I admit Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis gets away with things most other features can’t, but this letter to the editor revealing the extent one reader goes to hide the “offensive” strip from his granddaughter is unbelievable.
The comic strip ‘Pearls Before Swine’ ranges from just plain stupid to downright offensive.
My granddaughters regularly read the comics, and I have to be careful to get to them first and cut out those, like today’s ‘Pearls Before Swine,’ which are offensive on the surface and definitely not appropriate for elementary school children.
Lon Scofield
Virginia Beach
The letter is dated September 13 and refers to “today’s” strip. Starting on the 13th and working backwards, I picked the strip below that ran on the 10th as a Virginia Beach Knicker Twister Candidate:
It’s better than what my mom would do with strips she either found offensive or strongly disagreed with. She’d take a sharpie and mark out all the dialogue.
So not only were we not able to see the offensive strips, but we knew WHICH strips were bad, and therefore to be avoided even if they weren’t offensive some days. I wouldn’t look at Doonesbury for years specifically because of how frequently it got sharpied. (Usually because of pot references.)
Regardless, depending on how old the granddaughter is, cutting out that particular strip seems perfectly reasonable to me. When I was younger, I’d DEMAND my parents explain every comic strip I didn’t “get” to me. You don’t want to explain implied infidelity, and STIs to a five year old. Even if the kid’s mature enough, if they repeat the information to anybody they’ll never get a play-date again.
“Child Actually Reads a Newspaper!” I read about that in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Randy: Yeah, that’s my takeaway from this. =)