I Love Doonesbury

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/marmaduke/archive/images/marmaduke2004261470701.gif

The latest storyline has easily been the best in a long time -- he seems to do best now when he has something to focus on.

(To think what a player I would've been if I'd just asked the Apartment 3G questions instead.)

Here's the joke: Marmaduke is a big dog! Garfield is a lazy cat! Cathy is neurotic and overweight! And the Family Circus doesn't even MAKE jokes.

What happened to comics like Calvin and Hobbes (which i agree is the best ever), The Far Side, and Bloom County? Doonesbury is now one of only a very few that doesn't blow egregiously every single day. Can anyone think of any others?

Is Opus still around? It wasn't carried in any paper I can get here without paying out the ear.

xpost; the reason I wanted to know what Doonesbury was about is because I thought Zonker looked cool :) And it's been weird going back and reading strips that are familiar and realizing there's no way I would have understood them even with explanations.

Bloom County/Outland/Opus has not aged well with me.

I got all of the '70s and '80s Doonesbury collections at used book sales, they were fundamental to any interest in politics on my part. (And probably why I hate Richard Nixon more than anyone born in the '80s has the right to.)

That's for goddamn sure.

"YES NOW! INTO YOUR TURN!"

"Now, Harris, I put my pants on two legs at a time just like any other..."

Still, Zonker, Mark Slackmeyer and B.D. will forever be dear to me.

Roland the reporter: "Oh wow, together?"

I miss Jimmy Thudpucker.

Gasoline Alley holds that record I think -- been running since the twenties or something?

As far as the new Calvin and Hobbes, it'd probably be somewhere in between Get Fuzzy and Mutts, if it was actually out there right now. Mutts got the humanism, and Get Fuzzy got the nasty streak. I still love Mutts despite its semi-regular ventures into saccharine sentimentality, because McDonnell has a great grounding in all of the classic strips, which is definitely something that gets more of a chance to come out in the design of his Sunday strips. Sometimes I enjoy just looking at the design even more than reading the strip itself.

Doonesbury is still great too, to be on-topic for a second. This story arc has been pretty amazing.

I'm surprised to hear people talk of Calvin & Hobbes. I used to be crazy about that one, but I don't think the paper here gets it so if it's still going I haven't read it in like 10 years. I remember trying to share my love of it with my dad and he was baffled, but eventually he started to love it.

OTM, though i reread the first book a few months ago and it was still hysterically funny - espec. the one where Opus encounters the Hare Krishna guy.

best comic strip ever = Krazy Kat, closely followed by Peanuts. I think Trudeau and Watterson would both agree with me on that!

RS: "If somebody had told you back in college that Bush would be commander in chief one day, what would your reaction have been?"

Trudeau: "Complete confusion. He was just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries. On the other hand, I didn't know him very well -- there might have been undetected gravitas, an unseen thoughtfulness in his off-peak hours. That's a laughable image now, but at the time, you never know. FDR seemed a lightweight in his early years, but the course of his later life completely transformed him."

Great interview.

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http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050403
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050404
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050405
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050406
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050407
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050408

His ear for nasty flim-flam is phenomenal.

THE LONG ROAD HOME
One Step at a Time.
By G. B. Trudeau.
Illustrated. 93 pp. Andrews McMeel Publishing. Paper, $9.95.

I have always found it odd and a little frustrating that the largest, most concentrated cohort of Garry Trudeau's core constituency -- that is, we readers of this newspaper on newsprint -- must go elsewhere to read ''Doonesbury.'' And so as a New Yorker who only occasionally buys The Daily News and always forgets that the strip also runs every day in Slate and at nytimes.com, I have had a relationship with ''Doonesbury'' not unlike my relationship with the Metropolitan Museum and ''Nightline'' and the Union Square Cafe and my siblings: they've been around forever, so I take them for granted, and get to them more seldom than I'd like, although when I do I am always reminded, in a kind of self-flagellating D'oh! moment, just how splendid they are.

