Why comic strip creators pack up their pencils

JS Online:: "For comic strip artists, the daily deadlines and the demand to please in every word balloon can take the giggles right out of the job.

Add skirmishes with editors over politically or socially provocative content and backlash from readers, and it's enough to make cartoonists put down their pencils - even when their strips are beloved by millions of fans.

'It's a relentless grind,' said Berkeley Breathed, 49, who retired his Pulitzer Prize-winning strip, 'Bloom County,' in 1989. 'You wake up every morning and you have to come up with something, whether you're sick, whether you're depressed or even if your mother was hit by a truck.'

'It's a pretty brutal existence,' said Frank Cho, creator of 'Liberty Meadows,' a daily strip syndicated in 100 newspapers from 1997 to 2001.

'You're constantly under the gun, and there is always that burnout factor,' said Cho, 34. He now produces 'Liberty Meadows' as an occasional comic book and works for Marvel Comics on projects such as 'Spider-Man' and the 'New Avengers.'

Sabbaticals are a common way of coping with the pressure to be funny 365 days a year. Garry Trudeau took a 22-month break from 'Doonesbury' in the mid-'80s.

But in the history of comic strips, only a few major artists have shut down a strip while it was still popular: Breathed, Gary Larson of 'The Far Side' and Bill Watterson of 'Calvin and Hobbes.' Both Larson and Watterson took sabbaticals before eventually retiring their strips. They've been mostly silent since and have refused to do interviews.

The latest casualty of the grueling funnies business could be 'Boondocks' creator Aaron McGruder. In March, McGruder, 32, took a break from the 7-year-old strip about Afro-coiffed Huey Freeman and his gangsta-loving little brother, Riley, saying, 'Every well needs occasional refreshing.'"