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I"ve wanted to review this since I started this blog. It's one of the big ones for me, one of the things that always hangs near the back of my mind I just never get to like a JLI Retrospective, an Extremley Goofy Movie, Urkel Saves Santa or the For Better or Worse Holiday Special. I have weird varied tastes.
Doonesbury is one of those: I came into the strip in the mid 2000's as a big comic strip fan whose high school library didn't exactly have a ton of my faviorite medium, a big step down to my middle school library being packed with foxtrot. Thankfully their was one exception to this, these fine books
These ended up being a perfect intro too: Greatest Hits is the strips second treasury, so it was early enough in the series history that I wasn't lost and also right as a few key storylines happened including first openly gay comic strip character Andy Lippincott
Not used a lot but Gary at least didn't promote the fuck out of it like he was Disney. And the ascension of a weird far right drug enthusasist loosely based on a very displeased Hunter S Thompson
While Check Your Egos and Downtown both come from the late 80's, as the series underwent a soft reboot. Both perfect jumping on points. I was instantly hooked, read the meaty wikipedia page and cast pages, and got every book I could get my hands on and at present own almost the strip in a mostly finished chronology using treasuries, keeping a few of the smaller books for sentimental reasons.
For the unfamiliar Doonesbury is a political comic strip that began in 1969, the same year we made a landing that was sooner, by satarist and cartoonist Gary Trudeau, based on his rougher college strip Yale Tales. It's "rape as a punchline" rough and thankfully he grew out of that fast, with Doonesbury taking the best of yale tales and growing beyond it.
Doonesbury started as campus shenanigans with some political satire, following three distinct college kids:
Mike Doonesbury: A dork who starts the strip a tad overconfident and constantly striking out at romance. He'd continue to strike out, but would evolve into a sardonic straight man and center left counterpoint to the rest, having a love of campaning for usually hopeless third parties.
Mark Slackmeyer: The campus radical who eats and breathes the far left radical (60's and 70's edition) lifestyle, dubbing himself "Megaphone Mark" and constantly messing with the man on his campus radio show. Mark loves to mess with people, paticuarlly BD, who you'll meet in the moment and his conservative dad. Mark is stubborn, opinanted and often stoned, but tends to trade the straight man role with mike or share it to create a two man greek chorus.
B.D.: The local football hero and parody of yale football hero brian dowling. He was Brian Dowling's oppisite: while Dowling was a good leader and kind to his team, BD ruled his huddle with an iron fist, was pushy obnoxious and the only friend he genuinely seems to have is Mike, who puts up with his crap. Mark and him naturally spar all the time.
The three were plopped into Yale substitue Walden College, a setting that got fleshed out more after everyone left and slowly degraded more and more with time. As the strip moved on it kept the slice of life shenanigans, but gained two things that would be key to it lasting as long as it did: It upped the political satire, not afraid to mock issues of the day back when that wasn't something you could really find anyway, and it upped the scope with characters all over the country and sometimes beyond it. It let some cast members evolve, while still keeping the core cast mostly in stasis with some slight changes. It also added a bunch of new characters from Mike's tutoring student thor, to his lab partner and mad scientest bernie. But three stuck out and stuck around, remaning major figures in the strip to this day and earning a place in the special. They are
Zonker Harris: A stoned hippie and free spirit who first shows up runing BD's iron stranglehold on his team, constantly posing philosphical questions, messing with his captain or getting baked mid-game. He was the perfect foil to BD and something needed for the huddle gags: Having BD Just talk with random people wasn't going to cut it forever. Giving him a tangible nemisis worked. Zonker easily fit with the rest of the cast, becoming Mike and Mark's best friend and his weird antics, his love of tanning, fear of olympian mark spitz, and childlike detachment from reality, utterly unaware Santa wasn't real, determined never to grow up made him the perfect breakout star.
