NEW YORK -- AIDS Thursday claimed the life of Andy Lippincott, the gay Doonesbury character whose illness last year triggered protests from readers of the comic strip.
Lippincott, the only gay character in a nationally syndicated daily comic, was diagnosed with AIDS in March last year in a sequence of strips by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
Several of the 900 newspapers that carry the strip refused to print the AIDS sequences, which received a mixed reaction from the gay community.
In Thursday's strip, Lippincott, an affable man who had attempted to cope with the devastating disease with a continual patter of gallows humor, dies quietly in his bed, the window open to a sunny day and a coveted C.D. of the Beach Boy's 'Wouldn't It be Nice' playing.
Last year's strips had drawn fire from the gay community for being insensitive.
In one of them, Lippincott's doctor tries to keep his spirits up with an exchange of black humor, commenting, 'You know your jammies clash with your lesions, don't you?'
The next day, his old friend Joanie Caucus fainted at seeing how emaciated he had become, and the doctor observes, 'You still make'em swoon, kid!'
'Well, women, sure,' Lippincott replied. 'A lot of good that does me.'
'Last year, he had some tasteless jokes in it about the Kaposi's sarcoma lesions,' said Carrisa Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. 'I think what he's been doing this year has been much more sensitive and true to life and actually pretty moving.
'I think it's been pretty well done. A lot of people who read the strip feel like they knew someone with AIDS and knew someone who died. I read it this morning and I felt pretty sad,' Cunningham said.
Some newspapers also refused to carry sequences of the strip in 1976, when Lippincott was introduced to readers and, after dating Caucus for a time in law school at the University of California at Berkeley, revealed that he was gay.
'Well, what's wrong with that? I'm usually cheerful too,' Caucus said before getting the point.
After law school, Lippincott, worked as an aide for Congresswoman Lacey Davenport, as did Caucus, appearing in the strip as it meandered through life, commenting on current affairs.
As in last year's controversy, some newspapers rejected the gay series as possibly offensive to readers, but publication was eventually resumed and the storyline accepted without problems, said Lee Salem, Trudeau's editor at Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, Mo.
Trudeau, who won a Pulitzer in 1975 for the strip, was a finalist this year for work that included the AIDS story, Salem said.
