The Times-Dispatch took an unusual editing step Friday. A word deemed offensive in the comic strip “Doonesbury” was changed to a milder expression.
A generation and more ago, editors commonly doctored or omitted comic strips deemed out of bounds in language or political statement. That practice was criticized by a public that said it wanted to make its own decisions on what to read in the comics. Authors of comics argued that such editing intruded on their artistic license.
The editing of comics stopped. Until Friday. You can halt here if you don’t want to read the word that appeared originally in “Doonesbury.”
In the strip, two American soldiers in Iraq react to the death of a soldier in a Humvee struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. One soldier utters the word “Damn.” The other reacted by calling the incident “sucking.”
In the version published in The T-D, “damn” stayed in. The offending word was changed to “stinking.”
Executive Editor Bill Millsaps ordered the change when the language was called to his attention. “I see no reason why standards of taste we apply to our own staff-produced material should not apply to syndicated and/or wire material,” he wrote in a memo to editors.
Millsaps, appointed Times-Dispatch managing editor in January 1992 and executive editor two years later, said he didn’t recall ever before making an editing change in a comic.
The Chicago Tribune earlier had sought a replacement strip from Universal Press Syndicate, but “Doonesbury” author Garry Trudeau refused to change Friday’s comic. Don Wycliff, public editor (ombudsman) of the Tribune, wrote in a column published Thursday that the newspaper’s features editor had to decide whether to pull the strip or allow use of the word. He decided to run the strip unchanged.
Curiously, a similar situation in the comic “Zits” went unnoticed here. In the June 20 comic, Jeremy Duncan, the eternally 15-year-old main character, had been ordered to mow the lawn. The single panel showed a rebellious Jeremy behind the mower cutting “this suc” (the reader had to add “ks”) into the grass as his mother, from a window, screams, “Jeremy!”
Page proofs of the comics are reviewed weekly by a newsroom staffer or an editor who will flag comics of questionable taste, said Flair’s editor, Robert Walsh.
Walsh wasn’t flagged on the “Zits” comic. Neither he nor I received complaints from readers.
. . .
Readers have complained about other comics in the past month. “Funky Winkerbean,” by Tom Batiuk (rhymes with “attic), took hits for language and story line.
A Farmville resident was disappointed that the July 3 strip “had a curse word, ‘damn,’” he wrote in an e-mail. “Its presence in the comic section sends a message to readers that using such words is acceptable and customary.”
In his note, received weeks before Friday’s “Doonesbury” edit, the resident added that “I can live with ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ in ‘Doonesbury’ because you have wisely put that strip elsewhere in the paper, but I can’t live with them in ‘Funky Winkerbean.’”
Another e-mailed complaint, sent to a vacationing editor and forwarded to me, asked, “What’s with F.W.? Ain’t no comic no mo!”
Taking up the second comment first, perhaps the critic was not a regular follower of Batiuk’s work. In the sequence, his character Lisa, a lawyer and herself a breast-cancer survivor, was defending the job rights of a worker under treatment for breast cancer. Over the years, Batiuk through his strip has explored such other social issues as teen pregnancy, dyslexia, attempted suicide, guns in school, racial discrimination, date abuse, frustrated love and alcoholism.
An article on the Web site of King Features Syndicate, which distributes “Funky,” quoted Batiuk saying, “I think that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the readers’ interest.”
In the July 3 strip that brought the Farmville complaint, Lisa has been pushing husband Les to buy a house. She slaps a stack of magazines presumably on housing topics in front of him. His reaction is, “Damn that Martha Stewart!”
“I think of the comic page as one of the few refuges left where I can find light, funny, G-rated entertainment,” wrote the Farmville critic. “I don’t think curse words have any place in the comic section.”
Once upon a time, editors here would have changed a gratuitous “damn” to “darn.”
. . .
One of the most politically provocative strips is published on The Back Page of Sunday’s Flair. “Where I’m Coming From,” by Barbara Brandon, is a now-and-then target of readers. Last Sunday’s strip was a now target.
The female character in the strip said she would “prefer a president who lies to keep his infidelities a secret” to another “who speaks falsehoods while addressing the nation to help justify a bloody war.”
A Chesterfield County woman didn’t consider that comical. “I’m seriously wondering what planet Ms. Brandon is coming from,” she said in an e-mail. “Of the three people involved in this cartoon, only two are proven liars of fact and President Bush is not one of them.”
One of the people involved presumably is Barbara Brandon, identified in a Universal Press Syndicate biography as the country’s only black female cartoonist in the “mainstream press” and nationally syndicated. The biographer said she “knows where she’s coming from. She is blazing the trail for a greater awareness of the mind-set of black women and men – their beliefs, hopes, fears and everyday struggles – in her strip.”
. . .
A Richmond man found offense in the July 17 Weekend section comic, “Tom the Dancing Bug,” by Ruben Bolling, a graduate of Harvard Law School. The strip portrayed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote a dissent from a court decision overturning a Colorado measure denying constitutional protection for homosexuals, as a “primitive throwback.”
“This is sick!” wrote the Richmonder. “Why debase your paper and your readers with such hate?”
A United Features Syndicate article calls “Tom the Dancing Bug” a “unique hybrid of editorial and comic-strip cartooning” and said its topics cover a wide range, “including political and social commentary.”
The comic was added to the Weekend section in March 1997 as an “alternative” feature to appeal to Weekend’s target readership of ages 18 to 35.
If you’re an older reader, like me, you may have to become selective in which comics you choose to read and regard the selections like that purple-pill commercial. You have to ask yourself: Is this comic right for me?
The ombudsman receives and investigates complaints of unfairness, inaccuracy or imbalance in news and photo coverage. Write him at Richmond Times-Dispatch, Box 85333, Richmond 23293. Fax to (804) 649-6099 or call (804) 649-6458. Or send e-mail to him at: ombudsman@timesdispatch.com
