Don Josh

Author notes

Don Josh #393: Joe Returns To His Place Of Origin

jercoxthealmighty

on July 30, 2010

Crud, I had a whole lengthy post here that managed to get wiped out by my own stupidity. Okay… here's my attempt at reconstructing that…

This comic was challenging on several levels. Before you ask, yes, Cornton here is based on a real place, albeit exaggerated for comedic effect, insofar as one probably won't get exposed to this much horrifying ignorance just from one instance of standing around, people-watching. The city on which Cornton is based prefers to erode your faith in humanity slowly, as it's more painful that way.

Also, making all of the people look ridiculously generic and alike was quite intentional and not born out of laziness, exactly. Make of it what you will.

Another challenge was determining just what to censor amongs the horrid spewings of the Cornton people. Despite occasionally dipping into pretty edgy stuff, Don Josh is, thus far at least, an E-rated comic. This might be in error on my part, and if the folks at DD object to this choice, I will change it. I just hope they warn first. At any rate, it means I censor the harsh language. If anything, it's because I want to disincline myself from using profanity except when it seems like the only logical choice, since it's just going to be blurred out by the ol' smudge tool anyway. This strip is, of course, an exception, since in order to accurately satirize the people of Cornton's real life counterpart, I need to mimic their speech patterns effectively. So, yeah, that means lots of unnecessary swearing, hatred, and ignorance.

In the end, the only real gray area in terms of censorship was the word "gay." It's being used in a hateful context here, but is not a word invariably used hatefully, so I kept it in. Also, while any person whose actually heard a fair amount of profanity in their lives can put together most of what's blurred out, that sentence wouldn't have made sense without gay being visible. There was another homosexually-oriented word amongst another ignorant Corntoner's ramblings, and although it has been "reclaimed" in recent years, it still seemed a bit much for an E-rated comic, so it was blurred.

Maybe I over-thought that a bit. >_>