Doonesbury

Doonesbury is a comic strip by Garry Trudeau that chronicles the adventures and lives of a vast array of different characters, of different ages, professions, and backgrounds — from the President of the United States to the title character, Michael Doonesbury, now a middle-aged, remarried father.

Frequently political in nature, Doonesbury features characters professing a range of affiliations, but the cartoon’s editorial slant is noted for a liberal outlook. The name "Doonesbury" is a combination of the word doone (1960s prep school slang for "someone unafraid to appear foolish") and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau's roommate at Yale University.

History

Doonesbury began as a continuation of Bull Tales, which appeared in the Yale University student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, beginning September, 1968. It focused on local campus events at Yale. The executive editor of the paper in the late 1960s, Reed Hundt, who later served as the chairman of the FCC, noted that the Daily News had a flexible policy about publishing cartoons: “We publish[ed] pretty much anything.”

As Doonesbury, the strip debuted as a daily strip in about two dozen newspapers on October 26, 1970 -- the first strip from Universal Press Syndicate. A Sunday strip began on March 21, 1971. Many of the early strips were reprints of the Bull Tales cartoons, with some changes to the drawings and plots. BD’s helmet changed from having a “Y” (for Yale) to a star (for the fictional Walden College). Mike and BD started Doonesbury as roommates; they were not roommates in the original.

Doonesbury became well known for its social and political commentary, always timely, and peppered with wry and ironic humor. It is presently syndicated in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide. The decision, on September 12, 2005 to drop Doonesbury from The Guardian (United Kingdom) was reversed less than 24 hours later, after the strip’s followers voiced strong discontent.

Like Li‘l Abner and Pogo before it, Doonesbury blurred the distinction between editorial cartoon and the funny pages. In May 1975, the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first strip cartoon to be so honored. That month, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, the publishers of collections of Doonesbury until the mid-1980s took out an ad in the New York Times Book Review, marking the occasion by saying: It’s nice for Trudeau and Doonesbury to be so honored, “but it’s quite another thing when the Establishment clutches all of Walden Commune to its bosom.” That same year, then-U.S. President Gerald Ford acknowledged the stature of the comic strip, telling the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association at their annual dinner, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury—not necessarily in that order.”^[1]

In 1977, Trudeau wrote a script for a twenty-six-minute animated “special.” A Doonesbury Special was produced and directed by Trudeau, along with John Hubley (who died during the storyboarding stage)^[2] and Faith Hubley. The Special was first broadcast by NBC on November 27, 1977. It won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for best short film, and received an Academy Award nomination (for best animated short film), both in 1978.^[2] Voice actors for the special included Barbara Harris, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Jack Gilford and Will Jordan. Also included were two songs “sung” by the character of Jimmy Thudpucker (actually actor/singer/songwriter/producer James Allen "Jimmy" Brewer), entitled “Stop in the Middle” and “I Do Believe,” also part of the "Special." The compositions and performances were credited to “Jimmy Thudpucker,” but were in fact co-written and sung by Brewer, who also co-wrote and provided the vocals for "Ginny's Song," a 1976 single on the Warner Bros. Label, and "Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest Hits, an LP released by Windsong Records, John Denver's subsidiary of RCA Records)

The strip underwent a significant change after Trudeau returned to it from a 22 month hiatus (from January 1983 to October 1984). Before the break in the strip, the characters were eternal college students, living in a commune together near “Walden College,” which was modelled after Trudeau’s alma mater. During the break, Trudeau helped create a Broadway musical of the strip, showing the graduation of the main characters. The Broadway adaptation opened at the Biltmore Theatre on November 21, 1983, and played 104 performances. Elizabeth Swados composed the music for Trudeau’s book and lyrics.

After the hiatus

The strip resumed some time after the events in the musical, with further changes having taken place after the end of the musical’s plot. While Mike, Mark, Zonker, BD and Boopsie were all now graduates, BD and Boopsie were living in Malibu, where BD was a third-string quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, and Boopsie was making a living from walk-on and cameo roles. Mark was living in Washington, DC, working for National Public Radio. Michael and JJ had gotten married, and Mike had dropped out of business school to start work in an advertising agency in New York City. Zonker, still not ready for the “real world,” was living with Mike and JJ until he was accepted as a medical student at his Uncle Duke’s “Baby Doc College” in Haiti.

