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Comic strips and cartoons have become too horrendous

A few days ago, I woke up with so many worries in my mind that I decided to change my routine and read the paper starting on the comic strips page. It was a big mistake.

On that page, one of the comic strips showed a child who was walking with his pet. The pet was on a leash, but it was not a dog, but a monster. There were not words and no explanation about how or why the child had a monster as a pet.

On other comic strip – where the adjective “comic” is questionable- two men were inside a jail, clearly being tortured and complaining about being hungry. I have to confess I fail to see anything funny about that situation.

There was a third strip where a child was walking with a balloon on his hand. The balloon had an evil face. A second child, using some kind of arm, fired to the balloon, “killing” it. In the last frame, a multitude of evil balloons are devouring the aggressor, while the first child is laughing.

What is funny about children using firearms and being horrible “killed”?

Another comic strip on the same page had people being punished in Hell, and yet another showed a number of young people being eaten by a space monster.

I know these are just comic strips, that is, drawings somebody draws hoping to make somebody else laugh. But the atrocities shown in those “comics” reveal, first, that somebody is actually thinking about those atrocities and, second, that there is a market of people who finds those atrocities amusing.
I know this is October and, as it happens every year, October is always associated with Halloween and with horror movies. However, can we please leave the horror to the movies instead of include it in the comics? Whatever happened to the comics based on funny situations, wordplays and puns, or even satire and sarcasm?

But there is more to the story. Two days later, I was watching TV when a cartoon caught my attention. It was a musical cartoon, a sing-along, about a group of children in jail condemned to forced labor.

Two of the children refused to follow the orders given by their jailer and they were sent to solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the rest of the children kept breaking rocks or doing whatever they were told to do, singing all the time.

This cartoon is produced and distributed by the same mega-company that in previous decades produced innocent stories about unlikely princesses, a small deer, and a deformed elephant.

Can anybody explain to me what is funny and what is positive about having a cartoon dealing with children in jail condemned to forced labor?

Because of their number, Latino children are one of the main groups watching this cartoon and reading these comic strips. What kind of message are our children receiving? That they should be ready for a future where losing your freedom and living with monsters is something funny?

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