Doonesbury Turns 50

November 27, 2020 5:07 PM

Garry Trudeau, 72, launched ‘Doonesbury’ as a syndicated comic strip 50 years ago.

Brought to you by AARP, in case you didn't already feel really old.

posted by freakazoid (40 comments total)

There is also a good article on the Washington Post site, but you need to join to read it.
posted by freakazoid at 5:10 PM on November 27, 2020

Yeah, I assumed this was an obituary for a minute.
posted by Slinga at 5:30 PM on November 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

As ‘Doonesbury’ turns 50, Garry Trudeau picks his 10 defining strips
posted by octothorpe at 5:36 PM on November 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

I read Doonesbury faithfully from around '74 until the early Clinton years but haven't really paid much attention since then.
posted by octothorpe at 5:39 PM on November 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

in case you didn't already feel really

Too late. AARP's September cover was Bruce Springsteen: The Boss Talks About Family, Creativity, Love and Loss in Our Exclusive In-Depth Interview
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:48 PM on November 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

I discovered Doonesbury in junior high in a small town in Wisconsin, which means that I have to pause for a moment and pay tribute to the small town junior high librarian who selected a Doonesbury collection for her stacks. I'd read newspaper comic strips all of my (then-young) life, of course, but mostly they were dumb gag strips; I do remember Pogo, but any sort of allegories that Walt Kelly might have put in the last several years of it went right over my head. "Grown-up" strips were few, and mostly things like the Lockhorns drinking and fighting. Doonesbury was something else altogether. I can't say that I really understood Watergate from reading the strip--I think that Trudeau assumed some basic knowledge of the subject, and it hadn't percolated down to school lessons at that point, having only concluded a few years earlier--but I got enough of the basic subject matters to get into it. My favorite strip had to be the one where Mike and Zonker go off to find America, and get busted for having three marijuana seeds in their car (the speed-trap sheriff who nabs them figures that that makes them dealers), and when they're bailed out of jail, they discover a microphone (as in a full-sized stage mike) in their motel lamp. Standing right next to the mike, Mike asks Zonker if he's really into that dope stuff. Zonker goes, "Not me! I get high on life! And America!" That was a go-to phrase of mine for years.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:06 PM on November 27, 2020 [27 favorites]

Yeah, the phrasing, my breath snagged in my chest a bit.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:09 PM on November 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Halloween Jack, I remember reading that exact same sequence of strips in my own middle school library. Also, the sequence where Zonker toys with a reporter from CBS by telling him that all the young people nowadays were into peyote and aqua-Satanic rituals.
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:32 PM on November 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Wow - that's an amazingly long time to be doing anything. It's an extraordinarily long time to be doing something well.

I was just thinking about Doonesbury a few days ago and wondering how long it's been going. (I kind of thought it had started during the late 60s, so I was off by a bit.)

Also, another reason I love the web, even commercial sites: you should be able to view just about any Doonesbury strip since pretty much the start, just by entering the date in the URL:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2015/11/27
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2010/11/27
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2000/11/27 - unionizing grad students!
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1990/11/27 - corporate greed!
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1980/11/17 - Kissinger!
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1971/11/17 - sit-ins!

Hm - there are some dates that don't show anything. Still, that's a LOT of Doonesbury online. (You can even do some searching, although it's iffy: https://www.gocomics.com/search/doonesbury?utf8=%E2%9C%93&terms=zonker+mike+weed )

Thank you so much for posting this frekazoid - time to go revisit a few decades of Doonesburys past!
posted by kristi at 6:53 PM on November 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

I read Doonesbury daily for years and years. Likely since the early 70s? Only stopped in the past 10 years or so. Not sure why I stopped, but I’m glad he’s going and still enjoying the work.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 7:18 PM on November 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I was really young when I discovered Doonesbury. I talked my mom into buying me a used copy of one of the small collections in the early seventies. (Bravo for Life’s Little Ironies) I might have been six. All I knew was that they were comics, so I was interested. I didn’t understand a lot of the strips or punchlines, but I loved the characters immediately. Zonker in particular. I’ve been reading them ever since.
posted by jzb at 7:21 PM on November 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

Let's not forget that Trudeau too two years off of the comic strip in the early 80s to develop a Broadway musical of Doonesbury that would finally move the characters out of college (after 12 years) and into having actual lives. It starred Mark Lynn-Baker (Perfect Strangers - Cousin Larry) as Mike and included the song Another Memorable Meal, which is the only song from the musical I remember despite owning the cast album.

