Down South Celebrates One-Year Publication Anniversary

Posted: 6 June 2008

Oxford, MS - "Down South," the cartoon that chronicles the misadventures of two confused northerners Gordon and Maude vacationing in the Deep South, celebrated its one-year publication anniversary this week. The cartoon, with a readership of over 250,000 in the U.S. and abroad and boasting a growing internet following, first appeared in print in the June 2007 issue of Y'all Magazine, the Magazine of Southern People, published in Oxford, Mississippi.

"It's become a very popular cartoon," said Jon Rawl, the magazine's publisher. "It remains the only cartoon in America that addresses the American South, its culture, and the people who live there." The only other south-oriented comic strip was the popular "Kudzu", created by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette, who died in July 2007.

In addition to Gordon and Maude, other characters that regularly appear are the proud and pretentious Mrs. Coldfield, the simple-minded redneck Bubba Snopes, and Norman and Flo, two voraciously hungry kudzu vines, ever in search of new vistas. Other characters include Topper, Vardemann, and Arnie, an extroverted, and an aloof armadillo who thus far makes only cameo appearances and never speaks. The strip ultimately aims to irreverently poke fun at all of us, north and south, east and west.

"If you think about it," Enzweiler observed, "the South is perhaps the largest and most prominent cultural region in North America. Everybody writes about it, they make movies about it, they have cooking shows about it, and everybody wants to say they're from it. The American South is about as big, as controversial, and as unique a collection of human beings as it gets in one country. But nobody does a cartoon strip about it, which seems incredible to me."

The strip grew out of Enzweiler's own experiences during his travels through the South over the years. "I used to see a lot of Gordon and Maude's on the road," he said. "Just about every personality there is can be found in the American South." Enzweiler had been working as a writer and illustrator for Y'all Magazine in 2003 when he came up with the idea to do a cartoon about the South.

"The strip is really about all of us as Americans and the different ways we view one another," he says of the cartoon's concept. The response to it was immediate, and the increase in interest over time eventually prompted the editors to consider expanding the strip to an online version. Gordon, Maude, and the gang currently appear in each issue of the magazine as well as online at www.yall-downsouth.com.

Y'all Magazine was created by journalists Jon Rawl and Keith Sisson and is a bi-monthly magazine with national circulation. The publication, headquartered in Oxford, Miss, was named by Folio Magazine in the top 30 magazine launches of 2003, and the magazine has been featured in the Washington Times, Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and many other national publications.

News Contact: Keith Sisson, Yall Magazine, P.O. Box 1217, Oxford, MS 38655 (662) 238-1928