Doonesbury Encounters: Howard Cruse in Heavy Metal, April 1983

Posted on September 21, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

Alongside writing about the history of Doonesbury and posts about Trudeau’s ongoing work, I’ll also write about Doonesbury’s appearances in other media, starting with this look at Howard Cruses’s review of a Doonesbury collection that ran in Heavy Metal’s April, 1983 issue.

Recently, my rereading of Doonesbury intersected with another long-term comics reading project I’m doing, namely reading the full run of Heavy Metal magazine. Heavy Metal debuted in 1977 as an English-language spin-off from the French comics magazine Metal Hurlant, and played a key role in exposing American audiences to the work of European comics artists such as Moebius, Crepax, and Phillipe Druillet. While much of the magazine’s content can rightly be strongly criticized for its extremely limited vision of women as little more than objects of male sexual desire (a question that was regularly debated in the letters column from very early on), the magazine is packed with amazing – and historically important – comics art. When I was in tenth grade and devouring every Doonesbury book I could get my hands on, Heavy Metal ran an awesome little review of one of those books.

In the early 1980s, Howard Cruse, the creator of Wendel and Stuck Rubber Baby, wrote some short strips for HM. In April 1983, HM featured Cruse’s short graphic review of the Doonesbury collection Unfortunately, She Was Also Wired for Sound, which, among other episodes, chronicles Mike Doonesbury’s Uncle Henry’s brush with the law, Dick Davenport’s attempts to protest Reagan-era Secretary of the Interior James Watt’s anti-environmental policies. Cruses’s strip is great example of how comics can do so mush in a small space: in eight short panels, Cruse balances a positive review, a political contextualization of Trudeau’s work, a response to some critiques of Trudeau’s work, and some great humour at the expense of everyone’s favourite scapegoat, Mike Doonesbury.

“Cruse Reviews,” Howard Cruse, Heavy Metal, April 1983.

Cruse believed that Doonesbury, then in its thirteenth year, continued to provide insightful commentary on its times. Trudeau had recently begun a nearly two-year-long hiatus from writing and drawing Doonesbury (an unprecedented move for a mass-market comics artist), but Cruse sees no sign of burnout in Trudeau’s latest collection: waving his hands, he enthusiastically emphasizes GBT’s “humane but skeptical sensibility” which, during the Reagan era, captured how the “pathologically misguided bozos” acted like they were “shilling for a cake sale” and evoking a “jargon of decency” while leading a nation through crisies of a fundamentally existential nature, including a heightened Cold War and mounting environmental catastrophes. Cruse, like Trudeau, understood that the 1980s were a deeply cynical time, when an avuncular president sold America on the notion that a new day was dawning after a decade-and-a-half of moral decay while simultaneously hollowing out many of the protections that people had fought for over the previous two decades. One only has to look at current Environmental Protection Agency director’s Scott Pruitt’s disdain for the organization that he leads to see Reagan’s wicked vision for America’s future playing itself out.

James Watt, environmental exttremist and a model for current American environmental policy. Doonesbury, 5 September 1981.

As somebody who is only beginning to learn about the unique visual language of comics in an informed and analytic way, I get a lot out of reading comics creators’ analysis of other artists’ work. Cruse briefly discusses some of the technical aspects of Trudeau’s style, applauding his skills and responding to a persistent critique of GBT’s work. Trudeau’s relatively static style in Seventies and Eighties led to accusations that he was simply photocopying the same drawing over and over again; Cruse dismisses these by pointing to the subtleties – bits of body language, visual gags – that were a hallmark of Trudeau’s work in the late 70s and early 80s. The review ends with an appreciation of GBT’s drafting skills, as Cruse faithfully reproduces GBT’s fine lettering (still done by hand in those days), noting that he would never be able to work in a similar style without ending up “a bunch of loose jabber” confusing the panel.

What makes Cruses’s review truly noteworthy is that it is presented as a dialogue between himself and Mike Doonesbury. Cruse portrays himself as an enthusiastic fanboy meeting his favourite celebrity, gushing and then manically raving as the object of his affection grows increasingly uneasy and annoyed. But in true Doonesbury style, Cruse reminds us of Mike’s initial role in the strip – to be the butt of jokes about his incompetence and unlikeability. Mike “[doesn’t] get to be funny at all,” but still “draws a salary.”

This review was a fun thing to stumble across; like a lot of people part of one fandom or another, I’m a sucker for a crossover. More importantly, it showed me how a masterful comics artist like Cruse can convey a lot of information and emotion in a confined space. In less than half a page, these eight panels not only tell readers what Cruse wants them to know about Trudeau’s work, they show us just how geeked Cruse was about his subject – and if you haven’t figured it out yet, his excitement about and love for Doonesbury is something I share.

