A New Comic Brings Divorce to the Funny Pages I've always loved the "funny pages." We called them the "funnies," as in, "Pass the funnies." But my life, as the only child of two working parents, wasn't one I saw in the Sunday comics, where big families, sibling battles and giant sandwiches seemed to be the norm. Eventually "Sally Forth" came along and offered me something that reflected my world to cut out and put on the fridge. With the addition of "Gil," a new comic strip starring a young boy living with his mother, children whose parents are divorced get something similar - a funny, familiar, ordinary life against a backdrop of visitation and child support. Divorce has not been a staple of the comics. When the cartoonist Lynn Johnston, who based "For Better or for Worse" on her life with her two children and her dentist husband, divorced, it made news, and readers grieved - but the characters in her comic strip carried on. Bloom County's Michael Binkley lived with his single father, but the realities of divorce were rarely addressed amid a surreal landscape of penguins and wheelchair-driven Star Trek-style adventure. Today, Candorville offers the life of a single father in a few papers - but it's a more adult-oriented, political strip. "Gil" is more "Baby Blues" than "Boondocks," and while all comic strips are ultimately written for adults, it still serves the classic comic strip purpose of reflecting real life back through a much funnier lens. Some things are funny to all ages. For others, the question of why it's funny offers a child a glimpse into the grown-up mind. My own children still sprawl out on the floor on Sunday with the (shrinking) comics section, reading "Mutts" aloud to each other and puzzling (I hope) over "Doonesbury," as I once did. I have to admit, reluctantly, that "Gil" in the daily comic strip form will have a hard time finding its way into the hands of many kids. As I remember it, one opened the comics because the paper was on the breakfast table, and what else in that mass of black-and-white ink could you possibly want to read? But even if comic strips are not the dominant force of culture they were in their earlier days, or even back when "Calvin and Hobbes" was on the front of every Sunday section and "The Far Side" calendar on every desk, they're still out there, readable online, popular on Tumblr, created anew by teens from the Midwest and "70s divorce survivors, like Norm Feuti, the creator of "Gil." There is something about the format, the brevity and (of course) the humor that endures, even as formats change. "Gil" (online or in the paper) offers kids warily watching their parents work their way through a divorce some perspective and reassurance. Things may be mixed up, but that must be the way they're meant to be, sometimes - or they wouldn't be in the funny pages.