SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A prominent Sacramento-based comic strip creator, cartoonist and author has been arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Darrin Lawrence Bell, 49, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, was arrested Wednesday morning at his south Sacramento home by Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office investigators. Deputies served a search warrant Wednesday morning against Bell following an investigation by the Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Detectives task force.

Bell was booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail and remains held on $1 million bail. Bell was expected to be arraigned Friday afternoon in Sacramento Superior Court.

The Sheriff’s Office said it was the first arrest by the task force connected to AI-generated material, which was incorporated into existing child pornography law on Jan. 1. It was not known Thursday whether Bell would face federal charges, said Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi.

Bell is best known for his comic strip “Candorville,” which features three childhood friends of color and their daily lives in the inner city. Bell, who is Black and Jewish, was the first Black cartoonist to have two nationally syndicated strips, the other being “Rudy Park,” which was co-created by Theron Heir. “Candorville,” ran Sundays in The Sacramento Bee from 2021 to April of 2023.

Bell was 20 when he began his career in 1995, drawing as a freelance cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post, while the cartoonist was at the Daily Californian, the newspaper of UC Berkeley. Candorville — which frequently dealt with issues of race, civil rights, pop culture and family — 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.

“For over two decades, Darrin Bell has been one of the foremost voices in editorial cartooning,” King Features remarked on Bell’s signing. “Bell’s voice is hard-hitting and witty, using humor to portray commentary in a compelling, visual storytelling format.”

The Sheriff’s Office said it received a tip National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone had uploaded 18 files of child sex abuse material to the internet. Investigators said they had located “134 videos of CSAM were located and linked to the same account, owned and controlled by 49-year-old Darrin Bell.”

“Detectives recovered evidence related to the case, as well as computer-generated/AI (child pornography),” the Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. “This case was the first arrest by Sacramento Valley ICAC where possession of computer-generated/AI CSAM was charged against a suspect.

Gandhi said it was not clear whether Bell created or received the AI/computer-generated images.

In September, shortly before the sheriff’s investigation into Bell, California lawmakers approved AB 1831 expanding existing child pornography laws to include images created or manipulated by artificial intelligence.

“The harms exist regardless of how CSAM (child sexual assault materials) are produced, and it is imperative that we protect our children from that harm regardless of how the images are produced,” the bill’s text read in part. “The threat posed by AI-generated CSAM is real now and is emerging quickly as a serious impediment to protecting our children.”

The bill, authored by Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, also gamed out a horrifying scenario: Artificial intelligence that uses data sets of known child sexual assault victims by the thousands to generate yet more of the images.

“The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims, revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity,” the bill language read.

Sheriff’s spokesman Gandhi said the rapidly evolving technology is one more tool being deployed by increasingly sophisticated child sex criminals.

“Criminals are getting a lot more sophisticated,” using cloaking technology and internal IP addresses to mask their activity, Gandhi said. “These folks hide in the shadows. The source of these images is much harder to detect.”

Investigators had worked the case for a couple of months or more before arresting Bell Wednesday morning, Gandhi said Thursday.

“These are very seasoned detectives,” Gandhi said. “They don’t get it wrong. They know exactly where these things are.”

Bell five years ago had reached the pinnacle of his profession receiving the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. In their citation, the Pulitzer judges remarked on Bell’s “beautiful and daring editorial cartoons that took on issues affecting disenfranchised communities, calling out lies, hypocrisy and fraud in the political turmoil surrounding the Trump administration.”

In recent years, Bell had taken to Substack, the route of so many editorial cartoonists as more and more daily newspapers shed them from their opinion pages. The page he titled “Disobey in Advance” continued to touch on the themes of his Pulitzer Prize-winning work. The page became a Substack best-seller Jan. 9.

His last work, published Jan. 11, skewered President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans’ response to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles County.

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