Religion: Comic Cleric

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Where will David Crane's first parish be? Will well-born Virginia want to marry him when she finds out the rugged truth? How will Boulder Bluff's cow country characters take to the tall, blond, young minister fresh from divinity school?

These are the questions posed in 101 U.S. newspapers this week by a slick new comic strip, or "fiction panel," as the trade knows unfunny funnies. David Crane follows in the soapy footsteps of those other vocational do-gooders, Rex Morgan, M.D., Steve Roper, wholesome news photographer, and Mary Worth, motherly meddler.

The Rev. David Crane and his wellrounded bride (he marries Virginia in strip No. 17) struggle to beam the Light of the World on what the Hall Syndicate calls "an average sort of town filled with average sort of people, all of whom have warm, human stories." Differences in faith, doctrine and observance are passed lightly by, though later sequences are planned to build up a priest and a rabbi as community heroes. Idea for the strip came from Robert M. Hall, president of the Hall Syndicate, though many another syndicate had considered and rejected it as too controversial to handle. Apparently, the hero is a minister simply for the sake of credibility in presenting spiritually centered man "against the heavy materialistic stress of modern life," explains the syndicate. "Only in such a person, motivated by moral rather than financial considerations, could faith triumph."

David Crane's creator is Canadian-born Artist Winslow Mortimer, 36, who lives in Carmel, N.Y., collects guns, goes to Drew Methodist Church. He is aided by Hartzell Spence, son of a Methodist minister, who wrote One Foot in Heaven, and who serves as idea man and general consultant for the strip. Between them the two have a problem as old as literature —how to make the good as interesting as the bad.