HomeCommunity IssuesLA Times discontinues comic strip for using anti-Asian slur

LA Times discontinues comic strip for using anti-Asian slur

The Los Angeles Times says it will no longer publish the daily 9 Chickweed Lane comic strip after it used an anti-Japanese slur on December 1.

The Press Reader reports the Times apologized for the publication and vowed to “review all the other syndicated comic strips we publish.”

“We have decided to discontinue 9 Chickweed Lane,” the Times announced on December 3.

According to Rafu Shimpo, Asian Americans immediately protested the inclusion of the strip.

“Publications like The Times would never allow the ‘N-word’ because the backlash would be immediate and widespread, but an anti-Asian epithet is prominently displayed, and a simple apology is issued. Just another example of callousness towards anti-Asian racism and widespread violence against Asians,” attorney Mia Frances Yamamoto posted on Facebook, according to Rafu.

The Daily Cartoonist reports that since November 22, the storyline on 9 Chickweed Lane has evolved around The Outer Space Adventures of Flight Lieutenant Charge Chucker.

“Pen emerged from the waves, her bathing suit barely clinging to her wet pulsing substructure. A J*p zero clove the sky and began strafing their little patch of peacetime. Pen drew her ray gun and blew the zero out of the sky,” 9 Chickweed Lane cartoonist Brooke McEldowney wrote in the strip on December 1.

McEldowney created the strip more than 25 years ago, Rafu reported. The panel that sparked controversy is from a spy/sci-fi novel set during World War II.

Syndicator Go Comics removed the December 1 strip from its archives, accoring to the Daily Cartoonist.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW! How the PC NEVER ENDS. I’m sure the LA times has printed something offensive in years past. So please shut yourself down and fall off the planet. Stuff it you social BS artists. So sick of it.

  2. History…..is history, and during WWII calling the enemy “Japs” was common. People didn’t like them then, and they didn’t have lickspittals and lobbyists to pretend they did. The Times has become a creepy leftist rag.

  3. What a load of horse hockey!

    Today’s “woke” PC cancel culture Amerika is as bad as or worse that living in China or Russia. Those who disobey are tried and convicted in the court of the CCP controlled broadcast, news and social media well before they have had a chance to prove their innocence; and are simultaneously destroyed/canceled/bankrupted if they try to fight the ruling elite.

    That was a fitting and totally proper saying for the time period that the arc was in.

    Looks like the PC/woke fascists* have struck again.

    *Fascism is a far-left, authoritarian dictatorship, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition mainly through violence or the threat of violence, and strong regimentation of society and the economy

  4. Firstly, it isn’t an Anti-Asian epithet. It is an anti-Japanese epithet. Claiming it’s use as “Anti-Asian” is the same as claiming the use of a derogatory description of a German as “Anti-European”. An attempt to include all Asians under this epithet is a dishonest distortion of history. Secondly, at the time set in the work of fiction in which this epithet appears, Anti-Japanese feelings existed throughout Asia and the United States as a result of atrocities committed by the Japanese during their racist conduct of a war of conquest. Thirdly, the epithet is used in a work of fiction to define, for the reader, the outsized psyche of a principal character in a work entitled “The Outer Space Adventures of Flight Lieutenant Charge Chucker”

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