The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., has stopped running the strip as a result. Spirituality and religion routinely crop up in various other comic strips, said Greenspoon. Almost any comic strip on occasion will touch on religion, but it's done lightly. They'll make fun of a long sermon or something like that, but there's nothing like attacks on the pope. Weighty topics as breast cancer and homosexuality also surface amid routine story lines about families, relationships and work.
Comic strips draw their inspiration from everyday life.
They can't avoid these issues. Sometimes comic strips make a greater impact than the written word, said Morgan, whose comic strip centers on the congregants of the fictional Mainline Memorial Church. I think it was Don Wright, the editorial cartoonist at The Palm Beach Post , who said that writing a column is like throwing a lot of little pebbles at an issue, and doing a really effective cartoon is like throwing one big rock. That's very true. A visual can really have that kind of impact.