“Violence is as American as Cherry Pie”: Doonesbury Goes to War, Pt. I

Posted on September 15, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

When the curtain falls on Doonesbury, the ensuing retrospectives are bound to focus on Garry Trudeau’s chronicling of the War on Terror and its effects on the men and women who were asked to put their lives and their well-being at risk for a fundamentally flawed set of foreign policies. GBT has used the experiences of characters like B.D., Toggle, Ray Hightower, and Melissa Wheeler to promote awareness of the physical, psychological, and social challenges facing a generation asked to fight a poorly-conceived war in Afghanistan and a criminal war in Iraq. Beyond chronicling the effects of war on two generations of Americans, GBT has taken on an activist role, supporting veterans and giving them a space where they can make their voices heard on the issues that affect them.

Trudeau has written about virtually every war America has fought since the strip began in 1970 (and even a few that it hasn’t, such as when Duke, as governor of American Samoa, called on the Marines to invade the territory). Before re-reading the strip, my memory told me that the War on Terror led Trudeau to inject a dark tone in his writing about the military that had largely been absent in his previous work. The arc in which B.D. lost a leg in Iraq was one arguably the most chilling thing ever to appear on the funny pages. Melissa’s experience with sexual assault in Afghanistan reveals ugly truths about the armed services that many Americans are uncomfortable acknowledging. Compare those horrors to B.D.’s experience in Vietnam: he joined up in order to get out of writing a term paper, and the highlight of his time in-country was a series of comic misadventures with Phred the VC terrorist leading to him earning his first Purple Heart, not for being wounded under enemy fire, but for cutting his hand on a beer can.

However, re-reading Doonesbury’s first years, I’m seeing how, when Trudeau took an unflinching look at the human costs of the War on Terror, he was building on a longer history of writing critically about the effects of war on American society and on the people that were at the receiving end of American power. Trudeau did use B.D.’s Vietnam experience to have a little fun writing about the war in a more lighthearted way. But, more importantly, he focused a satirical gaze on the violence inherent in American culture and demonstrated how American violence had tragic results for both the American and the Vietnamese people. Vietnam was, for Trudeau, as it was for the generation he belonged to and wrote about, an episode that revealed ugly truths about the country he loves. Trudeau spent decades trying to understand and come to terms with Vietnam. Nearly half a century on, Vietnam still resonates in Doonesbury’s America; one of the central characters for the past twenty-five years, Kim Doonesbury, formerly Kim Rosenthal, was the last orphan to be airlifted from Vietnam at the end of the war.

Over the next little while, I’m going to look at how Trudeau wrote about Vietnam. From the strip’s first days, Trudeau used his privileged position as a widely-syndicated newspaper comics artist as a way to bring a strong anti-war message to a key part of American mass culture, the funny pages.

Trudeau’s first mention of the Vietnam war came about six weeks into syndication. Mark Slackmeyer, suspended from Walden College after occupying the university’s president’s office, is planning to enjoy some downtime, but his hopes are dashed by the appearance of a “Greetings” letter from the draft board. The dreaded draft board letter made another appearance six months later; in the intervening time, the “beautiful cats” at the Selective Service had gotten remarkably hipper.

Mark’s draft notice arrives. Doonesbury, 5 December 1970

The beautiful cats at the draft board come after a Walden graduate. Doonesbury, 1 June 1971

Unhappy days, indeed. Doonesbury, 2 June 1971.

While these two strips hint at an important dynamic in how the Vietnam war was experienced by young Americans – the ever-present anxiety among those fortunate enough to attend university and thereby avoid the draft that they might lose that status – Trudeau, surprisingly, largely overlooked the draft. Instead, as he thought about students being shipped off to war, Trudeau focused on a key link between American militarism and higher education, the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC). For Trudeau, ROTC revealed, and fostered, the violence deeply woven into the American character, a theme he would return to when he began writing directly about Southeast Asia.

The summer after his freshman year, B.D. began his ROTC training. ROTC was always in the cards for B.D. Alongside resonating with his pro-military/anti-Red ideological outlook, ROTC was probably the only way he could afford to attend a liberal arts college like Walden. After all, he’s the son of a working-class immigrant family (his parents emigrated from Poland) whose father is chronically unemployed. Trudeau later turned Walden into the butt of numerous jokes about for-profit “diploma mills” that trade meaningless degrees for crippling debt, but in 1971, B.D. was exchanging service to his country for a shot at social mobility his parents didn’t have.

B.D. was always army-bound. Doonesbury, 26 July 1971.

H. Rap Brown of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee famously pointed out that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” B.D. may have seen ROTC, at least in part, as a chance at a life that would otherwise be unattainable for him, but Trudeau used B.D.’s ROTC training to comment on how violence, especially in its militaristic form, was central to American identity. B.D. represents that subset of American youth who did not buy into the counterculture or New Left politics. He’s a straight-arrow, all-American quarterback, a Republican, and a patriot’s patriot, who has no sympathy for the anti-war left B.D. rejects Mark’s New Left radicalism, but he lives his politics as much as his ideological opposite. With B.D., the huddle becomes a forum for the politics of Nixon’s “Silent Majority.” He will interrupt a huddle to allow his team to acknowledge an Air Force plane flying overhead, and once called for a beating to be delivered to a dissenting protestor. B.D.’s love of military violence is America’s love for military violence.

