Chicago Tribune | Taking serious stock of the funnies

Additional material published March 4, 2005:

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS.

Don Wycliff incorrectly implied in his Thursday column that the "Alley Oop" comic strip no longer exists. "Alley Oop" is still produced and, according to a spokeswoman for the syndicate United Media, appears in about 600 mostly small newspapers.

I haven't had much personal use for the comics pages since they got rid of "Alley Oop" sometime back in the Stone Age. But as the Tribune's public editor, I don't have the luxury of just ignoring those pages. Readers won't let me, as I discover anew every time anything at all unusual happens to the comics.

"Hey, `Boondocks' is a comic strip," an irritated Paul McWilliams of Chicago wrote in an e-mail Monday. "The Feb. 28 strip deleted by the Tribune censors was funny. And it did not, as stated by the Tribune, present inaccurate information as fact. There was one undenied fact presented and one plausible supposition.

"If the Tribune wants to prevent inaccurate information from being presented as fact, it shouldn't print anything President Bush says about Social Security, the war in Iraq or his budget."

Let the record show that what Mr. McWilliams calls censorship we at the newspaper call editing. What he and a dozen or so other readers were complaining about was the decision of Geoff Brown, the associate managing editor for features/lifestyles, to not publish the Monday and Tuesday "The Boondocks" strips.

Brown said the problem was the same on both days: "The Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder had characters stating as fact things that were not.

One strip showed a character, Caesar, looking at a newspaper--some would say that was the real fiction--and relating to another character, Huey, the news that "[President] Bush got recorded admitting that he smoked weed."

To which Huey replied: "Maybe he smoked it to take the edge off the coke."

Funny, perhaps, but only if you ignore that Bush was not recorded admitting that he smoked marijuana. As Brown pointed out in a heads-up memo in advance of the strip's publication date, "All reputable news sources reporting [on] the tapes were careful to draw INFERENCES, but no one can say Bush admitted to drug use."

The other strip contained the same error, with a voice from Huey's television announcing: "Reportedly, a conversation in which President Bush admitted to smoking marijuana was recorded by Doug Wead."

Again, the punch line in the next panel depended for its humor on the false setup. But, Brown stated in his memo, "Even in a satirical comic strip, you can't present as fact something that isn't fact just to make a joke work."

Brown applied the same standard a few weeks ago in pulling the "Prickly City" comic strip for one day. That strip had a character announcing that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) had made a statement at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearing that Kennedy had not actually made. All to the end of setting up a punch line about Kennedy's actions at Chappaquiddick, Mass. Brown's action in that case provoked a similar protest.

Hey, say the readers, these are the comics pages for crying out loud! These are little fictional worlds wherein animals think and talk, where characters go for years or decades without aging, where no reader expects the usual journalistic standards to prevail.

Brown has a different view and he makes no apologies for it. He invokes a trinity of standards--taste, accuracy and fairness--that he considers his responsibility to enforce, even on the "funny pages."

Monitoring the comics for political accuracy and fairness was not a big concern in the past, he said, because few strips dealt in topical, political humor and satire. Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" for many years was the only such strip in the Tribune.

Now, he says, there are three: "Prickly City," "The Boondocks" and "Doonesbury." With such comics, he said, come all the issues of fairness and accuracy that political commentary anywhere in the newspaper must confront. Brown doesn't say it, but he might as well have: A commentator is entitled to pick and choose his opinions, but he can't pick and choose his facts.

Do strips like these three belong on the comics pages at all? Shouldn't they be on the paper's opinion pages?

Brown offers two responses to those frequently asked questions. The first is: Why deprive the Commentary page of space it can and already does use for good prose commentary? In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.