Serious issues work when staying true to comic’s characters

Handling a serious topic adeptly in a comic strip requires being true to its imaginary world.

It's why B.D. losing a leg in combat in "Doonesbury" makes sense, while Sgt. Snorkel of "Beetle Bailey" losing a leg in combat would be merely weird.

Francesco Marciuliano, who writes "Sally Forth," says he has been building up to Ted's layoff in the strip for about two years, taking Ted from being dissatisfied with his job but not doing much about it to losing his job and being forced to decide what to do next.

Tom Batiuk, creator of "Funky Winkerbean," notes that, as his strip evolved, readers grew accustomed to seeing heavier issues intermingled with its lighter, often absurdist, situations.

"It's been a slow, gradual process to stake out my claim and say, 'I can do this,' " he says. "When people look at 'Funky' now, it's not unexpected."

Lynn Johnston, creator of "For Better or For Worse," says she didn't even begin addressing serious issues until she -- and her readers -- had come to know the Patterson family well.

"You have to give your audience time to care," she says. "Like: Do I really care that that character is having a problem? And you don't if you don't know the character."

"I think what it boils down to is, you can do a lot with your characters as long as you're true to your characters," Marciuliano says. "I would never have Ted or Sally cheat on each other. That's not true to who they are and, frankly, that's more depressing than anything else."

Nothing should seem forced, offers Josh Fruhlinger of the Web site The Comics Curmudgeon. "If you can't make it progress naturally from the world you've created, perhaps your strip is not the strip that should be dealing with this."

Making serious issues work also requires an attention to detail, "because you're dealing with a very bright audience," Johnston says.

She consulted a fire department to learn how to depict a house fire, while Grandpa Jim's story line has been developed with the help of a neurologist and a family that is sharing with her their own experiences of a loved one's stroke.

Batiuk's story about Lisa's cancer was informed by his own experience with prostate cancer, while a story line that involved a character's encounter with a land mine in Afghanistan was done with the help of an organization in Washington, D.C., and an expert who could tell him whether the scenario was realistic.

And it helps if the serious story line can be counterbalanced by a lighter one. Batiuk wove into the story of Lisa's impending death a story line about her reunion with the child she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager.

"One thing you've got to do is make it so that it's not so stark and bleak," he says. "And that subplot was one of the things I did whenever things got a little intense on the Lisa side."