Comic Stereotypes Funny Papers Start To Portray Us As We Really Are

Imagine Blondie with 40 extra pounds, sagging breasts and a sardonic sense of humor.

You’d come close to Janet, a fictional free-lance newspaper columnist and a character in the new comic strip “Us & Them.”

After 100 years of perky housewives and well-stacked secretaries, the world of newspaper comics has finally begun portraying women - and men, too - more realistically. Once in awhile, the strips are even drawn from a female perspective.

Janet of “Us & Them” is a divorced mom, dealing with her son and her ex. Her male counterpart, Joe Pyle, is a radio talk-show host who’s battling middle-age spread and plenty of insecurities.

The strips featuring Janet are drawn by Canadian cartoonist Susan Dewar. Another new strip, starting today in our Sunday comics section, is also drawn by a woman. “Rhymes with Orange,” a sort of visual “Seinfeld,” was created by a 25-year-old Stanford graduate named Hilary Price.

They join “Cathy” by Cathy Guisewite and “For Better or For Worse” by Lynn Johnston. Still, in the land of the newspaper comics, women cartoonists are a distinct minority.

“Essentially, the comics page has been a man’s world for a long time,” says Dewar. “Blondie always annoyed me. She’s got a waist the size of an ant.”

But fortunately women’s strips aren’t the only ones featuring contemporary roles. There’s also “Sally Forth,” the working mother, and “Adam,” the stay-at-home dad, drawn by men. Older strips gradually have been updated: Even Blondie’s now a caterer.

“In the ‘50s, it was pretty common for a husband to come home from work and complain about the wife’s cooking,” says Brian Walker, one of the writers of “Hi and Lois.” “In the ‘80s, Lois got a job as a real estate agent. All of a sudden, when she’s been working all day, it doesn’t seem fair to poke fun at her cooking.”

While many newspaper editors are seeking gender equity in new strips, the old standbys still reproduce images from a “Take-My-Wife-Please” era.

Hagar seems to be battling with Helga more than ever, and Gen. Halftrack never seems to let up on Miss Buxley.

Brian Walker, whose father, Mort, created both “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois” in the 1950s, used to argue with his dad over Miss Buxley.

Brian Walker also writes for “Beetle.” When he began, he deliberately gave Miss Buxley more of the punch lines. “Although I wasn’t able to turn her into some sort of a militant feminist,” Walker says, “by putting some comebacks in her mouth, I made her look less airheaded, smart enough to outwit the general.”

Lately, Brian Walker has begun to defer to his dad and his years of experience. “He’s obviously from a different generation than I am,” Walker says.

“It may not be politically correct, but (my father) seems to know his audience. Whenever he has a poll that asks, ‘Should we drop Miss Buxley?’ it always comes in overwhelmingly, ‘No, keep her.”’

Greg Howard, the creator of “Sally Forth,” finds that political correctness has been hard on creators of the funny pages.

“People are finding less and less humorous these days,” Howard says.

One Spokesman-Review reader, Connie Grove, for example, hates the strip “Cathy.” “Not only does Cathy reinforce every negative stereotype attached to women, it creates new ones,” Grove says. “It would please me greatly never to see it again.”

Brian Basset broke new ground 11 years ago when he created the house-husband, “Adam.”

Early on, a feminist group sent him a letter describing their outrage. They felt he trivialized the role-changing idea, and that, furthermore, Garry Trudeau would never have handled it that way.

Feminist fury has died off. More recently, a Boston minister to accuse “Adam” of breaking down the moral fabric of the family.

Concludes Basset, “I’m not going to write for a specific group. The main person I have to please is myself.”

When women draw cartoons, they often display a different style of humor than male cartoonists. According to Howard, men typically go for the big laugh, the joke that explodes at the end. Women, however, tell richer, subtler tales. Lynn Johnston’s strip, centered around Elly and her dentist husband, is a perfect example of the latter.

Brian Walker is also a “For Better or For Worse” fan. He finds that because Johnston’s a woman, she can pull off a concept he wouldn’t dare.

In one classic series, Elly shopped for women’s bathing suits, pulling spandex over a flabby baby-stretched stomach. In Johnson’s hands, the idea worked. Walker doubts he could pull off the same joke with Lois.

“Us & Them” may solve that problem by featuring both a male and a female cartoonist. The strip was conceived by Wiley Miller, who draws an award-winning strip called “Non Sequitur.”

He draws the Joe Pyle strips that appear on alternating days with Dewar’s Janet story line.

The unifying theme, based on recent research on the differences between the way men and women think, will be the characters’ contrasting perceptions of life.

“Our gender does color our perspective of the world,” says Miller. “It’s not a matter of right or wrong. It’s just different.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 6 Drawings of comic strip characters