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The comic pages have long offered up a two-dimensional universe whose denizens' troubles are rooted largely in ill-fitting swimsuits, precocious children or workplace woes.
But comic strips are not always featherweight. Often they're more than "just kid stuff," according to Leonard Greenspoon, a professor of theology and classical studies at Creighton University in Nebraska.
"So many comics are not ideologically neutral, they're not even theologically neutral," Greenspoon said. "I think the comic strips have become what daytime soaps used to be before prime-time television - the place where abortion and other issues are dealt with."
Far too often the power of comic strips is overlooked, said Lucy Shelton Caswell, an Ohio State University journalism professor and curator of the university's cartoon research library.
"People have not stopped to think about what a complex form comics are - how the creator has to make words and pictures interact to communicate an idea," Caswell said....