Where To Find Opus On Sunday

Berkeley Breathed has a note up on his site: "Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.."

Comments

It's all too common now

[smallpaul]

Western publishers are self-censoring anything remotely offensive to Muslims. This is just evidence that threats, intimidation and terrorism work. Americans will go to any lengths to "fight terrorism" by invading countries basically uninvolved in terror, but given the chance to simply stand up and say: "we won't be intimidated by threats" the press folds like a three legged card table. Grow a pair!

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[Mark_in_Brazil]

Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.

I liked all three of the strips mentioned in the parent post for some time, but please don't forget the important part of the history of Bloom County where it was as "pat," as recycled, and as predictable as Garfield raised to the Cathy power. In its last few years (I'd say from about early 1987 on), Bloom County was recycling a lot of crap jokes. At that point, the quality of the strip ranged, depending on the day, from a high of maybe-a-slight-chuckle to a low of oh-my-gosh-did-they-really-waste-paper-and-ink-on- such-a-heavily-rehashed-and-thoroughly-unfunny-str ip. That was sad, because that high had previously been the strip's low range, with some true classics. I have to wonder if Bill Watterson's decision to quit doing Calvin and Hobbes when it was enormously popular has something to do with Watterson not wanting the strip to utterly suck like Bloom County did in its last years. I bought and enjoyed Bloom County books in the 1980s, but I had completely quit reading the strip by mid-to-late 1987. I think I gave Opus a chance when it appeared, but saw no reason to read it. There was another Breathed comic between those two, but it also blew goats like late Bloom County. I admit I had started to get disappointed in the strip before that. In the early parts of Bloom County, Opus was drawn with a much smaller and penguin-like beak. There were comments about his ugliness. As the years wore on, Opus was made cuter and cuter, and his beak grew to be too big for a frickin' pelican, let alone a penguin. It was, however, much more suited to making cute and lucrative Opus stuffed toys. In the early strips, like during the "Cockroach Revolution," roaches were drawn as little lines representing bodies with littler lines representing legs. Later, the character of "Milquetoast," the cute cockroach (I shit you not) came along. Ugh.
Watterson was right, you know. As great as the moments were that Calvin and Hobbes gave us, it did get to the point where I would say things like "OK, another week of violently killed snowmen" when I read the Monday strip. Some of the new versions of old jokes could get a chuckle or even possibly even a snort out of me, but it was typically one in a week or so of strips.
Of the three strips cited in the parent, only The Far Side didn't appear to lose anything over the years. When Larson quit in the mid-1990s, the strip was still as funny and as bizarre as it had been when I first saw it in the early 1980s. It also holds a special place in my heart as one of the greatest mainstream outlets of nerd humor. Futurama has taken that to much higher levels of sophistication (I have a Ph.D. in physics and completed requirements for a B.S. in math, and some of the science and math jokes on Futurama have blown right over my head), but The Far Side did it first and probably better. The Far Side's influence in academic circles was so great that a joke term from a Far Side panel in 1982 has been adapted for informal use by scientists in the field. There's something to be said for nerd "in jokes" so "in" that a trained theoretical physicist, one who happens to be known for how observant he is, can totally miss them, but there's also something to be said for a single panel on the comics page that brought nerd sensibilities to the larger public more effectively, which The Far Side did. I was a kid/adolescent for most of the 1980s, and I remember lots of non-nerd adults liking The Far Side. Larson brought "our" (nerd) culture to a wider audience in a more positive way than just about all portrayals of nerds in popular culture did before or have since.

Anyone remember the South Park issue with this?

[DigitalSorceress]

Anyone remember the South Park episode "Cartoon Wars", where the show was making fun of the western reaction, and itself was censored? The irony for me was that they had an episode maybe a year or two before that where Mohammed was clearly shown as one of the super heroes in the "Super Best Friends" episode. There hadn't been a blip back then. What's even funnier is that if you watch South Park reruns, the "Cartoon Wars" episode still has the controversial scene censored, but the "Super Best Friends" has been shown since with no alterations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park

The Cartoon Wars episode was played uncensored in the UK, and the world failed to end - go figure.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[Artifakt]

The problem with the invisible friends routine is it's simply stupid (Note I didn't say YOU are stupid, I said the routine's stupid).

What do you believe in?

Capitalists worship a giant invisible hand (and sacrifice people to it).
Socialists believe everyone will be honest and decent if they get elected.
Democrats believe in a 300% tax rate.
The NRA wants everyone to have their own Rocket Launchers.
The ACLU never defends anybody but Scum.
The French believe everybody is male (liberty, equality and fraternity - nothing about sorority there) (Yes, some English wags actually used this line in print discussing the revolution).
Quantum Physicists all keep cats locked up in boxes, how cruel.
People who believe in George Washington all think he was stronger than the Incredible Hulk (to throw a silver dollar across a broad river)...

      There's no real belief or opinion that can't be oversimplified to the point of looking absurd. Name a few beliefs of your own, and somebody will be glad to reduce everything you stand up for to a sound-bite and try to make you look like a fool too.
      Most Christians, Muslims, etc. believe that God is a spirit - what's so strange about believing that a spirit is invisible, it would be even stranger if they thought that it wasn't. Now you want something really silly, try the trinity. That three in one business is weird enough to be part of Scientology's schtick.

      Now as a Christian, I'll gladly defend your right to make fun of us. Yes, you should be able to make either jokes or serious and realistic criticisms of my beliefs. The real question is, are you, I or anyone else actually benefiting from making this particular criticism?