No one was laughing at a comic strip in the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday, in which the punch line hit uncomfortably close to the massacre last week at a Colorado movie theater.  The paper issued an apology for the "Broom-Hilda" strip that ran in Wednesday's edition, saying it was a mistake to run the cartoon in which two characters banter about being noisy at the movies when one delivers a punch line about gunfire.  “It makes people mad when I talk in movie theaters,” the curly-haired cartoon character said.  “Especially during action-adventure films. They can’t hear the gunshots!”  An editor at the paper publicly apologized for the comic strip, telling readers it was the result of an oversight.  “Many readers encountering today’s ‘Broom-Hilda’ comic strip must have gasped,” Associate Managing Editor Geoff Brown wrote on the newspaper’s website on Wednesday, before going on to explain the process that goes into reviewing the cartoon strips for publication.  “How did this strip get in the newspaper?” he asked. “We review all comics a week before we begin publishing them ... During that review we inspect 164 strips in one sitting.”  Brown said the staff is typically on the lookout for the possibility that a comic could cross the line or be offensive, and when that happens they ask for substitutes that would be more appropriate.  “When news breaks that turns a harmless cartoon into one in bad taste, someone flags it in time,” he added. “But not this time. Today’s ‘Broom-Hilda’ had passed from memory by the time the slayings occurred. That’s not an excuse, it’s just the explanation.”  Brown isn’t the first to issue an apology over a comic strip with an apparent connection to the Aurora shooting.  Francesco Marciuliano, writer for the strip “Sally Forth,” issued an apology to anyone who may have been offended by the cartoon that ran on Sunday after the shooting in which the characters discussed going to see “The Dark Knight Rises.”  “Such comics are written three months in advance ... and so the strip ... was in no way a direct comment on - or reaction to - the unbelievable tragedy that occured,” he said in a statement.  Some in the cartoon world wondered about the long-term effects of the shooting.  “It kind of (raises) the question - at what point after a tragedy can a cartoon run that depicts something - even indirectly - and not feel obligated to issue an apology or statement,” Alan Gardner wrote at Daily Cartoonist.  Brown said the staff at the Tribune is making every effort to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.  “We hate when anything like this gets past us, so we’re kicking ourselves - and trying to make sure it doesn’t recur,” he said.
'That's not funny!' is something no comic-strip creator wants to hear, but the people behind 'Broom-Hilda' and 'Sally Forth' were embarrassed by punch lines written weeks ago that came too close to the very unfunny recent incident in Aurora, Colo.