It’s no surprise that the first two weeks of the war brought a tidal wave of reader comment. But who would have guessed that readers’ most pressing concern would be a missing comic strip? It was. ”Boondocks,” to be specific.
The Globe’s failure to run the edgy strip on March 29 brought howls of protest. Many said they feared censorship. Some considered it insult-to-injury that the ”Boondocks” space was (oddly, and without explanation) given over to a vacuous Reflection for the Day — the antithesis of the cutting social commentary delivered by the young black characters featured in ”Boondocks.”
Many readers suspected that the Globe pulled the strip because it contained antiwar views. They went online to see what the Globe refused to publish. So did I.
What ”Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder had submitted for Saturday indeed included a call to end the war — presented in a rather unusual format. A typed statement, entitled ”Special Boondocks Protest Strip,” was pasted over the usual three-panel drawing. It expressed McGruder’s ”outrage” and ”disappointment” at what’s happening in the Middle East and at a new movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr. (For those who don’t know, it’s ”Boat Trip,” which has been widely panned as mindless.) ”Let’s stop the madness,” McGruder wrote.
The strip/statement might not have been McGruder’s most clever offering, said some readers who viewed it online, but there’s nothing unpublishable about it.Dozens upon dozens of readers called or e-mailed the Globe in protest — an outpouring equal in passion to, and more concentrated than, any that’s been received by this office over the last year, probably longer. Some readers apologized for zeroing in on what may seem a trivial matter, although others noted that the central issue — stifling dissent — was anything but trivial, especially in wartime. What, they asked, was going on at the Globe?
Here’s the explanation, preceded by a little background: Globe editors review all comic strips for taste and language. Occasionally — perhaps three times a year, on average — the Globe finds one objectionable, and asks the syndicate that markets the strip to send a substitute, usually a strip that has run in the past. That alternative is published and most readers don’t know the difference. For example, the Mallard Fillmore strip that ran in the Globe March 3 was a substitute; the original, with a demeaning reference to the French, was canned.
But there was no time to get a substitute for the ”Boondocks” strip. Globe editor Martin Baron didn’t see — and reject — it until just before deadline. Thus, the awkwardly eye-catching Reflection of the Day was used to fill the white space.
Baron’s reason for rejecting the strip: ”What I saw was not a comic strip. It was a written statement on the war. For such commentary, we have the op-ed page and letters. We reserve the comics page for comics.”
Does that mean that the same message in a drawn format would have run? ”It might have, though I would have to see the strip. We have to judge these case by case,” he said.
The Globe was not the only paper to pull the strip, but it was in a very small minority. Only about six of the 275 papers that carry ”Boondocks” asked for substitute strips, according to Universal Press Syndicate, which markets it. (A few papers that ran the strip did get complaints from readers, a syndicate spokesman said last week, and one paper cancelled.)
”Boondocks” has a ”very strong following, and does frequently cause controversy, particularly at newer papers that are not used to his [McGruder's] approach,” said Universal Press Syndicate Editor Lee Salem. Salem said the syndicate felt the strip in question was acceptable because the text note to readers device was one that McGruder uses relatively frequently. It’s part of his style. (A quick survey produced 10 examples over the past two years in which McGruder has used an Editor’s Note or To the Reader device as part of the strip.)
I agree with the Globe’s policy of editing comics for language and taste, just as it does word copy. And I would hate to see the comics page turned into a sea of text-based political messages. But I don’t think there’s any danger of that. Only a few strips — ”Boondocks,” ”Doonesbury,” ”Mallard Fillmore” among them — are overtly political, and their creators are unlikely to stray far from the drawn format that has made them successful. Allowing ”Boondocks” the occasional use of a text note as one way to connect with readers would not threaten the integrity of the comics page.
In other war news
Many readers are lamenting the loss of the weather pun that usually appears in the upper right hand corner of Page One, with the forecast. It was suspended because, as one desk editor noted, ”jokes at the top of the front page feel inappropriate in such serious times.” It will return.