Prior to the hiatus, the strip’s characters had aged at the tectonically slow rate that is standard for comic strips. But when Trudeau returned to “Doonesbury,” the characters began to age in something close to real time, as in “Gasoline Alley” and “For Better or for Worse.” Since then, the main characters’ age and career development has tracked that of standard media portrayals of baby boomers, with jobs in advertising, law enforcement, and the dot-com boom. Current events are mirrored through the original characters, their offspring (the “second generation”), and occasional new characters.

Post-hiatus, Trudeau developed a more sophisticated look for the strip, often varying his angles from frame to frame. The result was more graphically dynamic without sacrificing the deadpan quality that made the punchlines land.

Garry Trudeau received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1994, and their Reuben Award for 1995 for his work on the strip.

Characteristic style

The unnamed college attended by the main characters was later given the name “Walden College,” revealed to be in Connecticut (the same state as Yale), and depicted as devolving into a third-rate institution under the weight of grade inflation, slipping academic standards, and the end of tenure—issues that Trudeau has consistently revisited since the original characters graduated. Many of the second generation of Doonesbury characters are attending Walden, a venue Trudeau uses to advance his concerns about academic standards in America.

With the exception of Walden College, Trudeau has frequently used real-life settings, based on real scenarios, but with fictional results. Due to deadlines, some real-world events have rendered some of Trudeau’s comics unusable, such as a 1973 series featuring John Ehrlichman, a 1989 series set in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, a 1993 series involving Zoë Baird, and a 2005 series involving Harriet Miers. Trudeau has also delighted and intrigued readers by displaying fluency in various forms of jargon, including that of real estate agents, flight attendants, computer scientists, journalists, presidential aides, and soldiers in Iraq.

Use of real-life politicians as characters

Even though Doonesbury frequently features major real-life U.S. politicians, they are rarely depicted with their real face. Originally, strips featuring the President of the United States would show an external view of the White House, with dialogue emerging from inside. During the Gerald Ford administration, characters would be shown speaking to Ford at press conferences, and fictional dialogue supposedly spoken by Ford would be written as coming “off-panel.” Similarly, while having several characters as students in a class taught by Henry Kissinger, the dialogue made up for Kissinger would also come from “off-panel.” Sometimes hands, or in rare cases, the back of heads would also be seen.

More recently, personal symbols reflecting some aspect of their character are used. For example, during the 1980s, character 'Ron Headrest' served as a doppelganger for Ronald Reagan and was depicted as a computer-generated artificial-intelligence, an image based on the television character Max Headroom. Members of the Bush family have been depicted as invisible. During his term as Vice President, George H. W. Bush was first depicted as completely invisible, his words emanating from a little “spark” (or a "point of light") in the air. This was originally a reference to the man’s perceived low profile and his denials of knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair. (In one strip, published March 20, 1988, the vice president almost materialized, but only made it to an outline before reverting to invisibility.) George W. Bush was later symbolized by a Stetson hat atop the same invisible point, because he was Governor of Texas prior to his presidency (Trudeau accused him of being “all hat and no cattle”, reiterating the characterization of Bush by columnist Molly Ivins). The point became a giant asterisk (a la Roger Maris) and following the 2000 presidential elections and the controversy over vote-counting. Later, President Bush’s hat was changed to a Roman military helmet (again, atop an asterisk) representing imperialism. Towards the end of his first term, the helmet became battered, with the gilt work starting to come off and with clumps of bristles missing from the top. (By now, the helmet has been dented almost beyond recognition.) On September 2, 2006, he fantasized about himself wearing a crown.

Other notable symbols include a waffle for the indecisive Bill Clinton (chosen by popular vote—the other possibility had been a “flipping coin”), an unexploded (but sometimes lit) bomb for the hot-tempered Newt Gingrich, a feather for the “lightweight” Dan Quayle and a giant groping hand for Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is addressed by other characters as “Herr Gröpenfuhrer,” a reference to accusations of sexual assault against Schwarzenegger). Many minor politicians have also been represented as icons over the years, like a swastika for David Duke, but only for the purposes of a gag strip or two. Trudeau has made his use of icons something of an in joke to readers, where the first appearance of a new one is often a punchline in itself.

The long career of the series and continual use of real-life political figures, analysts note, have led to some uncanny cases of the cartoon foreshadowing a national shift in the politicians’ political fortunes. Tina Gianoulis in St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture observes: “In 1971, well before the conservative Reagan years, a forward-looking BD called Ronald Reagan his ‘hero.’ In 1984, almost ten years before Congressman Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, another character worried that he would ‘wake up someday in a country run by Newt Gingrich.’ ”^[3] In its 2003 series “John Kerry: A Candidate in the Making” on the 2004 presidential race, the Boston Globe reprinted and discussed 1971 Doonesbury cartoons of the young Kerry’s Vietnam War protest speeches.^[4]

Characters

Main article: List of characters in the comic strip Doonesbury

Doonesbury has a large group of recurring characters, with 24 of them currently listed on the cast list at the strip’s website.^[5] There, it notes that “readers new to Doonesbury sometimes experience a temporary bout of character shock,” as the sheer number of characters—and the historical connections among them—can be overwhelming.

