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.."

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Opus is the descendant of what was once Bloom County. If you don't know what Bloom County was then I feel sorry for you. Missing that cartoon is like never having read Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side. Great comics are few and far between. Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.

Who. Not "What"

[ctid]

Opus is an orphaned penguin who ends up living in a house with a lot of other misfits and weird people. He was one of the stars of "Bloom County", Berkeley Breathed's amazing cartoon strip which ran from 1980 to 1989.

Direct link to the first strip

[jesser]

http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/08/26/opus/i ndex.html [salon.com]

The second "censored" strip is dated next Sunday, so I guess it isn't available yet.

Correct Image Link to Cartoon

[giafly]

The Sunday cartoonist "Opus" is no conservative but he has just let himself go enough to joke a little about Islam. Bad move! A lot of papers that normally take it will not run this Sunday's cartoon. I have reproduced it above.

There is a full-size version [1] here [imageshack.us]

As you can see, it is not in fact laughing at Islam. It is laughing at his fellow Berkeleyites, if anything. - Stop The ACLU blog

I dislike censorship, so if you want offensive cartoons on this subject, visit 7chan, gaia online etc., (but not 4ailchan due to moderation). Or turn off image filtering and look on the second page of Married to Children [google.co.uk]. Some cartoons were inspired by a Fark.com photoshop contest, but I can't find it.

Please mod parent "over-rated" to hide it and mod this correct version up, if you wish.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[mutende]

Hot Air suggests this is the offending comic strip [imageshack.us]. Read the full story at Hot Air [hotair.com].

Re:Oh no

[khellendros1984]

I don't know, I can understand the reason, and I can summarize it like this: Christians aren't going to start murdering innocents if you make fun of them in a comic.

TF Link

[1u3hr]

So may inane links to blogs, why not direct links to the strips?

So after screwing around at Salon.com:
Today's strip is here [salon.com]. And all strips here [salon.com].

Re:Direct link to the first strip

[Ender_Wiggin]

That's not honest to say that Christians are peaceful and Muslims are not. Christians blow stuff up too and vandalize and are just as intolerant etc.

The difference is how they're percieved in America. You have Christian neighbors, you see nice Christians on TV, Americans have a high opinion of Christians and good experiences and exposure to them. Muslims, in American context, are seen as the Other, the violent people on TV. You can show a violent christian on TV, but the stereotype won't change the same way it seems to change for Muslims, because Americans will think of themselves as Christian, their relatives and neighbors etc. In contrast, Americans think of Afghanistan or 24 when they think of Muslims.

Direct link

[Futurepower(R)]

Direct link to the cartoon [salon.com].

A cartoon that criticizes women's attempts to act superior and also discusses Islamic religious practices is too complicated for most newspapers.

Of course, banning it gives it publicity, too.

A story on the story

[faloi]

Here ya go [mediainfo.com]. It looks like, depending on your neck of the woods, editors won't run it because it either has a tasteless sex joke, or because it might offend Muslims.

Re:Without a comment...

[faloi]

The strip is not blasphemous in any serious way.

Says you. Keep in mind, after the Danish cartoons, people are likely to tread a little bit lightly rather than get some expert opinion on what might qualify as blasphemous. Throw in CAIR getting lawsuit happy [danielpipes.org] (whether the lawsuits have merit or not) and you've got a recipe for less backbone enhanced editors to exclude the comics. The flip side to the comic is that some papers [mediainfo.com] won't run it because of a tastless sex joke. No clear breakdown on why different papers are excluding it.

Philadelphia Inquirer didn't pull it

[BShive]

I actually went back to Sunday to make sure it was the same one. Of course, we'll see about next week but you can't apply a blanket statement to all of them.

Course, I shouldn't be too surprised that Philly sez 'bring it'!

Not Censorship

[KermodeBear]

Newspapers deciding not to carry an article or comic is not censorship. Those are private businesses and they have the right to decide what does and what does not appear in their materials. Censorship would be if the government stepped in and said it couldn't be published. I know it's easy to want to use strong words to get your point across, but in this case, it is simply wrong.

