Newspaper comic strips are supposed to be a break from the news, so when an artist and/or writer makes the news for all the wrong reasons...
There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks and avoids knee-jerk reactions. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
- In February 2023, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams claimed on his livestream program Real Coffee with Scott Adams that black Americans were a "hate group" and urged white Americans to "get the hell away" from them. This prompted several news outlets to drop Dilbert and his distributor Andrews McMeel Universal to end their relationship with him. That March, Adams relaunched Dilbert on the Locals website.
- James Allen abruptly left Mark Trail in 2020 after his habit of picking fights with people on social media came to light, including doing a very unflattering storyline featuring a character that looked suspiciously like someone he was arguing with on Twitter. The final straw came when he left a very crude tweet to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, made worse when his Twitter handle had the strip's name prominently featured as this happened (his handle has since been changed to remove all mention of the strip).
- In June 2019, Brunswick News Inc. announced that cartoonist Michael De Adder was being let go after a Donald Trump cartoon
he drew referencing the deaths of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria went viral. - Guy Gilchrist's 22-year run on Nancy was abruptly ended in early 2018 after allegations of sexually assaulting his former assistant came to light. The strip went into reruns for a few months before new cartoonist Olivia Jaimes was hired to replace him.
- In February 2019, the reader of a Pittsburgh newspaper noticed a vulgar message to President Donald Trump in that day's strip of Non Sequitur. Creator Wiley Miller, a vocal critic of the president, later apologized, saying he'd never intended the message to make it to print, and that its inclusion had completely slipped his mind until then. This argument completely fell apart when it was discovered that he had tweeted about the "Easter Egg" in that day's strip, challenging his readers to find it. The paper dropped his strip for the use of profanity, and other publications followed suit not long after.
- Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall was fired from the Los Angeles Times in 2015 after allegations surfaced of him lying about an encounter with the Los Angeles Police Department in 2001.
- It is safe to say that Tulsa cartoonist David Simpson will never work again after he was caught plagiarizing other cartoonists (mostly Jeff MacNelly, of Shoe) for over 30 years in 2011.
