The New Era Ain't Publishing This: Merit Badge

For nearly 25 years my work has appeared in Church magazines. (Holy cow am I old!) The process works like this: I send a half dozen or so gags for the magazines to consider. They'll get back to me a couple of months later letting me know which, if any, of the gags I sent them they'd like to publish. I then wait for months and months for the gags to show up in a magazine. 

Usually, it takes about a year for a purchased gag to show up in print. Sometimes, though, it takes much, much longer. I've got a folder on my computer I keep of gags that haven't shown up in print. The oldest of which was sold to the New Era 17 years ago! Today, I'm posting one of the gags from that folder as I am absolutely convinced that there is no way the Church's magazines have any use for it now. Maybe you'll find it interesting or maybe you won't, but it's either that or another quartet of FTOYWDKM talk intros (and I'm pretty sure you'd like a weeklong reprieve from those).

Sadly, I sent this gag to the New Era just a few months before the Church decided to leave the Boy Scouts, because it is pretty funny. Back in the days before the Church announced it was severing ties with scouting, Boy Scout and Cub Scout gags were a regular occurrence on this website. Since then, I'm pretty sure I've only published one (it's a pretty great one, though). As we continue to streamline programs in the Church, please give Latter-day Saint cartoonist a brief moment of silence--there are less and less subjects to highlight.