Posted on 10/22/2001 6:45:21 PM PDT by summer
October 22, 2001
Some Comic Strips Take an Unpopular Look at U.S.
By JAYSON BLAIR
The events of the last six weeks have challenged creators of newspaper comic strips. Some have responded by simply avoiding references to terrorism and patriotic fervor. Others, like Aaron McGruder, have tackled those topics head on.
On Oct. 4, for example, Mr. McGruder's strip, "The Boondocks," depicted one of its main characters, Huey, calling the F.B.I. terrorist tip line to report on people suspected of abetting extremists in Afghanistan.
"All right, let's see," Huey says into a telephone. "The first one is Reagan. That's R-E-A-G. . ."
In the next day's strip, Huey tried to convince the F.B.I., pointing out that in the administration of Ronald Reagan the C.I.A. trained Osama bin Laden and other Afghan rebels to fight the Soviet Union. The strip then suggests that the current Bush administration has also given financial support to the Taliban government.
Newsday, on Long Island, pulled the strip for a week. The Daily News in New York pulled "The Boondocks" on Oct. 4 and published it only once since, assessing the strip on a day-to-day basis. The Dallas Morning News has moved the strip to a page away from the other comics.
But Mr. McGruder, the 27-year-old creator, writer and illustrator of "The Boondocks," has not backed down. Last Wednesday, his strip satirized the newspapers that pulled his work. The first panel carried a supposed editor's note, saying that "due to the inappropriate political content of this feature in recent weeks, it is being replaced by `The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon.' "
The end panel was an ad for flag- and-ribbon action figures for "just $19.95 plus $4.95 shipping."
Although many comic strips are avoiding even the slightest allusion to the attacks or the war in Afghanistan, a notable group of others, including "Doonesbury" and "Millord Filmore," are sharing Mr. McGruder's impulse to comment on the news.
After Sept. 11, Garry B. Trudeau, who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons with his strip "Doonesbury," canceled a week's worth of "Doonesbury" that would have ridiculed President Bush's I.Q. In their place, he began drawing strips that have addressed Americans' fears of suspected terrorists and the pain of many friends and family members of victims of the World Trade Center attack.
Over several days, for instance, the character Mike Doonesbury, on a flight to New York, wrestles with the stereotypes of ethnic profiling after being seated next to a man in Muslim garb.
But no cartoonist has been more defiant than Mr. McGruder. Last week's parodying of patriotism drew complaints from dozens of the 250 newspapers across the country that carry "The Boondocks" through Universal Press Syndicate — though none of the papers refused to publish the strip.
In an interview last week, Mr. McGruder, whose strip in the past has received acclaim, particularly for its examination of African-American issues, said his approach had not changed since Sept. 11: tackling issues that can make people uncomfortable.
"There was plenty to talk about without making light of the situation, and there was real opportunity to make legitimate criticisms of the government and media," he said. "I struggled with it, and I really thought I was going to get canceled from The Daily News. But this is one of those critical moments in history, and I did not want to look back and regret not having said something."
Executives at The Daily News said that they believed that the heavy political content of the strips the paper had held was not appropriate for the funny pages. Stu Vincent, a Newsday spokesman, said his newspaper's editor, Anthony Marro, objected to the tone of two strips, but not the content.
Lee Salem, vice president and editor of Universal, defended "The Boondocks." He said that many great comic strips were criticized for some of their best work during tense times, including some of Mr. Trudeau's "Doonesbury" strips, which some newspapers occasionally pulled during the Watergate scandal.
Mr. Salem surmised that New York region newspapers were particularly sensitive because of the impact of the attack. (The New York Times (news/quote) does not run comics.)
"We have newspaper clients from Bangor, Me., to Seattle, and we cannot always serve the editorial needs of such a diverse base of newspapers," Mr. Salem said. "It's understandable that in this very diverse mix of readers and newspapers, it makes sense that some might object to a particular scene that does not fit their community."
I don't need to be offended in my own home by a 27 year old idiot.
doonesbury was always too politically correct for me.
boondocks i'd never looked at. is he factually wrong about the cia's support of osama during the russian war in afghanistan?
What - this guy has never heard of Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert?
In my opinion, Herblock would have never survived if he had started in the era of cable news TV and the Internet.
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