Realism!

The numbers can be ugly sometimes. It's also strange to look at them from a comic strip point of view, because there is this limited space and you can't go into full detail. Some of these numbers have been chopped down to a point where some of their meaning gets a little lost or misrepresented. For example, the $18,000 sounds bad, but I think it sounds worse when put into the perspective that the median black household income is around $34,000. There just wasn't really room to get that in there, and I didn't want to make it only about income. I wanted to get a variety of stats and numbers.

But the number that has really been sticking in my head this week is the number of days that the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted. I think everybody has read about it. I think everyone knows who Rosa Parks is. But I wasn't aware of how long it went on. 382 days! It blows my mind. To be able to sustain that...

I wonder if there's even that kind of attention span today.

Anyway, the median income stat came from here. The obesity stat came from here. The credit card stats came from here. The prison stat came from here. Monty Python also has a good song about numbers that always makes me feel better.