In July of 1992, artist Drew Friedman was interviewed by the Comics Journal about the collaborations he did with his brother Josh.....
FRIEDMAN: The first strip we ever did was the ”Andy Griffith” comic, about the black guy coming to Mayberry and getting lynched. And it was 1978 when we came up with that idea. We came up with it because Josh had been an editor at Screw at the time, and he had been making connections in the magazine world, and was starting to be published elsewhere. He was published in New York magazine and Penthouse ran a short story by him. I was starting to go to SVA. I started getting printed in Screw, doing goofy cartoons in there. And then we started kicking around some comic strip ideas, just on a whim, and only for ourselves, and to show to our friends. We honestly weren’t thinking about actually publishing stuff or making money by doing comics. We just did it to amuse ourselves, mainly. I don’t know who had the idea to have a black guy go to Mayberry, but that was the first one. We wanted to do parodies of old TV shows. That seemed to make sense at the time. We were both into that stuff, so we both thought that was a natural idea – a black guy going to Mayberry. He scripted it, and I drew it, and it got printed in the Kurtzman’s school magazine, and then it wound up in RAW. It got some good reaction from people we showed it to.
Granted, there weren't many black people in Mayberry, North Carolina, which was somewhat surprising for a small Southern town in the 1960s. But they were there, just not that visible.
It certainly wasn't like this... except maybe in the Evil Mirror Dimension!
There is a web page that did the research into this rural tele-myth and provided pictures to prove it. Here are two of them:
For the full article and to see more pictures, click here.
BCnU!
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