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"Doonesbury" Flunks "Oral" Exam
Acclaimed cartoonist and perennial gadfly Garry Trudeau was at it again this week, using his Doonesbury strip to push the envelope of what can and can't be said in dialogue bubbles.
A Doonesbury storyline about a "sexual facilitator" who leads a third-grade class in a Q&A about the White House sex scandal was deigned unfit for readers by as many as six U.S. newspapers--with editors temporarily benching the popular feature.
Monday and Tuesday editions of the strip--featuring the very un-Family Circus-like phrases "oral sex" and "semen-streaked dress"--were the most likely to be red-flagged.
"We didn't run it because I thought the language was offensive and inappropriate for the comics page," Robert C. Gabordi, executive editor of the Herald-Dispatch in West Virginia, told Associated Press.
Other papers to suspend Doonsebury on Monday or Tuesday included: The Charleston Daily Mail, also in West Virginia; the Charlotte Observer, in North Carolina; and, the Valley News, of New Hampshire. Papers as big as the Chicago Tribune phoned in concerns, but ran the comics. Others shifted the strip from the comics to the editorial pages.
Doonesbury runs daily in 1,400 newspapers nationally.
Trudeau's editor at Universal Press Syndicate thinks the number of newspapers that bailed on the comic would have been much greater had the cartoonist not taken the unprecedented move of writing a letter to editors explaining why "semen-stained dress" was necessary dialogue.
The letter explained that "the language involved had become really part of the national political discussion," editor Lee Salem said, in USA Today.
Trudeau is more than used to generating as much angry mail as fan mail. Past strips to cause consternation to editor and reader types include ones about Frank Sinatra and the mob, Dan Quayle and his alleged marijuana use in the 1970s and the tobacco industry.
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