''Doonesbury'' collections ordinarily have titles that are funny (''The Revolt of the English Majors''), funnyish (''Talk to the Hand'') or at least jaunty (''Flashbacks''). The title of this compact new anthology -- ''The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time'' -- is earnest, without any wink or embedded irony whatsoever. And that's because it is all about the disabling war injury suffered by B.D., the quarterback-cum-coach serving as an Army officer in Iraq. In April of last year, a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humvee near Fallujah, nearly killing him, and ''The Long Road Home'' is just that -- B.D.'s evacuation to Baghdad, recuperation at Army medical centers and convalescence with his family back in the States. The cover illustration shows B.D. in a wheelchair with an artificial leg and (for the first time ever) without a helmet. There is no joke in the first strip, or the second, or the third. And the whole 84-episode series is thick with arcana about Army hospitals and prosthetics and rehabilitation.

But Garry Trudeau has not, thank goodness, fallen victim to Woody Allen Syndrome, neither Stage 1 (trying too desperately to be serious) nor Stage 2 (losing the ability to be funny). There's certainly more bittersweetness and melancholy here than in, say, ''Buck Wild Doonesbury,'' but only as a matter of degree. Trudeau has always leavened his main dish -- social and political satire, bobo comedies of manners -- with flavors from the wistful and elegiac end of the shelf. And there are plenty of chuckle-out-loud punch lines in the book. As when, during B.D.'s first phone call to his wife from the hospital, he beats around the bush about the particulars of his injury: ''Well, the good news is I'm finally down to my ideal weight.'' And when a visiting buddy shields his eyes from B.D.'s stump and says, ''Thanks for your sacrifice, dude.'' And when Boopsie, Mrs. B.D., reconsiders her plan to buy him a fabulous giant-screen TV because a nurse has warned her it could make him too sedentary, and he screams: ''No! That's wrong! The data on that is weak!'' And in maybe the funniest strip in the book, the hippie-slacker Zonker, now nanny to B.D. and Boopsie's daughter, tells the child they need to prepare the family home for her father's return by ''taping the wall sockets.'' She pauses and says, ''I thought that's for babies,'' and Zonker replies: ''Um . . . is it? I saw it on some program.''

So a story of war and amputation and depression and physical therapy manages to be funny and, maybe more surprisingly, entirely devoid of antiwar argument. The merits of the war in Iraq are never questioned or debated. For more than two years, Trudeau has used ''Doonesbury'' to rail against the war on every ground possible, but none of that material is here. Missing from this collection, for instance, are the exquisite Rumsfeld parodies to which one of B.D.'s men defaults like a tic; the Hunter S. Thompsonesque character, Duke, liberating the city of Al Amok; and one Army officer's explanation of the present Catch-22 -- that ''we've got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not get killed.''

TWO weeks into the injured-B.D. series run in newspapers, Bill O'Reilly wrote a column accusing Trudeau of ''using someone's personal tragedy to advance a political agenda.'' This was an odd and disingenuous criticism on a few counts. When are important political agendas -- antiwar or pro-war, anti-abortion or pro-abortion rights, whatever -- not advanced by telling stories about ''someone's personal tragedy''? If one weren't otherwise aware of his hard-core lefty politics, it would be reasonable to infer that the author of ''The Long Road Home'' was conventionally pro-military, maybe even a Republican. When he went on television last year to defend these strips, Trudeau had it exactly right: ''Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not,'' he said to George Stephanopoulos, ''we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.''

Getting John McCain to write an introduction to the book was the perfectly shrewd move to inoculate himself against any further carping from O'Reillyland. Trudeau's cheerful, love-the-warrior-but-hate-the-war sympathy for American soldiers is longstanding and seems altogether sincere, not (like, say, Michael Moore's) a cynical posture in the service of his political and commercial interests. Moreover, it has been reciprocated: during the war in Vietnam, ''Doonesbury'' ran in Stars and Stripes; during the early 90's, the Pentagon mounted a touring show of Trudeau's gulf war strips for the United States troops stationed in the region; and the military invited Trudeau to postwar Kuwait to award him medals of commendation.

O'Reilly and Moore notwithstanding, most people don't ideologically vet their entertainments before permitting themselves to enjoy them, just as good artists don't let political messages outshine story and character and sensibility. Plenty of veterans and pro-Vietnam War Republicans (like my father) loved Robert Altman's ''MASH,'' for instance, since its boyish black humor and foxhole existentialism were the point, not its presumed antiwar subtext.