B.D. on the anti-war movement. Doonesbury, 1 March 1971

B.D. doesn’t care for dissent on campus or on the field. Doonesbury, 29 December 1970.

A patriotic huddle. Doonesbury, 17 December 1970.

B.D. began his ROTC training on and Trudeau spared no time in engaging in some of the darkest satire imaginable in a mainstream newspaper comic strip. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and M*A*S*H* satirized the insanity of military life and the basic incompetence of Army bureaucracy; Doonesbury focused on portraying the military, and thereby American culture, as sadistically violent. We learn that ROTC is not really about imbuing young men with values of “leadership”and “discipline,” but teaching them “to be methodical machines of destruction and ruin.” This is exactly what B.D. was looking for; he proudly writes his parents to tell them that he has already learned how to “shoot, lacerate, knife, blow up, detonate, and liquidate” as required.

The truth. Doonesbury, 12 June 1971.

Skills training. Doonesbury, 14 June 1971.

B.D. takes to military life, and the accompanying opportunities for acts of heroic violence, much as he takes to the opportunities for controlled mayhem presented on Saturday afternoons on the college gridiron. In fact, one officer is concerned that B.D. might be a little too eager to put his training to practical use.

It looks like fun. Doonesbury, 16 June 1971.

B.D. develops a reputation. Doonesbury, 19 June 1971.

Too much of a good thing. Doonesbury, 18 June 1971

By the end of the summer, however, the commanders put aside their fears that B.D. might be just a little bit too enthusiastic, and, in a nod to the spectacular aspects of America’s favourite pastime, give him the equivalent of an Oscar for the “Best Performance as a Gung-Ho G.I,” an award our hero turns down because – in an early appearance of the normalization of violent militarism as an occupation like any other – he’s “just trying to do his job.”

“Just trying to do his job.” Doonesbury, 2 August 1971.

Over the next little while, I’ll talk more about how Trudeau showed his readers just how nasty a job that could be.

This Week in Doonesbury: Mental Health, Health Care, Homelessness and Trump.

Posted on August 12, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

(Note to readers: Hi Mom! … I intended to post at least once a week as a way to keep my writing chops up, but the past couple of weeks haven’t been great. I’ve been working on something about how GBT wrote about Vietnam during the first few years of Doonesbury, but it’s really not coming together. In the meanwhile, here are my thoughts on a recent new strip.)

A couple of weeks back, I looked at how Garry Trudeau used B.D.’s weekly check-in with his therapist Elias to talk about the Trump presidency and mental health. Donald Trump’s election may not have made us crazy, but, as B.D. and Elias show, for many people it underlined a feeling that nothing in the world feels right anymore, and brought into sharp focus a sharp sense of insecurity among those — women, immigrants, people of colour, LGBT people — who stand to lose the most in a nation ruled by Trump’s Republican Party.

While B.D.’s role in recent years has been in large part to allow GBT to talk about the challenges veterans face, notably mental health issues, he’s not the first Doonesbury character to deal with mental illness. Leaving aside Duke’s “bad craziness,” Trudeau’s first engagements with mental health issues focused on two characters who represent some of the most marginalized people in our communities — the elderly homeless. On 6 August, Trudeau returned to the question of Trump and mental health when Alice and Elmont, homeless people who are probably in their eighties, dropped in on Mark’s radio show to talk health care.

Full confession: a lot of what follows is from memory because I’m only up to 1977 in my reading of the strip, and much of what I’m talking about here took place in the 1980s and later. That said, Alice first appeared in 1973 as a regular in a pub where Zonker was tending bar. She was depicted as a sad woman, but a genuinely good and loving person who had built a community of people she loved, and who loved her.

Doonesbury, 25 August 1973. An early appearance by Alice.

At some point, she loses all of that. Alice reappears sometime in the 1980s as a homeless woman living in Washington DC. I’ll write more about Alice’s adventures on the streets and how she brought the realities of grinding abject poverty to the comics page later. What’s important here is that her situation reflected one of the most egregious failures in post-war American social policy. In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan eviscerated government programs that promoted housing security and cut tax breaks that fostered the development of low-income homes: homelessness increased sharply as a result. Bad enough that Reaganomics caused a sharp climb in homelessness; in Reagan’s America, the homeless became a scapegoat. An emerging neoliberal consensus ruled that anyone could succeed if only they worked hard, and those who “fell between the cracks” were somehow deserving of their miserable situation.

Looking back, it’s hard not to see Alice as someone who, in her earlier incarnation in the strip, struggled with severe depression. It’s easy to imagine that mental health struggles made it harder for Alice to keep up in Reagan’s America; with the HUD programs cut to the bone, there was nowhere left for her to go.

