Tom Batiuk's syndicated comic strip Funky Winkerbean is dealing with a serious subject in its current, ripped-from-the-headlines storyline in which a comic shop retailer is arrested for selling an 'adult' comic book to an adult. In the narrative, which started running last week (in our local newspaper anyway), the unsuspecting retailer is chatting about superheroes with a young comics fan when an older female customer enters the store and gravitates to the adult comics rack.  Her scowling face indicates that she is up to no good and her thought balloons read: 'Adult comics...now there's an oxymoron if I ever heard of one.'  She buys some comics and leaves, but after her visit an undercover cop meanders into the store, checks out the adult comics and arrests the shop owner, who is last seen contacting his lawyer.

Although at this point it's anybody's guess where Batiuk will take his storyline, he has already illuminated a key blind spot that fuels many attempts to censor comic books -- the inability to grasp that there can be such a thing as 'comics for adults.'