Amy Lago, who has assembled an impressive career as a
syndicate comics editor, having edited Charles
Schulz while she was at United Feature and Berkeley Breathed while at her present perch at Washington Post
Writers Group, knows whereof she speaks when it comes to irate readers and what
irates them. “We know that any time religion is mentioned, any religion, it’s a
warning flag to readers,” she told Tom
Spurgeon, who was interviewing her in September 2007 for Busted! the Comic Book Legal Defense
Fund magazine. “It’s as if they become primed and ready to be offended,” she
continued.
Spurgeon
had been prompted to interview Lago when several newspapers who subscribed to
Breathed’s Opus strip had declined to
run one or more of the Sunday strip’s episodes in which a character, a somewhat
dizzy bimbo as I recall, adopted radical Muslim behavior and attire.
Muslims — some of them — don’t take kindly to being depicted in the comics, and it
comes as no surprise, then, that some of them were offended when a dizzy bimbo
adopts the outward accouterments of their religion. Because comic strips are
usually funny and make people laugh, a dizzy bimbo Muslim impersonator in the
funnies might easily be interpreted as a rude attempt by the newspaper business
to make fun of Islam. No one likes their religion laughed at. And lately in
this country, as in most European countries, newspapers have religiously
avoided publishing cartoons with Muslim or Islamic references in them because
Muslims — some of them — when they take offense have been known to start lobbing
explosive devices at the offenders
You have to
be pretty fast on your feet if you’re a comics editor for a syndicate, and Amy Lago qualifies. She told me once of
a time that Charles Schulz produced
a strip over which a warning flag flapped. In it, Peppermint Patty, for some
reason or another, warns the African American kid, Franklin, that he needs to
modify his behavior or “Your name will be mud.” Having faith in Schulz’s
unerring sense of humor, Lago let 
the strip loose into the world of raging
newspaper readers, and, sure enough, one of them was offended. To connect
“mud” — i.e., “dirt” — to the color of someone’s skin is probably, in certain
circles, racist. And a reader phoned Lago to protest the slur. Lago responded
with confounding alacrity, summoning up an explanation of the origin of the
expression “Your name is mud.” Mudd is the name of the doctor who treated a
fugitive John Wilkes Booth for a broken ankle that the latter acquired while
assassinating Lincoln that night in Washington’s Ford Theater; and ever after,
the name Mudd has been associated with someone who manages to destroy his
reputation (in Mudd’s case, quite innocently, he being ignorant of how Booth
broke his ankle). The irate phone caller was somewhat comforted by this
information. I’m sure, judging from her usual performance, that Lago could have
calmed the caller without invoking Doctor Mudd, but when she told me the story,
it seemed to me an object lesson in how useful odd bits of trivia can be — and
how fast on your feet you must be, how resourceful, to be a successful comics
editor in the syndicate world.
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