Why Is This Night?

Why is this comic strip different from all other comic strips? Because it’s written by a Jewish artist, that’s why. And these days of Passover, we’re learning about their customs as we scan the daily adventures of the Pajama Diaries family, through the eyes of Terri Libenson. Oddly enough, she grew up across the river from where I am sitting.

There are comic strips which explain things, in addition to making us laugh (or, in the case of The Phantom, wonder why he wears his mask at home). The late Johnny Hart, who passed on to glory almost exactly three years ago, would occasionally work in Presbyterian faith in the strip, for better or worse.

Terri occasionally talks to us about her family’s Jewish heritage in a warm, homespun way. You learn and you laugh; the best way to get some education out.

I remember the most innocent of comic strips that ran in The Catholic Boy, a monthly magazine for, of all people, Catholic boys. We looked forward to it in grammar school and I later became friends with the editor. The strip was just the ideal of us altar boys, but today, oh wow, it would be condemned as a sarcastic anti-Catholic diatribe.

It concerned Fr. Jim, a handsome priest, and some young kid who lived with him in the rectory. The kid idolizes Fr. Jim. It was all so innocent in those days and we altar boys all wanted to be priests anyway; we envied the kid. But that was 1955 and we didn’t know men (priests and laypeople alike) did things to kids.