Comic strip puts artist's cancer battle up front (AP/CNN)

MEDINA, Ohio (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, will chronicle Lisa's experience through October.

"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.
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/05/09/comicstrip.cancer.ap/index.html