The Longest Eight Weeks
Posted on | November 19, 2004 at 9:48 am | 7 Comments
I don’t want to steal Josh’s thunder, but the comics page in today’s Rocky Mountain News really freaked me out and I have to talk about it. First up, Classic Peanuts:
Am I wrong in intrepreting this as sexual innuendo? In an old Peanuts strip?!? Or maybe my mind is just in a very, very wrong place this morning. It would’ve been cooler if Snoopy had omitted the “Not” though, like my brain did.
And then there’s Prickly City, the conservative strip that has been gloating about the election results all week:
I notice that the newspaper constantly prints letters from readers complaining about the liberal slant of such strips as Non-Sequiter and Doonesbury, saying (among other things) that they belong on the editorial page instead of the comics page. Or that they don’t belong in the paper at all. Yet these same readers usually don’t lump in Prickly City with this group. The ol’ Double Standard. Nor do the liberals write in and complain about it either – or maybe the paper’s just not printing those. The city’s other paper, the Denver Post, does put conservative strip Mallard Fillmore on the editorial page, but Prickly City remains on the comics page on Saturday and Sunday in the Post when the two papers put out a single combined edition (due to their Joint Operating Agreement). Where’s the Prickly City outrage? Maybe liberals are a tad less sensitive to (or are used to) such things. Or they have better things to do than write the paper about it. Luckily, I’m around to complain in my blog.
Latre.
Comments
7 Responses to “The Longest Eight Weeks”
November 19th, 2004 @ 1:46 pm
Even if Prickly City wasn’t a right-wing screed, I’d still be disappointed in it because its title always has me keenly anticipating the antics of SCTV’s Edith Prickley. Hey, if there could be an animated Ed Grimley series, why not an Edith Prickley comic strip? pfft-HA! [snort]
November 19th, 2004 @ 10:04 pm
Maybe liberals realize that, unlike themselves, who all too often try to accommodate, tolerate, and "respect" conservatives’ beliefs, conservatives couldn’t give a rat’s ass what any liberal thinks of them – and so a letter would be useless. My problem with every "Prickly City" strip I’ve seen is…it just isn’t funny. I mean, when the funniest gag you can come up with is the sort of spit-based humor that Adam thought was old-hat… Plus, c’mon: not *every* Bush voter voted for him because of "moral values." That totally ignores the stupidity vote.
November 20th, 2004 @ 8:44 am
Well, most comic strips are not funny, but yes, PC has yet to make me crack a smile even on the (rare) non-political gags.
As for the "stupid" issue, that was addressed (sort of) in the previous day’s strip. Although there seems to be some confusion on the writer’s part about the stupidity referring to the voters or to the candidate…
November 20th, 2004 @ 9:21 am
I think the reason that liberals aren’t complaining about a comic strip is that when you have four news channels pumped in through your cable and they are all conservative, both newspapers have a conservative slant, and (until recently) the only talk radio you could get was conservative, a comic strip just doesn’t seem that important.
Until Air America hit the airwaves Doonesbury was the entirety of the "liberal media." Doonesbury was all the conservatives had to complain about.
Let ‘em have a comic strip. After all, conservatives have provided liberals with such great material for making fun of the other side.
November 20th, 2004 @ 11:32 am
I also think it has to do with Democrats being less into censorship (aside from people like Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore). The Republicans, the party of "less government" are the ones who seem to want to curtail the media and entertainment.
November 21st, 2004 @ 1:26 am
At the risk of outing myself as a nose-beeper — I occasionally beep Hobie’s nose, and it’s definitely not "sexual innuendo." Thank your lucky stars that you get TRUE classic Peanuts in your paper; our reruns are the unbelievably lame ’90s-era Peanuts, after Charles Schulz had pretty much lost it.
November 21st, 2004 @ 5:37 pm
There will be no more talk of nose-beeping on Distance, Redefined.
I didn’t realize that different papers got different old Peanuts strips. The ones we get definitely do skip around in time a lot, though I don’t think there have been any from the 90s. But I would be happy if they just got rid of it altogether and put a new strip in its place.