Barbra Ann " Boopsie" Boopenstien: BD's giggly airheaded cheerleader girlfriend. She would grow later in the strip, but in these early years she was mostly there to be his innocent girlfriend he argued with from thinking her pilgramage to graceland shortly after elvis' death was nuts, to trying to forbid her from voting democrat or posing in playboy. He lost on both accounts.
Joanie Caucus: The biggest addition to the main cast and the first to have a more dramatic introduction: as is the norm for comic strips the rest of the cast just sorta came in when Trudeau had the idea for them and stuck around if he still had material. Joanie got a whole arc introducing her. Mike and Mark took a summer road trip across america on a motorbike, Mike being bored and Mark having found out his dad rented out his room. While lost in denver the two found Joanie Caucuss, a house wife who hit her limit with her verbally abusive mysgonist husband clifford and asked the boys to get her the fuck out of there. They gladly obliged and having nowhere else to go, Joanie came back with them to Walden.
Walden was a commune the group founded. It's also how I found out what a commune was, basically a community house where everyone shares chores. So one house with initially eight people including Bernie, Mark's friend Nichole who Mike had an unsuccesful crush on, and Bernie's girlfriend didi. If your wondering like some people on tv tropes on this special why the fuck BD would sign up for such a hippy dippy thing.. he didn't. The rest of the gang bought the house while he was serving a tour in Vietnam to get out of a term paper, and when his tour ended, he was enraged to find out where they were living and only agreed because they gave him a keg, a gag that's funny at the time but pretty fucked up in hindsight.
Doonesbury's popularity slowly climbed, with jabs at watergate both getting it slapped on editorial pages.. but also getting it picked up more and more
The controversy, as it tends to , only made the strip stronger and in 1976 Tredeau contacted animators John and Faith Hubley. I didn't realize till looking into the tie in book for the special that Hubley was both an animation pioneer and Gary's old teacher, having left DIsney to make his own stuido with more experimental films. It likley explains why there was only one specail.. the other sad reason being that John passed soon after the specail is complete, and that Faith and Gary wanted to leave the specail as was, a monument to a man's legacy. It won a judge award at canes and was nominated for an oscar. It's an excellent little special I was oh so happy to find as a teen, with the special seemingly lost media till Trudeau just straight up linked to a megaupload on facebook. It was rare gold, something I truly treasured then.. didn't revisit till now, but still stands out to me: while Comic strip specails were becoming more and more a thing, it was still a select few who got one. While Doonesbury understandably didn't have the breakout sucess of peanuts or garfield, it's seralized and heavily political nature didn't really fit merch, it's still notable this existed at all, a time capsule of the strips early years and of the malise following the idealistic 60's.
So why not review it before now? Honestly i've tried, but it's hard to get on the board: if I get behind, as I did for a while as I overloaded my schedule and stilll can now as my brain be bad and i'm subscteable to getting sick as anyone, I have to priortize comissions, reviews someone pays me to do of a certain work. I don't mind doing this: It's genuinely cool, even 6 years in, to get paid to write about stuff by people who genuinely want to hear my take on it, i've made friends that way, and it's let me do what I love for a living and I have full power over if I actually WANT to cover something or not. And while I still do reviews just for me free of any money or a helpful friend sponsoring it, I prioritze that money: It helps my family, it helps me buy stupid shit that makes me happy, and it makes this blog possible. I don't like having to do that, but it's the hard reality of self employment: you need those paychecks coming in. Loosing some last month as I got horribly behind thanks to a cold and depression wasn't great.
