Saturday, January 25, 2025

I Have Discovered an Enormous (Not Really) Conspiracy

The above strip is from the comic strip Big Nate by Lincoln Peirce. Specifically, it's the January 16, 1992 strip, the beginning of an arc in which Nate and Francis take the aforementioned "Cosmo Sex Quiz." I stumbled upon this and was shocked. Even though I have read the Complete Big Nate series many times, I have not once seen this strip or the storyline it spawned (which ends with Nate discovering that his sister Ellen, according to the quiz results, is "pure as the driven snow").

So I opened Hoopla and borrowed The Complete Big Nate 2 to see if I was maybe just memory-holing this. I wasn't. This, and to my knowledge many other "edgy" strips from earlier in the comic's run, have been completely removed from the book, and are now only available on GoComics. Presumably, this is a result of Peirce retooling the strip and surrounding franchise towards youngsters (a move I still feel was a step in the wrong direction for one of the best comic strips of the 90s).

Oddly, there are still some edgy strips present in the collections. There are still references to Nate's art teacher Mr. Rosa being targeted by a prostitute in New York ("Totally out of the blue, this woman came up to Mr. Rosa and offered to show him a good time!") among other things. I suppose there is an argument to be made that the removed strips are somewhat more inappropriate than the included ones, but nonetheless, if you're going to make some confused seven year-old ask his parents what that word means, you may as well go all the way.

So anyway, yes. Andrews McMeel has been erasing the existence of Big Nate's edgier past for years, and as a result, I have spent most of my life reading an expurgated version of one of my favorite comics. Guess the only thing to do now is start at the beginning on GoComics and move forward to see what I missed.

No comments:

Post a Comment