Ah, you're partly mistaken there Brad! You're right that it would remove slashes altogether from unescaped strings, but if all strings are being escaped (perhaps even twice in your case) then that is not an issue. Allow me to attempt to diagnose the problem and offer a vague solution.
Here's what I think is currently happening, in an oversimplified form:
As you may be able to see, addslashes() is named oddly, since it's actually escaping potentially harmful characters. Similarly stripslashes() isn't just meandering about deleting slashes, it's un-escaping characters (for output.) The first time addslashes() is used in the above example the only harmful character is the apostrophe, so it's escaped with a slash. The second time though both the slash and the apostrophe are deemed harmful, so both are escaped (slashes put in front of them both.) Note that a slash is escaped both because it could be used maliciously and because if it wasn't escaped then it would be lost upon use of stripslashes().
So somewhere along the lines you're escaping the string twice. I suggest that since it's (reportedly) only affecting editted comics that you need to stripslashes() the submitted strings in the editting script, before using mysql_escape_string() (or whatever database function you're using to sanitize your strings.) Note that my above example can be altered to use mysql_escape_string() instead of addslashes() with no difference to the resulting string as in this narrow example they perform the exact same job.
Without access to your code I can't make a better guess, so I hope that helps.
I reccomend that you try to stop the escaping occuring twice, rather than counter-acting it at output; prevention being better than cure and all that ;)
