Welcome to my first blog entry.
If you’re reading this on company time, congratulations on beating the system. If you’re reading it on your own time, you really need to find a job where they pay you to do this sort of thing.
Did you happen to see my comic on 8-4-05 that featured Dogbert as a police negotiator? When I first submitted it to my editor at United Media, it showed a cop shooting an unarmed suspect who had just surrendered. Here’s the original version.
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The problem is that there’s an unwritten rule in newspaper comics that you can’t show a gun being fired. I knew that, but my editor was new on the job and I thought it was the perfect time to try and slip one through. But his alert assistant thwarted my plan and brought it to the attention of an informal committee of executives to decide how to handle it. The group ruled that the gun could not be shown. The concept of a peace officer gunning down an unarmed suspect was okay, but I couldn’t show the actual gun firing.
So I submitted an altered version, this time replacing the middle panel with the words “BAM BAM BAM” to indicate a gun firing without actually showing it. The assistant editor showed the new version to the executives and they decided that the comic still showed a gun, and still showed that it was firing, so that wouldn’t work either.
[missing image]
Luckily I have 16 years of corporate experience, and I know how to navigate my way around group decisions. What you need is a solution that could only appeal to a committee. I suggested a compromise. I would keep everything the same, except the gun would be replaced with a donut… that fires bullets. My compromise was accepted. Without explanation to the readers, this is the actual comic that ran that day.
[missing image]
Interestingly, the executives were right. To the best of my knowledge, no one complained about the donut-related violence. But had we shown the actual gun, it would have been trouble. There is a certain art to this job, but it’s obviously not in the drawings.