Rugrats: The Newspaper Strips Volume One is coming next week.
Though what it will look like I couldn’t tell you.
Graphic Policy has a preview of, I guess, a vertical version:
They also post the page of cartoonists who contributed to the five year strip.
Creators Syndicate continues to distribute reruns of the strip.
Anime Expressway has everything, and I mean everything,
you need to know about the Rugrats comic strip.
I wonder if they will reprint the controversial Uncle Boris strip.
The series has received several accolades for its Jewish themes…
However, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) criticized the design of Grandpa Boris and charged it with being antisemitic. The controversy erupted when a 1998 Rugrats comic strip was published, featuring Boris in a synagogue reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish. The ADL issued a statement saying that the design resembled Nazi-era depictions of Jews, and the fact that the character was reciting the sacred prayer perverted its solemnity. The Washington Post, the newspaper who published the strip, issued a similar statement in their Editor’s Note section, criticizing Nickelodeon for not showing better judgment in editing the strip.
Though former Nickelodeon president Albie Hecht, a Jew himself, was dumbfounded by the accusation and deemed it absurd, Herb Scannell, president of the company in 1998, responded to the complaints and apologized to ADL.
The Boris page ran before I was working on the strip, but I heard the whole story about it. Boris was banned from the strip, so he was one character I never wrote or drew.
There were a number of rules about what we could or couldn’t include, some of them things that were all right on the show. Kudos to editor Lee Nordling for walking that tightrope, and keeping all of us on it too… and delivering a strip that worked on its own terms.
I was in Chicago recently and took a peek at the Sun-Times Sunday Comics section. They’re STILL rerunning the strip, years after they stopped producing new content (and years after the show ended).