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,a pioneer in queer comics and 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, and 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 much 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 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 crises of a fundamentally existential nature, notably heightened Cold War tensions. 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 twenty years. 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.
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 the 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.
Reading Doonesbury 