The main characters of the strip are a group who attended the fictional Walden College during the strip’s first twelve years, and moved into a commune together in April 1972. Most of the other characters first appeared as family members, friends, or other acquaintances of these. The original “Walden Commune” residents were: Mike Doonesbury, Zonker Harris, Mark Slackmeyer, Nicole, Bernie and DiDi. In September 1972, Joanie Caucus joined the comic, meeting Mike and Mark in Colorado, and eventually moved into the commune. They were later joined by BD and his girlfriend (later wife) Boopsie, upon B.D.'s return from Vietnam. Nicole, DiDi, and Bernie were mostly phased out of the strip in the next few years, and Zonker's Uncle Duke was introduced as the most prominent character outside the Walden group, and the main link to many secondary characters.

The Walden students graduated in 1983, after which the strip began to progress in something closer to real time. Their spouses and developing families became more important after this: Joanie's daughter JJ Caucus married Mike and they had a daughter, Alex Doonesbury. They divorced, Mike remarried to Kim Rosenthal, a Vietnamese refugee (who had appeared in the strip as a baby adopted by a Jewish-American family just after the fall of Saigon), and J.J. married Zeke Brenner, her ex-boyfriend and Uncle Duke's former groundskeeper. Joanie remarried Rick Redfern, and they had a son, Jeff. Uncle Duke and Roland Hedley have also appeared often, frequently in unconnected, more topical settings. In more recent years the second generation of characters have taken prominence as they have grown up to college age: Jeff Redfern, Alex Doonesbury, and Zonker's nephew Zipper Harris.

Milestones

Doonesbury delved into a number of political and social issues, causing controversies, and breaking new ground on the comics pages. Among the milestones:

• A November 1972 strip depicting Zonker telling a little boy in a sandbox a fairy tale ending in the protagonist being awarded “his weight in fine, uncut Turkish hashish” raised an uproar.^[6]

• During the Watergate scandal, one strip showed Mark on the radio with a “Watergate profile” of John Mitchell, declaring him “Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!” A number of newspapers removed the strip and one, The Washington Post, even ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon.^[7] Following Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was re-run with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed," lampooning the media's apparent glossing-over of his image in the wake of his death.

• In June 1973, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes dropped Doonesbury for being too political. The strip was quickly reinstated after hundreds of protests by readers, who were soldiers in the U.S. Army.

• September 1973: The Lincoln Journal became the first newspaper to move Doonesbury to its editorial page.^[8]

• In February 1976, Andy Lippincott, a classmate of Joanie’s, told her that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, “We just decided we weren’t ready for homosexuality in a comic strip.”^[9]

• In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed premarital sex in this fashion.^[9] Again, the strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers.

• In June 1978, one strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.

• In August 1979, Trudeau took a three-week vacation from the strip, which was uncommon among comic strip writers and artists.

• From January 1983 through September 1984, the strip was not published so that Trudeau could bring the strip to Broadway.

• In June 1985, a series of strips included photos of Frank Sinatra associating with a number of people with mafia connections, one alongside text from President Ronald Reagan’s speech awarding Sinatra the Medal of Freedom.

• In January 1987, politicians were again declared “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” This time it was Donald Regan, John Poindexter and Oliver North, referring to their roles in the Iran-Contra Affair.

• In June 1989, several days’ comics (which had already been drawn and written) had to be replaced with repeats, due to the humor of the strips being considered in bad taste in light of the mass murder of democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Trudeau himself asked for the recall.^[10] This was despite an interview published with Universal Press Syndicate’s Editorial Director, Lee Salem, in the 28 May 1989 San Jose Mercury News in which Salem stated his hopes the strips could still be used.

• In May 1990, the storyline included the death of Andy Lippincott, who succumbed to AIDS.

• In November 1991, a series of strips appeared to give credibility to a real-life prison inmate who said that former Vice-President Dan Quayle had connections with drug dealers; the strip sequence was dropped by some two dozen newspapers, in part because the allegations had been investigated and dispelled previously.^[11](Six years later, the reporter who broke the Quayle story some weeks after the Doonesbury cartoons later published a book saying he no longer believed the story had been true.^[12])

• In December 1992, Working Woman magazine named two characters (Joanie Caucus and Lacey Davenport) as role models for women.

