Doonesbury - Milestones

Milestones

Doonesbury has delved into a number of political and social issues, causing controversies and breaking new ground on the comics pages. Among the milestones:

• A November 1972 strip depicting Zonker telling a little boy in a sandbox a fairy tale ending in the protagonist being awarded “his weight in fine, uncut Turkish hashish” raised an uproar.

• During the Watergate scandal, a strip showed Mark on the radio with a “Watergate profile” of John Mitchell, declaring him “Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!” A number of newspapers removed the strip and one, The Washington Post, even ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon. Following Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was rerun with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed", lampooning the media's apparent glossing-over of his image in the wake of his death.

• In June 1973, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes dropped Doonesbury for being too political. The strip was quickly reinstated after hundreds of protests by military readers in the U.S. Army.

• September 1973: The Lincoln Journal became the first newspaper to move Doonesbury to its editorial page.

• In February 1976, Andy Lippincott, a classmate of Joanie’s, told her that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, "We just decided we weren’t ready for homosexuality in a comic strip."

• In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed premarital sex in this fashion. Again, the strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers, although some newspapers opted to simply repeat the opening frame of that day's strip.

• In June 1978, a strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.

• In August 1979, Trudeau took a three-week vacation from the strip, uncommon among comic strip writers and artists.

• From January 1983 through September 1984, the strip was not published so that Trudeau could bring it to Broadway.

• In June 1985, a series of strips included photos of Frank Sinatra associating with a number of people with mafia connections, one alongside text from President Ronald Reagan’s speech awarding Sinatra the Medal of Freedom.

• In January 1987, politicians were again declared "Guilty, guilty, guilty." This time it was Donald Regan, John Poindexter, and Oliver North, referring to their roles in the Iran-Contra Affair.

• In June 1989, several days’ comics (which had already been drawn and written) had to be replaced with repeats, because the humor of the strips was considered in bad taste in light of the violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Trudeau himself asked for the recall, despite an interview published with Universal Press Syndicate Editorial Director Lee Salem in the May 28, 1989 San Jose Mercury News, in which Salem stated his hopes the strips could still be used.

• In May 1990, the storyline included the death of Andy Lippincott, who succumbed to AIDS.

• In November 1991, a series of strips appeared to give credibility to a real-life prison inmate who stated that former Vice-President Dan Quayle had connections with drug dealers; the strip sequence was dropped by some two dozen newspapers, in part because the allegations had been investigated and dispelled previously. (Six years later, the reporter who broke the Quayle story some weeks after the Doonesbury cartoons later published a book saying he no longer believed the story had been true.)

• In December 1992, Working Woman magazine named two characters (Joanie Caucus and Lacey Davenport) as role models for women.

• In November 1993, a storyline dealing with California wildfires was dropped from several California newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register, and The San Diego Union-Tribune.

• In June 1994, the Roman Catholic Church took issue with a series of strips dealing with the book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell. A few newspapers dropped single strips from the series, and the Bloomington, Illinois Pantagraph refused to run the entire series.

• In March 1995, John McCain denounced Trudeau on the floor of the Senate: "Suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt." This was in response to a strip about Bob Dole’s strategy of exploiting his war record in his presidential campaign. The quotation was used on the cover of Trudeau’s book Doonesbury Nation. (McCain and Trudeau later made peace: McCain wrote the foreword to The Long Road Home, Trudeau’s collection of comic strips dealing with BD’s leg amputation during the second Iraq war.)

• Later in 1995 Mark Slackmeyer, a gay character from the strip, was seen in the final days of Berkeley Breathed’s comic Outland heading off with a main character from that series, Steve Dallas, to the great amusement of many readers of both strips given the one-time "tensions" between their respective authors.

• In February 1998, a strip dealing with Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers because it included the phrases "oral sex" and "semen-streaked dress".

• In November 2000, a strip was not run in some newspapers when Duke says of then-presidential candidate George W. Bush: "He’s got a history of alcohol abuse and cocaine."

