Tuesday, October 26, 2010

GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY: 40 years ago today, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury arrived in papers, and apart from a hiatus in 1983-84, has been a continuous fixture since. In honor of the anniversary, Slate has the full 14,600 strip archive open to the general public for the next couple of weeks, and provides 200 particularly memorable strips as an entry point. There are a lot of impressive things about Doonesbury and Trudeau's work--the evolution of his art from the rough pencils of the early days to the highly detailed work we see now, how he has created a finely intertwined group of characters and aged them (at least after the hiatus, when he moved away from Walden College and introduced a broader universe), and how he's been willing to break down barriers about the types of characters we see in the comics.

16 comments:

  1. Paul Tabachneck8:21 AM

    About 10 years ago, they put out a collection called "The Bundled Doonesbury," that collected all of the strips up to and including that year's strips on a CD-ROM.  Let me tell you -- the whole deal is so awesome as an experience.  The first time you meet Kim?  SHE IS A BABY.  Follow the dwindling-but-still-relevant career of Jimmy Thudpucker -- from indestructable superstar to aging country-western sell-in.  Marriages, divorces, precocious and ordinary children, career and financial worries, all of these things happen, but not before you get to live a good long while with the characters in their communal collegiate glory days.

    I highly recommend this read.

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  2. Michael9:43 AM

    Kudos to Trudeau for sending B.D. to Iraq and bringing him back without a leg, opening up a world of stories that needed to be told.

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  3. Watts9:55 AM

    And again, Gene Weingarten, FTW: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/20/AR2006102000446.html

    (Have I mentioned yet that The Fiddler in the Subway was one of the best books I read this year?)

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  4. Marsha10:22 AM

    Aaaaaaaand there goes my morning.

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  5. patricia10:24 AM

    Thank you so much for that link.

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  6. Joseph J. Finn10:24 AM

    I think it needs to be emphasized how many great female characters Trudeau introduced; Kim Rosenthal, Joanie Caucus, Lacey Davenport, etc, etc, etc.  Hell, one of the most interesting parts of the strip to me in the last ten years was part of the BD storyline, where Boopsie really comes into her own as a strong character (though that evolution had been an undercurrent for decades).

    That, and Trudeau's willingness to go all-out nuts occasionally, like when Duke was zombified or Hedley's week-long sojourn through Reagan's brain.

    (And man, how much have I been loving the ongoing story of Alex Doonesbury and Toggle?)

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  7. I've always said that Doonesbury is one of the top cultural achievements of our time, in any medium  I got into Doonesbury reading the comics when I was young, not really understanding it all but liking it.  I can clearly remember the "Guilty, Guilty, Guilty" strip and wondering why it caused such an uproar.  So I am a little older than the strip, but I grew up with it in so many ways.

    I have been thinking I need to go back and read from the beginning, and here's a good reason to do that.  And yes, The Bundled Doonesbury is an amazing thing, well worth having.

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  8. Eric J.11:21 AM

    I've said it many times. The collected Doonesbury up through the hiatus is about the best cultural history of the '70s that is likely to be produced.

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  9. Call me a narcissist, but I've always gotten a thrill out of my name being in the title of a Doonesbury collection: http://bit.ly/90Ox05

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  10. Joseph J. Finn11:49 AM

    Oh wow, that description mentions something I'd almost forgotten, that Duke was neighbors with John Denver.

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  11. isaac_spaceman mobile12:38 PM

    No review of Doonesbury would be complete without comparing his Yale strips, many of which became the Doonesbury of the newspapers, to the newspaper versions.  Michael Doonesbury himself is based, I believe, on one of the Pillsburys; BD was based on Brian Dowling, Yale's last All-America quarterback, etc.  There's a lot of casual sexism in the Yale strips (of a piece with the time) and the subversive civil rights strips are tempered by some casual racism as well (again, typical for the time).  But you can see in those early Yale strips a lot of the unusually funny political humor that characterized early Doonesbury, before Trudeau lost his wit in the 80s and became just a polemicist.  One of my favorite early strips was when the guys were bluffing each other in a poker game by likening their hands to political figures (Al Haig, etc.), and Doonesbury folded to "Harold Stassen."  You don't often get Harold Stassen as the punch line of a comic strip.   

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  12. I think Trudeau realized he was becoming a polemicist, and that was part of the reason for the hiatus in the mid-80s.  He continues to wear his political views on his sleeve, but clearly has had admiration for folks of a variety of political affiliations over time--heck, the most noble politician ever to appear in the strip is indisputably Lacey Davenport.

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  13. That Washington Post piece was fantastic.

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  14. isaac_spaceman mobile2:37 PM

    The hiatus definitely didn't cure his polemics or, more importantly, his loss of his ability to be both funny and political at the same time. 

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  15. Genevieve9:47 AM

    Seconded.  And I love Baby Kim, especially when she's a toddler and reciting Jimmy Carter lines from the debates.

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  16. Genevieve10:03 AM

    One of my favorite law school memories:  I was in then-Judge Breyer's Administrative Law class (he's a terrific teacher), and another student was giving an answer that rambled and was pretty unclear.  Prof. Breyer said, "A verb, Senator, we need a verb!"  I cracked up, and maybe two other students were also laughing - no one else knew the reference (which was pretty old).  I loved that Breyer was quoting old Doonesbury strips.
    http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/1980/01/23

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