Thanks to u/raicopk on Reddit and Catalans for Yes for assistance with translation for this one.

If you follow my cartoons, you’ll notice something different about this one, and it’s not just that for once I drew people’s ears… Skin tones! In the past, I have quite deliberately not used skin tones at all. My reasoning had been that if I didn’t put any skin colour, my characters would be raceless and anyone would be able to associate with them (similarly, my animal characters are genderless, so that girls and boys can call them he/she/whatever, applying their own or other genders however they may like, for instance, I say “the unicorn did…” rather than “he/she did…”).

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that my decision to leave my characters all skin toneless didn’t make them inclusive, but rather created a whitewashing effect. My characters all looked, let’s face it, white. By trying to include all races, I unintentionally excluded all but one.

Starting with this cartoon, I am ending my practice of not including skin tones. All human characters from now on will have skin tones, and I shall try to represent the full spectrum of skin tones our planet has to offer as often as possible. The exception, of course, will be on cartoons where no colour is used at all.