The venerable American comic strip doesn't seem as popular, or as influential, as it had been when people hung on every word of Dick Tracy, L'il Abner, and Pogo. This led some to make gloomy pronouncements about the end of that art form. Is the real problem, though, not that the medium itself is dated, but that its policies regarding appropriate content are stuck in 1953?

I'm inclined toward the latter view.

It used to be that comics were a bit ahead of the curve when it came to social trends. When Morrie Turner's "Wee Pals" came along in 1965 (the first mainstream strip with a multiethnic cast) the floodgates opened for the inclusion of non-stereotypical minority characters in comics. But some syndicate editor, somewhere, had the courage to be first, and had the foresight to realize the cataclysmic societal changes taking place around him.

No one's doing that today. Lynn Johnston's "For Better Or For Worse" managed to break new ground by outing the best friend of one of the characters as gay back in the nineties. Since then, however, newspaper comics have been in a holding pattern, retreating to the same old situations and formulaic jokes. They're too fearful of offending aged Aunt Minnie in Duluth, on the assumption that only folks like her are reading comic strips these days. It isn't true--just let an editor drop a beloved strip and watch the flood of irate responses pour in. They can't all be coming from nice old grannies. Yet they hold to that attitude, to the degree that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Part of the problem, too, is that newspaper strips have increasing competition from something they could easily have laughed off as recently as a decade ago. The internet.

Just as broadcast TV had to compete with the relative freedom of cable, newspaper syndicates are going to have to compete with the no-holds-barred webcomic if they want to avoid becoming as much a relic of the past as running boards and whalebone corsets. (An ironic attitude for your ragtime gal to take, I know, as she likes running boards, if not corsets. But nostalgia has its place, and its limits).

After reading Christine Smith's wonderful web strip "The Princess" recently, I began to think, "Here we have an emerging minority, one that's increasing in influence as well as in number. Chances are good that every cisgendered person is going to meet, grow up with, live next door to, or work alongside one of us sooner or later." Therefore, doesn't it make sense for mainstream comic strips to acknowledge that fact?

"The Princess" is, to me, the perfect candidate to go mainstream, being well-drawn and well-plotted, with memorable characters, which is more than can be said of much of what is in newspapers these days. Even though many of the characters are gender-nonconforming, including most of the kids, it's done in a very inoffensive way, without pulling punches.

It's something I would love to try myself, in fact. I've held off up to now for one reason, and it's not fear of offending non-TG readers. I fear I would offend other transpeople. I was once on a mailing list with transpeople who had transitioned at a young age. They are generally distrustful of those who, like me, transitioned in their thirties or later, and accused us of trying to co-opt their experience. Any strip I do would have a child as protagonist, as does The Princess, simply because I feel I can write kids more easily. I was not like Sarah--I didn't cross-dress or openly express any gender difference as a small child, so can I safely write about those who did? I'm guessing Christine Smith transitioned as an adult, but she seems to understand transkids pretty well. But I don't know yet whether I'd do them justice. If not me, however, someone will.

And if syndicate editors are smart, they'll sign that someone to a long contract.