all scans and crude image alterations done by me
The comic strip known as "Fox Trot" is seen by many as the successor to possibly one of the greatest strips of all time, "Calvin and Hobbes." It's kinda funny, but it really can't compare with Watterson's masterpiece. However, one day way back in 1989, my Mom opened the funny pages and found a rather disturbingly dark installment of Fox Trot, which she found to be absolutely hilarious. I read it, but failed to see the humor (I was only about nine-years-old at the time, damnit). I liked to clip and save funny comic strips however, and I held onto particular comic strips that my parents found funny but I did not, because I figured it'd make sense to me sooner or later.
Anyway, that's why I still have the torn and yellowed strip to this day. But there's another reason I have kept it; when the annual Fox Trot collection book came out about a year later, I was puzzled to see the strip I had cut out now contained different dialogue. At first I thought that maybe the strip was part of a running gag theme that appeared in various forms from time to time, but the strip I had cut out of the newspaper never made it to any of the books.
I now understand the gag in the strip, and yeah, it's pretty funny. Funnier than the version that appeared in the book, to say the least. I've never seen an explanation given to the changing of the dialogue, but it's pretty safe to assume that when the strip first ran in the papers, quite a few readers of the moral sort threw a hissy fit at the editors. Or maybe some twisted bastard at the Philadelphia Inquirer thought he'd have a little fun putting his own version of the comic strip in the paper. I personally think Fox Trot author Bill Amend is Satan in disguise and he accidentally let a little slip of his true identity spill into his strip. Censorship? Conspiracy? The beginning of the Rapture? Read, compare, and decide for yourself.
...and as it later appeared in the book Black Bart Says Draw, copyright 1991 by Andrews and McMeel
copyright 1999, 2006 by Chris Collette
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