Apparently, several newspapers are refusing to run the following Doonesbury strips:
Here’s what’s in the strips:
Monday: Young woman arrives for her pre-termination sonogram, is told to take a seat in the shaming room, a middle-aged male state legislator will be right with her.
Tuesday: He asks her if this is her first visit to the center, she replies no, that she’s been using the contraceptive services for some time. He says, “I see. Do your parents know you’re a slut?”
Wednesday: A different male is reading to her about the transvaginal exam process.
Thursday: In the stirrups, she is telling a nurse that she doesn’t want a transvaginal exam. Doctor says “Sorry miss, you’re first trimester. The male Republicans who run Texas require that all abortion seekers be examined with a 10″ shaming wand.” She asks “Will it hurt?” Nurse says, “Well, it’s not comfortable, honey. But Texas feels you should have thought of that.” Doctor says, “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”
Friday: Doctor is explaining that the Texas GOP requires her to have an intimate encounter with her fetus. He begins describing it to her. Last panel, he says, “Shall I describe it’s hopes and dreams?” She replies, “If it wants to be the next Rick Perry, I’ve made up my mind.”
Saturday: Back in the reception area, she asks where she goes now for the actual abortion. Receptionist tells her there’s a 24-hour waiting period: “The Republican Party is hoping you get caught in a shame spiral and change your mind.” Last panel: She says, “A final indignity.” Receptionist replies, “Not quite. Here’s your bill.”
I don’t find those strips offensive. I find the law that is accurately described in those strips offensive.
SuzieC
Including the arch-right Columbus Dispatch. I hope Balloon Juice publishes the strips every day so I can share them on FB and get them to circulate widely through Columbus.
Joeyess
Abso-fucking-lutely.
JMG
The decision of those newspapers is insane on business grounds (Forget ethics, there isn’t a top newspaper editor today who isn’t a venal coward, the rest have been run off). As a former tabloid hack, let me assure you that women are the most desired customers of newspapers’ biggest advertisers (department stores, grocery stores, etc.) So by all means turn turtle because you’d rather go broke than have someone say “liberal bias.”
JPL
Good for Trudeau.
Murc
I’m actually rather shocked. Doonesbury has been rather toothless and formulaic for quite some time. This is a return to the days when people were denouncing Trudeau on the floor of the Congress, and I for one welcome it.
Comrade Javamanphil
Silly. It is absolutely offensive to accurately represent their positions. Duh.
Baud
@Murc: Wasn’t there a period in the 90s when Doonesbury became somewhat enchanted with Republicans?
burnspbesq
The strips aren’t offensive.
The law, that’s another story.
JMG
The futility of this attempted censorship is amazing. It’s not like there aren’t thousands of Internet locations where readers can and will find the cartoons. Does the Columbus Dispatch honestly think that if it’s in their paper, nobody in Columbus knows how to find Doonesbury?
Comrade Javamanphil
@Baud: If by republican you mean “wasn’t afraid to point out that Clinton was slimey”, yes.
Libby
Amen brother. If they find the strips too offensive to print in their dead tree versions, they should be editorializing against the law.
SuzieC
@JMG: Their readership, judging by the fever swamps of the comments, skews old,white,racist, and teabagger. These readers probably don’t use FB, and would never ever look at a website where they might be exposed to librul garbage.. Doubt whether they even have very many female readers any more. It’s really odd, because Columbus/Franklin County is deeply blue.
Baud
@Comrade Javamanphil: My memory is vague on this, but I thought there was something more to it than being anti-Clinton.
Slightly OT, but:
Obama Plans Big Effort to Build Support Among Women
gbear
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is one of the papers that is afraid to run them. Can’t say that I’m surprised by that although it’s disappointing.
amk
I get my trudeau delivered by email. Who gives a shite if the newsies got their feefees hurt ? Talk about circling down the drain of irrelevance.
slag
@Baud: I’m trying to recall the last time Dems were seen as the favorite on social policy issues. And I honestly can’t. What changed?
Comrade Javamanphil
@Baud: Could be. I haven’t read the paper in decades. I seem to remember him willing to challenge whatever authority is in power but I may be coloring my memories.
Baud
@slag:
My $.02, but most of the time on social issues, it’s the Dems pursuing (progressive) change. With birth control, it’s the GOP pursuing (regressive) change.
slag
@Baud: Maybe. But I don’t know. The GOP has been going after lady parts in all ways for a really long time now. And even the gay marriage issue seems fairly benign (or maybe even a plus) for Dems now. The endless culture war feels substantially different to me right now. But I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe I’m just in the bubble.
