Haven't Seen Lips Drawn Like That in 20 Years

The weekly newspapers we cover in "We Also Read the Weeklies" are by no means the only weekly newspapers worth reading in the city. There's only so much of the Seattlest review team to go around, after all, and there is a lot of quality media in Seattle to cover. Every once in a while something bubbles up from a paper outside of our weekly reading sphere that we've got to throw our $0.02 in on, though, or at least point out to reading public at large.

Not everyone comes across the Beacon Hill News and South District Journal on a weekly basis, after all. They did have a little flame-up over there recently, though, with a cartoon they published along with their police briefs. The Beacon Hill News illustrates their police briefs (which Seattlest thinks is pretty cool) and a recent illustration sparked the paper's readership to flood the office with angry letters, phone calls and emails. The Beacon Hill News responded by cancelling the long-running police brief illustrations and offering an apology to the readers:

This newspaper has received countless phone calls and emails this past week registering protest, dismay and disgust with last week's South Precinct police log cartoon.

Rightly so.

The cartoon should not have happened.

We offer our sincere apologies to our readers and especially to the African American and African communities.

The cartoon was born from an attempt to illustrate a police report incident. The ultimate, unintended effect served up the worst kind of racial stereotypes.

The full apology can be seen here (scroll down) and the article the offending cartoon was illustrating is here. The cartoon itself is in this discussion thread at The Comics Journal (along with a wandering 8-page discussion over the cartoon's merits, crimes and the drawing tradition it stems from). We don't know that we'd like a thread similar to The Comic's Journal one here, but Seattlest would sure like to hear from anyone involved with the drawing or publication of this cartoon.

The illustration at the top of this post is an altered version of the original.