GBT brought the relationship between mental health and homelessness into sharper focus when Alice met up with Elmont, a homeless man who suffers from severe mental illness, including delusions and paranoia. Ever since, Trudeau has used Alice and Elmont’s struggles and occasional small victories to chronicle the ways in which society continues to turn its back on those who, for whatever reason, can’t keep up.

Doonesbury, 6 August 2017. Obamacare pays for EVERYTHING, Jack.

Trudeau’s 6 August strip looks at the most pressing issue in American policymaking this year, healthcare. While millions of people who could not otherwise afford health insurance dodged a bullet in the time between GBT writing the strip and its publication, for many Americans, access to medical care is set to be a critical question for the foreseeable future. Mark’s conversation with Alice and Elmont reveals how, like in Reagan’s America, in Trump’s America the truly marginalized — people like the homeless and the mentally ill — will be forced to give up a little more of their security and well-being for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. As is often the case, there is a nugget of critical truth in Elmont’s disjointed dialogue: a pre-existing addiction (…in this case to access to what literally every other person living in a modern industrial democracy knows he or she can rely on, basic health care) is a really hard thing to kick.

This Week in Doonesbury: Mental Health in the Age of Trump

Posted on July 20, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

I’m not going to write about myself very much in these pages, but I will note here that I read this week’s Doonesbury strip through the lens of my own mental health issues, namely a case of generalized anxiety disorder that I’ve been carrying around for quite a while. Things got really bad earlier this year on this front and I’m working on putting them back together.

You’ve been there too.

As I’ve been reading, listening, talking and learning about mental health, I’m beginning to understand how mental health is not simply about what’s happening in a particular individual’s brain. Our mental health struggles and the discourses that shape them play a key role in determining how we can live and enjoy our lives; they can also be read as symptoms of the larger issues that affect a society, or parts of it. Like with physical health, mental health outcomes reflect broader political, cultural, environmental, and economic dynamics. Race, class, gender, sexuality: categories like these play big roles in determining the state of a person’s mental health and in how their mental health issues will be diagnosed and treated (or not diagnosed/left untreated).

Today as I began drafting this post, the comics artist Lauren Weinstein posted this sketch on Twitter :

LaurenWeinstein

This comic and GBT’s 16 July offering both deal with a key dynamic shaping mental health outcomes for people today: a widely-shared sense among diverse elements of society that we are fast approaching a crisis point that may well be existential in nature. I recently asked a grad student in psychology if she knew of any studies linking Trump’s election to an increase in people seeking mental health care. She didn’t, but she thought it would be a great topic to research. In reality, while there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to go around suggesting that we are having a collective mental breakdown caused by the Trump presidency, the fears and anxieties I’m talking about did not originate with the campaign and eventual election of Donald Trump; the optimism for the long-term well-being of humanity that bloomed with the end of the Cold War long ago died a death by a thousand cuts dealt by terrorist attacks, illegal wars, bloody occupations, and torture regimes, all unfolding on a planet getting too hot to sustain human beings. That said, the dawn of Trump’s America has played a huge role in amplifying those feelings and intensifying their contagion. And it must be noted that the fears and anxieties that have become seemingly more widespread and intense over the past year or so are felt especially acutely by people who occupy more fragile positions in our society: women, people of colour, LGBT people, migrants. Some of us are already closer to that crisis point than others. At the end of the day, however, we are all the child in Weinstein’s dark vision, staring blankly at the Thing That Will Kill Us All But We Can’t Do Anything About. We are all, as Trudeau says this week, B.D., looking to a trusted authority to tell us what the hell is going on.

On a less abstract level, B.D.’s regular check-in with his therapist Elias cracked me up for two reasons. First, the two-panel “throwaway” gag that starts the strip. This is me and a lot of people I know, afraid that we’ll miss out on the Next Big Revelation while we’re away from our phones. Trump news is like heroin to us, and, like any dope fiend, we need to make sure we have our next fix lined up.

Second: The rest of the strip. I have had pretty much this exact conversation with my psychiatrist.

Thanks to Lauren R. Weinstein for permission to reproduce her work; check out her comic Normel Person on the Village Voice website.

“Even Revolutionaries Love Chocolate Chip Cookies”: Mark Slackmeyer and Radical Campus Politics.

