I was driving yesterday and I stopped on a talk radio station because Bill O'Reilly was talking about Doonesbury, probably one of the few good comics still left in newspapers.

I guess it was either a slow news day or Bill O'Reilly is really stupid, because he was talking about the comic being subversive because it shows B.D. losing his leg in Iraq.

This is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I have yet to hear a good explanation of why he thinks this.

Doonesbury is always political, (some newspapers only run it in the editorial section) so I'm not sure the big surprise here. He did say "most people are too stupid to understand the point".. or something to that effect. I'm pretty much under the impression if you are stupid you 1) don't read comics about politics and 2) you don't read comic with a lot of text.

And if he'd read anything after the amputation, he'd see it's still Gary Trudeau taking the "lighter side" of getting your leg taken off.

He also calls the comic "left wing" which seems kind of ridiculous. The comic is always cynical of government, and as long as I've read it targetted and ribbed the current president.

Also he treated B.D. as if he were a real person, and not a work of fiction. Is anyone actually that easily confused?

Frankly I think you could interpret this comic either way, since it's offering wounded soldiers a more human face. That aside, calling someone featuring a wounded soldier in Iraq in their cartoon "subversive" seems a little to ridiculous for someone in the media to be saying.

Not too long ago I remember some people bitching about the politics in Boondocks also. Does anyone honestly think that a comic, which is more funny than it is serious, is going to change anyone's mind about politics? Is it any surprise that a comic about black culture would not be a pro-Republican comic?

The only comic I can ever remember being offensive enough to consider action against was the one Easter B.C. comic that showed a Menorah burning down into a cross. Yeah, I could see how burning someone's religious symbol would be very, very offensive.

Does anyone have a legitimate gripe with cartoonists? Is anyone ever actually educated rather than entertained by comics? Does anyone RELY on comics (editorial or otherwise) for their information?

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I read Doonesbury all the time and always get a kick out of it. I like Boondocks a lot, and I really hope Boondocks DOES change some people's minds. It brings a lot of intelligence to the idea of black children or black cartoons.

It's funny you should mention the B.C. strip, MaKK, because that is probably the only comic I've ever read that actually piqued my offense gland. The one that stands out is the Menorah to Cross one, but lots of them are just overtly preachy in a Christian way.

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.

Most devout Christians aren't as preachy as that comic. Spouting dogma isn't how you're supposed to set a Christian example. There are some good verses about being pious INSIDE, and setting an example through ACTIONS. But hey, who actually reads that stuff.

B.C. (if it is even still out there) could easily just have Chrisitan themes (characters being kind to others, etc.), but it doesn't, which makes the random, out-of-nowhere, club-fisted Christian dogma completely out of place. The "moral" is never that I've seen 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' or anything else, it's always 'HE IS RISEN' with blood pouring out of an open tomb. Hilarious!

The comic is basically on par with peanuts. To turn peanuts into B.C. every so often Snoopy should get stigmata and tell everyone to worship the Lord Jesus Christ while speaking in tongues.

Maybe that's what Woodstock has been doing all along actually.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

One correction: Doonsbury is not always political, it is often political. Quite a few story lines are about the characters, with no politics at all. However, it does touch on political subjects a heck of a lot more than, say, Garfield.

Also, although it generally leans left of center, unlike Mallard Fillmore or Boondocks, it is quite willing to take shots at all sides of the political spectrum, including, as Makk said, whomever's in the White House.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

I think we'll all agree that the most political comic is Hoppy & George.

Even still, the material in Boondocks tends more to be of a certain sarcastic attitude, and much less about actual politics. Bush might be the subject matter, but as the above posted comic illustrates, it's not really attacking his politics, it's just taking it from what the author puts forth as a "black" point of view.

When I said Doonesbury has always been political, I meant politics in Doonesbury isn't a development new since Bush took office.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

quote:

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It's funny you should mention the B.C. strip, MaKK, because that is probably the only comic I've ever read that actually piqued my offense gland. The one that stands out is the Menorah to Cross one, but lots of them are just overtly preachy in a Christian way.

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Gabe from Penny Arcade:

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Poop.

Dude, Family Circus is always offensive. Offensively sappy, offensively stuck in the past, and offensively unfunny. How anyone can find it amusing is miles beyond my comprehension.

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I has a flavor!

Was there really a Family Circus about a child molester? That sounds like Mikey's dream come true.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

There really was. It was a Sunday comic a month or two ago.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

Someone post it, I really hate the Family Circus.

