Cover Story • Tales From The Crip

Read story @ Tales From The Crip

{SEE MORE CARTOONS}

After Pope John Paul II publicly embraced rock 'n' roll in the spring of 2000, Callahan drew this cartoon, using the lyrics from Patti Smith's edgy glorification of r'n'r. The use of the N-word outraged JoAnn Bowman, a local black activist and former member of the state Legislature. Bowman was unfamiliar with the song, but called the cartoon "outrageous," "racist," "disrespectful," "insulting" and "not funny." She organized a one-day demonstration in front of a Fred Meyer, with people holding placards blasting WW


This cartoon generated a lot of mail. Callahan wrote in his autobiography that much of WW's readership "saw this as glorifying the Klan. They could not accept the suggestion that simple humans like us, concerned equally with creature comforts, wore those sheets and committed those crimes."


"Building humor on the handicaps of a victim of some accident is…base and without merit," wrote one reader in response to the above cartoon.


"During your next conversation with your cartoonist Callahan, I wonder if you could do me a favor," Michelle Herrmann of Southeast Portland wrote in a letter to the editor about the above cartoon. "Could you please ask him what, exactly, is funny?"


The above Callahan cartoon prompted Grayson Dempsey of Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette to write: "His cartoon…adds fuel to an argument that is often based on misinformation.… Messages such as Callahan's are ignorant and perpetuate an issue that is becoming more violent and more divisive every single day. If he wants to draw offensive cartoons, he should stick to subjects that he knows something about."

WWeek 2015