Posted on July 17, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

When Garry Trudeau introduced readers to Nichole in September 1971, he seems to have largely shed the frat-boy misogyny that had dominated his writing about women and relationships between women and men in his early strips. [1] The introduction of a character who actively criticized and protested sexism and patriarchy not only marked a key shift in the strip’s portrayal of women, it marked the end of part of Trudeau’s “world-building” process. With the introduction of feminism as a regular thread, Trudeau finished assembling a set of themes that he would continue to explore over the next decades. Some of these themes would receive more or less attention over the years, and others would be introduced as real-world events warranted, but within the first year of Doonesbury’s existence, much of the thematic terrain Trudeau would go on to explore was sketched out. Alongside feminism, these themes include:

Radical politics
Education
War
Relationships between generations
Race
Electoral politics
Sports
Media
Drugs and countercultures

For the next little while, I’m going to be looking at how GBT introduced each of these ideas during the first year or so of Doonesbury’s run and set himself and his characters up to explore them. I’ll do my best to frame each theme around a particular character or set of characters. This week, radical campus politics through the eyes of Mark Slackmeyer.

But first, a quick diversion about the general political culture of Doonesbury’s first few years. Trudeau’s “Core Four” of B.D., Mike, Mark and Zonker each represent a distinct faction in Boomer political culture. From right to left: B.D. is a young Goldwater Republican; Mike (leaving aside the strong misogynistic tendencies he displayed in the early years) is a bleeding-heart liberal; and Mark represents the radical left. Fluttering about in no particular lane is Zonker, a head who has believes in neither the bullet nor the ballot. In later posts, then, I’ll come back to B.D.’s hyper-patriotic conservatism, Mike’s wishy-washy liberalism, and Zonker’s flying-of-the-freak-flag.

We first meet “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer on 19 November 1970, as he calls out Mike’s political spinelessness. Mark represents the New Left phase of the American revolutionary tradition – movements like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. Mark actively opposed the war in Vietnam, read Marx and hoped to see the end of capitalism, and was an active ally in struggles against racism and sexism.

Our first extended encounter with Mark follows him as he stages a one-man occupation of Walden College’s president’s house, one he narrates as a historical epic starring himself. Trudeau often had characters act as their own interior sportscaster, calling the play-by-play on whatever they were up to, much as a sandlot baseball player might “call” his or her on-field performance as they strive to emulate one of the game’s greats. Garry Wills, in his introduction to the first hardcover Doonesbury complication writes that this device allowed Trudeau to comment on how people understood their actions in terms of a larger ongoing narrative: Doonesbury’s characters are “watching each other watch themselves” as they play their ascribed roles. [2] As Mark watches himself play the role of the radical campus activist leader, Trudeau uses his experiences to satirize elements of the radical campus politics of the Vietnam era. Mark’s play-by-play on his solo occupation of Walden College’s president’s house, for instance, points at the egotism that seems all too common among political leaders, while hinting at some the darker elements of the political climate of the times.

Slackmeyer practices for his big moment, and reminds us that people were beaten and killed for contesting the system. 2 December 1970

Another element of radical politics that Trudeau explores through Mark is the gap between student activists – who often come from a comfortable backgrounds which give them the opportunity to immerse themselves in political theory – and the people on whose behalf they claim to be struggling. Mark may be out on the streets fighting capitalism, but he’s the son of a wealthy stockbroker, and his family has servants. This distance between students and workers is the theme of a long July 1971 arc in which Mark takes up a summer job on a construction site. He wants to connect with the working class and introduce them to revolutionary theory; instead, his self-superior attitude leads him to alienate his fellow workers. Instead of forging a student-worker alliance, he spends much of his time getting beaten up. Unable to get through to the workers, Mark talks down to them – and reveals something about how he actually feels about his ostensible allies in the working class. Of course, those working-class revolutionary allies often know their revolutionary theory better than the academic “experts,” as we see in what is one of my all-time favourite Doonesbury strips. The bricklayer represents what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Grasmsci called an organic intellectual, a thinker who emerges from within the working class, and is thus better-positioned than a stockbroker’s son to help workers understand their circumstances and envision a road forward.

“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” — André Malraux. 17 July 1971.

As student activists are alienated from important elements of the society they hope to change, they are also often alienated from each other – and inept as a result. A long December 1971 arc featured Mark’s experience as the moderator at a radical campus activist congress reveals how sometimes, it seems as if activist movements can be their own worst enemies.

Anybody who has been involved in activist politics can relate to this. 8 December 1971

One strip from that sequence brings into focus an American tragedy that Trudeau commented on through Mark’s experience, that of the violence inflicted by the state on those who fought for a better world. The young women and men who struggled in the 1960s and 1970s for equal rights, equal opportunity and equal justice for African-Americans, migrants, women, and LGBT people, and who fought to end a brutal and unjust neo-colonial war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, fought a system that was built on violence and never shrank from using violence to maintain the social order. As we see above, Mark’s first campus occupation ends with the arrival of “baby-blue helmets,” striking visible fear into our previously-confident hero’s heart. A few weeks later, a Trudeau gives us a bit of dark humour on the use of surveillance and chemical weapons against protesters.

