It’s not about the comics
There are a number of things that can get my knickers twisted, but newspaper comic strips aren’t among them. That apparently puts me in a distinct minority of newspaper-reading citizens.
My local paper revamped its comic section twice in the past year — once to cut some tired, dated strips in favor of newer, edgier ones, then a second time to shoehorn the discontinued strips back into the paper when it became clear they had vocal constituencies. But readers continue to quibble over some of the editors’ decisions, most notably the choice to put “Mallard Fillmore” on the comics page while keeping “Doonesbury” on the editorial page.
If there was a look of puzzlement and confusion on your face as you read that sentence directly above, it’s understandable. Could any other issue show up as a brighter blip on the radar of the inconsequential? Do people really care about such things?
Yeah, buddy, they care. The paper’s public editor, whose job (when boiled down to its essence) it is to accept phone calls from any aggrieved reader who’s worn out his or her welcome with the actual decision-makers, devoted his most recent weekly column to refereeing the matter.
There’s more to this argument than simple placement of a comic strip, however. Consider this question from a reader, sent to the public editor: “Why is ‘Doonesbury’ still hiding out on the editorial page while you allow the egregious ‘Mallard Fillmore’ to mingle with the other cartoons?” You can’t take that question at face value. For starters, “Doonesbury isn’t hiding on the editorial page; it occupies prime real estate, and benefits from not being jammed onto a comics page that is already too crowded. Also, you don’t have to have a particularly sophisticated grasp of nuance to seize on the word “egregious.” That reader wasn’t asking why “Mallard Fillmore” isn’t on the editorial page. He was asking why it’s in the paper at all.
And thus we come to the true crux of the matter. This isn’t about comics. It’s just one more skirmish in the great cultural struggle that has continued for decades. There’s an ideological tit-for-tat that has gone on for so long that few of us even remember the original offenses. Let’s see, did I hound the Dixie Chicks off the radio because Ann Coulter was heckled off a campus stage somewhere? Did I organize a boycott of “The Passion of the Christ” because Jesse Helms sought to eliminate federal grants to controversial artists? Ah, it doesn’t matter. If the other side’s gonna do it, so am I. Two can play this game.
But when you perpetuate the endless struggle, you eventually reach that point of reductio ad absurdum. If you want to know when you’ve gotten there, it’ll be when you find yourself making the serious argument that society will be much improved if a particular comic strip gets the bum’s rush from the paper.