''The Long Road Home'' is very ''MASH''-like, although as a result of the single-minded focus on B.D.'s injury, it seems more like the TV series (soft, sensitive, wise) than Altman's masterpiece (sexy, wild, anarchistic). ''MASH'' came out in 1970, the year Trudeau graduated from Yale and took his college paper's comic strip national. Trudeau has collaborated on TV projects with Altman, and calls him one of his great influences (along with Jules Feiffer, Charles M. Schulz and E. L. Doctorow). Perhaps it's through Altman that Trudeau has channeled the spirit of another artist of that older generation, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose presence seems to hover over the Iraqi war strips and particularly ''The Long Road Home.'' Mauldin enlisted as a regular G.I. before World War II, but by the end of the war his cartoons for Stars and Stripes were appearing in civilian papers in the States. His main characters were a pair of irreverent, non-gung-ho grunts, and General Patton raged about ''Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline.'' One of those cartoons -- a bedraggled, downcast soldier in a rainstorm with a caption that began, ''Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory'' -- was mentioned by the Pulitzer judges when they awarded Mauldin a prize in 1945. Sergeant Mauldin was 24 (two years younger than Trudeau when he won his), and had a great career as a (liberal) newspaper editorial cartoonist for another half-century.

''The Long Road Home,'' given its absence of any explicit ideological line, reminded me why ''Doonesbury'' has managed to endure so long and to be so fine so much of the time. Trudeau is a great comic writer whose devotion to politics and capacity for moral outrage are apparently undiminished after 37 years, but he is a great comic writer first, with the intellectual honesty that implies. He does not give a pass to the flaws and hypocrisies of his political comrades, and never has. Not only did he portray President Clinton as a grotesque, he was satirizing John Kerry at a time it was really politically incorrect to do so, just when Kerry had become the darling of the liberal media-political complex. In a ''Doonesbury'' from 1971, the 23-year-old Trudeau has a young man approach the strip's two main characters and tell them: ''If you care about this country at all, you better go listen to that John Kerry fellow. . . . He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!'' B.D. asks Mike, ''Who was that?'' and Mike tells him, ''John Kerry.'' In another strip in the series, Kerry thinks to himself, ''You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy.'' It is hard to imagine ''Mallard Fillmore,'' the comic strip Bruce Tinsley began syndicating 11 years ago as a kind of conservative ''Doonesbury,'' taking equivalent shots at its author's fellow travelers. And whereas Tinsley seems concerned only with politics, narrowly defined, Trudeau is interested in the whole range of passions and quirks and flaws of his two dozen major characters. (Again, it was this way from the start: a good half of his original, proto-''Doonesbury'' strips from The Yale Daily News between 1968 and 1970 were not, rather amazingly, about Black Panthers or the war or politics, but dating and football -- the Yale of George W. Bush, class of '68.)

Another significant difference between ''Doonesbury'' and all the other ''political'' strips, from ''Pogo'' to ''Shoe'' to ''Mallard Fillmore,'' is that Trudeau's characters are not talking animals but human beings. The stakes and daily writerly challenge seem inherently greater. For their first 15 years of existence, the characters in ''Doonesbury'' were like the Simpsons (and nearly every other comic-strip character in history except those in ''Gasoline Alley''): they were ageless. When Trudeau entered middle age himself, he started letting his creations grow older -- and then promptly took an almost two-year hiatus. That could have turned into his shark-jumping moment, when the familiar rules of his fictional universe were overturned in a reckless bid for new juice. But instead of jumping the shark, which is born of boredom or creative bankruptcy, Trudeau actually raised his stakes some more. His characters graduated from college, got married, had children (who became characters themselves), got divorced, died. The strip became more ambitious, not less.

As his characters grew more real, he pushed ''Doonesbury'' more into the actual world as well, sometimes undertaking true journalistic tasks. His strips about a Palm Beach ordinance requiring servants to carry ID cards led to a Florida statute eliminating such crypto-racist laws. Where did I learn that the current president and vice president have been arrested five times between them, and that 29 Reagan administration appointees were convicted of crimes? For better or worse, in ''Doonesbury.''

As most of the characters became more human, it seemed to inspire Trudeau to make others more surreal. I don't love every result of this tendency -- depicting presidents and vice presidents as feathers, waffles, points of light, Stetsons and Roman legionnaire's helmets is a Trudeauvian trope I found much funnier the first time than the 500th. On the other hand, I never tire of Duke, and the whimsy of the propagandistic talking cigarette, Mr. Butts, was brilliant.