There were any number of atrocities committed by the American state against the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s; the Murder of Fred Hampton; Attica; Chicago ‘68. But one horror seems to have had special significance to a young Garry Trudeau. On 4 December 1971, a young man proposes the congress issue a statement calling for “an end to government-sanctioned violence.” When B.D. challenges the man on his right to talk about violence, we get one of the darkest punchlines Trudeau ever penned: he’s the delegate from Kent State. The May 4, 1970 murder of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University was the subject of at least three strips in the first fifteen months of Doonesbury’s run. On 28 November, things take a dark turn as Mike announces that he has moved on from being outraged over Kent State: if he were to stay angry about Kent State, he reasons, his “indignation over Attica would be compromised.” A few months later, we find Zonker reflectively issuing a bitter commentary on the anniversary of the massacre at Kent State; using the voice of a character who rarely follows current events to comment on the massacre two years on conveys the scope of the tragedy for Trudeau and his contemporaries.

This is the one of the most poignant strips in the early Doonesbury. 4 May 1972

Mark will remain a crucial voice for radical political ideas as the strip moves forward, even as he loses some of his edge with age. He allows us to see the political idealism of his era in terms of its triumphs and its defeats, whether those defeats were self-inflicted or the outcome of state violence. Mark shows us, above all, the human foibles that shape any political undertaking; after all, like all of us, revolutionaries are just regular people who want a better world, and love chocolate chip cookies.

22 December 1970

[1] I say “seems to” because I’m still reading through the strip and can’t vouch for what I haven’t read yet. Also, there may very well be sexism/misogyny that I don’t see in the post-Nichole strips that I have read.

[2] Garry Wills, “Introduction,” in Garry B. Trudeau, Doonesbury Chronicles (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1975).

This Week in Doonesbury: “The Safest Space on the Comics Page”

Posted on July 4, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

July 2nd’s Doonesbury strip ran as Image Comics pulled a cover image drawn by Howard Chaykin that was widely perceived as being violent and racist (a perception I share). The image and the ultimate call to pull it fuelled debate about hate speech, the limits of free speech, and the responsibility of artists to consider the messages behind, and the potential effects of, the images they create and market. On one side of these debates were progressively-minded comics artist, scholars and fans (my Twitter feed counted a high proportion of women, PoC and Queer- and Trans-identifying people in this camp; your Twitter mileage may vary). On the other side of the debate were people (largely men, largely white, it seemed: again, statistical analysis limited to my recollection of my Twitter feed) who believe in a narrow conception of free speech that seems to disregard accounting for a power imbalance between privilege and marginality or the potentially painful histories through which people perceive art. Some in this camp claim the right to shock simply for the sake of shocking. While some on this side had thoughtful things to say about the relationship between freedom and responsibility, more than a few seemed to rely on slippery-slope arguments about book-burnings and imploring their opponents to go back to their “safe spaces.”

“Safe spaces” were also at play in the weekend’s Doonesbury offering. It’s Reader Mailbag time, a recurring set up since sometime in the 80s (I think). A young man writes, asking if he can read Doonesbury without fear of being offended: Mike and Mark reassure him that characters undergo regular “sensitivity training,” making them “the most woke in all of comics”; Doonesbury has thus been named “the safest space on the comics page for twelve years running.” The punch line is Mark’s outrage at the fact that they lost the title one year because a “snowflake” reported them for a “microaggressive joke.”

Reading the strip in the context of what was going on in Comics Twitter (…a space I am still very new to…) in the wake of the Chaykin situation hung me up a bit. What exactly was GBT getting at? Given Mark’s deployment of words often used by the right to mock elements of today’s radical youth culture, it’s reasonable to read the strip as a shot taken by an ageing Boomer against a generation that he is completely out-of-touch with: “Look at those damn Millenials, they can’t even handle reading a comic strip out of fear they might get offended.” From there, the joke easily becomes: “Even libtards like Garry Trudeau hate the Millenials!!””

And that may well be what GBT was trying to say. But even if he did mean it that way, the strip points to a larger truth that’s at stake.

First off, I don’t buy the idea that Trudeau is simply playing the “hey you kids get off my lawn” card. One: he’s not that lazy. Two: it doesn’t fit with his long history of holding nuanced views on any generation. GBT both praised and ridiculed his generation’s various sub-sets, and he does the same with the Millenials who followed. Yes, Jeff and Zipper are idiots. But Alex and Toggle are smart and resourceful grown-ups confronting a world that holds much less promise than did the world offered to their parents.

Reading the 2 July strip in terms of Doonesbury’s longer history makes things a little more interesting. Mark Slackmeyer is a former campus radical who came out as gay sometime in his late thirties or early forties. His character is the personification of the most radical elements of the campus anti-war left of the 1960s and 1970s. He represents those who fought on the front lines during a revolutionary moment that experienced violence on a level that has often been left out of popular memory of the 1960s. Mark has been beaten, tear-gassed and jailed as he and his comrades confronted the violent racism and imperialism of post-war America. Mark is a stand-in for the Students for a Democratic Society, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the defendants at the Chicago Eight Trial, and the four college kids who were shot down by the National Guard at Kent State in 1970, and his sexuality puts the Stonewall uprising in his radical genealogy (though his marriage to a neo-con risks putting his radical cred in jeopardy). Mark isn’t speaking for his generation writ large: he’s speaking as a representative of a particular moment in the longer history of the radical American tradition.

