Comic creator with cancer weaves topic into his strip

Northeast Ohio resident Tom Batiuk underwent surgery this year.
MEDINA (AP) -- Faced with his own diagnosis of cancer, syndicated comic strip creator Tom Batiuk returned Wednesday to a story line in which one of his "Funky Winkerbean" characters copes with the disease.
"I realized there is a huge gulf between empathy and personal experience," said the 60-year-old Batiuk, who underwent surgery for prostate cancer in January. "It showed me that I had only skimmed over the surface of the subject."
In Wednesday's strip, main character Lisa Moore learns that her breast cancer has returned after seven years and gotten worse. A radiology lab had mixed up her scans and she thought her cancer was in remission. The character has had a mastectomy and chemotherapy.
The King Features strip, which is published in about 400 newspapers, including The Vindicator, will chronicle Lisa's experience through October.
Something new
"It showed you can do things with this medium that hadn't been done before and that there was an appreciative audience ... that wanted to see comics maybe taken a little bit further than they had been," Batiuk said.
"Funky Winkerbean" started in 1972 and focused on teenagers, including Funky Winkerbean, at the imaginary Westview High School. Lisa arrived in the 1980s as an unmarried student who became pregnant.
Batiuk likens Lisa's approach to cancer to that of Elizabeth Edwards, presidential candidate John Edwards' wife, who announced in March that her breast cancer had recurred and spread.
"One of the things that crossed my mind while watching her is the way breast cancer is perceived, the way people diagnosed with it now behave. They don't cower in a corner," he said from his home studio in Medina, about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland.
Batiuk said he was relieved when he finished writing and drawing the story line. "It was a hard story. ... But it's the work I feel best about," Batiuk said.
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