Jok Church, of Beakman and Jax cartoon strip for kids, dies at 67

Jok Church knew about gravity, about the planets and about why a spoon reflects an image of your face upside down — and with a cartoonist’s flair for the serious and the absurd, he loved to explain it all to kids.

Mr. Church, the creator of the syndicated kid’s cartoon strip You Can With Beakman and Jax, also knew why stuff slides to the back of a drawer when you pull it open (inertia) and what makes light-up sneakers light up (LEDs).

His cartoon strip, which at its peak had 52 million readers in 13 countries, was such a hit that it spawned an equally wacky science-based kid’s TV show, “Beakman’s World,” that ran for four years during the 1990s, delighting and inspiriting millions of curious young minds.

Mr. Church died April 29 of an apparent heart attack while riding in a taxi near his Castro district home. He was 67.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Mr. Church hitchhiked to California after what he called his traumatic high school years.

‘Teacher saved my life’

“I was the class queer, the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys’ room,” he recalled in a 2007 lecture. “One teacher saved my life, by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers’ lounge for three years.”

Mr. Church arrived in Northern California with $85 in his pocket and found work as a news reporter for a Sacramento radio station. After a friend who worked as a landscaper for filmmaker George Lucas introduced the two men, Lucas hired Mr. Church to answer mail from young fans of his “Star Wars” movies, of which Mr. Church was a great admirer.

Mr. Church found that answering kids’ questions suited him, and he began doing the same thing in his new cartoon strip, first published in 1991 in the Marin Independent Journal. Each panel would feature a science question from a reader that Mr. Church’s spiky-haired alter ego, Beakman, would answer in a whimsical manner while also providing a science experiment that the reader could perform to verify the information.

Despite the humor of the strip, Mr. Church took his work seriously, occasionally discarding an already-drawn strip if he could not get the experiment to work. Once, when a reader asked if there was such a thing as a cube-shaped soap bubble, Mr. Church spent hours constructing a bubble model with straws and paper clips — only signing off on that comic strip after he finally produced a cube-shaped bubble of his own.

Proves air has weight

In another cartoon, to prove that air has weight, Beakman advised readers to fill two balloons, fasten them to opposite ends of a ruler, tie the whole thing to a string, suspend and balance it in midair — and then watch what happens to the ruler when you pop one of the balloons.

To a reader who asked how Beakman knew so much, Mr. Church revealed in another strip that the secret was to ask a lot of questions, especially of strangers. He encouraged his young readers to pick up their phones (with their parents’ permission) and do the same.

Computer art pioneer

“Think about your question,” Beakman advised. “If it’s about a dog’s nose being wet, you could (call) a vet. Be polite. Your job is to get past the receptionist (re-SEP-shun-ist). That’s how we’ve done it for, like, 30 years.”

Mr. Church drew his cartoon entirely on his computer, without use of pen or brush. It was said to be the first strip created entirely with computer graphics.

“He loved his work,” said his partner, Michael Hemes. “Although he did get frustrated when the newspapers ran cartoons in smaller and smaller spaces, and he was forced to eliminate text.

At the time of his death, Mr. Church was in the process of drawing Beakman strips explaining why rubber balls bounce and what makes glue stick.

Christo associate

Mr. Church was active with the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, often creating and testing experiments there. He was also a close associate of the environmental artist Christo and was active in gay rights causes and in supporting young artists. He was a passionate fan of the Beatles, of motion picture sound effects and of the color red, which were not coincidentally the color of Beakman’s eyeglasses.

He is survived by Hemes and by his brother, Jim Church of Washington, D.C.

Plans for a memorial service in San Francisco are pending.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com