JC
The Tennessean talks to Nate Creekmore, a senior at Lipscomb University. Creekmore has won several awards for Maintaining, the comic strip he writes for the campus paper. His own experiences being mixed have definitely fueled the comic, which features a biracial character named Marcus. It’s possible that when he graduates, Maintaining will make it into the rest of our newspapers!

Some called him racist. Some called him enlightened. Either way, he kept them wondering what his characters would say next.

Kyle Gregory, editor-in-chief of The Babbler, says the strip has been good for Lipscomb, a largely white school.
”We don’t have the best diversity on campus. For a biracial student to come in here and start talking about racial issues from both sides — I think it opens up people. He’s coming from a very lighthearted standpoint. He’s not pointing fingers.”

The strip has generated buzz off campus as well as on. For the second year in a row, Creekmore has won the Scripps Howard Foundation’s national award for college cartooning, a highly competitive category that receives dozens of entries, says president and CEO Judy Clabes. Winning in two successive years is an extremely rare accomplishment in any of the National Journalism Award categories, she added.

The three-judge panel, which included two professional cartoonists, praised Creekmore for speaking ”in his own voice” about racial and ethnic identity and said, ”He deals with sensitive subjects with humor and a frank, refreshing openness.”

Maintaining also caught the eye of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes comics such as Doonesbury and Garfield. The company has offered him a stipend to spend the next year developing the strip. At the end of the year, it will decide whether to add Maintaining to its repertoire.