Dirty tricks in politics are as old as… well, politics itself. But the last thing readers of Prickly City's online edition needed was a fictitious URL in the October 19 edition of the conservative comic strip that was configured to route surfers to a porn site.
Prickly City creator/cartoonist Scott Stantis was slightly astonished to discover a fictitious URL he’d included in a storyline was actually registered and configured to send his readers to the porn, telling Editor and Publisher it showed just how ugly political debate has become this particular election season.
"It's horribly embarrassing and disgusting," Stantis told E&P. "I'm just so sorry for anyone who looks it up." He added that it might have been mere cleverness, and not a low blow, if the dirty trickster had set the URL to a campaign site for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
"This is just foul," he told the magazine, adding that children also read the strip.
Similarly, Kentucky Republican congressional candidate Geoff Davis, running against Democrat Nick Clooney, learned the hard way that his old GeoffDavis2002 routed those typing it in to an adults-only destination whose new operators are trying to sell it and other connected sites.
"It's extortion," Davis' unidentified campaign manager told WHAS-TV about the GeoffDavis2002 cybersquat. "They expect you to buy it back from them. He's disgusted by it. We'll potentially buy it back. We're caught in a bad position."
Davis’ manager said the site announces it's for sale and wanted $500 for the old Davis site and $500 each for "dozens of others" now expired, from a furniture business to at least one Christian-oriented site.
Stantis apparently learned one lesson: he told E&P he wished he'd registered the should-have-been fictitious URL himself before using it in the Prickly City strip. The same URL was included in the October 20 edition of the strip and couldn't be pulled in time to keep people from hitting it, but Stantis and syndicator Universal Press Syndicate said it was pulled in time to be left out of October 21-22 strips.
"In the three-month history of Prickly City," Stantis said, "I have written about the growing coarseness of our political discussion as well as the growing crudity of the culture.... Prickly City was a victim of both."
The incident has also prodded Universal Press Syndicate to rethink its policy of allowing fictitious URLs in feature comics, E&P said.
WHAS said they tried to contact those who posted the old Davis site as porn. According to the station, those posters gave no answers to the station's questions but removed the porn from the former Davis site.
"In my mind it is [extortion," IgLou Internet management company spokesman Sean Newton told WHAS, "but a lot of people are going to pay for it to get it out of their hair to get it off the Web and get the name back."
