A Serious Turn

It's a good thing the new year's almost here, because it's been a bad 2007.

Lisa died a few months ago after a harrowing battle with breast cancer, leaving behind her husband, Les, and 5-year-old daughter, Summer.

Grandpa Jim suffered his second stroke and remains bedridden, facing a prognosis that doesn't inspire optimism.

And Ted is still unemployed after having received his pink slip in May from whatever job it was he's had all these years, and has battled depression because of it.

Yes, it's been a really bad year, and it doesn't even matter that Lisa, Grandpa Jim and Ted aren't, technically speaking, real people. The fact that they live only in the ink-and-paper world of the comics pages -- in, respectively, "Funky Winkerbean," "For Better or For Worse" and "Sally Forth" -- doesn't make their troubles any less painful to bear.

And for anybody who still thinks of the comics pages as the "funny pages," where painfully obvious political humor, lame gag-a-day strips and plot lines that would be more in sync with the '50s than whatever it is we're calling these first years of the 21st century: Welcome to a brave new world.

Well, not new, exactly. Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library, notes that comic strips have been tackling life, death and other serious themes for "basically forever."

In fact, the first death of a comic strip character -- in "The Gumps," a strip about a middle-class family that ran from 1917 to 1959 -- occurred in 1929. Yet, some have a misconception that comic strips are only about laughs, as well as that comic strips are for children, Caswell says.

Comic strips actually were aimed at adult newspaper readers, because they were the ones who had the disposable income to buy newspapers, Caswell says. "I can prove this to you by showing you color supplements from the turn of the 20th century that have advertisements for adult products like liquor and cigarettes. And advertisers never would have paid for that space if they had not understood that adults were their readers."

What may be different today is the intensely realistic way in which everything from personal financial reversals to terminal illness is explored in daily black-and-white and Sunday color. For example, the most talked-about news in the comic strip universe this past fall was the death-by-cancer of Lisa, a much-beloved character in "Funky Winkerbean."

Tom Batiuk, the strip's creator, introduced readers to Lisa when she, like the strip's other main characters, was attending high school. In fact, it was Lisa who was the focal point of Batiuk's first venture into serious issues when she became pregnant and had to give her baby up for adoption.

The 1986 story line was a landmark sequence in the evolution of a strip that began mostly as a humorous look at high school life. But reaction to the story line was positive and Batiuk increasingly began to weave serious themes into his strip, including Lisa's seemingly successful battle with breast cancer in 1999.

When Lisa's cancer returned last year and news began to spread that she wouldn't beat it this time, "I heard from a huge number of people who wanted some kind of miracle for Lisa and wanted me to not let her die," Batiuk says. "Afterward, once people saw where I was going, they kind of gave me space to tell the story and trusted me to tell the story, and it was an incredible response."

Around the same time readers were preparing to say goodbye to Lisa, Grandpa Jim, the grandpa everybody would love to have in Lynn Johnston's "For Better or For Worse," was felled by his second stroke. While the first left him aphasic, the second has left him bedridden and, as far as readers can tell, comatose.

Johnston is no stranger to tackling serious issues, from a gay character's coming out to an attempted assault on the strip's eldest daughter, Liz, and from the start had planned to make the strip realistic and "push the boundaries." When she did a sequence in 1993 about the coming out of son Mike's friend, Lawrence, her editor told her she would lose a few papers, Johnston recalls. "At that time I was in about 1,800 papers and I figured I could afford to lose a few."

About 40 papers did cancel the strip. (The Review-Journal, which ran the strip then and still does, didn't run that particular sequence.) But, Johnston says, "we picked up another 50" as competing papers signed on.

While it has not -- not yet, anyway -- dealt intensely with life and death, "Sally Forth," has dealt with several topics of interest to the sandwich generation, those Americans who are caring not only for their kids but their aging parents, too. Most recently, writer Francesco Marciuliano has been dealing with the layoff of Ted, the husband of working mom Sally, and exploring Sally's uneasy relationship with her mother.

