CSotD: Quick! Read this comic right now!
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Lynn Johnston famously stood her ground when she was offered the chance to syndicate "For Better or For Worse" and insisted on making postal boxes red instead of blue, of celebrating Thanksgiving in October and of calling November 11 "Remembrance Day." Other Canadian cartoonists have followed the preferences of their editors and Yankified their strips, on the theory that American readers couldn't possibly take an interest in a strip set in faraway, exotic Canada. Despite, y'know, the instructive example of "For Better or For Worse."
On the other hand, Madam & Eve is so firmly rooted in South Africa that it is often a little incomprehensible to anyone not living there and so only runs in the Mail & Guardian and online. The payback is, first of all, the intense loyalty of its core audience (it's been adapted for TV and the stage, but there, not anywhere else), and, second, its ability to laugh at deadlines and function more as an editorial cartoon than a traditional strip.
Example: I'm posting this rather early by Eastern Daylight Time, and its shelf life here is already down to about three hours. But it wasn't printed with all that much time to begin with — Mother Anderson (and the rest of the nation) will be delighted or dejected within a very short time in any case.
Which I think is pretty cool. And then, in six to eight weeks, we'll start seeing Americanized vuvuzela jokes from the syndicated strips.
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