It seems letter writing campaigns are effective.
The Los Angeles Times announced today that Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur comic strip will be returning.
TO OUR READERS:
A month ago, The Times halted publication of the “Non Sequitur” cartoon by Wiley Miller after an illustration in the strip on a Sunday contained a vulgar message. Miller and Andrews McMeel Syndication, which distributes the cartoon, apologized, explaining that the cartoonist inserted the message when drawing the cartoon a few weeks earlier and had intended to remove it before distribution. We have discussed our concerns with the cartoonist and agreed the violation was a serious one that won’t be repeated. “Non Sequitur returns Friday to the Los Angeles Times daily comics. Because the Sunday comics are printed in advance, it will return on March 24 to the Sunday Los Angeles Times.
The Redemption of Wiley begins.
What are the odds for other papers to reinstate Non Sequitur? Slim and none?
And the Los Angeles Times to date is still carrying daily rerun mode/off and on first run Sunday mode of a strip I still wish it would end this 2019 year for good – Get Fuzzy!
There are maybe five comics worth reading on any given day and I’m not counting Peanuts or Calvin -both have long since been space eaters for newer material for far too long. Buy the collections and move on.
I’m talking about the guys who put out art and wit and do it daily. So when one of them goes full bonehead and gets himself canned it pisses me off. That Wiley screwed up is bad for comics regardless your politics. He should have never mixed the two and now we’re all paying the price because now there’s only four.
And so it goes. How soon we forget the fire which swept through Santa Rosa and the “content” Wiley inked on behalf of NorCal Fire Relief? I regret I paid less attention to the offending Sunday strip than I would have in my teens (9 Chickweed anyone?) which spanned the 70’s. An avid reader of Giles and Norris collections (Mom was English) Rat Fink, MAD Magazine (experienced many of the films I was too young to view) and later, Zap Comics (Older Brother) I understood early on that comics, while accessible to, weren’t expressly written (Andy Capp) for kids. Props to Stephan Pastis, who perhaps helped tip (literally and figuratively) the conversation on its end. It goes without saying (I suppose) that there currently exists no “suitable replacement” for Non Sequitur, but I encourage the editors to embrace the struggle. Hopefully you provide a conduit for the next Don Martin, Dave Berg or Maria Scrivan. Thanks for making ordinary lives a little bit more fantastic.
Signed,
a fan
Congrats to LATimes — maybe you do have a sense of humor and perhaps you even believe in freedom of speech!