''The Long Road Home'' is ''Doonesbury'' at the other, ultrarealistic extreme. The point is that Garry Trudeau, who by all rights should be phoning it in by now, still takes his responsibilities to the strip and his audience seriously, and in service to them still takes large and interesting risks. Which is one reason I am much more enthusiastic about the Democrats' favorite comic strip than I tend to be about the Democrats.

Kurt Andersen is the author of ''Turn of the Century.'' His second novel will be published next year.

(This is the same newspaper that once dropped "Crabby Road" because the main character used the word "fart". The editors reinstated it with tail between their legs after a thousand blue-hairs descended on the newsroom with canes in hand.)

Jeff, of course, is Alex's uncle.

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I'll withhold judgement on Duke's bastard.

I know she's getting older, but is there any other reason why Joanie is slowly turning into Lacey Davenport?

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-213098-1914967.php

Over time -- particularly after Trudeau's famed 20-month hiatus in 1983 and 1984, when he allowed his characters to ripen into reluctant adulthood off the page -- he seemed to learn the fundamentals of cartooning, and then some. The art in "Doonesbury" became far more professional, with inventive angles, cinematic shading, even intimations of an occasional foot. This led to a widespread suspicion that Trudeau was getting major help from the man who ostensibly just did his inking -- a suspicion nudged into an assumption a few years ago when Entertainment Weekly stated flatly that Trudeau wasn't drawing it himself.

"For years," he says, laughing, "I was blamed for my art, and then I couldn't get credit for it."

For the record, the art is his. I'm looking right now at Trudeau's pencil drawings of a recent week of "Doonesburys" before they were sent to the inker. They are rich in detail, identical to the finished version, and every line is Trudeau's, even the lettering.

Let's see what's going on here. B.D. appears to be considering cheating on Boopsie, which hasn't happened to our knowledge in 20-plus years of an eccentric but strong marriage

Alex at MIT: still awesome

get back from vacation, you lazy Quebecois!

I believe he's taking more than a vacation

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20081121

I'd forgotten how awesome Lacey was.

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090120

loooooool

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090212

no massive lolz, but lol nonetheless

Is that the first Doonesbury with an actualy gag?

arg! Akchewal

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20090321

Makes up for two weeks of fucking roland hedley's twitter nonsense.

haha speaking of Roland Hedley's Twitter nonsense:

http://twitter.com/Roland_Hedley

Alex is a grad student according to today's Sunday strip -- when did that happen? Thought she was MIT undergrad?

like 4 years ago!

The time sure does pass.

AKA I'm getting old. ._.

Wait, Alex is Mike's kid, right? Seriously, I'm still in "They're finally back from their hiatus! Boy, I bet Trudeau's pissed about Bloom County!" mode.

Buuuuuurn: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/07/10

Starting Monday: Doonesbury takes on Texas ultrasound law.

I keep meaning to add Doonesbury to my daily reading but honestly forget it still exists when this thread isn't bumped.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics.html

I always forget to look at it on Slate. I started reading it again in newsprint on the Washington Post comics page. The W. Post used to feature it, bigger, on a separate page in their Style section, but now its just another comic (again)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-doonesbury-interview-garry-trudeau-says-to-ignore-abortion-debate-would-have-been-comedy-malpractice/2012/03/09/gIQAjTHy1R_blog.html

Texas's HB-15 isn't hard to explain: The bill says that in order for a woman to obtain a perfectly legal medical procedure, she is first compelled by law to endure a vaginal probe with a hard, plastic 10-inch wand. The World Health Organization defines rape as “physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration — even if slight — of the vulva or anus, using a penis, other body parts or an object.” You tell me the difference.

Trudeau otmfm.

Not the lolziest or beard-strokingest response but I like Ruben Bolling and I like Garry Trudeau.

http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2015/05/01?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+uclick%2Ftomthedancingbug+%28Tom+the+Dancing+Bug+-+GoComics.com%29

for posterity's sake, here's the strip referenced in the original post:

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2004/07/01

came up today in my feed (i think all the dailies are reruns now) - felt exceptionally dark

http://assets.amuniversal.com/103fe7100978013462ef005056a9545d

Having a blast re-reading the 70s collections. They were essential education back in the day. Phred, Honey, Ginny & Clyde, MacArthur, etc ... Trudeau wrote his supporting cast very well.

