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On a certain webcomic directory, Soup was listed as G-rated. (I don't recall which, and don't seem to be able to find any now that including such ratings at all.) I pointed out that this may not be completely accurate, that it might be better to rate it PG. After all, there are strips like this one, which involve people being killed... All right, admittedly, the violence in this one isn't all that graphic; the strip on August 28 was probably worse, despite the Calthophacus already being dead. So... bad example, maybe. Still... aside from the occasional violence, there is some nudity in Soup, albeit no graphic full frontal (heck, there was nudity in the very first strip, and there'll be more later)... yeah, I just really can't see calling it G-rated, exactly. It's certainly not R, but PG seems reasonable.)
Of course, comic strips aren't generally rated according to the MPAA guidelines anyway, which I guess maybe renders this whole discussion sort of silly. Is there a comic rating system? There was the Comics Code Authority, but that's pretty much irrelevant now, and even when it was in force it was basically just an all or nothing thing; either it approved a comic or it didn't—and anyway it was only for comic books. I guess there was never a rating system for comic strips because all newspaper comic strips pretty much had to be appropriate for all ages anyway (and, conversely, most alternative newspapers probably didn't care how inappropriate their comics were). So it's not until the rise of webcomics that there was ever anything approaching a need for a rating system...
Well, let's see, some Googling turns up a "Family Webcomics" page that includes some rating buttons. According to that system, Soup would probably be WC-14. (The only iffy thing is the "partial" nudity... there is some full nudity in Soup, but always from behind or from a large distance. Certainly there is never any graphic depiction of the genitalia, so... yeah, I'd say it still qualifies as WC-14; that's not enough to push it over into WC-M.) I don't know how often this rating system is actually used, though.
DrunkDuck seems to use its own proprietary rating system that as far as I can tell isn't used anywhere else. (And which seems rather skewed toward the younger end...) But DrunkDuck does a lot of weird things. (For what it's worth, according to DrunkDuck's scheme, it seems Soup would be rated "M". I don't know if any of its violence is "graphic" enough to disqualify it from "T+" (though honestly I suspect it would be), but going by the way their ratings are described, any nudity at all automatically seems to rate at least an M, so...)
According to a Comixpedia page on webcomics ratings, though, the most commonly used webcomic rating system, originating on Comic Genesis, pretty much mirrors the MPAA rating system. Okay, it has "Web-14" instead of "PG-13", and "Mature" (or "Web MA") instead of "R", but aside from that...
So, yeah. I guess let's go with PG.
Maybe at some point I'll put some rating boxes up.
Or conceivably not.
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