“The Bittersweet Ambiguities of Youth”: Garry Trudeau on Love and Romace on the Comics Page.

I’m still working on the next instalment of my series about Garry Trudeau’s coverage of Jimmy Carter’s presidency: in the meantime, let’s look at a bit of Doonesbury-related ephemera. 

In February 1973,* New York magazine ran a special issue: “Couples: The Art of Staying Together.” Alongside “Videotaping Your Marriage to Make It Better” and Gail Sheehy’s “Can Couples Survive,” NY featured a piece credited to a certain 24-year-old “graduate student in art and architecture at Yale University,” better known to the reading public as the creator of Doonesbury. 

The title of Garry Trudeau’s contribution to NY’s look at 1970s coupledom was “Maggie & Jiggs & Blondie & Dagwood & Lucy & Charlie,” a nod to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a 1969 comedy by Paul Mazursky about two couples navigating the sexual revolution. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote that its “genius” dwelt in how it used humor to decode “the peculiar nature of the moral crisis” facing Americans as “Free Love” and other challenges to traditional notions of marital fidelity became more mainstream. Trudeau’s essay traces how, like Bob & Carol …, comic strips were “a pop mirror for our changing ideas about relationships.” “The sticky problems of our comic couples” had, over the course of the 20th century, reflected shifts in how Americans thought about, and built, their intimate relationships, and the larger social and cultural contexts within which they did so. 

One of the articles in the “Couples” issue revealed the “Ten Mistakes Couples Make with Their Money.” Finances, of course, are an important dynamic in any marriage. GBT begins his examination of married life on the comics page by reflecting on two classic comic strips which explored how socio-economic change helped define the central characters’ relationship. 

George McManus’s Bringing up Father, which debuted in 1913, is about an Irish-American couple whose newfound wealth creates marital tension. Maggie embraces high-society life; her husband Jiggs struggles to conform to bourgeois values, preferring familiar working-class trappings and company. Trudeau casts McManus as an important cultural critic, calling him “one of the first men of American arts and letters to sense the fallacy of our favorite national equation: money equals happiness.” Jiggs was happiest during his regular retreats to Dinty Moore’s tavern, where he could “enjoy corned beef and cabbage” with his mates as opposed to the “tenderloin and napoleons” on offer at home. Maggie’s perpetual anger at Jiggs’s inability to fit into bourgeois life makes her the villain of the piece. The marriage is largely defined by the “interminable harassment” Jiggs suffers at Maggie’s hands: her frustration at Jiggs’s working-class boorishness regularly ends up with her throwing pots and pans at him. GBT highlights the sexism woven into McManus’s class critique. In Bringing up Father, money becomes “the absolute nemesis of a good man, especially when its control rested in the hands of his wife,” thereby “[providing] reinforcement for confirmed misogynists.”

If Bringing up Father reveals the pitfalls of social climbing, Blondie, created by Chic Young in 1930, is about finding complacent satisfaction in downward mobility. Before taking on its familiar incarnation  as a strip about middle-class American domestic life, Blondie focused on the courtship of Dagwood Bumstead, the son of a railroad tycoon, and Blondie, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, whom GBT describes as “a cheap tart…with wild, tousled hair, snapping gum, and a boo-boop-a-doop shopgirl’s lingo.” Dagwood’s wealthy family disapproved of Blondie, but three years after the strip debuted, the couple wed: our hero was disinherited and demoted to a life somewhere in the lower middle class.

Blondie’s premise – that a family can find domestic bliss even when facing financial setbacks – reflected a critical cultural dynamic underpinning the strip’s historical moment. If Bringing up Father’s rags-to-riches plotline spoke to the strip’s 1920s/pre-Depression heyday (Trudeau notes McManus’s “lavishly styled Art Nouveau interiors); Dagwood’s life as “an impoverished ex-bon vivant … and a martyred romantic” was morally appropriate to its roots in leaner times, when “the New Deal called for moral belt-tightening.” 

Blondie and Dagwood’s New Deal moralism, Trudeau argues, helped set the stage for the “era of unparalleled complacency” of post-war American suburban life. Young “[set] a new standard of ennui which has since become the cornerstone for so many American middle-class marriages.” A profound sense of dissatisfaction with a lifestyle that provided a certain sense of material security but failed to deliver deeper meaning, combined with an equally-profound sense of anxiety rooted in the brutal realities of the Nuclear Age, permeated two of the most significant comics of the postwar decades, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and Jules Feiffer’s eponymous cartoons. 

