I can answer this. I own most of the Pearls collections, and Pastis has comments below most strips in the books. He's mentioned several times that when certain newspapers consider a strip to be too shocking, racy, offensive, or whatever, they'll re-run an older strip in place of the one scheduled to run that day. If a strip is really controversial, his syndicate doesn't even allow it to go out to newspapers, so it's a re-run for everyone. And this is one - actually two - of those times.
So the original strip was from 2017. In the collection Pearls Seeks Enlightenment, the strip that had been intended to run on 2020-06-11 was as follows:
Larry (to two other crocs): Okay boys, me got plan catch da zeeba. Me dress as woomun of night. Zeeba let me een house.
Croc #1: You reely tink you can pass as woomun?
Larry (off-panel): Of course me can. You is wait here.
(Larry returns on panel, dressed in a leather miniskirt, fishnet leggings, leather boots, and a fishnet bra. He's holding a handbag and has fake eyelashes on.) Larry: Boys, see... I da ho!
Comic Strip Censor (to Pastis): Offensive on many levels.
Pastis: Boise loves me.
Pastis writes here that "I think they (my syndicate) thought that too many newspapers would find it offensive. But as this is a book, not a newspaper, you can judge for yourself."
Then later on in the same collection, there's a full page note about how the entire week of strips from January 18-23rd of 2021 was pulled by his syndicate; all those were repeats. Pastis says: "The reason for this was that the strips concerned a violent attempt to remove Rat as President of the United States. And in a ridiculously odd coincidence, real life caught up with fiction on January 6th, 2021, when Donald Trump incited a mob to attack the Capitol...my strips were not a comment on that...but it sure looked like I was making light of the tragic events of January 6." The strips were postponed until August of that year.
Statistics: Posted by KelpTheGreat — 20 May 2024 03:31