That said having such great people comission stuff sometimes leads to a miracle: out of the blue last month Kevin, who comissions a LOT of work and i'm etnerally greatful for that found out something existed: Doonesbury, A musical comedy, an early 80's musical that Trudeau took time off the strip to write and stage. It also ended the college era of the strip and lead to that soft reboot, pushing all but one character to real time. I have had the book for the musical for a while, and it is fully canon to the strip and something I simply hadn't gotten to so I was glad to cover it.. and to help with the exposition I politiely asked if we could also cover a doonesbury special, which sets up the general characters nad most of the ones in the musical (ther'es a few others we'll talk about). He said sure, and here we are. Later this month i'll be covering the musical itself, having found a u of m production of it and also having that book and the soundtrack, but for now I wanted to finally give this special it's due: what's great, what's a bit tacked on, and why ti's just plain nice to see these characters I like so perfectly represented in animation
The opening to the special is excellent: Zonker is hanging out in Walden Puddle, a small pond on the property that thorugh the powers of whimsy and some good stuff, he can dive in and swim around, even spearfish as Mike calls him for dinner. It's a perfect setup and also does something intresting: It defines the inside of walden. The strip never really did this as most comic strip houses are "whatever's funniest". It's why Snoopy's doghouse can be a multistory palace or just a regular doghouse depending on whatever the gag needs. Lynn Johnston of For Better Or Worse had to come up with a solid lay out for her specials, something kept after.
Walden in the strip has a kitchen through the living room, something the special highlights and that's it. Thorugh it's many transformations over the years, the only constants are it's dining room, where most strips set at the house are set nowadays, it's living room with a character in front of the tv, one of Trudeau's faviorite narrative divices early on:
Shoutout to cbr for doing a top ten list. Unlike peanuts it's a lot harder to find specific doonesburys trips as it's both not as popular and buried in gocomics archives. I have access to them, but it is a lot. Also credit to the blog discovering doonesbury, both have been a tremendous help.
But whose room was where, what they looked like, how many rooms are there.. it's all malliable to better suit the story. Walden just exists. It's outside is more defined with a thicket of trees to go on long talky walks with than the inside. So it's nice to see it more laid out: a record player with two chairs, a staircase leading up, a big rug a small kitchen. Not a lot but enough to make it feel a bit more lively on the inside, to feel like an actual place you could go to and hang out with some college kids.
Naturally Trudeau coudln't resisit sneaking in a "watching the tv" bit and it's here we get one of the most gorgeously animated parts of the special. The animatoin is limited, but expressive, perfectly capturing the strips style at the time.
Yet the special dosen't capture the strip as it would've been right before the special came out, allowing for animation lead times; they instead go for the status quo of the early 70's: The characters have settled: BD's conservatism is more pronounced, Mark is more naunced, and Mike isn't an incel. I wish I was kidding on that but Bull Tales mike outright threatned to rape a woman for laughing at him. The character massively improved once they removed his smugness and replaced it with dry sarcasm and patheticness. He works much better as the group's straight man and put upon butt monkey than an overconfident weiner trying to pick up women.
The bigger note is that Joanie is still with the group. While she'd be an offical part of the Walden Group for the rest of her life , Joanie left for Berkley to get her degree. It was Trudeau's first big expansion outside of Walden. While he tested the waters with Phred, a viet kong who after getting lost after capturing BD became one of his closest friends, and his struggles due to the war and the bombings after, Joanie was the first character to get her own fresh supporting cast: her roomate Ginnie, Ginnie's obnoxious boyfriend Clyde, Andy, eventual boyfriend rick and eventual boss congresswoman Lacey Davenport and to really give a character their own entirely seperate story. She'd still interact witht he main cast, when Ginny ran for the seat Lacey would eventually get, ZOnker came down to help and when Joanie graduated Zonker, being an 11 year student, tried to stop the madness, but otherwise she had her own life now. She'd be the first with Phred's role slowly ramping up and Zonker's drugged out far right uncle duke bouncing from job he wasn't qualifed for to job he wasn't qualified for before settling into bouncing from wacky illegal scheme to wacky illegal scheme.
