Web Strip Showing Hillary Clinton in Blackface Causes Stir

By: E&P Staff A conservative Web comic showing Hillary Rodham Clinton in blackface has stirred plenty of reaction, reported The Comics Journal blog today.

Yesterday's installment of "Day by Day" (http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2007/04/26/) -- Chris Muir's self-syndicated strip -- satirizes Clinton's efforts to win African-American votes as she seeks the Democratic nomination for president. In the last panel, Muir shows Clinton in blackface as she's asked for her take on 2008. "Lawdy!," she replies in stereotypical minstrel dialect. "I's seen da promised land!"

The Comics Journal blog noted that "Day by Day" is "usually one of the very few intelligent conservative strips out there -- but this one was guaranteed to blow up in its creator's face from the outset; any underlying point that Muir was trying to make was buried in a sea of f*****-up symbolism that he himself invoked. ..."

Even some conservative blogs criticized yesterday's comic. For instance, The Rightwing Nuthouse said the strip "may have crossed a line of good taste."

But the Composite Drawlings blog, while expressing some trepidation with the way Muir satirized Clinton, said: "How else does one show, in a three-panel cartoon, the absurd lengths the candidate has gone to, and therefore will possibly go to, in order to pander to a voting bloc?"