Papers Pulling Next Week's Doonesbury

http://jimromenesko.com/2012/03/09/report-some-papers-wont-be-running-next-weeks-doonesbury-strips/

Surprised by the Oregonian, here.

Don't readers know what Doonesbury is like, by now?

 

I don't know if Doonesbury has ever been quite like that. Political, yes. Graphic, without a hint of subtlety and with the word "rape"? You'd have a hard time finding anything close.

Tough call. But, and I don't mean to turn this solely into a THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!! issue, but my sons are 12 and 9 and look at the comics every day. It's the #1 reason we still get the paper, in fact. I don't particularly feel like explaining rape and slut and transvaginal to them next week, so I guess I'll make sure to lose the comics page.

 

Your 12 and 9 year old read Doonesbury? Most 49-year-olds don't.

 

I don't blame these newspapers or LongTimeListener at all. Doonesbury often is very, very political and polarizing, but I don't recall it ever getting so sexually descriptive.

And TheSportsPredictor, these strips easily could catch the eye of someone who never reads Doonesbury.

 

I got to talk to my editors about this on Friday, since I'm on the news desk and paginate the opinion page (where we put Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore).

A part of me would have liked to have been a little brave and run them, but I could understand my editors' decision not to run them when I took a look. I'm not one to find too much humor "over the line" but I did find myself raising an eyebrow over a couple of those strips when our photo tech showed them to me: The aforementioned one that used the "rape" term, and, though it was a little more subtle, the one where the legislator was telling the woman they needed to talk about the unborn child's hopes and dreams and the woman said "if he's dreaming of being the next Rick Perry, then I've definitely made up my mind."

 

Editorial-page / online at best, this time around . . . but the Rick Perry line is great.

Feeding off 9/11 and its unfortunate aftermaths, Trudeau's had a great ten years.

 

The decision not to run these is just silly. All it does is create the image a newspaper is afraid of its own shadow. That's not a selling point. It'd be as if Sports Illustrated had killed the swimsuit issue in 1965 because people canceled their subscriptions.

 

All that language appears elsewhere in the paper if the paper is covering this issue.

And I understand why Romenesko has to to do it here, but is there anything less funny than seeing jokes described?

 

I have been reading Doonesbury since the 1970s, and I am a huge fan.

But I would say that these strips -- at leats as described -- sound worse than about anything I have ever seen.

My thought is that if it's on your editorial page, you leave it, but I can see not running it on the comics page.

I think some of his work, especially the stuff on wounded and traumatized veterans, is brilliant.

 

That's an incredibly lame argument for putting it on the Comics page. Words don't have the same impact as visuals, for one, and the Comics audience is widely different from the audience reading the news coverage.

 

Do any of these newspapers have ads for titty bars?

 

Exactly. I don't understand how any newspaper that ran the Muhammad cartoons would then not run these.

Oh, wait...