• In November 1993, a story line dealing with California wildfires was dropped from several California newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the San Diego Union-Tribune.^[13]

• In June 1994, the Roman Catholic Church took issue with a series of strips dealing with the book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell. A few newspapers dropped single strips from the series, and the Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois, refused to run the entire series.

• In March 1995, John McCain denounced Trudeau on the floor of the Senate: “Suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt.” This was in response to a strip about Bob Dole’s strategy of exploiting his war record in his presidential campaign. The quotation was used on the cover of Trudeau’s book Doonesbury Nation. (McCain and Trudeau later made peace: McCain wrote the foreword to The Long Road Home, Trudeau’s collection of comic strips dealing with BD’s leg amputation during the second Iraq war.)

• Later in 1995 Mark Slackmeyer, a gay character from the strip, was seen in the final days of Berkeley Breathed’s comic Outland heading off with a main character from that series, Steve Dallas.

• In February 1998, a strip dealing with Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers because it included the phrases “oral sex” and “semen-streaked dress.”

• In November 2000, a strip was not run in some newspapers when Duke says of then-Presidential candidate George W. Bush: “He’s got a history of alcohol abuse and cocaine.”

• In September 2001, a strip perpetuated the Internet hoax^[14] that claimed George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, half that of Bill Clinton.^[15] When caught repeating the hoax, Trudeau apologized "with a trademark barb - he said he deeply apologised for unsettling anyone who thought the president quite intelligent."^[16]

• In 2003 a cartoon that publicized the recent medical research suggesting a connection between masturbation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, with one character alluding to the practice as “self-dating,” was not run in many papers; pre-publication sources indicated that as many as half of the 700 papers to which it was syndicated were planning not to run the strip.^[17]

• February 2004: Trudeau used his strip to make the apparently genuine offer of USD$10,000 (to the USO in the winner’s name^[18]) for anyone who can personally confirm that George W. Bush was actually present during a part of his service in the National Guard. Reuters and CNN reported by the end of that week that despite 1,300 responses, no credible evidence had been offered;^[19] as of 2006, the offer remains unclaimed.

• April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw BD’s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the Iraq War. Later that month, after awakening and discovering his situation, BD exclaims “SON OF A BITCH!!!” The single strip was removed from many papers—including the Boston Globe^[20]—although in others, such as Newsday, the offending word was replaced by a line. The Dallas Morning News ran the cartoon uncensored, with a footnote that the editor believed profanity was appropriate, given the subject matter. An image of BD with amputated leg also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954).

• May 2004: two Sunday strips were published containing only the names of soldiers killed in the War in Iraq. Further such lists were printed in May 2005, May/June 2006 and 2007.

• On 7 March 2005, the series began a sequence memorializing the death by suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the inspiration for the character of Duke. In the sequence, Duke’s head explodes upon reading the news; no newspapers are known to have refused to print that day’s strip. Trudeau indicated in a news story that one reason for this willingness may have been that the character had a history of similar events: “I’ve been exploding Duke’s head as far back as 1985,” he said.^[21]

• In June 2005, Trudeau came out with The Long Road Home, a book devoted to BD’s recovery from his loss of a leg in Iraq. Although Trudeau opposed the Iraq War, the foreword was written by Sen. John McCain, a supporter of the war. Proceeds from the book, and its sequel The War Within, benefit Fisher House, the generic name for homes where families of injured soldiers may stay near where they are recovering, also known as “the military equivalent of Ronald McDonald House.”^[22]

• July 2005: Several newspapers declined to run two strips in which George W. Bush refers to his adviser Karl Rove as “Turd Blossom,” a nickname Bush has been reported to use for Rove.^[23]

• In September 2005 when the British newspaper The Guardian relaunched in a smaller format, Doonesbury was dropped due to space considerations. After a flood of complaints the strip was reinstated with an omnibus covering the issues missed and a full apology.^[24]

• The strips scheduled to run from 31 October to 5 November 2005 and a Sunday strip scheduled for 13 November about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were withdrawn suddenly after her nomination was. The strips have been posted on the official website,^[25] and were replaced by re-runs by the syndicate.

• Trudeau sought input from readers as to where Alex Doonesbury should attend college in a 15 May 2006 straw cyber-poll at Doonesbury.com. Voters chose among MIT, Rensselaer, and Cornell. Students from Rensselaer and then MIT hacked the system, which was designed to limit each computer to one vote. In the end, voters logged 175,000 votes, with MIT grabbing 48% of the total. The Doonesbury Town Hall FAQ stated that given that the rules of the poll had not ruled out such methods, “the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected,” declaring that Alex will be attending MIT.