In one of the best comics-related essays I’ve read, “What Peanuts Taught Me about Queer Identity,” Jennifer Finney Boylan explains how Schulz’s treatment of a theme that ran throughout the strip’s 50-year run, unrequited young love, taught her to look beyond social appearances to see a deeper reality underneath, and thereby better see herself. Boylan grew up “believing in the transformative power of love.” As someone struggling with gender identity issues, a young Boylan would pray that either she would awake “as the girl I knew myself to be,” or that an “all-encompassing love” would come along and “erase this desire completely.” Her belief that love had the power to fix her biggest problems grew, at least in part, out of her understanding of her parents’ marriage as a “selfless, giving, ideal” relationship. That kind of facade hides much of the complication and pain that’s an inherent part of the human experience – and of our closest relationships. To believe, as her parents’ marriage seemed to exemplify, that being in love has transformative powers that can make everything right in a difficult world, is to live “in a cartoon universe.” Like the Peanuts gang, Boylan lived not in a comic-page reality, where the love of another can make the world right, but in a very real world  “defined by unrequited love.”

The angst of unrequited love that for Boylan defines Peanuts also figured in Trudeau’s analysis: Charlie Brown yearns for the Little Red-Haired Girl, “a young lady of unquestioned pulchritude but with a tragically underdeveloped awareness of Charlie Brown’s existence”; Lucy has deceived herself that “sooner or later her man Schroeder is going to look up from his keyboard and suddenly be smitten by the most gorgeous thing ever lowered into a playsuit”; Sally hopes against hope “that her chosen will eventually look beyond his blanket for comfort and solace.” The deliciously-painful high and devastating lows of unreturned love was the sine qua non of the Peanuts kids’ world. If Schulz let Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl fall in love, the strip would lose its relevance. In Peanuts unrequited love functions on two levels, one speaking to a more personal experience, and one speaking to larger dynamics. On the comics page, the pain of the unreciprocated crush was a stand-in for the senses of isolation and angst that marked the strip’s historical moment, becoming a “running metaphor with world and national tension.” More personally, the romantic frustrations of Charlie Brown, Sally, and Lucy touch the scars we all carry on our own hearts, letting us, for a few moments, remember how it felt to be immersed in the “bittersweet ambiguities of youth” (…we all have a Little Red-Haired Girl in our past). 

Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer is one of Trudeau’s primary influences (GBT refers to him as “the maestro” in the NY essay). As Peanuts used the innocence of childhood crushes as a metaphor for Cold War-era angst, Feiffer’s cartoons examined the era’s anxiety more directly. Like Charlie Brown, Feiffer’s protagonist, Bernard Mergendeiler, embodies anxiety, self-doubt and self-loathing, exemplifying an American fondness for characters who “come across time and again as terrified, ineffectual paranoid-schizoids.” Bernard was a “pathetic wreck of a human being … [living] in an urban nightmare of alienation, emotional self-destruction, and duodenal ulcers.” His chief hang-ups concerned romance, sex, and intimacy, reflecting, during a time of shifting mores and expectations, a widespread uncertainty about these things. Feiffer’s running commentary on the “drifting young men” who “cajole and badger neurotic young women into doing things for which they will later despise themselves” made Bernard “a folk-hero of the literati and a topic of chic conversation at all the rarefied cocktail parties he himself would never have been invited to.” 

As Bernard’s pseudo-intellectual musings on sex and love resonated with the readers of highbrow papers like the Voice, other comics – or rather comix – took a decidedly more earthy approach. For Trudeau, Robert Crumb’s “sketches of fornicating mammals” and other “anarchic” characters in Zap Comix were “singularly appropriate for [their] vulgar times.” GBT warned “aspiring Stan Drakes” (the artist behind The Heart of Juliet Jones, a popular romance/soap opera comic strip that debuted in 1953) that they were out-of-step with the times: Crumb’s “vision of human interaction far surpasses in authenticity anything offered in the comics of the straight press.”

