I came of age with Doonesbury. Garry Trudeau’s comic strip debuted in 1970, the year I turned sixteen amid the country’s involvement with the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s rights, and social activism. For the first time in the nation’s history, the Funny Pages of the daily newspaper chronicled the everyday lives of people just like my friends and me. And if not exactly us, then our neighbors, our parents, our teachers, and our leaders. The characters were recognizable and relatable, mainly because they were based on composites of people from Trudeau’s own life and student years at Yale. Beyond the characters that so eerily reflected our thoughts, the larger world was depicted, giving a semblance of reason and humor to those front-page trendsetters and decision makers out of our reach, our politicians and celebrities. Yale became Walden College. Duke was reckless power incarnate. Blind service to one’s country was B.D. And Trudeau became Mike Doonesbury, observer and participant along with the rest of us, America’s Everyman.
I recently wrote a paper for one of my classes about Doonesbury, and my teacher was fascinated because she had stopped reading the strip about ten years ago. She belongs to one of the generations after mine that no longer reads newspapers. My grown children fall into this category. If it’s not online, it’s not in their lives. As a former print journalist, it breaks my heart.
Christopher Lamb noted in Changing With The Times: The World According to Doonesbury, “When the cultural wave shifts, Doonesbury moves with it. This does not apply to most comic strips where characters say the same thing in the same place day after day, year after year. Lucy, Linus, and Charlie Brown are always kids.” But not in Doonesbury. Just like in our own lives, the campus liberals and hippies of the sixties and seventies got married in the eighties, had kids, got divorced, started over, changed jobs, dealt with aging parents, and on and on.
There are so many arenas where the denizens of Doonesbury parallel the lives of we mortals – Mark Slackmeyer coming out of the closet as the first openly gay comic strip character in history; Zonker Harris’s well-worn reluctance to graduate college saying, “The only thing between me and the real world is one unflunkable ceramics course;” shallow journalist Roland Hedley’s seduction by and ultimate abuse of Twitter; left-wingers Joanie Caucus and Rick Redfern, whose mercenary son works undercover for the CIA. The same ironies, twists of fate, and life decisions – good and bad, planned and unplanned – that flesh and blood people see pass through their own lives. Our comic strip counterparts wrestle with conundrums that resonate, such as Mike Doonesbury’s lament upon being told in his first post-college job as an advertising copywriter that he had to sell Ronald Reagan to black voters. His plaintive response was, “This is a test, right? To see if I have no shame?”
Perhaps the most affecting storyline and character rebirth has occurred with B.D. Always in a helmet – be it a football helmet in college, a camouflage helmet in Vietnam, or in California Highway Patrol headgear – B.D. embodied the middle-American soldier, unquestioning in his ideals and service to a higher order. As a quarterback at Walden College, he told a fellow player who showed up to practice stoned, “Marijuana leads to communism.” And when he was sent home heartbroken from Vietnam, he bemoaned his fate by saying, “This war had such promise.”
But in Trudeau’s 2005 book The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time, B.D. appears without a helmet for the first time, and also without a leg. Serving as an Army officer in Iraq, a grenade hit his Humvee near Fallujah, nearly killing him. The book, and the strip ever since, depicts B.D.’s coming to terms with his faith in the military as expressed by an Army officer’s rendering of the present-day Catch-22: “We’ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not get killed.” In therapy sessions, talks with fellow vets, and interactions with his supportive and sometimes confused family and friends, B.D. comes to embody Trudeau’s love-the-warrior-but-hate-the-war sensibility which has been present through Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
A recent addition to the war scenario is Melissa, a young enlistee who suffered a sexual assault at the hands of an officer. Her road back to self-esteem, and her decision to return to the front, has elicited some of the most poignant yet knowingly humorous strips of late. Mirroring a situation that must go on more often than the public is aware, Doonesbury once again opens the door a crack for us to see in.
And then:
Why does it all ring so true? As far back as 1984, Gloria Steinem summed it up in her introduction toDoonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years: “Trudeau’s people grow, take on new ideas, change their jobs and even their personal worlds. . . This gives us faith. If the Doonesbury characters we love and identify with can change and be redeemed, surely we the readers can change and be redeemed too.”
Over twenty-five years later, it’s a different war and a history-making President. Our lives have changed and so have the lives of our counterparts in Doonesbury. The only constant has been the reflection we see every time we read it. For as long as it stays around for us to read.
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