Editing Comic strip (section)

===Censorship===
Starting in the late 1940s, the national syndicates which distributed newspaper comic strips subjected them to very strict censorship. ''[[Li'l Abner]]'' was censored in September 1947 and was pulled from the [[Pittsburgh Press]] by [[E.W. Scripps Company|Scripps-Howard.]] The controversy, as reported in ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'', centered on Capp's portrayal of the [[U.S. Senate]]. Said Edward Leech of Scripps, "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks... boobs and undesirables."<ref>{{cite magazine | url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,804275,00.html | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071023081224/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,804275,00.html | url-status=dead | archive-date=October 23, 2007 | title=Tain't Funny | magazine=[[Time (magazine)|Time]] | date=September 29, 1947 | access-date=2009-05-15}}</ref>

As comics are easier for children to access compared to other types of media, they have a significantly more rigid censorship code than other media. Stephan Pastis has lamented that the "unwritten" censorship code is still "stuck somewhere in the 1950s". Generally, comics are not allowed to include such words as "damn", "sucks", "screwed", and "hell", although there have been exceptions such as the September 22, 2010 ''[[Mother Goose and Grimm]]'' in which an elderly man says, "This nursing home food sucks," and a pair of ''Pearls Before Swine'' comics from January 11, 2011, with a character named Ned using the word "crappy".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.grimmy.com/comics.php |title=Mother Goose and Grimm/Mike Peters Website |publisher=Grimmy.com |date=1994-01-01 |access-date=2012-12-27}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2011-01-10/ |title=Pearls Before Swine Comic Strip, January 10, 2011 on GoComics.com |publisher=Comics.com |date=2011-01-10 |access-date=2012-12-27 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110115200207/http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2011-01-10/ |archive-date=January 15, 2011 |url-status=dead |df=mdy-all }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2011-01-11/ |title=Pearls Before Swine Comic Strip, January 11, 2011 on GoComics.com |publisher=Comics.com |date=2011-01-11 |access-date=2012-12-27 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110124191330/http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2011-01-11/ |archive-date=January 24, 2011 |url-status=dead |df=mdy-all }}</ref> Naked backsides and shooting guns cannot be shown, according to ''[[Dilbert]]'' cartoonist [[Scott Adams]].{{sfn|Adams|2007}} Such comic strip taboos were detailed in [[Dave Breger]]'s book ''But That's Unprintable'' (Bantam, 1955).

Many issues such as [[sex]], [[narcotics]], and [[terrorism]] cannot or can very rarely be openly discussed in strips, although there are exceptions, usually for [[satire]], as in ''Bloom County''. This led some cartoonists to resort to [[double entendre]] or dialogue children do not understand, as in [[Greg Evans (cartoonist)|Greg Evans]]' ''[[Luann (comic strip)|Luann]]''. Another example of wordplay to get around censorship is a July 27, 2016 [[Pearls Before Swine (comics)|Pearls Before Swine]] strip that features Pig talking to his sister, and says the phrase "I SIS!" repeatedly after correcting his sister's grammar. The strip then cuts to a scene of a NSA wiretap agent, following a scene of Pig being arrested by the FBI saying "Never correct your sister's grammar", implying that the CIA mistook the phrase "I SIS" with "[[ISIS]]".{{Citation needed|date=April 2021}} Younger cartoonists have claimed commonplace words, images, and issues should be allowed in the comics, considering that the pressure on "clean" humor has been a chief factor for the declining popularity of comic strips since the 1990s (Aaron McGruder, creator of ''[[The Boondocks (comic strip)|The Boondocks]]'', decided to end his strip partly because of censorship issues, while the ''[[Popeye]]'' daily comic strip ended in 1994 after newspapers objected to a storyline they considered to be a satire on abortion). Some of the taboo words and topics are mentioned daily on television and other forms of visual media. Webcomics and comics distributed primarily to college newspapers are much freer in this respect.