• In September 2001, a strip perpetuated the Internet hoax that claimed George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, half that of Bill Clinton. When caught repeating the hoax, Trudeau apologized "with a trademark barb – he said he deeply apologized for unsettling anyone who thought the president quite intelligent."

• In 2003 a cartoon that publicized the recent medical research suggesting a connection between masturbation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, with one character alluding to the practice as “self-dating”, was not run in many papers; pre-publication sources indicated that as many as half of the 700 papers to which it was syndicated were planning not to run the strip.

• February 2004: Trudeau used his strip to make the apparently genuine offer of USD$10,000 (to the USO in the winner’s name) for anyone who can personally confirm that George W. Bush was actually present during a part of his service in the National Guard. Reuters and CNN reported by the end of that week that despite 1,300 responses, no credible evidence had been offered; as of 2006, the offer remains unclaimed.

• April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw BD’s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the Iraq War. Later that month, after awakening and discovering his situation, BD exclaims “SON OF A BITCH!!!” The single strip was removed from many papers—including the Boston Globe—although in others, such as Newsday, the offending word was replaced by a line. The Dallas Morning News ran the cartoon uncensored, with a footnote that the editor believed profanity was appropriate, given the subject matter. An image of BD with amputated leg also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954).

• May 2004: two Sunday strips were published containing only the names of soldiers killed in the War in Iraq. Further such lists were printed in May 2005, May/June 2006 and 2007.

• On March 7, 2005, the series began a sequence memorializing the death by suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the inspiration for the character of Duke. In the sequence, Duke’s head explodes upon reading the news; no newspapers are known to have refused to print that day’s strip. Trudeau indicated in a news story that one reason for this willingness may have been that the character had a history of similar events: "I’ve been exploding Duke’s head as far back as 1985," he said.

• In June 2005, Trudeau came out with The Long Road Home, a book devoted to BD’s recovery from his loss of a leg in Iraq. Although Trudeau opposed the Iraq War, the foreword was written by Sen. John McCain, a supporter of the war. McCain was impressed by Trudeau's desire to highlight the struggle of seriously wounded veterans, and his desire to assist them. Proceeds from the book, and its sequel The War Within benefit Fisher House, the generic name for homes where families of injured soldiers may stay near where their loved ones are recovering, also known as "the military equivalent of Ronald McDonald House."

• July 2005: Several newspapers declined to run two strips in which George W. Bush refers to his adviser Karl Rove as "Turd Blossom", a nickname Bush has been reported to use for Rove.

• In September 2005 when The Guardian relaunched in a smaller format, Doonesbury was dropped for reasons of space. After a flood of protests, the strip was reinstated with an omnibus covering the issues missed and a full apology.

• The strips scheduled to run from October 31 to November 5, 2005 and a Sunday strip scheduled for November 13 about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were withdrawn suddenly after her nomination was withdrawn. The strips have been posted on the official website, and were replaced by re-runs by the syndicate.

• Trudeau sought input from readers as to where Alex Doonesbury should attend college in a May 15, 2006 straw poll at Doonesbury.com. Voters chose among MIT, Rensselaer, and Cornell. Students from Rensselaer and then MIT hacked the system, which was designed to limit each computer to one vote. In the end, voters logged 175,000 votes, with MIT grabbing 48% of the total. The Doonesbury Town Hall FAQ stated that given that the rules of the poll had not ruled out such methods, "the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected," declaring that Alex will be attending MIT.

• Before the 2008 presidential election, Trudeau sent out strips to run in the days after the election in which Barack Obama was portrayed as the winner. Newspapers were also provided with old strips as an alternative. When asked whether he created the original strip with complete confidence in an Obama victory, Trudeau replied: "'Nope, more like rational risk assessment. Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com is now giving McCain a 3.7% chance of winning – pretty comfortable odds. . . . Here's the way I look at it: If Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it'll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face'." In response, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said, "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame."

• The sequence for the week of March 12–17, 2012, lampooning the changes in abortion law in several states was, again, pulled or moved to the editorial page by a number of newspapers.