Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The Punishment Does Not Fit the "Crime"


Non Sequitur, by Wiley Miller, is a 27 year old comic strip syndicated to 700-plus newspapers.  This Sunday, the feature's strip about Leonardo BearVinci included an unintentional F-bomb.  Here's how it was supposed to appear:

February 10, 2019

But here is the "offensive" panel which ran by mistake:


The red-circled words read:  "We Fondly Say Go Fuck Yourself to Trump."  Rather illegible, but ooh!

Miller says he was only amusing himself and forgot to white-out his scribble/doodle burn before submitting it to his publisher.  That publisher, Andrews-McNeel Syndication, apologized yesterday for not catching the language.  

Nevertheless, more than a dozen bluenose newspapers, including my own daily fishwrap, the Columbus Douchepatch,  abruptly and permanently discontinued Non Sequitur, using subjective words like "disgusting," "sneaky," "tricky," and "vulgar."

Those stalwart members of the Fourth Estate have overreacted.  There was a small, unintended, one-time error from a long-running, successful feature, both the artist and the publisher have apologized, it's just a friggin' comic strip for cryin' out loud, and yet the prudish papers who did no proofreading of their own have decreed a punishment of . . . death.  Just a little excessive.  And stupid.


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