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In the Luann Newspaper comic strip, since April 9, they have had a thread dealing with nude art posing. Luann, a college student, had a friend of hers who posed nude for an art class. Since then, there has been talk about the idea of posing nude and even into Luann going to the class to attempt to draw the nude form with a live model.
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And the strip went nowhere. A male friend was the model, he drove her home after that (clothed), there was something about a flat tire and the thread abruptly ended.
Rarely does a mainstream comic strip deal with the topic of nudity. In this day and age, with the print newspaper business dying out - some papers will dump a strip if there's anything controversial, and especially if they get subscriber complaints.
While some strips DO tend to live on forever -- more contemporary ones like Luann, will be quickly dropped if they cross certain boundaries. There is a larger internet audience but I don't know how the finances for the artists and syndicates work with that.
This is not new; some strips had some controversial themes back in the 60s-70s and were dropped (example = the Jackson Twins) or relegated to the editorial pages where kids and the less intellectuals don't go (Doonesbury), or, newspapers requested alternate versions (For Better or For Worse, when Michael's friend Gordo came out of the closet).
So, don't expect any comic strips to go far with a nudity thread. Artists can't afford to carry a torch for a cause these days. -
The strips don't have to go anywhere for now. However, this was a very lengthy thread going for about 18 non-Sunday strips. And yes, newspaper strips rarely deal with nudity, so this one does stand out as being unique both in the fact that it showed nudity positively as well as making the joke not the naked person but Luann, who was embarrassed to even look up and prudish compared to the others in the class.
Bob S.
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