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.

October-December 1970: “Dispatches from the Front”

Posted on June 22, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

I’ve been a huge Doonesbury fan since sometime in the early 1980s. A few weeks ago I had the idea to re-read the entirety of the strip’s run 47 year run and to use the exercise as a way to learn more about comics. The plan is to read Doonesbury alongside comics scholarship and criticism so I can indulge myself in a strip that I have loved since I was about twelve years old while learning about the history of comics and the theory behind how they “work” – topics I’ve always been curious about, but never really pursued.

Then, I decided I should write about it. I’ve never written about comics before, and I’ll be learning as we go along. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Doonesbury, 26 October, 1970. Things Garry Trudeau apparently couldn’t draw in 1970: mouths, feet, hands.

Garry B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury made its debut on 26 October, 1970. Most of the strip’s first few months consisted of jokes about campus life as experienced by two college roommates who were selected by a computer system for ideal compatibility but who have nothing in common: B.D., the quarterback of the football team (named after Yale QB Brian Dowling) and Michael J. Doonesbury, a clueless nerd who sees himself – all evidence to the contrary – as an irresistible chick magnet. Most of the early strips focused on the everyday humour of college student and athlete life. There are some great football jokes, bits about Mike’s dating failures, and “Odd Couple” gags about Mike and B.D.’s slowly-developing friendship .

Yet even when exploring these fairly standard themes, Doonesbury was different from anything else appearing on mainstream American comics pages in 1970. For this first post, I want to focus less on themes that Trudeau was beginning to explore and more on how his style announced a generational challenge to the orthodoxy of the comics page, a medium that was a key part of mass culture in twentieth-century America. While maintaining the basic structure of the comic strip medium – images and text arranged in sequential panels building up to a punch line – what Trudeau rendered within those panels eschewed accepted aesthetic values in favour of a roughly-drawn scrawl that might have appeared like a middle-finger salute to the form’s middle-class, middle-American ethos.

Trudeau says his early work “… didn’t fit anyone’s idea of what a mainstream comic strip should look like. It was written on the fly, crudely executed, and ignored pretty much every convention of the craft.” Sharp-eyed readers in 1970 may have noticed a hint of the work of cartoonist/illustrator Jules Pfeiffer in Trudeau’s drawing, but readers tuned into changes in the comics medium would have no doubt seen the first Doonesbury strips as following in the footsteps of underground comix artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton or the strips in their own campus newspapers. Doonesbury was, in effect, one of those campus newspaper comics: Trudeau got the Doonesbury gig on the strength of Bull Tales, a comic strip he had been drawing for the Yale Daily News beginning in 1968, and many of the first Doonesbury strips were redrawn versions of Bull Tales strips.

Jules Pfeiffer, The Phantom Tollbooth. Though he draws with a much finer line, the influence on GBT is easy to spot.

I’m currently about halfway through Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: A History of Graphic Novels and What They Mean, a history and critical evaluation of what Wolk sees as our contemporary “Golden Age” of comic arts. His brief analysis of the underground comix of the sixties and seventies helped me understand Trudeau’s initial rough drawing style in a broader context in three different ways. First, Wolk argues, comix artists strove to be “as transgressive as possible.” Beyond that, Wolk argues that by embracing a style that was “deliberately ugly” comix artists, instead of giving the audience to a chance to participate in a shared sense of joy rooted in perceiving something beautiful, instead prompted in readers a sense of alienation by having them enjoy something that was repulsive, or that at least failed to meet commonly-shared aesthetic standards, thus forcing the individual reader to see herself as an outsider. As Wolk puts it, “the meta-pleasure of enjoying experiences that would repel most people is, effectively, the experience of being a bohemian or counterculturalist.” Finally, Wolk points out, comix artists, reflecting a culture grounded in an ethos of “do your thing,” put much more emphasis on “the quirks of their drawing style” than their predecessors had, seeing the comics they drew as “as artifacts of their artistic personae and creations of their hand, rather than as specific pieces they happened to have made.”

