NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In the comic book series Omaha the Cat Dancer, Susie Jensen is a tall, curvy anthropomorphic feline stripper with a large bosom and the stage name “Omaha.” She has an on-again, off-again relationship with the equally feline Chuck, a freelance commercial artist whose father is opening an underground strip club. There’s sex, there’s nudity and there’s fur — lots of it.

Omaha was unusual for an erotic comic book in the 1980s. Most “adult comics,” as they were called, were exploitative and emphasized violence, sex or a combination of the two. Omaha was more of a soap opera that included sex.

At the heart of the series was writer Kate Worley, who gave the comic its distinctive voice and helped cultivate its wide-ranging fan base.

The character Omaha, created by writer and artist Reed Waller, made her debut in 1978 as part of a fanzine. She eventually found her way into her own comic book, beginning in 1984. But then Waller got writer’s block.

“He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue,” Worley wrote in an introduction to a 1989 collected edition of Omaha. So she offered some suggestions. “I chattered for some time about possible plot directions, new characters,” she said.

When she was finished, Waller asked, “Would you like a job?” Worley took over as the writer, while Waller continued to draw the comic.

“Kate injected a woman’s point of view that was very important,” said Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press, which began publishing the series in 1986. “It would be easy to criticize a book dealing with a stripper as titillating. She brought a real humanity to the story. The characters became more real.”

Worley noticed that at comic conventions, a disproportionate number of women would line up at the booth to buy copies of Omaha, evidence that “puts pay to the lie that women, and particularly feminist women, hate sex,” Worley told The Comics Journal in 1991.

Worley also expanded the cast, giving Omaha a best friend, Shelley, who used a wheelchair, and adding gay, lesbian and bisexual characters, making the comic book relatable to a wider audience.

In the interview with The Comics Journal, Worley talked about how Shelley resonated with readers. “We have a number of longtime fans who are physically handicapped,” she said, “and one woman wrote us a letter and said, ‘You’ve been reading my diary again, haven’t you?’”

Fantasy author Neil Gaiman praised the series for its realism, saying in the foreword of a 1993 collected edition that it was “simply a story in which virtual cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love (just as they do in the world you and I inhabit).”

One issue, for instance, opens with Omaha at a beauty salon, moves on to conversations between various characters and ends with the protagonist and her friends posing for a Christmas portrait. Of 22 pages, only two depicted nudity and sex.

Though Worley is best known for Omaha, it was far from her only work. She wrote several issues of Jonny Quest, one of Wonder Woman and 10 stories for a Roger Rabbit series published by Disney Comics. She also wrote magazine articles on sexual identity and censorship.

Kathleen Louise Worley was born on March 16, 1958, in Bellville, Illinois, about 15 miles east of St. Louis, and made her way to Minneapolis in the 1970s. She met Waller through the Minnesota Science Fiction Society and reconnected with him a few years later, when they were actors for “Shockwave Radio Theater,” a weekly radio program about humor and science fiction on KFAI-FM. Each was going through a divorce at the time, and they moved in together after their breakups.

Waller had Omaha make her debut in Vootie, a fan publication devoted to funny animals; he had intended it to be a commentary on the closing of strip bars in St. Paul, where he was living at the time. Waller and Worley produced more than 20 issues of Omaha from 1986 to 1995, in fits and starts between other things. “They had a band together; they had full lives,” Kitchen said.

Worley explained their delays more directly in an issue of Comics Interview in 1988: “We are the most disorganized people in the business.”

Their series became involved in censorship battles. The first came in 1987, when copies of Omaha and other comics were seized in a raid on Friendly Frank’s, a comic book shop in Lansing, Illinois. The store’s manager, Michael Correa, was charged with possession and sale of obscene material. He was found guilty, fined $750 and sentenced to one year of court supervision.

Kitchen raised $20,000 and hired First Amendment lawyer Joseph Burton to appeal the case, and won. The money that remained was used to start the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that protects the First Amendment rights of the comics art form.

In 1990, copies of Omaha were seized in New Zealand. The next year, the country’s Indecent Publications Tribunal ruled that Omaha was, in fact, not indecent, acknowledging the “extremely high standard” of the comic’s artwork and writing and the “complex plot involving murder and civic corruption.”

The Tribunal concluded: “The sexual activity is portrayed in the context of permanent, loving relationships between articulate, caring and reasoning characters.”

“It was my favorite review of all time,” Kitchen said.

By 1995, Worley and Waller separated, and the adventures of Omaha went on hiatus for more than a decade. Worley married writer Jim Vance and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they had a son, Jacob, and a daughter, Sarah.

“During those 10 years we each did other projects,” Waller wrote in an email, “and though we tried occasionally to work together again, it was overwhelmingly difficult for both of us, because our breakup had been very long and very bad, something we managed to conceal from our fans till the very end.”

But Omaha, like a cat with nine lives, would return. In 2002, Worley and Waller reunited after a publisher expressed interest in reprinting the series and adding about a hundred new pages. The proposal was worth about $250,000, Waller said.

Worley would not live to see the project through. She learned she had lung cancer in 2002 and died on June 6, 2004. She was 45.

The deal eventually fell through over ownership rights. Still, Waller said, “in anticipation of this windfall for her children, she wrote copious notes for the rest of the story.” She even wrote select scenes, which allowed Vance to work with Waller to complete the saga for another publisher, NBM, which serialized the story’s conclusion in Sizzle Magazine.

The series is out of print in America, though Vol. 1 of a translated version was released this month in Germany.

When the final collected volume of Omaha premiered at the Comic-Con International in San Diego in 2013, it was a bittersweet moment.

“It had taken us too long to finish it, interest had waned, and the book did not sell very well,” Waller wrote. (He now shares the rights for Omaha with Jodi Vance, the widow of Jim Vance, who died of cancer in 2017.)

The story’s final panels serve as a fitting coda to the series. “After all they’ve been through,” one character says of Omaha and Chuck, “maybe it’s time we leave them to each other.” The last image is of a closed door with a sign that reads, “Please Do Not Disturb.”

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