Doesn't the original guy's son do it now? When they started doing dead family members as ghosts I thought they crossed the line. Ghosts belong in predictable horror movies, not the comics.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I really hate Family Circus. It's so saccarine that it's sickening. I don't like my morals preached to me by some fuckwit simpleton who loves "sharing" so much that he must include that brilliant, hilarious concept in every third strip.

And Doonesbury and Boondocks (along with Get Fuzzy) are probably the only good non-editorial comicstrips left. I love 'em.

I saw that Easter strip! And the guy who does B.C hates those damn, dirty Mooslems as well! He did a non-sequiter strip a while ago where a guy runs into an outhouse at night. The outhouse has a crescent symbol carved into the door and in the sky is a crescent moon. The character then says something like "Whew... it stinks in here!"

Not very subtle. :/

So yeah, he is a bigot. He hates Jews and Muslims and probably anyone who's not a WASP.

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Destroying my reputation one post at a time.

Let me run this delightful comic over one more time.

First panel: The little girl runs in to a man who asks, "Can you answer a question for me, little girl?"
Second panel: The little girl stops and thinks. She thinks of her mother saying, "Don't talk to strangers!"
Thrid panel: She ignores the man and runs away. The man thinks, "What ever happened to good old-fashioned kindness?"

If Haggard Lee Hak, the creator of Family Series, had just left it at that, it would have been great. But it goes on.

Fourth panel: The little girl is talking to her mother. "Mommy! Mommy! A strange man tried to talk to me! I didn't talk to him because you told me not to talk to strangers." "Very good, sweetie."
Fifth panel: "He seemed alright, but I just did what you told me to." "He might have been fine, but you can never be sure."

And if Mr. Hak had left things like this, it would have been absolutely passable. But there is one last panel that sickens me to the core.

Sixth panel*: The cops are huddled around the man from the first three panels. One of them says, "We got him sarge! You know, the molester we put out the APB for!"

I felt absolutely offended. I took the comic, photocopied it, wrote an article about it and sent it in to a local independent newspaper(they published it and it got letter of the week). Then I stepped on the comic, crapped on the comic, and burned the comic.

Mr. Hak also delights in showing us the fun of white suburban life. One of the kids looks at the little placeholder on a bible and says, "This one comes with a little bowtie!" My god! For every great Kaufman comic, there is a Family Circus comic. So right now that's got to be at least 2,000 terrible Family Circus comics.

I also despise Ziggy, Luann, Cathy, Rose is Rose, That's Life, and Hi and Lois.

I love Doonsebury, Grand Avenue, Stone Soup, Get Fuzzy, Mother Goose + Grimm, Pickles, Pearls Before Swine, Boondocks, Sylvia, and Zits. I used to get La Cucaracha, which I loved, but when I moved to Oregon I never saw it again. And I don't care what anyone says: The serious comics are more hilarious than the intentionally funny ones as long as you only read it once a week and therefore totally isolate you from the convoluted plots.

"Oh, Chuck! We must go bowling!"
"Why, darling?"
"Because... Dr. Giggletinks will be there!"
"No... as in... Dr. Englodroheim Von Giggletinks of Vietnam?!"

And then it's over.

I'm gonna go lie down now.

*Those damn newspaper artists have it all. Six friggin' panels! Here at stripcreator, we has to make do wit' three panels, and that's enough! I remember back in the FTC of 21...

Even worse. People asked to reprint it.

Actually I think I saw that Family Circus. It's definitely in bad taste, I don't know how political it is. It seems grossly out of place in a sappy Family Circus cartoon though. I do know that sometimes in political cartoons, the editors send them back and ask to clarify what they thought was obvious by pasting giant text explanations on their metaphors. "The Eagle is "Man's Inhumanity to Man" and the soapbox is the "Mass Media". Duh, it's so obvious) I wonder if the end of the comic was just the guy being arrested in the first draft, and it wasn't clear what was going on so they added the text about him being a molestor.

Also on the "anti-Muslim" B.C. comic, old outhouses are always portrayed as having a cresent moon window, I think that's a bit more of a stretch to call that anti-Muslim than it is to call a comic portraying a Menorrah burning down Anti-Jewish.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Yeah, but consider the fact there was no obvious punchline. The dude ran into the outhouse and then just said "Whew.. it stinks in here". Now I guess one could make the case that BC is just not a funny strip (because it's not), but still... a lot of people thought it was suspicious enough to make a stir about.
Plus, this guy does have a history of not being very tolerant as we saw with the infamous Menorah burning (and several comments he's made in the past as well).

I did some digging and here is the strip so draw your own conclusions.

Also (and this may be stretching...) take a look at the "SLAM" which is bracketed between the first two panels, and that the gap it's bracketed into is in the shape of an "I".

