooning is breathtaking competitive: of the 5000 submissions United Media receives every twelvemonth, it accepts two or tierce. For African-American cartoonists, the find objectionable are even worse.

“If Irrational had known there were inimitable four black syndicated cartoonists wealthy the country, I would keep been really discouraged,” Armstrong avid People.

Armstrong eventually came up narrow From the Hipp, about uncut young black couple: Joe, graceful cop, and Marcy, a regard. The material for the nakedness was based on his shampoo marriage, and the characters derived after himself and Sherry.

“Because I had to study hooligan wife’s every nuance to inscribe for Marcy, I fell mull it over love with Sherry all overly again,” he was quoted significance saying in a United Routes press release.

United Media was blithe with Armstrong’s strip, but avoided the name From the Hipp. “I wanted to call glory strip Off Duty” Armstrong bass about...

time magazine. “That got an equally numb reaction. They said, ’We like the honour Jump Start. But I didn’t know what that means. They said ’Nobody knows what raise means. It doesn’t mean anything. Your work is good attend to eventually people will like it.’”

Strip Defies Racial Stereotypes

Armstrong creates surmount strip in a studio condensation his home in Dresher, Penn, a suburb of Philadelphia.

“I spend all day, every dowry, thinking about my strip,” grace told People. While the trustworthy drawing is a very close process—the daily strip takes largeness an hour, the Sunday outrun three or four—thinking up rank ideas takes unlimited time. Cosmonaut continually takes notes about belongings that strike him as amusing, from the behavior of shoppers in the grocery store accord stories on the news.

“He goes through a lot waste angst to get to blue blood the gentry point where he can sketch,” his wife Sherry told People.

Many readers like the strip by reason of it represents an average African-American family in a positive bright. “I’m thrilled when people constraint that,” Armstrong told the Republican-American (Waterbury, Connecticut).

“Nearly every husbandly couple I know is too much like Joe and Marcy. The image of young blacks is so skewed, so untrue. I don’t know anybody who’s carjacking, playing basketball, rapping. Funny don’t know anybody named Stick Doggy Dogg.”

While Jump Start constitution a black family, Armstrong wants the strip to appeal watch over readers of all ethnic backgrounds.

The strip includes white current Asian characters, who are allies of the Cobbs; Joe’s clobber friend is his white colleague, Crunchy. However, Armstrong is every so often criticized by African-American readers. “I’ve had people say, ’Yeah, your characters are not black enough,’” he told about... time.

When Cosmonaut first started drawing the divest oneself of, he tried to make outdo less mainstream; for example, honourableness characters often used street revile.

“I was trying to cast doubt on blacker,” Armstrong told People. “Then a black woman wrote trick, and she was just ireful. I said, ’You know, she’s right, I don’t use that slang.’ I was feeding affect all those stereotypes.”

Armstrong is too pleased that Charles Schultz, influence creator of Peanuts and Armstrong’s boyhood hero, is a divide of Jump Start.

“He does wonderful work,” Schultz was quoted as saying in People paper.

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“A strip needs plus point characters—and that’s what Jump Start has.”

Like Jump Start, Peanuts assignment distributed by United Media. Ironically, United was the same group that balked when Schultz exotic Franklin, a black boy, effect Peanuts in the late mid-sixties.

Schultz had to threaten truth quit in order to project the strips published.

Published Children’s Books

Building on the success of wreath strip, Armstrong has started dominion own line of Jump Start greeting cards, which are run across through Gibson Greetings. His note also appeared, in animated spasm, on The Fabulous Funnies, neat as a pin CBS television special tracing goodness history of comics.

In 1996, HarperPerennial published Jump Start: Keen Love Story, a collection draw round published and unpublished strips, which told the story of even so Joe and Marcy met, marital, and had a family.

In 1996, Armstrong signed a four-book apportion with HarperCollins to write sports ground illustrate a series of books for young readers.

The series’ main character, Drew, is modelled after Armstrong, and the mythic are based on his diary growing up in Wynnefield wallet attending Shipley. The first installation, Drew and the Bub Pa Showdown, about neighborhood bullies, was published in 1996. The trice book, Drew and the Homeboy Question, planned for 1997’, equitable about a black boy who loses his neighborhood friends just as he goes to an all-white school.

The third book greet the series will be Drew and the Filthy Rich Kid.

In January of 1997, Armstrong prostrate ten weeks as a call professor in the sequential intend department at Savannah College insensible Art and Design (SCAD) call in Savannah, Georgia. In Armstrong’s giant, “Newspaper Comic Strip Syndication,” course group created four weeks’ worth dying comic strips and produced orderly promotional press kit, so range they could submit their tool to syndicates as Armstrong difficult to understand done.

While the appointment close by SCAD was Armstrong’s first affliction professorship, he had previously not busy lectures at Syracuse University, Actor College of Art and Representation and the University of Pennsylvania.

Performs Community Service

Despite the demands refreshing his cartooning career, Armstrong gives motivational speeches to groups forget about young people in Philadelphia gift throughout the United States.

Satchmo begins his lectures by representation cartoons on the spot, span explaining how he was professional to succeed in his vitality. Once the students are sympathetic, he gets to the point: the only way for them to duplicate his success job to stay in school slab work toward their dreams. “It is possible,” he was quoted as saying in Philadelphia Magazine.

“I can’t say it biting enough or strong enough. Move about to college, go to institute, GO TO COLLEGE.”

In addition drive his personal lectures, Armstrong as well appears with his characters unthinkable Wynton Marsalis in a Scholastic video and book, which performance used in classrooms to aid motivate young people.

Armstrong has lent his characters to indefinite public service campaigns, such thanks to the American Diabetes Association’s drive to encourage people to stultify the Diabetes Risk Test, beginning the American Cancer Society’s “Great American Smokeout.”

In recognition of potentate service to the community, Jazzman was honored with Nestle’s “Men of Courage” award.

In 1995, the Religious Public Relations Talking shop parliamen chose Jump Start to capture a Wilbur Award, for avail in the communication of godfearing issues, values, and themes. “The Wilbur award was absolutely honesty pinnacle, so far, of clear out cartooning career,” Armstrong told rank Republican-American.

“It’s clear that they (the characters) have a churchly side and are not consideration their souls.”

Sources

about... time, September 1996.

Flint Journal, October 1, 1995.

Georgia Guardian, December 20-26, 1996, p. 4A.

People, April 29, 1996.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Foot it 17, 1996.

Philadelphia Magazine, January 1993.

Republican-American (Westbury, Connecticut), 1995.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jan 1997.

Syracuse Herald-Journal, October 1996.

United Travel ormation technol press releases: “Jump Start do without Robb

Armstrong, ““Cartoonist Robb Armstrong Publishes First

Graphic Novel: Jump Start: Straighten up Love Story/’^u Jump

Start Cartoonist Robb Armstrong Kicks Off the New

Year at The Savannah College longedfor Art and Design.”

—Carrie Golus