Crumb and his cohort were breaking new expressive and transgressive ground in comics arts, but smut has been part of the comics world for as long as the medium has existed. Even in the family-friendly confines of the daily funnies, there was precedent for the cartoon filth that Crumb et. al. were indulging in at the height of the sexual revolution, even if the naughty parts were more implied as compared to the raw explicitness of the comix era. Al Capp’s L’il Abner consistently challenged respectable bourgeois ideas about sex and marriage. While Trudeau doesn’t mention Sadie Hawkins Day, an annual event in which traditional gender roles regarding dating were overturned, in his look at the strip, he notes that the  “shotgun marriage” of Li’l Abner and his longtime pursuer Daisy Mae,  a highlight moment in 1950s American popular culture, marked “the culmination point of Capp’s satire on the ultimate aspiration of every American girl – to get married.” Capp’s cynicism about the virtues of marriage existed alongside a “lasciviousness” that permeated the strip. No popular cartoonist could match Capp’s ability to draw “cheesecake”/pin-up renderings of male or female bodies, but beneath that veneer of wholesome sexiness, the denizens of Dogpatch were into some freaky stuff. Trudeau sees characters like Moonbeam McSwine, “the dazzler who preferred hogs to men,” and Adam Lazonga, a “winner of loving cups in exhibitions of Dogpatch-style wooing the world over,” as evidence that, while Abner and Daisy’s marriage might have been “tame, almost anachronistic, by modern standards,” they and their neighbors were “still some way from being just plain folks.”

Trudeau ends his look at love in the comics with a few words about his own strip and a look at what the future might have in store not only for his titular hero, but for the medium more broadly. It was “highly unlikely,” GBT mused, that Mike, as he was in 1973, could be “an active participant in any serious romantic involvement.” That said, Trudeau admits to trying to “foster a natural maturation within Mike,” helping him overcome his awkwardness so that he could “converse more or less coherently on a variety of contemporary topics, like sex and skyjacking,” and thereby hopefully find a partner. A key part of Mike’s maturation process was already unfolding at this point: the character had stopped actively hating women. As I’ve written before, after 1971 or so, Trudeau began moving away from the misogynistic humor that followed the strip from its college-newspaper incarnation to the daily comics page to embrace the core feminism that defined much of its subsequent run. Our hero, however, would have to wait until 1980 to find his first real love.

In 1973, Garry Trudeau couldn’t predict what shape our hero’s future love life might take, but he understood that for his generation of cartoonists, neither the overt misogyny of Bringing up Father nor Blondie and Dagwood’s domestic bliss could serve as “an acceptable model” for their work. A new comics aesthetic was approaching, one that would, presumably, build on the emotional directness of Peanuts while bringing Feiffer’s observations about the era’s malaise and Crumb’s twisted psychological explorations closer to the mainstream. The early 1970s were a dark time in America: Trudeau understood that cartoonists needed to address a “world-weary public … now amused only by representations of despair more agonizing than its own.”

I’ll leave it to another day to think about how Trudeau’s later work, and that of his contemporaries, met or failed to meet the expectations he’d set in the NY essay. I want to conclude with some preliminary thoughts about how Trudeau understood the cultural role of comics to be given a readership looking to understand and ease the “agonizing despair” of their historical moment. 

Trudeau has likened daily comic strips to “a public utility,” in that they are (or, at least were) woven into our daily lives; as “a dominant force in popular culture” the funnies have, at their best, reflected popular ideas about, and critiques of, the shared experiences of a vast and diverse readership. They do so, he writes, by allowing readers to reconnect with ways of seeing the world that came naturally to us when we were much younger. 

In his introduction to the first Doonesbury compilation, The Doonesbury Chronicles (1975), Trudeau recalls Pogo’s Walt Kelley saying that “cartoonists should be attended to at all times by staffs of small, insouciant children.” To see the world through the eyes of a child, GBT continues, is to “celebrate the boundless, shimmering diversity of everyday experience.” The world we see isn’t the only one there is, and kids know it: only they get that “a flight of fantasy” is “as profound as the arbitrary state of awareness we are taught to regard as reality.” What Trudeau calls “nonordinary reality” has much to teach us, but connecting with it “seems beyond the capacities of every practicing adult.” 

(This goes a long way in explaining Zonker.)

Comics help us see what is otherwise invisible to grown-ups. It’s the “the indispensable function of the cartoonist in society,” Trudeau writes, to give us what we’ve lost in adulthood, a “means to look back into ourselves.” Done well, comics have the potential to be a “conduit between our self-serious facades and those pockets of vulnerability buried deep within.”; they allow the “small meannesses and foolishness of life [to] face each other in distortion, stretched, juggled and juxtaposed, but always lit with laughter to ease the pain of self-recognition.” The “self-recognition” that Jennifer Boylan experienced reading Peanuts helped her see herself and understand her way of being in the world in a way that her parents “real-life” marriage couldn’t. 

Comics are magic. Garry Trudeau gets that. 

Okay, I’ve got a few things on the go: more of Doonesbury’s Carter years, and some looks at some other stuff that Garry did away from the daily comics page that are a lot of fun. Stay tuned.

*The scan I’ve linked to gives a 1971 date for the piece, but it ran in 1973.