It didn’t take long for the decision by Gannett Co. to drop the conservative comic strip “Mallard Fillmore” from its newspapers to be decried by conservative websites as just one more example of “cancel culture.”
USA Today runs an opinion piece about Gannett newspapers dropping the Mallard Fillmore comic strip with an emphasis on the Doonesbury comic strip and its habit of running against the wall of what some editors took to be acceptable.
Every era has examples. Back in the early ’50s, Beetle Bailey was excised from an edition of Stars and Stripes for not being adequately respectful of Army officers.Just last August, some newspapers canceled the “Six Chix” cartoon because it depicted a white woman who was clueless about both COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
The single most targeted comic strip of all time, though, has to be Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” Throughout its 50-year history, the often liberal comic strip has faced outrage, suspensions and cancellations.
© Garry B. Trudeau
Read the entire column here (no mention is made of the relationship between USA Today and Gannett).
Cartoonists ought to be mocking the cancel culture — not becoming victims of it!
An opposing, and outraged, view from The Family Research Council.
Comic strip histories of late are mostly about one distinct component of the art. This very slight, one paragraph look at the background of “cancel culture” as it relates to comics (in the USA Today piece) makes us think there is a book to be written about the controversy. After all the push against cartoons and comics stretches back over one hundred years. From anti-cartoon bills (1899) and newspapers dropping comics sections (1908) to today’s debates.
Waitaminute—FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL has an opinion about “cancel culture”? As in “gay people should be imprisoned” FRC? As in “we want to ban Girl Scout Cookies”? That Family Research Council?
Whoever is writing the third-rate farce that we all seem to be living in needs to lay off the sauce.
Yeah, them’s the people.
The ones foursquare behind canceling the last election.
:Cartoonists ought to be mocking the cancel culture — not becoming victims of it!”
Juxtaposition of the day for Tuesday: the free weekly mailing from Counterpoint consisted of:
1) a Nick Anderson cartoon depicting a drowning American, to whom Biden is throwing a life preserver and a generic GOP elephant-in-a-suit is throwing a Dr. Seuss book.
2) an Eric Allie cartoon depicting a smiling donkey in a hat, seated at a table with a coffee cup, saying “this is fine” while the room burns with flames labelled “Cancel Culture.”
Talk about prior refutation. . . .