Best guess is that the artist is a perfectionist and felt like it wasn’t good enough for some reason. Most of the other ones he’s taken down also don’t seem like they were taken down due to being offensive.

From what I understand that’s not really the mods’ decision. Reddit was getting takedown notices from the copyright holder, which is unfortunate but not worth fighting. You can argue fair use, but Reddit doesn’t care and the mods are just people that don’t have fancy lawyers so here we are.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Figure this one out: When I originally drew and submitted this cartoon, the ants were carrying an older man. That’s it, everything else was identical. The cartoon came back to me, unused, with the words “no thanks” written across i from my editor.

I waited a few weeks, and then resubmitted the cartoon―only this time with a baby substituted for the man. And then they accepted it! I’m still scratching my head about that one.

Also, pretty sure those are supposed to be lips, not teeth. Think the colorist misinterpreted that.

Posted previously, from his Patreon:

https://discuss.online/post/34645293

Looks like he worked on it some more and posted it to the site today

He talks about that in the commentary for another comic:

Transcript:

The goal in any cartoon is to create that perfect marriage between the drawing and the caption (if there is one). And this cartoon, I feel, is a good example of when that goal is reached.

Visually, I wanted to capture the look and feel of a scene from an old Bogart film. (I would have preferred the elephant to be a little more hidden in the shadows under the staircase, but it’s difficult to pull off those subtleties in newsprint.)

But the caption had to accomplish the same dramatic touch. In general, it’s risky to write long captions that contain two or more sentences, because it tends to break continuity with the static image. I think this one works, however, because there’s no exaggerated action in the drawing. The elephant is speaking under his breath, and Mr. Schneider has turned around and frozen in his tracks. Even if this little scene were animated, we wouldn’t see much more movement than what’s captured in this cartoon.

Some background on this comic:

This cartoon has always bothered my because of a basic error: The birds’ wings are raised before the question is even asked. I think it would have been better in this case to have just left the wings down.

By “taken down”, I mean the artist took it down from their website, not that it was taken down or modded on Lemmy at all. I’m not really sure why, but the artist has removed a few of his comics from the site without explanation.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

The Los Angeles Times, which carries The Far Side, has taken umbrage with my cartoon on several occasions. (Apparently, someone there actually reads the comics beforehand.) These three, as I recall, created some conflicts with the “good taste” standards of that paper, and I believe all three were deleted from their comic page back in the early eighties.

The first two I suppose are subjective, although I don’t remember other papers censoring them. Their rejection of the elephant cartoon, however, had me baffled. I’ve always found it appalling that the demand for ivory has caused these magnificent animals to be continuously poached—but the ultimate act of contempt for the rights of wildlife has got to be represented by the elephant’s foot wastebasket. And that’s the point I was striving for in this cartoon—not that I was hoping to make a profound comment of any sort (the cartoon is really pretty inane, I think), but just who wouldn’t be upset to find out something like this had been done to a former part of their anatomy?

There’s no list that I know of, I had to go trawl through archive.org to find everything. Not really sure why it got taken down, other than that the author has said in interviews that he’s kind of a perfectionist and enjoys scrapping art that he’s already done if he thinks it isn’t good enough.

You can kind of see that with my other comment with the older version of this strip. He redid it at least once to add some subtle coloring to draw the viewer’s eye towards the background where they see the vulture and get the joke. Probably just a lot of that sort of thing.

Interesting to compare the coloring to an earlier version:

I interpret it as bullethead being a highly-skilled artisan that used ketchup (or similar substance) to create art. Ketchuphead thinks he can recreate the art but is missing the skill to do so and just has the raw materials.

It’s a pun on desert/dessert. At first you think they’re in a desert and the character pronounced it wrong/author spelled it wrong, but the final panel reveals that it was accurate and they’re on top of a large dessert, which is possibly also a desert as well

It’s been borrowed into graphic design as the Cicada Principle:

https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-revisited-with-css-variables/

Looks like the original link is dead, but there’s a newer examination of it. If you have a repeating pattern, you can maximize variation while minimizing file size by using multiple sequences with different prime lengths

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Reaction to this cartoon baffled me.

Although for the most part I think readers understood the “gag,” a few individuals accused me of having fun at the expense of hydrocephalics. Yep―that’s what they said.

I hope it’s obvious to most people that hydrocephalicus (I still can’t believe it) had nothing to do with the cartoon.

Singling out any tragic disease for ridicule would never fall within my own standards―let alone my editors.

So what do they think about Charlie Brown?

It’s the equivalent of riding into town in a beater car. It works and gets you to where you need to be, but it’s embarrassing to be seen in.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

As a reader pointed out to me, bananas don’t grow this way. The individual bananas grow upward, not downward (as I’ve drawn them here).

One side of me wants to say, “So sue me,” but the truth is, it does bug me when I make these kinds of mistakes.

This would be great for !writingprompts@literature.cafe or something

Judging by the copyright years in the top right that I’ve seen, it’s not chronological. They definitely pick the comics to match some events, like Christmas, but other than that it seems pretty random.

Best guess is that they either fainted or are looking down judgmentally at the farmer. Agree that the drawing is ambiguous though

I think he drew an eighth note just because that helps get the joke across easier than a whole note. It’s more instantly recognizable as music, even if you’ve never learned how to read it.