Hot Type, for the week of July 9, 2004 -- continued By five o'clock Shaw-Staley had disappeared from the Channel Five news, but Mary Ann Ahern stepped up with a full report. Here it is: "It was a wild scene in the Thompson Center today. An education rally with parents and children vying for the media attention, screaming all around the reporters, yelling, 'This is the real political scandal.' So at least in their case those voters are saying, 'Leave the candidates' personal life alone. We've got other issues we care about.'" Ahern left out nothing but every detail. Fair Funding member Tamie Burian of Plainfield e-mailed me. "We normally do not watch the news because in our monarchy household we censor it," she said. "The day was worth it for my kids because it was a learning experience. They learned about the First Amendment (we had a right to demonstrate and speak, the news media had a right to talk about things that were inappropriate for children -- I had to keep clicking the channel!), they learned about machine politics, and they saw the apathy in so many of the people that came by the rally. It was a home-school moment -- but wait, the home-schoolers were not there because they don't care about school funding." The Right Strip The job Scott Stantis wanted for years was editorial cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune. He thought of himself as a logical successor to Jeff MacNelly, who died in 2000, because he, like MacNelly, like the Tribune itself, is conservative and because editorial-page editor Bruce Dold obviously liked his work. But though Dold frequently picked up cartoons Stantis drew for his home paper, the Birmingham News, whenever a name bubbled up as someone Dold was seriously considering to fill MacNelly's shoes, it belonged to someone else. But on July 12 Stantis slips his politics into the Tribune through a side door. He's launching a new comic strip, Prickly City, and the Tribune is one of about 40 papers that have already picked it up. "It's obviously a political strip," Stantis told me. "It's a cross between a conservative Doonesbury mixed in with Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. There's a real call for a quality character-driven comic strip with a conservative bent to it." I asked what he meant by "conservative bent." "Smaller government. Less taxes in your private and business life." But no soapbox, he promised. "This is very subversive in a lot of ways. It runs contrary to what the last decade of conservative commentary has been, which has been yelling. It's almost sweet." Geoff Brown, who oversees comics at the Tribune, says he wanted a strip that would placate readers who piss and moan about Doonesbury and Boondocks. "It's not that a conservative strip can't take potshots at conservatives," Brown explains, "but I want to make sure it's not a centrist or seemingly liberal strip in disguise." He says readers who raise hell when the Bush administration is the target don't notice when Doonesbury and Boondocks "are running down icons on the left." Those readers deserve a strip they can be certain is on their side. The pickings were slim -- the ham-handed Mallard Fillmore, which the Sun-Times briefly carried and dumped a decade ago, and Stantis's brand-new strip. Prickly City's a two-character strip set in the Sonoran Desert, where Stantis lived for about six years. The characters are Carmen, a little girl, and a coyote pup named Winslow. "Berkeley Breathed [Bloom County, Opus] was asked once what makes a great comic strip. Is it great characters?" Stantis told me. "He said, 'No. It's how the characters respond to each other.' And that's where I think this strip, Prickly City, works all day. These two characters obviously love each other. He's not the sharpest spike on the cactus, but she adores him. He's well-intentioned but dim-witted -- in short, a Democrat. Carmen is much more grounded. She's very steady, very intelligent. She's very, very comfortable in her own skin. Her ethnicity is always a question. She's rather brown skinned. She's going to be the face of America." The early strips I've seen don't disprove the proposition that conservative whimsy is an oxymoron. Stantis is struggling to convey anything about Carmen and Winslow beyond their opinions. But Stantis understands where he needs to go. "The last thing I want to be is preachy," he says. "If you want to be lazy, preaching's the easy way to go. Boondocks falls in that category. Now it's just a statement. It's no longer what I loved about Boondocks when I first saw it. I thought, 'My God, here's a strip I can't write.' This was an experience and a language I couldn't write. I thought it was one of the most compelling things I'd seen in my professional life. And [Aaron McGruder has] gotten lazy. Look at Garry Trudeau, who rarely if ever falls into that. I think he's really been energized by the war. His work wasn't up to his standards, and then holy schmoly -- fantastic stuff!" I don't think Stantis has it in him to be unremittingly ideological. He has plenty of Democratic friends and considers Democrats more fun to party with than Republicans, though as he says, the Republicans have cooler toys. "I don't think because you're a Democrat you're necessarily evil," he says. "Michael Moore is evil, but that's because he is. You're not a Nazi because you're a conservative, and you don't hate America because you're a liberal." Stantis heard through his syndicate, Universal, that someone at the Tribune had made the startling admission, "We're not used to seeing a conservative who can see both sides." I confronted Brown. "Gee, that sounds like me," he said, laughing, "but I'll be damned if I'll be quoted saying that." News Bites • Never read a pundit you respect when he's writing about something you know more about than he does. Frank Rich's theme in last Sunday's New York Times was a familiar one: the hypocrisy of moralizing Republicans. "So the party of Kenneth Starr now tosses worthless family-friendly initiatives to religious conservatives," Rich wrote, "while countenancing Clinton-style behavior among its own if holding on to power is at stake." Exhibit A? President Bush was talking up old-fashioned marriage in Ohio while "fellow Republicans were rallying around a rumored swing voter of another sort, Jack Ryan, the party's scandal-beset senatorial candidate in Illinois." George Will, who'd previously flattered Ryan in print, "did not raise his voice in condemnation now. Nor did any major Republican leader." Robert Novak "stood up for his man." Will? Novak? Who cares about either one of them? When Ryan's divorce file was finally cracked open, Illinois' Republican Party chewed him up and spat him out in 96 hours. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2004 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.