It wasn't a hit in any sense of the word, but without this, the strip wouldn't have grown and become something bigger than a college commune fantasy.
posted by hippybear at 7:33 PM on November 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

I suppose if the characters had aged in real-time Mike would be almost 70 now since I think it was a freshmen in the first strip.
posted by octothorpe at 8:22 PM on November 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure how Mike would respond to you using "it" in reference to him.
posted by hippybear at 8:24 PM on November 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh man, I love this. I read Doonesbury in the paper when I was little of course, but also my family somehow wound up with one of the very early collections (Unfortunately, She Was Also Wired for Sound). For reasons known only to history, I read and re-read both that and a collection of Calvin Trillin's food essays over and over as a child which gave me...an interesting sense of humour. (And, I think, also a strong sense of NYC in the 70's, which has only been boosted by reading a bunch of Fran Lebowitz. I have zero regrets about any of this.)
posted by kalimac at 8:47 PM on November 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

that's an amazingly long time to be doing anything

50 years, same as Schulz (but he never went on hiatus like Trudeau does). The latter lost me when he began depicting W as floating objects (a centurion's helmet, an anarchist's bomb), not sure why.
posted by Rash at 9:22 PM on November 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

My parents had a bunch of Doonesbury and Bloom County collections that I read obsessively as a kid, so pretty much my entire understanding of 70s/80s politics comes from them, and I had a whole host of references that no one else got - Al Haig's "I'm in charge", "It's a baby woman!", "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!", lots of Watergate names. I never encountered anyone in my life or in the broader culture who took Donald Trump seriously as a businessman and a human until after I'd absorbed who he was solely through his appearances in Doonesbury, and when Bill the Cat's brain got put inside him, so it was something of a shock to me to find that people actually believed he was smart, capable, etc.
posted by skycrashesdown at 10:50 PM on November 27, 2020 [12 favorites]

tween me was obsessed with Doonesbury compilations & would frequently drop barely-informed Watergate jokes on my parents (in the early 90s) to impress them

(this isn't necessarily why tween me had no friends but you can't rule it out as a factor, right)

in 2020 I've been thinking about the "guilty, guilty, guilty!" strip a ton & just found out Trudeau did a callback
posted by taquito sunrise at 10:51 PM on November 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

on preview it's too bad skycrashesdown & I were not friends
posted by taquito sunrise at 10:54 PM on November 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

I just recently started reading Doonesbury again, after a break of a couple of years. I don't exactly know why I needed a break, but I did. I started following it in 1981, when I moved from my grandparents' to a dormitory where we shared a couple of newspaper subscriptions and I became a huge fan fast. (I'd seen it before at my aunt's house, but you need to get to know the characters, I think.
The best thing is how the characters age and change, I really love that.
posted by mumimor at 2:27 AM on November 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

tween me was obsessed with Doonesbury compilations & would frequently drop barely-informed Watergate jokes on my parents (in the early 90s) to impress them

Heh. When I was a kid in the seventies, for some reason there was a book of jokes and cartoons about the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 kicking around the house. Nothing like an eight-year-old dropping cutting remarks about Gamel Abdel Nasser and Moshe Dayan to mystified adults.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:09 AM on November 28, 2020 [13 favorites]

The latter lost me when he began depicting W as floating objects (a centurion's helmet, an anarchist's bomb), not sure why.

Doonesbury rarely depicts politicians directly - Nixon era strips typically show conversations emanating from the White House. Ford was generally off panel. The object era sort of starts with Ron Headrest, Reagan's Max Headroom doppelgänger, and basically becomes a gag in itself. One running Doonesbury joke was that VP George H. W. Bush was invisible, so it made an odd sort of sense that when W arrived on the scene, he was also invisible, but with a Stetson hat: All hat, no cattle. The hat mutated into an asterisk after the contested 2000 election, then an imperial Roman helmet around the time of the Iraq War. It can be a little confusing if you're not familiar with who's represented by what - for instance, the floating bomb isn't W, but Newt Gingrich.
posted by zamboni at 6:41 AM on November 28, 2020 [11 favorites]

There's one particular Watergate-era strip which I swear I can remember seeing at the time, but have since had so little luck finding that I'm beginning to wonder if I imagined it. It ended with a shot of the White House with a Nixon speech balloon above it reading "Come and get me, copper!"

Anyone else have any recollection of seeing this strip? I've been trying to find it again recently as it seems so apposite to the last days of Trump.
posted by Paul Slade at 6:48 AM on November 28, 2020

Also, since we're recalling our early encounters with the strip, I was a student here in the UK when The Guardian first started carrying it in the late seventies. There were no book collections available here then, so I dutifully snipped each strip out of the paper and kept them all in a letter-sized rectangular envelope - which turned out to be the perfect size and dimensions for the job. My flatmate thought I was mad.

