Monday, April 07, 2003

More on The Boondocks, plus a correction. Boston Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund today alludes to the weirdness of obsessing over the comics in the midst of a war. It is weird, but now I'm going to do it, too.

Chinlund's topic is the Globe's decision to kill the March 29 edition of The Boondocks, which, on that particular day, consisted of a text-only protest against the war in Iraq. She quotes editor Marty Baron as saying, "What I saw was not a comic strip. It was a written statement on the war. For such commentary, we have the op-ed page and letters. We reserve the comics page for comics."

Chinlund disagrees with Baron, saying he should have allowed it to run. She writes: "Allowing Boondocks the occasional use of a text note as one way to connect with readers would not threaten the integrity of the comics page." I agree.

As I was reading Chinlund's column, I realized, too, that I had made an error in this Media Log item on March 29. I took the Globe to task for censoring The Boondocks while doing nothing about the humor-free right-wing strip Mallard Fillmore. And I specifically cited a March 3 strip I'd found on the MF website that referred to the French by a junior-high-level anti-gay slur.

Well, Chinlund writes today that "the Mallard Fillmore strip that ran in the Globe March 3 was a substitute; the original, with a demeaning reference to the French, was canned."

My bad, but what I find interesting is that though I received several e-mails in response to my March 29 item, no one pointed out my mistake. Perhaps that says something about how closely people are looking at Mallard Fillmore, which may be the most stupid, unreadable comic on the page.

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