SALLY FORTH STORY
(from 5/22 Drink at Work.com Presents)

Some of you may know that I write a syndicated comic strip called “Sally Forth,” which does not run in a single newspaper in New York City, but trust me, does indeed exist.

Over the years I’ve received numerous irate responses from readers of “Sally Forth” wishing to lecture me, chastise me—or in one instance call me a “feminist gay pussy twat”—because of various plot lines or jokes in the strip.

In the past two weeks alone, I’ve read 35 nasty messages from readers enraged that I had made fun of looms.

When I wrote a story about the Forth family considering having a second child, people thoughtfully took the time to track down my home phone number and leave messages angrily demanding that I remind the characters there are already 6.2 billion people currently populating the globe, none of whom I imagine are fictional.

Last year, when I had the family’s cat—“Kitty”—go missing for two days, my syndicate received 2800 pieces of hate mail and over 200 irate phone calls. Two newspapers pulled the strip, three ran scathing editorials about the storyline, several animals rights groups contacted me threatening to boycott the strip and a call-in pet care radio show in Florida invited me as a guest so I could chat with their listeners, all of whom they said “wanted me dead.”

And just yesterday I got emails from four incensed readers—one stating, “Dear Mr. Marciuliano: You are a dumb fuck”—because I didn’t know that pickles now come in plastic bags.

Most of the responses I find funny, a few I find irritating and one or two make me wish I never left copywriting. But only once in the seven years that I’ve written the strip was I completely terrified of the readers’ reaction to a story. It was the result of remarkably poor timing and completely without intention, but it involved a geopolitical fiasco.

Now, there is a significant lag time between when one writes a strip and when it appears in the newspaper. I’m currently writing daily strips that will run at the end of July and Sunday strips that will appear in the fall. So at the end of May 2004 I wrote a Sunday strip for that autumn in which the title character—Sally— dreams office demands and obstacles keep piling up at an increasingly bizarre pace, until her company’s building is eventually taken over by Chechen rebels. The strip was approved, illustrated and set to run in 800 newspapers on Sunday, September 7, 2004.

Four days before the strip was to appear—on Wednesday, September 3—on the third day of a tense standoff in a Beslan elementary school, shooting broke out between Chechen rebel hostage-takers and Russian security forces, resulting in the deaths of 344 civilians, 186 of them children.

On Thursday, September 4, I received the advanced print run of that Sunday’s strip. Only then did I remember what I had written.

I now had one business day to get the comic pulled.

Now, to be honest I had two reasons to prevent the strip from running. First and foremost, the last thing I wanted to do was appear to be making light of a horrible tragedy, especially one involving the death of children. Second, I had once received 13 emails in a single day cursing me out because the characters in the strip did not wrap their Christmas gifts until Christmas Eve. The thought of what kind of—and how many—responses I would receive from this was a little more than I wanted to deal with.

Unfortunately, the reason Sunday strips are written so far in advance is that it takes that long to process them in color, put them in Sunday comics supplements and send them out to various warehouse distribution centers. In other words, the only chance I would have had to pull the strip was three days after I wrote it.

So I had another idea—what if I wrote a note to run in the editorial section of all 800 newspapers explaining that the strip had been written and illustrated long before the shootings and apologizing to anyone who might take offense at its content. Not wanting to seem indifferent to people’s reactions—which were going to be strong—I also gave readers a special address through which they could contact me with their questions or concerns.

The papers ran the statement. Then I waited in fear, worried that if I could receive 22 emails telling me off for getting one of the “Thundercats” names wrong—it’s “Cheetara,” not “Cheetera”—God only knows what wrath I was about to face.

I got one letter. This is that letter, furiously hand-scrawled, all in caps, on unlined paper:

The very next day I got an email from a reader angry because I had mentioned “Yodels” in the strip instead of “Ho-Hos.”
Thank you.