Uppity-Negro.com

That's what United Press Syndicate says about the new strip Prickly City, anyway. The Palm Beach Post Staff Ombudsman adds:

The strip definitely is different from the left-leaning Doonesbury in that its perspective comes from the political right. In addition, Prickly City's quality beats another popular conservative strip, Mallard Fillmore, which features a conservative reporter-duck.

Which quote (more or less) at Romenesko is what sent me to the link, and looking for more info on the strip.

Or rather, reminded me, as last week he linked a Chicago Reader interview with/profile of the cartoonist, Scott Stantis:

He's launching a new comic strip, Prickly City [on July 12th], and the Tribune is one of about 40 papers that have already picked it up. "It's obviously a political strip," Stantis told me. "It's a cross between a conservative Doonesbury mixed in with Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. There's a real call for a quality character-driven comic strip with a conservative bent to it."

[. . .] Geoff Brown, who oversees comics at the Tribune, says he wanted a strip that would placate readers who piss and moan about Doonesbury and Boondocks. "It's not that a conservative strip can't take potshots at conservatives," Brown explains, "but I want to make sure it's not a centrist or seemingly liberal strip in disguise." He says readers who raise hell when the Bush administration is the target don't notice when Doonesbury and Boondocks "are running down icons on the left." Those readers deserve a strip they can be certain is on their side. The pickings were slim -- the ham-handed Mallard Fillmore, which the Sun-Times briefly carried and dumped a decade ago, and Stantis's brand-new strip.

Does anyone actually like Mallard Fillmore?

Then again, I ask the same thing about Cathy.

Then again, I ask the same thing about Day By Day, the name of which I'd forgotten, and I just wasted a good two minutes tracking the strip/link down.

This was not time well spent.

Too early to pass any sort of judgment on Prickly City, so perhaps unlike its fellow, explicitly right-leaning cousins, the strip will actually be funny.