Getting Crap Past the Radar/Newspaper Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



Examples from other newspaper comic strips:


  • The original April 4th, 2005 comic strip for Get Fuzzy has Bucky listing the different animals eaten for different holidays: "Christmas turkey, Thanksgiving turkey, Valentine's Day beaver..." Later reprints changed "beaver" to "marmot".
    • Another series in Get Fuzzy featured two ghost hunters showing up at the main characters' apartment; they represent Atlantic Research of Supernatural Entities. If this wasn't clear enough, their initials appear on their shirts and, later, their laptop (in a larger font than any of the dialog lettering).
    • Bucky once owed money to the Chipmunkfia (Chipmunk Mafia), and received a note that said "Pay up or we will turn you into a nut sack." Reprints have replaced it with "nut case".
    • Another time the phrase "Tiger Woods doesn't wash his own balls" comes up. This one was NOT changed for reprints.
  • Rather tame, but from a surprising source: a 1974 Peanuts strip had Marcie measuring Peppermint Patty for a dress, but she becomes embarrassed and tongue-tied as she reads the measurements, leading a frustrated Peppermint Patty to shout "Bust, Marcie! It's a perfectly legitimate sewing term!"
    • A far less tame one includes Snoopy going on his Joe Cool persona. He takes off his sunglasses and collar and yells "Streaking!"!
  • Zits has one scene that parents just loved: Walt and Connie in bed, bare shoulders above the sheets ("You know, where Jeremy moves away, I think my 'Empty Nest Syndrome' will be a very mild case." "Is it really only 7:30!?!"). The censors were nervous.
    • Another Zits comic had Jeremy's friend Pierce give a long list of medical problems that his various pets had. In the middle of the list? A rabbit with E.D.
  • 9 Chickweed Lane, pretty much in its entirety.
    • The Nov. 7, 2008 edition of 9 Chickweed Lane, on several levels: Newcomers will only have a vague idea of what's going on. Regular readers will know it's Edda and Amos curing Amos' hiccups. Sharp-eyed readers will take special note of the hands' positions...
    • Latest one: Edda's grandma is having a flashback to the Forties when she met her husband and telling it to her daughter: "That was a very patriotic kiss" "I can tell by your salute."
  • One strip of The Angriest Dog In The World mentions that Pinocchio loved birds... he even had a woodpecker.
  • For Better or For Worse indulges a lot. There are numerous sexual references, and John had a Viagra shirt. Then there was a comic where April yelled "I've got crabs!" with Michael looking startled.
    • The topper might be in the collection book What? Me Pregnant?, which naturally involved all the strips when Elly was expecting April. The placement of the very first strip in the book seems to imply it was the very day April was conceived - especially since it was a strip that had already been printed in the previous collection, giving no other reason as to why it would be reprinted in the next.
    • In a For Better or For Worse strip, Elly's friend Anne looks at a newspaper filled with personal ads for "swinging couples looking for partners", and says she wouldn't do something like that because it would require her to "lose at least 20 pounds". It was surprising that newspaper editors would let a specific reference to "the lifestyle" on the comics page in 2009, much less when it originally ran in 1980 [dead link].
  • Baby Blues did it by accident at least once. A strip in which Daryl asks if there's any milk left for his coffee, and what is clearly meant to be Wanda's breast milk is squirted directly into his coffee from off-panel (followed by a yell of "BULLSEYE!"), was drawn up and sent in as a joke for their editor... who turned out to be on vacation that week.
  • The very name of the current strip W. T. Duck.
  • Agnes does this every now and again. One particularily impressive example is here.
  • Buckles occasionally has various strips in autumn 2008 that contain sex or drug references, i.e. Buckles wearing a woman's bra (much to Jill's annoyance), and Scrappy sitting on a pile of nuts feeling drunk.
  • Soup To Nutz loves to do this. Here's an extremely impressive example.
  • Calvin and Hobbes has a phone sex joke. Seriously:

Calvin: Why would it be worth three dollars a minute to talk to ladies who show up on commercials in underwear?

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