Simpson Fired From Tulsa World

Longtime Tulsa World cartoonist David Simpson was shown the door late last week after allegations of plagiarism surfaced regarding a recent cartoon. That cartoon, featuring a pretty gentle, almost Borscht Belt-style joke about where life begins, had been traced back to a 1981 cartoon by a different cartoonist. Simpson's defense is that he found it in his file and believed it to be an older one of his own. This explanation didn't satisfy Simpson's employers at the World.

Although Simpson's situation sounds specifically and uniquely screwy, copying jokes is such a complicated thing in newspaper comics that any story of firing makes me a bit uneasy. In general it's hard to tell when you came up with something on your own or when you're remembering something somebody else did first, or -- always my favorite -- when you've used a joke from your circle of friends you thought was unique only to find out it was introduced from a pal who stole it from MASH or whatever.
 
posted 4:34 am PST | Permalink
 

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