Doonesbury

Title	Doonesbury
Author	Garry Trudeau
Url	Doonesbury.com
Status	Daily
Syndicate	Universal Press Syndicate
First	October 26, 1970
Genre	Humor, Politics, Satire
Preceded by	Bull Tales

Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various 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 representing a range of affiliations, but the cartoon is noted for a liberal outlook. The name "Doonesbury" is a combination of the word doone (prep school slang for "someone who is out to lunch") and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau's roommate at Yale University.

Doonesbury is written and pencilled by Garry Trudeau, then inked and lettered by his assistant Don Carlton.

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 chair 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 Bull Tales.

Doonesbury became well known for its social and political commentary, always timely, and peppered with wry and ironic humor. It is currently syndicated in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide.

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.”

, from August 12, 1974; awarded the Pulitzer Prize.]]

In 1977, Trudeau wrote a script for a 26-minute animated special. A Doonesbury Special was produced and directed by Trudeau, along with John Hubley (who died during the storyboarding stage) 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.)

Later, George W. Bush was 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) 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 late 2008, the helmet had been dented almost beyond recognition. No symbol for Barack Obama has appeared in the strip; the May 30, 2009 strip showed Obama and an aide wondering what the reason for this might be.

Other 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.’ ” 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.

Characters

Doonesbury has a large group of recurring characters, with 24 currently listed at the strip’s website. 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 are a group who attended the fictional Walden College during the strip’s first 12 years, and moved into a commune together in April 1972. Most of the other characters first appeared as family members, friends, or other acquaintances. 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 moving 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 in subsequent 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 J.J. Caucus married Mike and they had a daughter, Alex Doonesbury. They divorced, Mike remarried Kim Rosenthal, a Vietnamese refugee (who had appeared in the strip as a baby adopted by a Jewish family just after the fall of Saigon), and J.J. married Zeke Brenner, her former boyfriend and Uncle Duke's former groundskeeper. Joanie married Rick Redfern, and they had a son, Jeff. Uncle Duke and Roland Hedley have also appeared often, frequently in more topical settings unconnected to the main characters. In more recent years the second generation has taken prominence as they have grown to college age: Jeff Redfern, Alex Doonesbury, Zonker's nephew Zipper Harris, and Uncle Duke's son Earl.

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.

During the Watergate scandal, a 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. Following Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was rerun 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 military readers in the U.S. Army.

September 1973: The Lincoln Journal became the first newspaper to move Doonesbury to its editorial page.

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.”

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. Again, the strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers, although some newspapers opted to simply repeat the opening frame of that day's strip.

In June 1978, a 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, uncommon among comic strip writers and artists.

From January 1983 through September 1984, the strip was not published so that Trudeau could bring it 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 violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Trudeau himself asked for the recall. despite an interview published with Universal Press Syndicate Editorial Director Lee Salem in the May 28, 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 stated 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. (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.)

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

In November 1993, a storyline 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.

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 Bloomington, Illinois Pantagraph 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, to the great amusement of many readers of both strips given the one-time "tensions" between their respective authors.

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 that claimed George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, half that of Bill Clinton. When caught repeating the hoax, Trudeau apologized "with a trademark barb - he said he deeply apologized for unsettling anyone who thought the president quite intelligent."

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.

February 2004: Trudeau used his strip to make the apparently genuine offer of USD$10,000 (to the USO in the winner’s name) 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; 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—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 March 7, 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.

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. McCain was impressed by Trudeau's desire to highlight the struggle of seriously wounded veterans, and his desire to assist them. 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 their loved ones are recovering, also known as “the military equivalent of Ronald McDonald House.”

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.

In September 2005 when The Guardian relaunched in a smaller format, Doonesbury was dropped due to space considerations. After a flood of protests, the strip was reinstated with an omnibus covering the issues missed and a full apology.

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

Trudeau sought input from readers as to where Alex Doonesbury should attend college in a May 15, 2006 straw 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." In response, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said, "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame."

Criticism

Charles M. Schulz of Peanuts called Trudeau "unprofessional" for taking a long sabbatical.

In 1975, the Editorial Cartoonists' Society passed a resolution condemning the Pulitzer Prize committee's decision to award Trudeau the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for Doonesbury. After confirming that the award could not be revoked, Trudeau supported the resolution.

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.” There have also been other politicians who did not view the way that Doonesbury portrayed them very favorably, including former U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill and former/current 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. 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'."

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. 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. In 2008, Trudeau received the Mental Health Research Advocacy Award from the Yale School of Medicine for his depiction of the mental-health issues facing soldiers upon returning home from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Published collections

Notes

References

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 February 9, 1976

Category:Comic strips started in the 1970s Category:American comic strips Category:Political comic strips * Category:Satirical comics