Comics Stripped

For a time, it seemed as if there were no more taboos left for the comics, especially since Garry Trudeau’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, Doones-bury, began dealing frankly with topics like the war in Vietnam, student protest, the drug scene, Watergate, and homosexuality. But it now appears that there’s a last frontier for the funnies. When Trudeau depicted a heterosexual couple in bed recently, lots of papers, including the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Dallas Times Herald killed the strip. The Herald ran a terse note that its “contents . . . might be considered objectionable to some readers.” It’s not just that the couple is in bed, for though Blondie and Dagwood still sleep chastely in twin beds, Steve and Summer Canyon have been seen in double-bedded-blessedness, and even Dennis the Menace’s parents peer from beneath a common blanket when their son intrudes upon their privacy. It must be because Trudeau’s couple is unwed, though even that isn’t a first for the funnies – Mary Worth is currently counseling an unmarried mother-to-be. But Mary’s charge is repentant, while Trudeau’s lovers seem to have no regrets.