)[4][5] Bell is the first African American to have two comic strips syndicated nationally[6] and to win a Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning.
Bell engages in issues such as civil rights, pop culture, family, science fiction, scriptural wisdom, and nihilist philosophy, while often casting his characters in roles that are traditionally denied to them.
Bell also sold his cartoons to the San Francisco Chronicle and the former BANG (Bay Area News Group) papers, which included the Oakland Tribune.
Bell's strip Candorville, launched in September 2003 by The Washington Post Writers Group (WPWG), features young black and Latino characters living in the inner city.
Candorville grew out of a comic strip called Lemont Brown, which appeared in the student newspaper of UC Berkeley, The Daily Californian, from 1993 to 2003.
[11] Bell at that point took over the writing duties as well as illustrating the strip, which ended print syndication in June 2018,[12] although it continues to appear sporadically (now distributed by Counterpoint Media).
[13] In 2023, Bell wrote and drew the autobiographical hardback graphic novel The Talk, which combined his life story with some common tropes of the American civil rights narrative ISBN 978-1-250-80514-0.