If past letters to the editor and comments on our Web site are any guide, I'm sure there are those in the community cheering today's announcement that Mark Thornhill is leaving his longtime job as editorial cartoonist at the North County Times.

Don't count me among them.

Mark's decision to move on to the next chapter of his professional life not only leaves a void in the pages of this paper, it leaves a void in the intellectual and political discourse in North County.

Truth be told, Mark's world view, which springs from his biblically based Christian faith, is probably closer to that of the North County community at large than is mine or that of most of Mark's critics. His defenders may not have been as vociferous as his critics, but clearly Mark spoke for an awfully broad swath of this community.

And yet, despite his resonance with the larger community, Mark often found himself swimming alone on a daily basis. To be an openly conservative Christian in the news business is to swim against the current a good chunk of the time.

But having his dissenting voice in our newsroom made us a better newspaper by consistently making us aware of the views and feelings of a demographic all too underrepresented in this and just about every newsroom: conservative believers.

Of course, Mark also took heat from those readers who disagreed with his cartoons, or who chose to find them offensive. He received by far the most hate mail of anyone who's ever contributed to these pages. Much of it was vile, some profane.

It is a disturbing mark of current social conditions that people feel that disagreeing with someone's point of view somehow grants permission to attack the dissenter's very humanity.

And what was lost, I think, in the heated reaction to many of Mark's admittedly pointed cartoons is the reality that he never chose what appeared on our pages. The editorial page editors, and sometimes the top editor and even publisher, made those calls.

In the early 1990s, when I was promoted to opinion pages editor of one of the Times' predecessors, the Blade-Citizen, Mark was already here, providing graphics work and also contributing an opinion cartoon for each Sunday's paper.

What was readily apparent upon seeing just a couple of Mark's cartoons was that he had an immediately recognizable style, and a pretty unique voice among American editorial cartoonists.

The B-C's editor, Rusty Harris (now a managing editor of the Times) and I convinced both Mark and our publisher, Tom Missett, that one cartoon a week was a waste of Mark's talents.

Eventually, Mark was contributing between three and five a week, touching on issues both global and local.

And when we could talk him into entering his work in contests, he won a bunch of awards from fellow journalism professionals, too. Would have won more if he'd entered more.

But he didn't choose what ran. His editors did.

As I told Mark when we made him our full-time editorial cartoonist some 12, 13 years ago: "If you don't make me reject at least a handful of cartoons a year, you're not pushing hard enough."

Well, he met that challenge and most thrown his way. His mark on this community is indelible.

We were surely among a very small number of daily newspapers with a conservative evangelical Christian editorial cartoonist.

Maybe the only one.

Starting tomorrow, that will no longer be true.

Contact columnist Jim Trageser at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.