As the most radical early regular cast member, Mark played another crucial role throughout much of Doonesbury’s history, that of the younger half of a deep divide between the Boomers and the (self-described) “Greatest Generation.” Mark’s relationship with his father was the relationship between a substantial cohort of the Boomers and their parents in microcosm. Mark’s father Phil was a conservative in every sense of the word, and every choice the younger Slackmeyer made challenged Phil’s values. Love of country, long-held ideas about relationships between black and white or men and women, the capitalist system: Mark rejected his old man’s values with every fibre of his being. Trudeau’s strips about the eternal father-son conflict between Phil and Mark Slackmeyer allowed him to explore at length the effects of social and political change on family relationships and the mutual distrust and misunderstandings often experienced across divides. But if the distrust and the misunderstandings are mutual, the punchline usually makes it clear who the good guys are: the younger generation.

With all that in mind, I read this week’s comic not simply as a shot at the “Snowflakes,” but as a commentary on how critiques of today’s radical culture coming from older liberals and lefties happen because clashes between generations are inevitable – even when (elements of) those generations have many shared ideals, outlooks, and ultimate goals. Of course elements of today’s radical culture might well seem ridiculous to a radical activist from decades earlier: otherwise, those things wouldn’t be radical. It’s easy to see how a figure in Mark’s position might have to struggle to make the mental leaps necessary to embrace ideas that arose from a few decades of radical politics following his own activist years. Mark doesn’t get it; he’s not supposed to get it. That’s part of how generations keep moving forward to a better world.

A Screaming Herd of Females: Women and Misogyny in the Early Doonesbury Strips.

Posted on June 30, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

Until I got to graduate school, I had learned more about modern feminism from reading Doonesbury than from anywhere else.

This may be an exaggeration, but there’s a truth behind it: the social and political dimensions of post-World War Two feminism are a central thematic element in GBT’s work, and he has long made it a point to bring feminist messages to the funny pages by featuring strong, independent female characters and using their voices to advocate for policies that support women. Doonesbury’s cast is male-centred, built around what I think of as a “Core Four” of Mike, B.D., Mark Slackmeyer and Zonker. Notwithstanding that, characters like Joanie Caucus, Ginny Slade, Lacey Davenport, Ellie, Honey Huan, Kim Rosenthal-Doonesbury, and Alex Doonesbury reveal Trudeau’s dedication to making smart, independent, competent and complex women a key part of his work. Even Boopsie, written for decades as a stereotypical “bimbo,” was shown to be smarter, more resourceful and wiser than she had previously been portrayed when faced with the challenge of B.D. losing his leg in Iraq. Beyond populating his strip with a diverse cast of impressive women, Trudeau has consistently pointed out how the deck is stacked against women and put their struggles against sexism in the foreground. Doonesbury has been a vehicle for exploring issues facing women including sexism in the classroom (from kindergarten through Berkeley law school), access to abortion, pay inequality, sexualization, and widowhood.

Nichole, Doonesbury’s first feminist character.

But before I get too far into Doonesbury’s feminist dimensions, I have to deal with an uncomfortable truth: in the first year of Doonesbury’s run, Trudeau did not embrace the feminist outlook that defines much of the strip, but instead reproduced the misogyny that was common in many of the underground comix, and youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s more generally.

In my last post, I wrote that Doonesbury brought some of the style and energy of underground comix, themselves an expression of the youth cultural/political rebellion of the 1960s and 70s, to the mainstream American newspaper comics page. One element of that movement was a tendency to portray women not as fully-developed human beings, but as potential targets of sexual conquest. As Margaret Galvan writes, a “whole set of misogynist underground comics [featured] sexually attractive women drawn for the purposes of objectification in sexual situations.” Beyond that, comix artists often portrayed women as targets of violence. As comics creator and herstorian Trina Robbins notes, it was “almost de rigeur for male underground cartoonists to include violence against women in their comix, and to portray this violence as humour.” [1.]

Reading the first year of Doonesbury, we can see how Trudeau drew on this dimension of the underground comix to bring a harder edge to a tendency in newspaper comics, seen in characters such as Beetle Bailey’s Miss Buxley or B.C.’s Cute Chick and Fat Broad, to portray women as objects of desire and/or ridicule. Throughout Doonesbury’s first year, we encounter strips that are impossible to reconcile with the idea of Trudeau as a feminist voice in the funny pages; overwhelmingly, the women we meet are presented as potential sexual conquests or as objects of derision because they are too ugly or stupid to count as such.

Bull Tales, date unknown.

Doonesbury, 16 January 1971. Some things don’t change, some things do.

