Potty mouths are rare, if not nonexistent, in syndicated newspaper comics. Potty humor, on the other hand, has become a modern-day standard – usually involving dogs or other animals.
Sometimes cartoonists feature humans and their bathroom habits.
above: Oh, Brother
above: Marvin
Greg Evans and his Luann comic strip has been known to dive into that area:
Showing a baby potty training? No problem.
Looking under the stall doors? A bit more daring.
But yesterday Greg and Karen pushed the envelope further than ever before:
Show a young adult woman peeing on the toilet may be (is?) a first for newspaper comics.
Bernice, having moved in with the DeGroots, is trying to be quiet;
this early morning scenario started on Monday.
I read that Japanese women, particularly over a certain age, would sing in the toilet to drown out any noise. Of course that wouldn’t help Bernice…
re “Show[ing] a young adult woman peeing on the toilet may be (is?) a first for newspaper comics.” —
Especially when it’s a regular, continuing character rather than an unknown in, say, some one-panel gage comic (not that I can think of an example of having seen the latter offhand either).
But if you take out the “young,” there was an example a couple of weeks ago in ZITS in which we saw a middle-aged adult woman who is a continuing character — Jeremy’s mother — doing so, in her memory flashback of lack of privacy back in the days when Jeremy was a toddler running around in the bathroom.
(And as you note, there have been numerous instances of milder ‘legs under stall doors’ depictions, many of them in earlier LUANN strips.)