Linkmeister
Check the two cartoons linked in the final paragraph of this post at Washington Monthly for things that are seriously offensive.
Anton Sirius
@slag: Demographics are changing in out favor, which also has the effect of getting the right to stop using code and dog whistles out of a desperate sense that no one is listening to their hate any more. Pre-Obama, can you imagine prominent Republicans publicly asserting that taking the pill was essentially a sin? I can’t. It would have been cloaked in economic terms somehow.
Their time is running out, and they know it.
cmorenc
The Raleigh News and Observer continues to run the overtly right-wing and un-humorous “Mallard Fillmore” on the comics page, even though it moved “Doonesbury” to the Editorial Page at least a decade ago due to complaints from conservatives about its overt politics.
JoeShabadoo
Comics are the poster child of why newspapers are going under.
I can’t think of a comic that has brought readers to a newspaper. They could have been using it to draw in kids with new comics that interest them or get more adults with some humor and wit. Instead the comics are the most worthless place in the paper. It is filled with Family Circus and reruns of Peanuts, reruns of a freaking comic. They are nearly all aimed at old readers who would not drop the paper for a comic.
Not only that but every paper has the exact same comics so no one has any reason to support your paper.
Papers are full of problems today but I find that comics really expemplify their horrible business model that existed even before the internet stole their milkshake.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Maybe they’re upset that Rick Perry wasn’t the one depicted as the legislator.
You know how those crazy wingers always want credit for winning a Crusade…
As the old saying goes: The truth hurts. All Trudeau is doing is pointing out the truth. With a two by four.
Good for him.
JoeShabadoo
@slag: They went after contraception. They can pound the abortion issue all they want but people love contraception and don’t give a shit what their religion says. The bishops and evangelical reverends can harp on it all they want but their congregations think contraception is great not to mention the very large number of churches who think birth control is fine.
different-church-lady
No vajayjay stuff in the comics. It’s right there in the End-user license.
different-church-lady
@JoeShabadoo:
That Yellow Kid wasn’t chopped liver.
Wait, you meant this century?
Not in the LEAST bit true. Especially in the few two-newspaper towns we have left.
Auguste
Wow, the Oregonian is one of the papers. Just a reminder that we literally have NO good newspapers in Portland.
Jason
It’s usually good publicity for Trudeau whenever this happens. I wouldn’t sweat it. Personally I despise Trudeau and his cast1 of bobo Yalie lackwits (whether hippy or yuppy, they are all equally loathsome) and I wonder if he has these brief bouts of actual leftism from time to time just to feel like a more than the newspaper industry’s pet neutered totebagger.
Mike G
Countdown to some rightard claiming “Doonesbury did exactly the same thing Rush did, double standard librul media, JeebusMurkaKenyanMooslinHitler.”
PurpleGirl
I seem to remember in the past when Trudeau wrote a more (or very) political strip and people paniced, newspapers printed them on their op-ed pages.
Mike in NC
Pretty sure it was some fuckwad Texas Republican politician who once said, “If you’re about to be raped, at least lie back and try to enjoy it”.
Jason
@Comrade Javamanphil: Well, in the early Clinton years, the tone of Doonesbury is obsequiously worshipful towards the guy. Much is made of the characters high-fiving each other, saying “this is the moment I’ve been waiting for”, and angling for jobs in the new administration (which tells you a lot about the little bubble Trudeau lives in). Later on, there’s some disenchantment.
maya
You can find Doonesbury on-line here or here . In case the links don’t work, try Excite*com and go to their cartoons link. I DB, and, Garfield, every day to get my happy fix before I come here and get my usual dose of sadz.
Murc
@Baud: No, there really wasn’t. There was a time in the mid-nineties when the characters, who were starting to hit middle age, began flirting with Republicanism, or in the case of Mike outright converting. The strip itself never went right-wing on us, or if it did I didn’t really notice.
@Jason: That’s a little unfair. The characters in question, Rick Redfern especially, were all aging leftists about whom there had been many storylines about how ground-down the Reagan and Bush years had made them. The CHARACTERS had stars-in-their-eyes over Clinton, and that was pretty damn accurate, especially as a reflection of the people who were swooning over him at the time in the real world. The strip itself had a fair amount of distance.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Jason:
Did I miss something? Last I checked, Trudeau was a borderline Obot. From a 2010 interview:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/doonesbury_at_40/2010/10/an_interview_with_garry_trudeau.3.html
Slate: Who’s the hardest politician to satirize, and why?