Reaction to the latter story line has been about evenly divided, Marciuliano says. "Some say, 'I can't stand looking at this anymore. I still go to the funny pages for laughs.' "

Conversely, Marciuliano also receives "a lot of very personal, very warm e-mails" from readers who are "glad someone is talking about this."

Meanwhile, some readers are upset that Ted is, after about eight months, still jobless, and were startled when he recently battled depression because of it.

"I think some people are going, 'Why aren't they all happy now?' " Marciuliano says. "Because: That's how it happens."

Besides, Marciuliano says, "the problem with everything working out fine is, it creates a remarkably boring strip."

Josh Fruhlinger, who writes The Comics Curmudgeon, a daily online blog found at www.joshreads.com, says the site's readers who post comments have been rough on "Funky Winkerbean" -- both generally and for the Lisa story line -- because of what both he and they see as the never-ending misery it inflicts on its characters.

When Lisa's cancer returned, "I think my overall impression was like, 'Oh, no. Not again' " Fruhlinger says. "She had cancer before and she had been in remission. I thought that, in the context of 'Funky Winkerbean' -- with the (characters') missing arms and alcoholism and going deaf -- I think people just thought this was just gratuitous, this is sadistic."

Even though reaction of Lisa's impending death was mostly negative, Fruhlinger says some commenters did find the strips in which Lisa died "pretty moving. I wouldn't say a lot, but some people did."

In contrast, Fruhlinger said commenters largely felt that Grandpa Jim's second stroke "just seemed more natural in the sense that he was an old man and he'd (already) had one stroke."

However, Fruhlinger also notes that such strong reaction, good or bad, to the strips' goings-on is at least to some extent a testament to the resonance they have among readers.

"No one," he says, "is getting worked up about 'Beetle Bailey.' "

Fruhlinger even seems reluctant to speak too ill of "Funky," and commends Batiuk for exploring ground few others on the comics pages would.

"I feel like there are so many people on the comics pages who don't take any chances at all," he says.

So, while "there are things about 'Funky' that I find kind of clunky," Fruhlinger says, "I still think, in the sort of very big picture, it's good for people to try some new things. Don't just listen to some jerk on the Internet."

Sometimes, a serious story line in a comic strip even can leap from newsprint into real life. Johnston received a letter from a woman who, thanks to the Grandpa Jim story, noticed stroke symptoms in a neighbor and immediately took her to a hospital. (She's fine.)

And, University Hospitals in Cleveland has unveiled its "Lisa's Legacy Fund for Cancer Research and Education." Batiuk -- who is donating to the fund all royalties from a book that collects the strips about Lisa's cancer battle -- has given the hospital permission to use Lisa's name and likeness in the fundraising effort.

That, Batiuk says, "knocks me out, to think your character can step off a page and do some real-world good."

By the way: If it's any consolation to grieving readers, whenever something bad happens to your favorite comic strip characters, their creators feel as much pain as you do.

Batiuk says that, while Lisa's story line "made sense, I hated to lose her as a character."

He laughs. "It's funny: On my drawing board, I'm doing a strip of Les and Lisa, a bit of a flashback thing. She appears in a lot of flashbacks where Les is sort of talking to her and sees her sitting there, just sort of talking about Summer, thinking things through as a single parent."

WHERE TO READ

The Review-Journal doesn't run "Funky Winkerbean." But comics fans can keep up with the strip through King Features' DailyINK (www.dailyink.com), a subscription site ($15 annually) that includes both current and archived strips. Creator Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean Web site (www.funkywinkerbean.com) features Batiuk's blog and other information. The R-J runs "Sally Forth" and "For Better or For Worse" daily. Archived strips of "Sally Forth" are on DailyINK. More information on "For Better or For Worse" is available through Lynn Johnston's Web site (fbofw.com).

REVIEW-JOURNAL

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0280.