This thing called a "newspaper"

Global warming sneaks into the funnies 3

Recently I got suckered into a 12-week trial of my daily paper. I wasn't sure I could maintain the pace -- and honestly, since my job requires me to be online all day, I wasn't sure I was really missing that much news.

But I'm doing my best to keep up with the onslaught of ink, and I'm making some interesting discoveries. Yesterday's edition, for instance, featured not one but two conservative comic strips poking fun at broad acceptance of humans' role in global warming. Mallard Fillmore blamed it on the media, while Prickly City blamed it on the "church of the unquestionable paradigm."

Now, I admit I'm a some-time fan of Doonesbury, whose flaming liberalism was deemed so out of place in my hometown paper that it ran on the op-ed pages. So I shouldn't get prickly about politics invading the funnies. On the other hand: do illustrators Bruce Tinsley and Scott Stantis -- who both hail from the South, as it happens -- really claim to know more about science than, you know, scientists? Now that's a laugh.

Katharine Wroth is a senior editor at Grist.

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  1. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 5:15 am
    28 Feb 2007

    Newspapers are OKif you are happy reading short bursts of inaccurate yet grammatically correct pap watered down to the lowest common denominator in a manner that will not upset anyone especially advertisers.

    In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

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  2. stringy Posted 9:55 am
    28 Feb 2007

    Mallard FillmoreThe Two Percent Company recently had a rant about Mallard Fillmore's "feverish brain-spooge", which was funny, and a link to a blog that regularly comments on the comic.

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  3. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 10:21 am
    28 Feb 2007

    Great link, stringyFor those of you who are unaware of him, Tinsley is the batshit insane, incoherently raving, neo-conservative cartoonist who pens the comic strip Mallard Fillmore. Please take note: we're not attempting to insult the man with our descriptive phrases -- that's just a pretty damn accurate description of Bruce Tinsley. We could also throw in "raging alcoholic," but we're not that petty. (Oh, wait...did we link those out loud?)

    In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

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