Shawn in ShowMe
@Jason:
Did I miss something? Last I checked, Trudeau was a borderline Obot. From a 2010 interview:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/doonesbury_at_40/2010/10/an_interview_with_garry_trudeau.3.html
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mike in NC:
Around ’79-’80 there was a detective in Spokane who had a t-shirt made up that said the same thing. I can’t remember the controversy surrounding it essentially went; he said it, was quoted on it, uproar ensued, he had t-shirt made up and proudly wore it.
I don’t know how his career went but he didn’t lose his job over it. The cops were pretty fucked up there, probably still are. I’m glad to have abandoned the shithole many years ago, same for the wife. No regrets.
Other than we still have to go there to visit family. We love seeing the family and friends but we’re really happy to GTFO of there.
JoeShabadoo
@different-church-lady:: I used to get multiple newspapers where I lived and the comics were essentially all the same outside of one having Bizarro and another inexplicably having Prince Valiant because the editor must have been 95 years old.
I now live in a different area and the comics are pretty much the exact same. Maybe I have lived in bad areas but I hardly see any variety, especially in the comics that get showcased on the front page.
Recall
@JoeShabadoo: They were doomed from the start. There’s no way newspapers can compete with the webcomics that are out there these days.
john
The issue here is that most American comic strips go for the funny, with very little social commentary, or at least little enough that they can pass for apolitical. Trudeau is following a long tradition of comic social critique which can sometimes put him out of place on the “funnies” page.
Good stuff and I like it, but I can see why some editors might be worried about having little Susie reading about doctors raping their patients (however nuanced that might be when considered in context by a politically aware adult).
JoeShabadoo
@Recall:
Of course that’s the case now but the horrible business model of comics in newspapers existed long before webcomics became a thing as I said earlier.
joel hanes
@JoeShabadoo:
I can’t think of a comic that has brought readers to a newspaper.
While Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the strip was sufficient reason to jump out of bed and dash down to the end of the driveway in a dawn rainstorm to keep the paper from getting ruined.
And don’t get me started on Pogo, which back in the day was as political as Doonesbury (Spiro Agnew appeared as a hyena), as funny as Calvin, and as full of inside jokes as Firesign Theatre.
Finally: If the Mercury News could tell me there’d be a new Gary Larson “Far Side” panel in every Sunday edition, I’d subscribe again.
THE
So the Christianist Taliban don’t like cartoons either?
danielx
@Mike in NC:
The line was definitely used by Bobby Knight, former IU/Texas Tech coach and well known Asshole At Large. Why do I think Knight votes the straight Republican ticker?
As to why they’re not using the strips, it’s probably under the same logic which prevents the news media from showing pictures of what happens to combatants and civilians alike as a consequence of war. Don’t want to show anything upsetting or thought provoiking, don’t you know.
Canuckistani Tom
So there’s this week’s Doonesbury, there was the time For Better or For Worse got pulled because Lawrence came out of the closet, when else have newspapers refused to run strips?
Recall
@JoeShabadoo: Their business model was dictated by the medium. Dead trees are just a really shitty way of publishing comics.
AA+ Bonds
Doonesbury is a guilty pleasure of mine because Trudeau is a silver-spoon Ivy Leaguer but non-Yalie-Key-Society comix are far from dead my friends
King City by Brandon Graham is out in one big book, 424 pages, twenty bucks
And for the love of God, please buy it in a bookstore if you can
Yutsano
@Canuckistani Tom: There have been a few Far Side cartoons that have been refused by papers. But not for political reasons, so not quite the same thing.
(fergot to close my tag. d’oh.)
Chet
@Canuckistani Tom: Well, from the other end of the spectrum, some of Johnny Hart’s late-period B.C. strips were pulled from the L.A. Times due to controversial religious content. Here’s Michelle Malkin waxing apoplectic about the journalistic stifling of religious expression.
Robert Paehlke
Offensive? No. Pulitzer Prize and Congressional Medal of Freedom, yes.
Trakker
@joel hanes:
Oh yes! And Bloom County.
Somewhere I saw a an article about the Doonesbury strips and I was happy to note that the vast majority of newspapers even in the south are running the strips. Honestly, I think news businesses all over the country are acutely aware of the shock and anger that women feel because of Komen, Santorum, and Limbaigh, all within the last few weeks.
gravie
Can’t believe some of y’all are trashing Garry Trudeau. Do you also think Stephen Colbert supports the ideas he satirizes?
McJulie
@slag:
That is a really good question. It might be like the famous illustration of exponential growth, the pond where the number of lilies doubles every day. They’ve been doubling down on the crazy at a steady pace, which means that overnight they went from 50 percent crazy to 100 percent crazy.