The Donnesbury's Greatest Hits collection came out here in 1979, just as my envelope was about to burst its seams. I've been buying the A4 collections ever since, but Im pretty sure I've still got that stuffed envelope full of yellowing newsprint somewhere in the house too.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:11 AM on November 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

Paul Slade, maybe you’ve conflated it with the Nixon Escapes sequence in The Onion’s Our Dumb Century? Ending with Feds Gun Down Nixon Outside Arizona Motel...
posted by thecaddy at 8:27 AM on November 28, 2020

They ran ‘Doonesbury’ on the editorial page of the Atlanta paper and that's all you really need to know about Georgia. I think I stopped following it during the Bush the Lesser administration because it was clear that the Blanks and OGXers had turned their backs on the politics of liberation.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:07 AM on November 28, 2020

I'd like to compile my own Smokers Doonesbury collection containing every strip featuring Mr. Butts and Mr. Jay. kristi showed us how to search by date; anybody have the details on how to search for these?
posted by Rash at 11:02 AM on November 28, 2020

Rash - does this give you a start?

https://www.gocomics.com/search/full_results?category=comic&short_name=doonesbury&terms=+butts+doonesbury
posted by kristi at 12:52 PM on November 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I used to occasionally pick up a compilation; it's a fantastic view of American history. I ordered the new book, Dbury@50: The Complete Digital Doonesbury, because it has a digital archive. My understanding of things is way better with Trudeau's spin.
posted by theora55 at 1:54 PM on November 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I love Doonesbury. I’ve read it pretty much steadily from the earliest strips on.

I love that even the old strips are enjoyable; Trudeau has a talent for making his strips both historically relevant and timeless. The same was not true for Berke Breathed, whose ‘80s strips are unreadable to me today (though his work in the early Trump years was very good).
posted by lhauser at 8:03 PM on November 28, 2020

Paul Slade - I just started rereading Doonesbury from the beginning on GoComics, since the new digital collection is getting some not so great reviews on Amazon for its formatting and technology needs. I'm up to the Ford years now, and kept an eye out for your missing Nixon-era "Come and get me, copper!" strip, and didn't find it, I'm afraid.
posted by skycrashesdown at 12:01 AM on November 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think probably nothing written in the last fifty years comes closer to the original idea of the “Great American Novel” as laid out by John William de Forest, “this task of painting the American soul”, than Doonesbury. Trudeau has blindspots, and limits himself to a certain cohort, but few other works of fiction have the sweep of Doonesbury, or the width of field.
posted by Kattullus at 2:46 AM on November 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

We shouldn't neglect the soap opera aspects of the strip either. I still remember the warm fuzzy feeling produced by that slow zoom revealing Rick and Joanie had spent the night together for the first time.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:37 AM on November 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

Uncle Duke remains eternal.
posted by delfin at 7:05 AM on November 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

the “Great American Novel”

Speaking of comics, some award this accolade to the Fantastic Four (previously)

does this give you a start?
Yes kristi - thanks!
posted by Rash at 10:22 AM on November 29, 2020

For your reading pleasure, I give you this strip about John Kerry from 1971.
posted by bq at 10:23 AM on November 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

I got big into Doonesbury when I was in junior high for some reason. I credit that for a lot of what I know about 70s and 80s American political history.

(13 year old me got the Watergate joke in FORREST GUMP, much to my mother's bafflement.)
posted by brundlefly at 12:07 PM on November 29, 2020 [4 favorites]

Based on the comments to this thread, and my own experience, there seems to be some correlation between Gen X kids who were super into Doonesbury in the 90s and being a particular kind of odd-ball who didn't have any friends in middle school.

Like others, I learned much of what I know about American history in the 1970s from reading my parents' Doonesbury anthologies. As far as my public school education was concerned, American history ended on V-J Day, with a brief coda about how MLK Jr. solved racism. Doonesbury was definitely a part of crafting me into the cynical middle-aged liberal I am today.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:28 AM on November 30, 2020 [5 favorites]

I would say that is an entirely accurate description. Every word.
posted by brundlefly at 11:56 AM on November 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

> "It's a baby woman!

I thought that when my daughter was born!

Like many people here, I started reading Doonesbury in the 1970s when I was too young to get the references but was still entertained, and read it faithfully for decades. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" can still make me cry.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:48 PM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]