While acknowledging that there are important differences between underground comix and mainstream comic strips, I find Wolk’s analysis useful for understanding the early Doonesbury and its place in the history of the comics page. Doonesbury might not seem terribly transgressive when compared to, say, Zap Comics, but if we focus on Wolk’s use of the words “as possible,” and limit ourselves to the what was possible while working in the context of daily newspaper funny papers, there’s no doubt that Trudeau’s style and subject matter pushed boundaries that Charles Schultz or Mort Walker never came close to approaching. Furthermore, young readers, by choosing to read Doonesbury first when opening up the comics page instead of like Blondie or Hi and Lois were in a small, but every-day manner, underlining the generational divide being experienced in many American households and reminding themselves how out-of-touch with the new culture their parents were. And, no doubt that Trudeau’s refusal to adapt his style to the conventions of the medium, and his continued success while doing so not only reflected his individuality, it allowed him to develop his artistic persona in a distinct way over the following years and decades. FabulousFurryFreakBrothers

Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural: two of the most enduring bits of the underground comix movement. Trudeau found a way to bring some of this craziness to the mainstream funny pages.

What set Doonesbury apart from virtually every other mass-market comic strip in 1970 was that it roots were firmly planted in the youth and campus culture of the time. Like Walt Kelly’s Pogo before it, Doonesbury brought pointed political and cultural satire to the funny pages. What was different about Doonesbury, however, was that its style, as much as its content, reflected contemporary values of youth rebellion. Trudeau jokingly referred to the “urgent scrawl” that defined his early strips as evidence that he was producing “cartoon vérité.” [1] Trudeau sees his early work as not merely a commentary on its times, but a product of them: “If Doonesbury looked like it had been created in a stoned frenzy,” he maintains, “then that was evidence of its authenticity. The strips were dispatches from the front.” Trudeau, after all, was part of the generation he was writing about, a generation, he notes, that had “effectively hijacked the culture” by the time of Doonesbury’s debut. Doonesbury brought this cultural hijacking to the comics page. Until then the butt of jokes about long-haired, dirty layabouts in the strips of their parents’ generation, the hippies and the peace freaks seized a patch of turf on the funny pages and made it their own. On that piece of turf, Trudeau became a spokesperson for the Boomers and a critical chronicler of his generation and the generations that succeeded them.

In the next few posts I will focus on how a comic that came into the world as a gag-a-day strip about college kids who play football, goof around and try to get laid became one of the most consistently insightful bodies of satire in any genre in American history by looking at how Trudeau began to introduce some of the themes – politics, war, racism, feminism, inter-generational and intra-generational conflict, and others – that he would focus on for the next five decades.

Character Tracker:

In each of these posts, I’ll be tracking new characters’ first appearances as we meet them.

Mike Doonesbury; B.D.: October 26, 1970.

1: All quotes are taken from Brian Walker’s essential study of Trudeau and his work, Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau.

Reading Doonesbury

Posted on June 2, 2017 by readingdoonesbury

Doonesbury, 26 October, 1970: Mike and B.D. meet for the first time.

I’ve been reading G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury since I was in eighth grade; I’m turning fifty this year. Doonesbury is, aside from my family, the thing that has been a consistent part of my life longer than anything else. I’ve grown up, and grown older, learning about American politics, society and culture through the eyes of Mike Doonesbury, Joanie Caucus, Zonker Harris, Mark Slackmeyer, and B.D.

I recently decided to re-read Doonesbury from its first published strip. A few days into reading, I realised that I had ideas about the strip and what it had to say about the world that I wanted to explore; hence, this blog.

My plan is to offer a running commentary on Doonesbury as it unfolded and write about the strip’s development and what it had to say (and continues to say) about its times. Alongside individual strips and arcs, I’ll be zooming out to see how Trudeau’s take on particular themes evolved over the years. What sets Trudeau’s work apart from every other English-language mass-market comic strip is how he has remained insightful and relevant for nearly half a century. Most comic strip creators have a fairly limited repertoire and end up repeating themselves over the years; Charles Schultz was still writing Citizen Cane/Rosebud gags in the 1980s. Trudeau’s work has always been very well tuned to its times, and while he may be sometimes be guilty of the kind of anti-Millennial bashing that is increasingly common in our times and among his own Boomer generation, he’s largely managed to stay in tune with changing social and cultural dynamics and able to address new ideas and practices on their own terms.

I also hope to offer critical commentary on any Doonesbury scholarship I run into as I set out to learn more about the strip, and to also write about comics theory more generally. While I’ve been reading comics my whole life, I’ve never really studied their history and how they work; I’m hoping this project will force me to learn more about something that has been an important touchstone for so long.

Thanks for stopping by.