UPDATE: The assistant managing editor of Notre Dame’s student newspaper, The Observer, has resigned over the publishing of an offensive anti-gay cartoon, and the comic “The Mobile Party” has thusly been discontinued as well.

Kara King wrote: “A miscommunication between another editor and myself led to the comic running without me first reading and approving the material. Regardless, no excuse can justify the comic even being considered for publication, and the duty to censor it fell to me. I failed to do so, and am solely responsible for providing a forum for this message of hate.”

Original Post:

The Editor-in-Chief of Notre Dame’s The Observer, Jenn Metz, along with three contributors to the cartoon “The Mobile Party,” have issued a public apology after an anti-gay comic was printed in the paper recently.

The comic depicts a saw with arms and legs asking “How do you turn a fruit into a vegetable?” A “college dude” holding two 40 ounce bottles of beer appears in the second frame responding “No idea.” The third frame returns to the saw saying, “A baseball bat.”

Metz apparently was not present when the decision was made to run the cartoon, and the contributors to “The Mobile Party” – Colin Hofman, Jay Wade, and Lauren Rosemeyer – have plead that the cartoon was actually trying to address the negative views of gay culture at Notre Dame by making the offending character a saw…or more blatantly, a “tool.”

Here’s a portion of the public letter of apology from the three cartoonists:

”Intolerance of homosexuality is a major problem on Notre Dame’s campus. We tried to address it in our comics — using the tool characters to emphasize a mindset that we simply find ridiculous. In our last comic, we had the human character, our voice of reason, not understand the joke because of its absurd nature. Reasons, however, are not excuses. We consistently try to write comics that rely on shock value and now that we have gone too far, we realize that we have abused the privilege and responsibility of contributing to the Observer, and therefore, the Notre Dame community as a whole.”

GLADD, of course, was on top of it from the beginning, saying:

”The cartoonist had posted on his blog – though it’s since been removed – his original version of the cartoon. In the original version, it shows that the punchline read, ‘AIDS’ instead of ‘A baseball bat.’ The paper, he reported, preferred ‘not to make light of fatal diseases.’ The Observer made a dangerously misguided decision that promoting violence was somehow superior to making fun of HIV/AIDS. Both versions of the cartoon were abhorrent…”