ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608020063
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DONNA LARCEN THE HARTFORD COURANT
The story line in ``Funky Winkerbean'' this week, in which a bomb injures Les Moore's fiancee, Lisa, sounds more like it's coming from the news pages than the funnies. But weaving story lines from the darker side of life has been part of cartoonist Tom Batiuk's strip since 1986, when Lisa, then a high school student, got pregnant.
``I held onto the bombing story line for about a year,'' says Batiuk, 49, who has been guiding Funky and his friends through Westview High School and adulthood since 1972. ``I wanted some time to pass because of Oklahoma City.''
Ironically, the news of the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park and the crash of TWA Flight 800 makes this terrorist subject matter all too chilling.
``I'd certainly understand if the folks in Montoursville, Pa., didn't want to read this,'' Batiuk says. (The town is mourning the deaths of a group of high school students and chaperones who were on the TWA flight.) ``We tried to time this so it was topical but not falling right on top of the news.''
Like a favorite sitcom that is character-driven but sometimes takes us into serious topics, Batiuk trusts that his audience (in 400 newspapers) will go with him.
``I've worked with the characters for a long time, so they have grown, and I have grown, too,'' he says. ``I want to examine more adult themes and mature ideas. You have to do that, or they become gerbils in a cage.''
Funky and his friends are now through high school - and college - a move Batiuk made a couple of years ago to open them up to more experiences.
Teen suicide, guns in the school and dyslexia are topics that have all been aired through Batiuk's characters, who either attend or teach at Westview High.
Another relationship-based strip that has always included life's tougher challenges is Lynn Johnston's ``For Better or for Worse.'' The Canadian cartoonist's work centers on the Patterson family of Mom, Dad and three kids. Last year she killed off Farley, the family dog.
``There was a big flap about that when it happened,'' says Lucy Caswell, curator of the Cartoon, Graphic and Photographic Arts Research Library at Ohio State University. ``Lynn Johnston received more than 650 letters from readers who were touched by the way she handled that. Stories about pets always engender strong emotion.''
``I think what is different about what Lynn Johnston and I do is that people can see themselves in the strip,'' Batiuk says. ``We are talking about what is going on in neighborhoods and in families. And when we introduce some reality, people know it's based on what's happening in the world.''
The comics pages in American newspapers have always had strips that embraced politics, crime and social situations.
In 1895, Richard Outcault set his ``Down in Hogan's Alley'' strip in city slums with squalid tenements and tough street characters. Out of that strip came ``The Yellow Kid,'' the first cartoon character to be illustrated in color and the genesis for the term ``yellow journalism,'' a description of sensationalism of the news. Outcault's strip included grisly details such as kids falling from fire escapes, eyes being gouged and dogs being kicked, writes Richard Marschall in ``America's Great Comic Strip Artists.''
``Adventure strips had a great deal of reality in them,'' says M. Thomas Inge, Blackwell professor of humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland. In the 1930s, Milton Caniff started ``Dickie Dare'' about an average American boy who daydreams in a Walter Mitty fashion and has fantasy adventures. But Caniff changed the tone in 1934, sending Dare on a cruise where he encounters gun smugglers, murderers and kidnappers. He was working on the advice of Heinie Reiker, managing editor of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. ``Always draw your stuff for the guy who pays for the paper,'' Reiker told Caniff. ``Kids will never see it if the old man doesn't buy the paper and bring it home.''
Caniff went on to produce ``Terry and the Pirates'' and ``Steve Canyon,'' both bigger-than-life heroes with military story lines.
Other adventure strips, such as Chester Gould's ``Dick Tracy,'' jumped right in with shocking story lines. In the first episode in 1931, Tracy sees his sweetheart Tess Trueheart kidnapped and her father murdered. Roy Crane's ``Buz Sawyer'' was launched in the middle of World War II. Sawyer was a fighter pilot. But after the war, Crane had his hero battling villains, being a private investigator, and having Indiana Jones-like escapades.
``The adventure strips have all but disappeared,'' Inge says. ``We have more gentle satire in today's strips. Charles Schulz' ``Peanuts'' takes aim at kids and family, Johnny Hart's ``B.C.'' uses prehistoric jokesters and Scott Adams' ``Dilbert'' addresses the foibles of modern corporate life.
``They talk about our failures as human beings,'' Inge says. ``Charlie Brown is always failing to live up to his expectations, hopes and dreams.''
Batiuk is not expecting a huge negative reaction to the terrorism panels.
``I started out as a gag-a-day,'' Batiuk says. ``But it doesn't let you grow. I think I have the freedom to explore more adult topics because I have brought the audience along. If `Blondie' put in a terrorism story line, it wouldn't work. People wouldn't accept it.''
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Monday's ``Funky Winkerbean'' panel shows theby CNBaftereffects of a terrorist bombing.