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.)

People these days have a tendency to get irrationally worked up about anything in the comics page of the paper that’s not totally innocuous. Just last week, for example, somebody had written their local paper about a Zits strip that had Jeremy doing the old mentos in the diet coke bit that’s been making the rounds on “the internets” these days. Apparently the writer had never heard of this and thought that Jeremy was shown throwing an actual bomb into the teachers’ lounge, and that the strip was making light of school violence. WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?! I can only imagine what this person might have thought of Jiggs and Maggie, or Andy Capp and Flo (although, admittedly, their weaponry was somewhat lower tech).

At any rate, this hypersensitivty is pretty typical of your average suburban newspaper comics reader, which is what makes it so incredibly baffling to me that no one’s even raised an eyebrow (as far as I can tell) about this week’s story arc on Get Fuzzy. On maybe Tuesday or so, Bucky Katt declared that he was running for president, and began debuting campaign slogans to Rob and Satchel. The running gag is that all of the slogans–supposedly unintentionally on the part of Bucky–are obvious pro-marijuana slogans. Here are a few:

Microsoft to use comics in antipiracy campaign | CNET News.com

From the article:

Dubbed “Genuine Fact Files,” the campaign is now launching in the U.S. It went online last month in Italy, France, the U.K., Indonesia, Brazil, Australia and the United Arab Emirates. Microsoft plans to draw attention to it through banner ads on its Web sites and promotional material that it will hand out through partners. By using comics, the company aims to make the message more accessible to a broader audience. They are black and white, in a style similar to newspaper comics.

While this may seem dopey at first glance, It’s nice to see that people understand the potential effectiveness of the comics art form to convey important information–although who knows what the euphemism “broader audience” is supposed to mean; it’s kinda got that “differently abled” vibe to it.  That being said, I’m far more likely to wind up with a shiny new Microsoft comic book this year than Windows XP, since my ancient computer would likely grind to a smoking ruin trying to run it, given the OS’s hardware requirements.

Actually, the comic that Microsoft did to promote Office 2007 is very nicely drawn.  You can view it at EnchantedOffice.com.  “Oh my God, they killed Clippy!”  Classic.  You can even see the mangled, bleeding form of Clippy, the annoying anthromorphized paperclip/pre-Office 23007 MS Office assistant in the background.