What's funny about gay marriage?

GAY MATERIAL in newspaper comic strips is about as rare as an episode of The O.C featuring an actual teenager. But what was once solely the occasional realm of "Doonesbury" and "For Better or for Worse" has branched out to other comics as the gay marriage issue sweeps the land.

As the cat in "Get Fuzzy" tried to get a constitutional amendment banning ferrets and Wiley Miller's "Non Sequitur" joked about, "activist judges," three minority-created comic strips tackled the issue head-on. "La Cucaracha" imagined a marriage announcement between Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia, while "Boondocks" featured a frustrated African-American grandfather trying to tell his grandsons about gay marriage.

Darrin Bell's six-month-old "Candorville" featured a four-day sequence with his characters' watching couples in line to be married. The son of a black man and a white Jewish woman, Bell says that he identities "strongly with anyone who has to deal with the state telling them they're second-class citizens." Neither Miller nor Bell has received much negative reaction to their strips; indeed, Miller noted. the antigay marriage backlash is "such a huge, obvious issue for satire." Dagwood Bumstead, the Wizard of Id, and Ziggy refused to comment.