A few examples: In a pair of strips from January 1971, a female college applicant embodies a middle-aged man’s sexual fantasy about liberated co-eds. (In the original Bull Tales version of the strip, things are even more risque; she walks into the office wearing nothing but the beret). These strips are part of a consistent thread in the early Doonesbury, as Trudeau repeatedly portrays relationships between men and women as a competition in which the goal is for the man to “score.” This is a situation that, for Mike, required professional help in the person of Sam Smooth, a precursor to the “pick-up artists” of our times. B.D., of course, as quarterback of the football team, needed no such help, having his own “screaming herd of females.”

The women Mike and B.D. pursued were quite often nameless and always devoid of any defining characteristic besides their sexuality. The only thing we know about one of Mike’s girlfriend’s is that she is a “nice-looking chick.” Once successful, GBT’s male characters show little interest in forming any lasting attachment to these women, preferring to “recycle” them when things get stale.

When women aren’t desirable, their role is to show us how that lack of desirability marks men as failures and losers. The third strip introduces a running gag: Mike is a laughing-stock because he dates unattractive women. One strip from December 1970 shows Mike being set up with a woman who is portrayed as more animal than human, maybe not the kind of violence that Robbins was referring to, but a dehumanizing and thus rhetorically violent move on Trudeau’s part.

Feminism came to Doonesbury in March 1971, not as the core value, but as an emasculating threat that needed to be ridiculed. Mike is on a date with a woman whose dialog is limited to shouting caricatures of feminist slogans. Note that she is drawn differently from the other women who had thus far appeared in the strip: she has the eyes that in Doonesbury’s visual language signify an alert and reasoning adult (Rounded eyes signify, depending on the context, being high, shock, childhood innocence, or cluelessness and stupidity; GBT usually drew women with these.). But her sharp eyes are not a sign that she has something to say that is worth listening to; rather, they warn us that she is a threat to masculinity – albeit one that is relatively easily disarmed with a little bullshit Mike probably picked up from Sam Smooth.

Doonesbury meets feminism for the first time, 4 March 1971.

If that episode set readers up to expect the stereotype of the man-hating militant feminist to be a recurring theme, a strip from a week later featuring Mike and campus radical Mark Slackmeyer watching a televised interview with Gloria Steinem foreshadowed a shift in how Trudeau would deal with feminism. Steinem calls for an end to “sexual oppression” (a term I’m willing to bet had never appeared in the comics pages before then), and Mark notes that Steinem is “[telling] it like it ought to be.” Mike replies, with a shit-eating grin, that she has “nice legs.” To me, this feels different from other cracks Trudeau’s characters had made about women. Steinem’s words read as more reasoned and reasonable than the gross simplifications of the week before; I see the joke here not as lying in Mike’s objectification of a woman, but in Mark’s amazement at and disgust in this display of cluelessness on his friend’s part.

Mark’s disapproving glare hints at the emergence of a completely different handling of female characters that took root with the appearance of Nichole on 29 September 1971. Nichole’s position as a feminist icon in Doonesbury eventually became overshadowed by the centrality of Joanie Caucus’s story in the overall narrative arc, but she was the first character that confronted the sexist attitudes shared by many of the male cast members. If Mike’s date from the week before was crude caricature of feminism, Nichole is the real deal; she is smart (and knows it!), self-assured, and more than willing to call out male characters for not thinking of or treating women as their equals – or betters. From this point, GBT puts the joke on characters like Mike who are too slow to understand that their frat-boy attitudes are no longer relevant to Doonesbury’s emerging feminist ethos.

Most of the strips I’ve written about here were carryovers from Bull Tales, the Yale student newspaper strip that was an incubator for Doonesbury. As much as they reveal the energy and desire to break boundaries that defined alternative comics/comix of the day, they also reflect the hatred that was, and remains, a part of comics/comix culture (see the criticism being levelled at Howard Chaykin’s The Divided States of Hysteria for just a taste of the issue.) Moreover, seeing as most of the strips mentioned here originally ran in Trudeau’s Yale newspaper strip, we have to see these early strips as reflecting the deep-seated misogyny that remains a part of campus culture.

As we move through Doonesbury’s history, we’ll see that in the weeks, months and years following Nichole’s debut, Trudeau did important work in bringing feminist characters and ideas to newspaper comics; as I learn more about that history, I will also be learning and writing about female comics creators and how they worked to challenge the boy’s club mentality of the funny pages. That said, the first year of Trudeau’s run reminds us that the rebellious era that GBT documented was both progressive AND deeply rooted in, and reproduced, profound anti-woman sentiment. That’s something that historians of the era still need to fully come to terms with.

Character Tracker:

First appearances mentioned in this post: Nichole, 29 September 1971.

[1.] Margaret Galvan, “Feminism Underground: The Comics Rhetoric of Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, no. 3/4 (2015): 203–22.

Reading Doonesbury

A trip through nearly fifty years of American comics