Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9309120258
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FORREST M. LANDON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When cartoonist Berkeley Breathed was drawing ``Bloom County'' (the long-running predecessor to ``Outland'' that deservedly won Breathed an '87 Pulitzer), Opus and all his buddies were wonderfully funny - not just to me, but to vast numbers of readers.
That's why it got carried in more than 1,000 newspapers, and why ``Outland'' appears in only 350 or so.
But a couple of hundred ``Outland'' fans in these parts are mystified, saddened or downright angry by the loss of Opus and friends in the Roanoke Times & World-News.
Paul Lancaster, latest in a now-distinguished line of good-humored ``Nightline'' hosts on WBRA-TV, is one of those fans.
He let Bill the Cat say it for him: ``Acckkk! Thpbfpbpt!''
And John Sabean, a reader who often worries about my mental health, used the back of an envelope from our circulation department to scream at me: ``Save Outland.''
Eighteen readers said they would cancel the paper. Another dozen or so said they might.
At best, only one in five of you who either called or wrote said you liked my decision.
Even that limited support was more than I expected. When a newspaper messes with a comic strip, it hears mostly from fans, seldom from anybody else.
For ``Outland'' lovers, as some of the letters to the editor indicate today, most of our other comics are lame, insipid, shallow, witless - or worse. Not ``Outland.''
``Censorship is rearing its ugly, bulging, pus-filled head,'' Christopher E. Shepard of Roanoke said.
David McKissack of Blacksburg wondered whether the strip got canceled because it was a thorn in the side of liberals.
Bobby Putnam of Roanoke, like several others, worries that from here on we'll drop any cartoon that's outrageous, irreverent or politically incorrect.
Another reader feared that ``Outland'' had fallen victim to the same politically correct fuzzyheadedness it so often tried to lampoon.
And a psychology prof at Roanoke College asked if complaints by a vocal minority had done ``Outland'' in.
To each of those questions, the answer's no.
Most troubling was the suspicion, expressed by several women, that I'd dropped the strip simply because, on July 25, it satirized men's attitudes toward women.
Judith E. Johnson of Abingdon worried that Blondie might someday be a victim of sexual harrassment, and that somehow I'd even find that objectionable.
(In fact, the ``Outland'' strip July 25 struck me as hilarious - unlike many of the 200 or so that had preceded it. But when three male cartoon characters are caught peeking at their penises, we're into a brand of humor that belongs on Saturday Night Live, not in the funnies of a general-circulation newspaper - and I'd feel that just as strongly, maybe more so, if men weren't the lampooner's target.)
Nino Sylmar wrote that ``Outland'' is far from being offensive ``compared to what we see nowadays on TV.'' With at least that critic, I'm in agreement.
To some, all of this obviously smacks of 19th-century Comstockery and late 20th-century Thought Police.
Obviously, humor and taste are subjective, as 200 good readers have just reminded me.
But a Supreme Court justice once observed that he sure knew pornography when he saw it. And editors are expected to know tastelessness when they see it.
As editors, we select features, make news judgments and edit news stories as honestly and intelligently as is humanly possible - striving, and not always succeeding, to exercise good taste in all that we do.
We try to avoid putting in the paper anything of a salacious nature, or any detail that strikes us as gratuitous, when we are making those editing judgments.
Will we leave out anything that's potentially offensive to any reader? Heck no.
(After all, we only recently reported the rather disgusting rumor that somebody was masturbating on home-delivered pizzas. And columnist Ed Shamy reported it because it was one of those urban-folklore vulgarities that was getting told and retold as fact - and was about to ruin a local pizza franchise. Offensive to some readers? Of course. But this is, after all, a newspaper.)
But sometimes we do have choices - particularly with something as silly as a comic strip. And, even on the comic page, we surely have some obligations to keep a family newspaper free of gratuitous vulgarity.
Some of our decisions will seem right to some readers, wrong to others.
Some decisions - particularly ones that try to gauge community standards on what's funny and what isn't - obviously will be wrong.
Think us fuddy-duddies, if you must. (Or, as usually is the case, allege that we lack any standards at all.) But at least believe this: Knowing the right thing to do is not always self-evident, even to a newspaper editor.
I yanked ``Outland'' because I'd come to believe it was often a crummy comic, one that never had approached ``Bloom County'' standards or readership.
But, fear not, ``Outland'' fans: Weird humor is in our columns to stay.
If some don't get ``The Far Side,'' so be it. Plenty of others do, and that's the test that counts.
Controversial comics are also here to stay, be they a ``Doonesbury'' inside Ronald Reagan's brain or ``For Better or For Worse'' when it's sensitively portraying a teen-aged gay.
And that's why this paper continued to carry the latter well-read strip during a recent three-week period when 50 or so newspapers did not.
Next month, we'll be adding an offbeat new comic strip, ``Non Sequitur,'' that I hope will give ``Outland'' fans - and many others - a chuckle everyday.
``Steve Roper'' will be dropped the same day, which shouldn't upset anybody (but probably will).
``Mother Goose and Grimm'' will switch from the daily pages to Sundays only, replacing ``Andy Capp.''
And we plan some other changes to broaden the appeal of our comics for many readers, young and old, female and male.
One reader, Don Young, decries ``pious'' decision-making that causes us to drop something, satirical or not, that we think goes over the edge of acceptable taste limits.
Asks Young: ``Why not allow the reader to decide? If one doesn't like the strip, don't read it.''
That, of course, is what we say to most readers, most of the time, about stock listings and horoscopes and grim news stories and a lot of comic strips. And many readers take us up on it. (Maybe too many: Perhaps one-third of a newspaper's readers never even look at the funnies - even when they're funny.)
But we're almost everybody's newspaper in these parts, thank goodness. And to stay credible with a quarter of a million readers, we can't just let it all hang out.
(And we can't just make the comic section bigger, as one reader suggested; for some reason, people don't want us running up our costs and their tab.)
We edit, every day. When we edit something out, we try to do it for the right reasons - not, as some ``Outland'' fans mistakenly fear, to squash legitimate artistic freedom, nor to stop a cartoonist from mocking political correctness in a consistently funny or tasteful way.
And, no, we won't be bringing back ``Snuffy Smith'' or ``Mary Worth,'' even though each gets higher ``favorite comic'' ratings than ``Outland.''
My apologies to those who had to talk to an answering machine. It will take awhile, but I'll try to return the calls from each of you who wanted to speak to me.
Forrest M. Landon is executive editor of this newspaper.
by CNB