More college cartoon controversies

Comments ¹⁶

1. Charles Brubaker

   For the record, here are the cartoons in question:

   http://img576.imageshack.us/img576/7917/collegecartoons.jpg

2. Keith Brown

   Wow. That’s just bad all the way around.

3. Ben Carlsen

   Shock value seems to be all that’s important in college papers. Art quality obviously isn’t. As I look and think about it, the first comic is actually quite surreal…

4. Paul Fell

   Their readers should be more upset at grade school crap like this being passed off as editorial cartooning. The same college papers wouldn’t DREAM of publishing some unreadable screed by a preliterate moron, would they? But then again…

   We can certainly see where they learn to be editors at major dailies.

5. Alec Fritz

   The first one is only funny if you think that the creator probably feels that way because he picked up some VD from some while while he should have been practicing unprotected sex. And the second one is a funny joke, but so poorly drawn, it’s insulting. Meanwhile if anyone says anything offensive or stereotypical about men, nobody cares.

6. Steve Walsh

   First one was, meh. Not offensive, just not very good.

   Why is it offensive? Sure it’s a stereotype, but well… “waiting until marriage” is a major trope in American society, and I can tell you that my peer experience in college was not without men and women trying various devious ways to get onto each others’ pants. Promises of marriage/material goods were only one tactic routinely employed.

   I’m also uncertain why either of these is seen as an endorsement of violence towards women.

7. Ted Rall

   Terrible toons, but we shouldn’t forget that college newspapers are a forum for experimentation. Future editors and writers and cartoonists try stuff out to see what works and what doesn’t. Obviously a lot of stuff doesn’t work.

   It isn’t reasonable to expect college newspaper content to be polished.

8. Derf Backderf

   Note the “solution” the paper came up with: add additional layers of editors. Classic. Because we all know that there’s nothing like a squadron of humorless, frightened editors to foster great cartoons.

   Bad comics, I agree, but you read more tasteless stuff in the comments section of every newspaper. The “violence against women” charge is, I assume, the university’s PC thought police flexing their muscles.

9. Philip Taterczynski

   I agree with Alec – there is a male-bashing double standard. And Mike Wussow, who did the “Sugar & Spice” gag, must know my sister.

10. Topher Davila

    Dear God in heaven, did I just agree with Ted Rall? Yes colleges are time hone ones skill on all levels. You’ve got to mess up & even do to much to mud a times to learn mistakes. Ive always said of college, “Its time to make adult mistakes without adult consequences so you can learn before entering ‘the real world’ ”

    I do also agree that rude and demeaning tones towards men are not just accepted but institutionalized: they neve win in a discussion in a tv story a the most minor example & then there’s the lack if example of positive strong (but not abusive) men in tv an movies.

11. Rob Tracy

    Kids are being raised differently these days. The upbringing is so sheltered and oppressive in many ways they just explode when they get out from under their parents for the first time.

    I was on a bus the other day listening to some six year olds lamenting the inexcusable recklessness of some teenagers on quad runners driving fast through their neighborhoods and how one of them’s “mother was going to call the police if they came back” and “how could they drive so fast on the roads when it’s so dangerous?”

    I know they were just aping what their mothers were probably saying. But I looked at them and wanted to shout “because quad runners are AWESOME!… tell your mom to stop being such a stick in the mud.”

    I bought my first dirt bike when I was 13. Got hit by a car on it on Mothers Day when I was 14 (shouldn’t have been on the road but in my defense at least I was on my side of the road… the guy who hit me took off like a bat out of hell and was never caught). And of all the kids in my neighborhood my mother was easily one of the most smothering and sheltering parents around. I got my mouth washed out with soap for using the word “ass” when I was 10.

    I should point out all of this happened in CT where I grew up. UCONN is known for being a major party school but there are offices of the PC police on every College campus in this state. These comics are terribly in quality but I’d hardly say they were worth the time of 3 editors to catch and sanitize.

12. Derf Backderf

    I disagree, Rob. I think college kids today are MUCH more unfettered than 15-20 years ago, thanks to the wide-open, anonymous comments and chats online. It’s a welcome end to PC snuffing of free speech. Except, of course, as we’ve all learned, when it comes to cartoons. I don’t know what it is about the funnies that raises hackles, when the exact same sentiment, in the written word, would barely cause a ripple.

13. Ted Rall

    “I don?t know what it is about the funnies that raises hackles, when the exact same sentiment, in the written word, would barely cause a ripple.”

    So true. You can call for the overthrow of the government in prose and nobody minds. Make fun of 9/11, however, and…

14. Ted Rall

    Make fun of 9/11 in cartoon form, is what I meant to say.

15. Gar Molloy

    Man, the controversial college cartoons are never particularly funny, are they? It’s weird, given how many funny clever people there are in universities.

16. B.J. Dewey

    Beyond the unfortunate and sometimes offensive subject material in these college comics (and in ones mentioned earlier), what I find most offensive is that they’re not funny, not clever, not original, and not especially well drawn. And I’ve seen lots of funny, clever and well drawn college comics (I even thought Trudeau’s Yale comics were pretty good, but then how many Trudeau’s are out there?).