Posted on 05/14/2004 2:01:00 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War
By E&P Staff
Published: May 14, 2004 1:11 PM EST, updated at 2:23 PM
NEW YORK Clients of Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" comic were alerted today to the fact that the May 23 strip, drawn in April, "contains the image of a head on a platter." Lee Salem, editor of Universal Press Syndicate, referred to the strip's content as "an unfortunate coincidence," explaining, "Given its timing following the recent grisly tragedy in Iraq, and the realities of Sunday color-production cycles, we felt we should call this to your attention."
Universal will be offering a replacement strip to those newspapers that have not already printed that Sunday's comic section, but it is already too late to make the switch at many other papers. According to Universal, Trudeau plans to post this message on his Web site the morning of May 23, explaining his "chagrin," given the "grizzly tragedy" in Iraq: "Most Sunday sections are prepared five to six weeks in advance, and today's strip was unfortunately overtaken by events. I regret the poor timing and apologize to anyone who was offended by an image that is now clearly inappropriate."
"We do this routinely," said the spokeswoman Lillian Kuras. "If we feel there is [a comic strip] that will be controversial, we give our editors a heads-up. We respect their knowledge of the newspaper and their market."
I was wondering about that too. Sometimes it's hard to stop the press, but yeah. Worst case, I bet he could have pulled it/stopped it, even if he didn't have time to get a replacement cartoon for the week.
A: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20040523
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