Who is Darrin Bell? Cartoonist now facing child porn charges built groundbreaking body of work

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell, creator of the syndicated comic strip Candorville, is photographed in his Sacramento office in February 2024. Bell was arrested Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, by Sacramento County sheriff’s investigators on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Darrin Bell, the famed comic strip creator of “Candorville” and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, now faces child pornography charges in Sacramento. Arraignment is set for Friday in Sacramento Superior Court.

The Sacramento-based cartoonist, arrested Wednesday by Sacramento County sheriff’s detectives following a months-long investigation, faces an uncertain future.

But the arrest of Bell, 49, a married father of four children, stuns amid a groundbreaking career that began when a young Bell was still in college, drawing cartoons for the Daily Californian at UC Berkeley.

Bell was 20 when he began his career in 1995, freelancing for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post, while a student at UC Berkeley. In 1997, Bell self-syndicated his first comic strip, “Rudy Park,” co-created by Theron Heir.

ADVERTISEMENT

But it was the debut of “Candorville” in 2003 that brought Bell wider acclaim. The strip, featuring three childhood friends of color, often investigated issues of race, civil rights, pop culture and family.

Candorville was syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group three times a week beginning in 2003 before moving to King Features, a division of Hearst, in 2019. With his earlier “Rudy Park,” Bell, who is Black and Jewish, was the first Black cartoonist to have two nationally syndicated strips. At its height, Candorville ran in about 300 newspapers nationwide. The popular strip ran Sundays in The Sacramento Bee from 2021 to April 2023.

He also authored “The Talk,” the 2023 graphic novel memoir that unearthed painful childhood memories to explore race, racism and their lasting scars.

In 2015, Bell was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Editorial Cartooning. The National Press Foundation awarded Bell its Berryman Award the next year, the honor recognizing “work that exhibits power to influence public opinion, plus good drawing and striking effect.”

In 2017, Bell and family relocated from Los Angeles to Sacramento; moving, as a Sactown Magazine profile described, to a smaller, safer, more affordable city that still provided enough material to populate his urban characters’ stories.

ADVERTISEMENT

In 2019, Bell received journalism’s top honor, the Pulitzer Prize, for editorial cartooning. He is the only Black cartoonist to win the honor.

Pulitzer judges remarked on his “beautiful and daring editorial cartoons” that tackled the issues that affect the nation’s disenfranchised communities and took on the political turmoil that surrounded the first Trump administration.