The Waldenites by contrast remained in place: they moved up a grade every couple of years, with Zonker being the only one who in canon was a student for a decade a record only his even bigger mess of a nephew Zipper would break with gusto, going almost 20 years as a student before moving on out to a colorado farm. Personality wise they were largely the same people. It's the other reason why cover this: it breaks up the exposition as the rest of the characters had a longer weirder interconnected ride to where we find them in the musical. Mike has one major arc we'll get to, and plenty of stuff will be important in thier post college lives, Boopsie being in playboy started her career as a D-Movie actress , Mark remains in radio to this day, Mike continued his love of lost political causes etc. With the waldenties their lives and stories don't become a whirlwind of change till after they leave. Their's a pretty straight line with just one or two dips from Mike rooming with BD early on to the group as a whole graduating. Joanie's is curvy and full of intresting twists and Duke's is a fucking squiggly do. The man starts the strip as a thinly veiled hunter s thompson parody working for the Rolling Stone, and ends at the start of the musical, busted for drug dealing trying to fund a john delorean biopic. And tha'ts not even getting into his post time skip career running trumps yacht and booking an alive elvis who will only cover john denver songs
The special just has the gang hanging out, down the street, same old thing they did last week and makes it easier to dive in than a big turning point in all their lives that would change the strip forever
In this case the same old thing is razzing mike's cooking, an ocasional running gag. He made Lasanga and everyone has to needle him about it. Maybe it's because I relate to mike, he comes off like what I would've been in that decade and not for the better, but I side with him: the jokes at his expense are funny, Mark's saying "I think it moved", but .. he also cooked dinner for everyone. It was his turn. If they didn't like it order a pizza to bipass his turn till someone who can cook. Or just order pizza in general as none of the waldanites outside of Joanie, whose done enough of that for a life time, strike me as the type who could cook something edible. Zonker even proved he's not exactly good at cooking despite being a good gardener
I get their college kids and only one of them works , Mark as a waiter at various class reunions, but most of them have decent enough parental support to afford it or I assume, even living off campus, they'd still have access to a meal plan. I did look into it apparently they used punch cards back then. I can't say that food would be any more edible, but I can say it'd be included in tuition.
Zonker has a diffrent type of grousing to do than mine, coming down in a tie, though stills wim trunks and flippers, he announces the 60's are over and they shoudl couple up and disband. This is done as a bit... but gets Mike thinking. Did they actually solve anything? They started campus int he 60's, full of optimism and hope.. but have they actually DONE anything? Does social movement even still matter? It's a feeling I know all too well, that feeling of supporting everything you can only to watch the country turn to crap anyway and it'd only become more presecent as this was only a few years before the regan era, when thigns got even more conservative, and campuses themselves turned from hotbeds of protests to this
It's easy to see why Tredau and the Hubley's had this in mind, this idea that all the irreverant snarking and shouting and protest... was doing nothing, that the fires were dying out. Given how many of these firey protestors became the same boomers trying to either stick to a status quo that's crumbling or took a hard right, it was a question worth asking and one the special dosen't quite answer. It has something resembling one, but ti's a question you really can't answer. HOw a generation deals with thier fire going out. We're still dealing with the baby boomers fires going out today, with many having sold out and many an elder liberal wanting us to "just get along" and preaching civlity over actually fighting for those Trump is trampling on. This idea that the true activism is dying. That part isn't nearly as true these days, but I can see why it'd be on their minds into the malase of the carter admitstration, with again Regan just ahead. Was what they were fighting fo rsomething that mattered? They stopped vietnam but did it stop the damage done to the country? no. Did it stop the right's bloodthirst? nope. Did it all matter? And the hard answer is.. kinda.
We do get a protest flashback, along with a concernt from one of the few characters allowed to show up in the special: Jimmy Thudpucker, an apparently jackson browne moddled muscian. We even see how he's changed a bit peforming to arenas in what's easily the most gorgeous segment of the special, with plenty of zooms, pans and all kinds of stuff i'm impressed they pulled off on what was clearly a limited buget. This is the tv bit I failed to circl eback to and the song "Stop in the middle of your life" is a gorgeous song that asks what it all meant.. and may be WHY Zonker did his whole schitck at dinner.
