Post dropping comics

Mike Cavna's breaking the story that his colleagues are dropping Pooch Cafe, Zippy, Judge Parker, Piranha Club and Little Dog Lost as of March 30th. Bah.

I really like Judge Parker and Pooch Cafe, Zippy and Piranha Club (Bo Grace is local by the way) both have their appeal. Little Dog Lost didn't catch on with me. No notice as to why except that Dilbert is moving back from the Business section, but I'll bet they're putting in another Soduku type game since the NY Times just added one.

Post censors comic strips, again - Get Fuzzy this time

MetaDC and Ben Towle picked up that some papers, including the Post, were censoring marijuana jokes in Get Fuzzy last week. Ben's got the story, and the some of the strips in two posts - here and here. Fortunately Darby Conley's syndicate wasn't as worried as the Post and all the strips can be seen on the Comics.com website for a few weeks.

As is par for the course, the Post never mentioned this. You'd think the paper would have a bit more spine, and at least confess to their censorship.

Anyone like to try to recall other instances of the Post censoring, or "editing," (their preferred term) the comics? There have been several. In Sept 2005, a Dilbert strip showing assault by a porpoise was cut (Dave Astor had the story); in July 2005, they pulled a Boondocks strip and Suzanne Tobin defended their actions in a chat with Paul Gilligan of Pooch Cafe. (Hit refresh and the link will work - twofer!)

They had pulled Boondocks in 2004 and their ombudsman at the time Michael Getler noted, One year after refusing to publish a week's worth of the "Boondocks" comic strip drawn by Aaron McGruder, The Post did it again last week, only this time it didn't tell readers. The Post says that comics are edited just like any other feature of the paper and denies that this is censorship. Editors say last week's offering was racially offensive and used negative stereotypes of African Americans to lampoon TV reality shows. Last year The Post was the only paper, among 250 that buy "Boondocks," to drop it. This time seven other papers dropped it, including the Boston Globe. I disagreed last time, and this time, too. I think McGruder, who is African American, is a brilliant artist who has created young, black characters speaking with razor-sharp, satirical candor who say things that make us uncomfortable but also make us think. In January of 2004, Mike Peters of the Dallas Morning News noted that the Post dropped a BC strip, admittedly lame, The strip offered to newspapers today mocks the notion that two Asians could have flown the first airplane. The punchline: "Two Wongs don't make a Wright?" They've dropped other B.C. strips for religious sensitivity reasons too.

The aforementioned Boondocks was dropped in October 2003, the Boston Globe reported, "In an unprecedented move that angered readers and generated industry criticism, The Washington Post recently killed an entire week of "The Boondocks" comic strip with a story line suggesting the world might be a safer place if national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had a more active love life." As in the later event, the ombudsman Michael Gertler disagreed, noting on October 19, 2003 "I may need a refresher course in sensitivity training, but I also found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire. I don't know a thing about Rice's personal life, nor do the characters in the strip, and I think readers understand that. The "Boondocks" characters, and their creator, were being mischievous and irreverent, in their mind's view of the world, about a high-profile public figure, and that seems okay to me." A month earlier, a Doonesbury strip about masturbation was dropped. Boondocks also was skipped twice in January and October of 2002. There's a few more BC examples and Ted Rall's strip was dropped online in March of 2002 after his 9-11 Widows strip. Anyone else got any more?