Gil Thorp

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Gil Thorp is a sports-oriented comic strip running since September 8, 1958. Thorp is the athletic director of Milford High School and coaches the football, basketball, and baseball teams. In addition to the sports storylines, the strip also deals with issues facing teenagers such as teen pregnancy, steroids, and drug abuse.

The strip was created by Jack Berrill, who modeled and named Thorp after baseball player Gil Hodges and Olympian Jim Thorpe. Berrill continued the strip until he died of cancer on March 14, 1996.

Berrill chose author Jerry Jenkins (co-author of the religious Left Behind novels) to take over writing the strip. Many of Jenkins' stories were written uncredited by his son Chad Jenkins, a baseball coach at Bethel College. The Jenkins stories discussed overtly religious topics which had not appeared in the strip before, including an Orthodox Jew football player [1] and a 15-year-old pregnant girl whom Thorp talks out of getting an abortion [2]. The Jewish player sequence was interesting because the player, named David Greene, was never actually identified as a Jew; it was merely presumed he was Jewish.

Jenkins was followed as writer by Detroit News columnist Neal Rubin in 2004. The strip was drawn first by Berill's Connecticut Cartoonist Associate colleague Warren Stattler, then Frank Bowles, Ray Burns, and finally Frank McLaughlin following Burns' death in 2000.

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