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Destroying my reputation one post at a time.

No, he said "does it stink in here or is it just me". That makes more sense as a joke (though still probably not very funny to anyone with an IQ over 80. Crescent moons on outhouses is a very old convention.

http://images.google.com/images?q=outhouse&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

I simply disagree with your interpretation.

I don't think I'm biased since I said his menorrah comic was pointlessly inflamatory, and I'd really like more reasons to dislike the comic. I think that "scandal" is more of a smear campaign (maybe brought on by the menorrah comic scandal). If so I think that's the interesting story. Can't exactly say the author doesn't deserve it though.

I do think there's a chance he didn't intend that comic to be anti-semetic, but that's no excuse. If I had a family-oriented comic that featured a cross burning down to advocate another religion, I think I'd focus group it with a few ministers to see if it needed to be tweaked just a little bit. "Oh that's offensive? I had no idea."

Yeah, that is digging a little too much. Also I don't think that's digging, you copied that "talking point" from one of the articles discussing the "scandal". Yes, I can use a search engine too, better luck plagarising next time.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Shit. I copied and pasted one sentence on the fly instead of putting it in my own words. Don't bite off my fucking head.

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Destroying my reputation one post at a time.

CHOMP

Don't take it personal.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

MaKK, stop being such an asshole. This thread was actually something worthwhile and thought-provoking until you had to go and get nasty. You're such a fuckwit.

Family Circus has always been excessively saccharine and maudlin. The stupid ghosts were one thing, but they always appeared as angel-ghosts with harps and such. I've seen many a Family Circus strip where the grandfather is looking down from 'Heaven'.

As for B.C., it is probably the most overtly Christian 'comic' strip I've seen in, well, forever. I struggle to cite anything specific, but I remember quite a few times being taken slightly aback by a reference to God not being happy or avenging something or just a little poetic diatribe from the eyepatched character.

Besides its Christian tendencies, B.C., just like Family Circus, is UNFUNNY. One of the many, many unfunny strips still in the paper. And I loved Charles Schultz, but he's dead. Get Peanuts the fuck out of that slot and put something fresh and new in there. Give someone else a chance. The comic I really, really miss is Calvin & Hobbes. I know Bill Watterson retired, but is he still alive?

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.

I just disagreed that the molseter comic was political, and that the BC comic was anti-Islamic. And that the "I" comment was his own (which it wasn't).

It's called discussion, Mikey, and staying on-topic. Try it one day.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Ted Rall has always seemed just like a shock artist and less like an informed political commentator. A while back he got some people mad during the thick of the Afghanistan war when his hilarious "punchline" were soldiers falling to their deaths out of helicopters. (The incident ended with the bodies / survivors being beaten and tortured, which was captured by onboard military cameras). Hilarious! What was the political point? Um. Mumble mumble, people die in war, and I think it's funny.

This is a good case in point. First of all, the artist obviously confuses Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, he clearly says the war in Afghanistan was pointless. Huh? Does anyone think that? He depicts Tillman as just wanting to kill Arabs. News flash, it's a different ethnic makeup in Afghanistan, aside from that just being an ignorant assertion. Also for some reason he depicts Tillman as fighting in Iraq, when he died in Afghanistan. And while we're at it, if a pipeline is attacked, are we just supposed to let it dump oil out? We sure as hell would defend our own pipelines, and it sure as hell doesn't help rebuild Iraq to have the oil cut off.

I don't know how anyone could take this guy seriously. I don't think he intends that though. Does anyone think removing the Taliban was NOT a good idea? Does he really not understand the concept of advancing on the holdouts from both the Afghanistan theater and from Pakistan using their own secuirty forces? Is he advocating a war against Pakistan and Saudi Arabia?

A lot of people ran to sign up for the armed services after 9-11. Calling them "saps" or idiots at the time probably would have gotten you mobbed to death. I'd like to see Rall stand on a street corner and say something like that in New York. It would be so inflammatory it wouldn't be protected by free speech, because it would probably incite violence against him.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I have to disagree w/r/t the anti-moslem strip, as the crescent as a Moslem symbol is generally accompanied by a star. What I'm really surprised no one has brought up yet is the recent Get Fuzzy series where Rob's brother (or it may have cousin) came back from Iraq. Of course, that was tastefully done and was still funny, so I guess you can't really complain there (it should still up at ucomics.com, if anyone missed it).

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MaKK, you obviously know jack shit about New York City. People like the Black Isrealites and other groups stand on soapboxes on NYC streetcorners all the time and no violence is incited. Dude, just shut the fuck up or stick to what you know.

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.