Re:Direct link to the first strip

[Chris Mattern]

by far the most deaths have been caused by catholics and protestants over Northern Ireland, including a large number of bombings outside Northern Ireland such as the bomb aimed at taking out parts of the British cabinet back in '84. People have short memories.

No, people just know that "The Troubles" don't really have anything to do with Christianity. The root cause of this is an English/Irish hatred that goes back long before there even *was* Protestantism. We see a Protestant/Catholic split only because the great majority of the Irish are Catholic and the great majority of the English/English-descended are Protestant (because the English followed their king Henry VIII into forming the Anglican Church whereas the Irish weren't disposed to follow an English king *anywhere*).

Chris Mattern

Re:Direct link to the first strip

[Teancum]

One huge difference here is that violence in the name of religion has official state support from Moslem countries and quasi-state organizations like the Palistinian Authority. I do not know of any predominantly Christian country that has as an official policy or through unofficial actions supporting and endorsing actions and policies encouraging violence in "the name of God".

I can name several countries that have offered bounties and cash rewards for those "martyrs" who blow themselves up in the name of Allah and Islam. As a matter of official governmental policy. Not to mention official support of several well known terrorist organizations who have stated genocide as explicit foundational goals of those organizations.

In the explicit situation you are referring to in Northern Ireland with the sectarian violence between the Catholics and the Protestants, there may have been an implict support of the Protestant cause by the British government, but religious freedom is still practiced within British society. This is also increasingly a moot issue as Northern Ireland as the issues are being resolved (perhaps too slowly) and eventually this will be just an embarassing issue left to history. I have ancestry from Northern Ireland, but I'm glad those ancestors got smart and moved to Canada a couple of hundred years ago.

Re:Not comparable

[emarkp]

Muslims prohibit any depiction of Mohammad.

That's actually not true. There is a great body of artwork by Muslims depicting Mohammad. It's only a small part of Islam that forbids it. The same kind of nutjobs that blow up centuries-old statues for their crazy beliefs.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[iapetus]

For today's comic for the nerd culture, incidentally, you could do a lot worse than xkcd [xkcd.com]...

Re:Fuck all panderers and Muslims

[halfcuban]

Except, it doesn't take being a Muslim to beat your wife. In fact, American men, whom demographically are not overwhelmingly Muslim, seem to be okay beating their wives to the tune of 22% of all women have been physically assaulted at some point in their lives.

This is not to suggest that Islamic countries, or the misogyny of Muslim men, should get a pass, but frankly I'm tired of this double standard passing around people in the West that we are a font of perfection. The Christopher Hitchen's of the world who hold up all that is liberal, open, and free when they're facing down the so called Islamic hordes, but then sponsor their own forms of back-water conservatism when they argue on their home turf. You can't have it both ways.

Re:Direct link to the first strip

[soliptic]

they [the IRA] tried to focus on political targets because they were attempting to achieve a political goal. I'm not excusing their actions, nor am I saying that they didn't kill hundreds of innocent bystanders, but they generally didn't go out of their way to blow up coffee shops, discos, and bus stations.

WTF?!

I can't let this go uncorrected.

I'll take a wild guess that you're not British. I might even go further and guess that you're in America (where many people happily funded the IRA's regular bombing of civilians, until 9/11 there was a distinct lack of aversion to terrorism it seems).

Actually, they happily bombed shopping [manchester2002-uk.com] malls [metacafe.com] and city centres [bbc.co.uk] , offices [bbc.co.uk], pubs [wikipedia.org], restaurants [bbc.co.uk], public transport [bbc.co.uk]...

The IRA VERY MUCH systematically "went out of their way" to kill and injure hundreds of civilians.

Re:It's all too common now

[ConceptJunkie]

The liberal press is generally very biased against Israel, which if it were a position taken by conservatives, would be considered anti-Semitic.