As for the fragility of the public– you can argue about whether we’ve gone too far, but our social sensibilities are at a place where certain things are deemed offensive, which means they are offensive.

Personally, as a Jew, I’d be alarmed to pick up the paper and find a reprint of a 1920s strip with a typical period caricature of, say, a slimy Jewish pawnbroker. We just don’t expect to be jolted that way, and, although this kind of thinking can go too far, by and large it’s probably a good thing.

“What’s the name of his other leg?”

There’s racism and racism of course: the nasty conscious kind which ends in white supremacism and anti-miscegenation laws, and the unconscious kind where people are offensive without meaning to be, out of ignorance or laziness. It’s a shame that we use the same word for both: calling people out for the second kind of racism is actually doing them a favor by letting them know that they are being inadvertantly offensive, but most people do not respond well to it because they think you’re referring to the first sense. Yes, this comic is racist, but easily in the second sense.

@Steffen 25: The only problem with using Ebonics is when the black people are shown speaking their dialect, while the white people are shown speaking standard English (which we usually do not do). In this case, however, Jeff clearly speaks with a non-standard dialect too, so it’s all right by me.

The black fellow is not mangling the English language, he’s speaking African American Vernacular English, AKA Ebonics - linguists consider it to be a valid dialect, and in my opinion viewing it as bad English is more racist than having a cartoon character speak it.

On another note regading this comic, I’m glad to see that being shocked at something caused hats to fly off heads even back then.