Breast Cancer Awareness is No Laughing Matter

Very few words strike fear into people's hearts as "breast cancer" does. October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, so it is no surprise that the comic strip Funky Winkerbean would chose October to bring "Lisa's Story" to a close. For those not familiar with Funky Winkerbean, it is a daily comic strip by Tom Batiuk, which began in 1972. The strip has followed the characters from teens to adults, allowing them to mature. While breast cancer awareness is no laughing matter, Mr. Batiuk managed to bring humor and heart to the characters as he showed the process of dealing with cancer.

I was first introduced to the strip in 1987 by one of my college music professors. He had a strip with Harry Dinkle, also known as "The World's Greatest Band Director" on his office door. As an aspiring band director myself, I was hooked. However, the strip had more to offer than just good jokes aimed at music educators and has kept me coming back for twenty years.

Mr. Batiuk has had a way of blending the silly with the serious. He has dealt with teen pregnancy, alcoholism, suicide and violence in the schools and much more through the years. But, the first storyline to nearly bring me to tears is "Lisa's Story", which concluded with Lisa Moore's loss of the eight-year fight against breast cancer on October 4, 2007. I'm not one to cry while watching movies or reading books, but getting to know these characters over the past twenty years has made them almost seem like good friends. I have to admit to choking up and getting chills as I read the strip.

Lisa's battle with cancer began in January of 1999. The book "Lisa's Story" was published in 2000, collecting all the strips concerning her discovering and dealing with cancer and moving past it. The new book, "Lisa's Story: The Other Shoe" includes the original strips, following through Lisa surviving cancer, getting her law degree and having a baby with her husband Les and the new strips after discovering the cancer had returned in the spring of 2006. The book, in addition to the strips, also contains a great deal of resource material on breast cancer.

In the past few weeks in the daily strips, Lisa and her husband Les discovered that a mistake had been made in her test results. They thought she had a clean bill of health, when in fact she was beyond the help of treatment. Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she decided to make the most of the time she had left. She made videos for their young daughter to watch when she was older. She located the baby, now a teen, she had put up for adoption when she was a teen herself. Also, Lisa bravely made a trip to Washington DC to testify about the importance of cancer research.

Mr. Batiuk, himself a cancer survivor, will be making appearances during the months of October and November to discuss the new book in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and California, beginning in his home town of Akron on October 6th. A list of these appearances can be found at the Editor And Publisher website.

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