Gil Thorp Gets Benched
“We don’t know that the Chicago Tribune dropped its Gil Thorp comic strip as a calculated insult to Christian fundamentalists. There is, we emphasize, no evidence that the ‘Left Behind’ books cowritten by Jerry Jenkins, the author of Gil Thorp, offended a coterie of proabortion atheists in the Tower who decided to show Jenkins what ‘end times’ are all about.”
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George Knue, editor of ChicagoSports. com, created and still manages the Web site, which he thinks of in two parts. “It’s today’s strip, and part and parcel of that is the history, the archives,” he says. “The other part is the message board. To describe it as a unique community of people is probably not doing it justice. The people on there often do pick [the strip] apart, really pick it apart. They’re really good at it. But they’re also people who at some point in their life came to Gil Thorp and they loved the strip.”
“What anti-abortion story?” asked Tooky69.
I asked Walter Mahoney, Tribune Media Services’ vice president for domestic syndication, for his personal reaction to the story line. “I thought it was a little edgy,” he said, not making this sound like a compliment. “I’d say that in the history of Gil Thorp it was not out of character. Jack Berrill, who was married to a high school counselor, frequently touched on issues that at the time were edgy. Teenage pregnancy–that came up certainly. Marijuana. Family issues.”
Though the war in Iraq made all the difference in the world to Iraq, it didn’t have much impact on the United States. It briefly distracted the Americans who’d supported war and the Americans who’d opposed it, but they’ve now gone on with their argument as if nothing happened.
Paul Krugman still had no use for the White House. “There is a pattern to the Bush administration’s way of doing business that does not bode well for the future–a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect.”