Devoured those volumes in my late teens and agree totally - all those characters are still sharp in my memory. Would love to plop down someday and reread the whole strip in order, the long-term soap opera and sense of caring about the characters is remarkable for a strip you'd expect would just be full of reductive allegorical figures who are just there to facilitate political or otherwise topical gags.

("my late teens" = 20 years ago, to be clear)

They finally released a proper complete (digital) edition a few weeks ago.

Ooooh that's appealing. I used to have the CD-ROM, but it was one of those annoying things where it only installed a dinky viewer program and you had to hang on to the disc and pop it in to actually view anything....

I had that CD-ROM as well. Just super annoying. That @50 collection looking very tempting.

Anyone ever hear the Jimmy Thudpucker Greatest Hits album from 1977? I picked up a copy recently, listening to it for the first time right now. Seems like exceedingly generic 1977 pop-rock - a little too aggressive in places to be Yacht (though the Porcaro-Lukather credits suggest otherwise), or even the laid-back country-folk sound I pictured for the guy. Plausible as something he might have arrived at under label pressure by that point in time. I'm someone who can just enjoy the lushness of this era so it's cool. But for the record, I'm not hearing a single, Jimmy.

But like... what a weird project, right?

a lot of these tracks could pass as demos for Elton's Blue Moves with a less distinctive vocalist filling in.

Trying to track down a Doonesbury strip and googling has got me nowhere. It's a weekday strip with each panel showing a character's reaction to a surprise birthday party at different points in his life. For example, for the birthday party at age 20, his reaction is something along the lines of "oh wow - this is totally groovy you guys!" but by the time he gets to 40, his reaction is just a stern "everybody out!" I'm pretty sure the character was Rick Redfern, probably and 80s or 90s strip.

an

I can't remember if I've ever actually seen that, but based on the description I can totally draw it in my head. I'd buy it as a Mark or Mike strip also. Sorry, this is not helpful!

Holy shit, I found it.

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1992/08/22

Sleuthed it out from this google search result: https://books.google.com/books?id=kC1aiBNgK2QC&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=rick+redfern+birthday&source=bl&ots=F27BsKx_ny&sig=ACfU3U0VC70NSTPQe6wDLnK4FFzcuVSOig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjM45ye15P3AhUqUt8KHVOZBG0Q6AF6BAgSEAM#v=onepage&q=rick%20redfern%20birthday&f=false

I've never been a fan but cycled through some of the strips after the 1992 birthday strip, and they were a *lot* better than I was expecting. What's a good era to dabble in?

I'm sure this is a common crit, but it feels like the quieter 2nd and 3rd panel jokes & asides are generally funnier than the punchlines.

I feel like if you like those early 90s strips, you might try out the post-hiatus period (October 1984 onward) which is similar in visual style and tone. But I haven't actually gone back through to see how well that period holds up.

I also feel like the best way to read Doonesbury probably is in order from, more or less, the beginning... the later soap-opera turns do trade on built-up affection for the characters. I originally read it through the big multi-year anthologies; they turn out to have been very highly abridged, but they worked for me as a teen. I feel like it might get a little rough clicking through every single scrappy college strip from the early 70s though. My advice is scoop up cheap old copies of The Doonesbury Chronicles and Doonesbury's Greatest Hits - those cover most of the 1970s, when the strip rose to fame and glory.

"I feel like" a lot of things about Doonesbury, it seems.

I had to replace my tattered Doonesbury Chronicles last winter and was surprised that I could find hardcover editions in decent shape for like $20-$30 bucks.

My dad had a lot of the small paperback collections back in the 70s. I especially enjoyed "Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!"

I haven't read the strip since the Reagan years. I'm tempted to dive back in, but I'm afraid it would just depress me.

Peace, man - I know the exact strip you mean.

Yeah, look above - I found it!

Stumbled across this as a result of this thread, looks like a nice deep dive:

Reading Doonesbury

^good find, thanks. i read 2 of their older posts - they did a good job providing historical context & thoughtful commentary

wow, the one on death in the strip got to me. that Dick Davenport sequence is one of Trudeau's finest moments.