I was looking through Diamond’s solicitations that are due in this week to see if there’s anything I wanted to order last minute, and I noticed that Drawn & Quarterly was soliciting a collection of the first fifty or so issues of John Porcellino’s King Cat Comics. I like Porcellino’s work and ordered the book, but I was a bit taken aback by the text of the solicitation blurb, presumably written by someone at D&Q. It began thusly:

“John Porcellino has long been considered the greatest of all cartoonists…”

Really? I’m not so sure of that…

In what will likely be the final installment of this tempest in a teapot that wasn’t–namely last week’s Get Fuzzy story arc–I’ll post a small update with a few bits of info I received yesterday from folks who read my initial posts.

First off, I heard back from my friend at our local paper, The Winston-Salem Journal, and he confirmed that the Journal did not in fact run the (potentially) offending strips, but ran instead replacement strips presumably offered by the syndicate, who certainly must have anticipated resistance from the get-go. (Although I seem to recall that a Sunday Get Fuzzy in which Satchel is shown reading a partially obscured magazine called Bitches in Heat managed to slip through a while back.)

Andrew from MetaDC wrote in to note the interesting choice of replacement strips chosen by the syndicate (assuming that the ones running in The Washington Post are the ones offered to all the papers that chose not to run the strips). I’m not sure how much one can read into this, but apparently the replacement strips were from a previous story arc in which Rob tries to brew beer in his apartment! I’ve got to admit that it seems peculiar to me that a character shown brewing beer in his house is more acceptable to the general public than a character making sign with a slogan that could be construed as referring to–an not even necessarily advocating–marijuana use.

Anyway, at this point it seems like it’d be more fruitful to try to locate a paper that did run the original strips than to keep adding to the list of ones that didn’t. I’ve in fact yet to hear of any paper that ran them…

UPDATE: Well, if this article on Editor and Publisher is to be believed, I’m wrong on several counts. Apparently only 10-12 of the 650 or so papers that carry Get Fuzzy, opted to run the alternate strips instead of the Bucky pot slogan strips.

I’m also pleasantly surprised to be wrong as well in my supposition that, had the original strips been run widely, there would have been more complaining in evidence. Maybe people are so busy complaining about Lio that Get Fuzzy flew in under the radar?

On the other hand, it’s hardly a mark of pride that my local paper, The Winston-Salem Journal was one of the apparently few that wouldn’t run the original strips.  “City of the Arts,” my ass.

I noted last week a curious absence of protest about a current story arc in the comic strip Get Fuzzy in which Bucky Katt’s presidential campaign slogans are all–supposedly inadvertently–pro marijuana slogans. A bit of over-the-weekend Googling, though, has brought to light some interesting tidbits.

First and foremost, the storyline appears to have just been totally dropped by the cartoonist as of this week. Today’s strip reverts back to an earlier storyline about Bucky wanting a cell phone.

Secondly, it appears that the lack of brouhaha about the storyline may be due in part to papers pulling the offending strips, thus never giving the public a chance to react. MetaDC notes that the Washington Post put the strip into reruns rather than run the story arc. (The Post?! C’mon–I thought that was one ah them lib’ral papers!)

The comics curmudgeon made a passing reference to the storyline as well on Friday.

Blogger (and fellow philosophy major) Shawn Klein notes that the strips were pulled by The Arizona Republic and then, via a quick call to a family member, adds The Boston Globe to the list of buzz-kill papers. Duuuuude!

I subscribe only to the Sunday edition of my local paper, The Winston-Salem Journal, so I have no idea if they’ve been running the strips. I put in a call to a friend who works at the paper, though, and if I hear back from him, I’ll update. (And to anyone reading this, please feel free to chime in via comments about whether your local paper has been running the strips.)

Back to the web… The pot-related blog Yamagoo appears to have been tracking last week’s strips with some glee. Good luck with this site’s bizarre navigation, though–maybe you gotta be high to understand it. Down below that, on the first page of Google hits, is my first post on this subject from last week. If this blog is appearing on the first page of Google, you know nobody’s writing about it. All in all, the internets seem largely devoid of mention of the strips, leading me to speculate that perhaps the strips were pulled from a majority of the papers that carry Get Fuzzy and that largely only the folks who read the strip online got wind of them (so to speak). The other possibility I guess is that the strips have indeed been running, but that no one is really kavetching about it. I consider this highly unlikely, but I’d certainly love to be proven wrong on that count. (I’m neither a pot head nor a gung ho marijuana activist, but I’d really like to think that people have better things to get worked up about these days.)