Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before...

Ah...one of my favorite tales of angst. A few years ago, I was charged with the task of coming up with a sort of mascot for a website to get teens to quit smoking, TeenQuit. A noble cause, for sure. I whipped up a little blue jellybean type character, figuring he was pretty innocuous. Slam dunk. I'm done, right? I was more than slightly shocked to be informed that he's "too white." And he should be more ethnic.

So I complied. It was a knee-jerk response. Of course, by the time I had done this, it was a moot point, because the mascot should be a dog.

I drew up scads of dogs. When one was decided on, I did bunches of color variations of that. I even went so far as to design a poster that was to be a part of the project. And I thought the kids would get a kick out of it, too. I was pretty happy with it. But the powers that be had changed their minds again. The mascot should be....a teen!

And just what does that teen look like? Blonde hair, blue eyes...kinda white looking. Exactly what they didn't want in the first place. There's also an African-American female character. So it sort of balances out. I was pretty aggravated and felt like I should do something subversive. I was reading "Lexicon Devil" at the time, the biography of Darby Crash and the Germs. So I put a Germs shirt on the kid. It made me feel a bit better, even if no one who ever sees this knows anything about the Germs.