• Before the 2008 presidential election, Trudeau sent out strips to run in the days after the election in which Barack Obama was portrayed as the winner. Trudeau explained that poll analysts saw an Obama victory as a near-certainty and "If he loses, there'll be such a national uproar that a blown call in a comic strip won't be much noticed."^[26] Newspapers were also provided with old strips as an alternative.^[26] In response, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said, "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame."^[27]

Criticism

Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts called Trudeau "unprofessional" for taking a long sabbatical. ^[28]

Some conservatives have intensely criticized Doonesbury. Several examples are cited in the Milestones section. The strip has also met criticism from its readers almost since it began syndicated publication. For example, when Lacey Davenport’s husband Dick, in the last moments before his death, calls on God, several conservative pundits called the strip blasphemous. The sequence of Dick Davenport’s final bird-watching and fatal heart attack was run in November 1986.

Doonesbury has angered, irritated, or been rebuked by many of the political figures that have appeared or been referred to in the strip over the years. Outspoken critics have included members of every US Presidential administration since Richard Nixon’s. A 1984 series of strips showing then Vice President George H.W. Bush placing his manhood in a blind trust—in parody of Bush’s using that financial instrument to fend off concerns that his governmental decisions would be influenced by his investment holdings—brought the politician to complain, “Doonesbury’s carrying water for the opposition. Trudeau is coming out of deep left field.”^[29] There have also been other politicians who did not view the way that Doonesbury portrayed them very favorably, including former U.S. House Speaker Thomas Tip O’Neill and former California Governor Jerry Brown.

The strip has also met controversy over every military conflict it has dealt with, including Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and both Gulf Wars. When Doonesbury ran the names of soldiers who had died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, conservative commentators accused Trudeau of using the American dead to make a profit for himself, and again demanded that the strip be removed from newspapers.

After many letter writing campaigns demanding the removal of the strip were unsuccessful, conservatives changed their tactics, and instead of writing to newspaper editors, they began writing to one of the printers who prints the color Sunday comics. In 2005, Continental Features gave in to their demands, and refused to continue printing the Sunday Doonesbury, causing it to disappear from the 38 Sunday papers that Continental Features printed. Of the 38, only one newspaper The Anniston Star in Anniston, Alabama, continued to carry the Sunday Doonesbury, though of necessity in black and white.

Some newspapers have dealt with the criticism by moving the strip from the comics page to the editorial page, because many people believe that a politically based comic strip like Doonesbury does not belong in a traditionally child-friendly comics section. The Lincoln Journal started the trend in 1973. In some papers (such as the Tulsa World) Doonesbury appears on the opinions page alongside Mallard Fillmore, a politically conservative comic strip.

On the weekend before the November 4, 2008 presidential election, Trudeau submitted a strip that was scheduled to be published on November 5. That the strip depicted soldiers celebrating a win by Barack Obama brought some criticism that led to Trudeau making a replacement strip available to subscribers who requested one.^[30] When asked whether he created the original strip with complete confidence in an Obama victory, Trudeau replied: "'Nope, more like rational risk assessment. Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com is now giving McCain a 3.7% chance of winning – pretty comfortable odds. . . . Here's the way I look at it: If Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it'll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face'."^[31]

Awards and honors

• In 1975, the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first strip cartoon to be so honored. It was also a Nominated Finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005.
• Trudeau received “Certificates of Achievement” from the US Army 4th Battalion 67th Armor Regiment and the Ready First Brigade in 1991 for his comic strips dealing with the first Gulf War. The texts of these citations are quoted on the back of the comic strip collection Welcome to Club Scud!
• Trudeau won the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1995.^[32]
• Trudeau was awarded the US Army’s Commander’s Award for Public Service in 2006 for his series of strips about BD’s recovery following the loss of his leg in Iraq.^[33]

See also

• Enzo Baldoni

Published collections

Main article: List of published collections of Doonesbury

Notes

References

• Trudeau, Garry (1984). Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 0-517-05491-4. 
• Trudeau, Garry, Doonesbury Flashbacks CD-ROM for Microsoft Windows. Published by Mindscape, 1995.
• NCS Awards

External links

• Doonesbury home page
• Doonesbury—The Sandbox-Military Blog
• DOONESBURY: Drawing and Quartering for Fun and Profit—TIME Magazine article from 9 February 1976
• The Doonesbury Special (1977) at the Internet Movie Database