We get a flashabck to a more grass roots jimmy doing a concert , the more idealistic song I do belivie.. which is contrasted with a nasty riot nad bd randomly beating up protestors. It's got really smooth animation, really captures what I know of the 60's well and explains why many were so nostalgic for it.. while not leaving out the ugliness as BD decides to just straight up beat the shit out of protestors. The animation is still smooth.. to the point I put this in my intro for the 5 seconds I tried video reviews. Also shows just HOW rapidly animation changed
It also shows where I was at , with at leats two diffrent clips of the critic, MLP back when that was the breath of fresh air in the community and daria. I don't regret any of it, I mean it ends on Death shredding the guitar and the song, from the animated adaptation of the discworld movel soul music, is still one I love to this day. It's , to my delighted shock, on spotify. And I really gotta get to Soul Music one of these days. The animation may be limited but damn is it good.
BD is in top obnoxious form, alying into mark that things are fine and that they coudl've won vietnam. He also rightfully gets needled for the term paper thing, though BD is also right in that he did genuinely belivie. He may of enlisted to escape a term paper, but he was geninely commited
It dosen't make him a good person. That took decades to get to. For now he's a narrow minded asshole more concerned about the fact THEY COULD'VE WON, than the loss of life and the argumetn gets nowhere as Joanie talks about how change, may not necessarily be bad. She went form a housewife to running a daycare.. which is a lateral move but "at least I get paid!"
The next two bits are.. okay but I question why their in here. The daycare stuff is fine enough, taken directly from the strip as one of the girls tries to make another be a building contracter, the boy isn't exactly enthused women are doing "men's work" and joanie tries to both get Ellie to see she shoudln't FORCE her friend to do a job, that feminism means doing whatever you want to be even if it's taking care of other people's children and that jobs are gender neutral.
The next bit I really question why it's in here. It's a christmas pagent done by Reverened Scott Sloane, the local reverened who tries to be down with the kids. He also has a bit of an obession with Joanie. They went out once, and he NEVER forgets it bringing it up EVERY time the two interact, both when he officiates her own wedding, mike's second wedding, and mike's chidl and joanie's grandchild's wedding. Scott can be intresting, but it's hard to like him when he won't take the hint several decades into her marriage that nothing happened. I't sa rock in role natvitiy and i'ts.. eh. It's nothing really special and frankly BLoom county would eat this bit's lunch when they did thier own christmas pagent
It feels like padding in a specail that isn't that long.
One bit that COULD'VE felt that way but didn't, is the huddle. I almost forgot this and shame on me as we get about three minutes straight of Zonker huddle shenanigan from him comparing football's violence to interventionsim, to his smoking a doobie giving everyone else a contact high, all while a delightfully douchey ref prances around and keeps giving them yard penalties while BD gradually looses his mind. It's beautiful.
The special's end is also beautiful, with ellie from the daycare coming over for her and Joanie's woman's meeting. Understandably she's a bit put off that JOanie's doing the dishes, but Mike explain's it's her term. I like that Ellie apologizes, realizing even at her young age that true equality means everyone shares instead of just ASSUMING the women do all the chores. It was already shown with Mike cooking dinner. Sure he was bad at it but he was doing his fair share, and is shown before Ellie shows up talking to Joanie for tips. It's a nice subtle character bit.. and while her suggestion to deep fry it is played for laughs I would eat an entire deep fried lasanga. Granted I am not exactly a good arbiter of taste but still, the fact lasanga bites are a thing kinda kills the joke these days.
We end on Joanie and Ellie heading off as Zonker ponders things
"What happened to everyone? Ah, nothing special. Just... caring in different ways. Feeling the present as it moves by. Things gotta change, right?"
And that's a powerful ending.. and a good one: things will change, the past can't hold forever and the techniques of how we do it may change little by little.. but progress is good. While Mark oversells it people were still trying and even as the 80's became a captalist hellscape, if nothing compared to where we are now. What matters is we keep moving forward, keep helping people, keep doing the right thing. And how much people change and grow over the years, and what happens when they don't, would be the strip's core once it moved out of Walden.. and would remain once pieces of it moved back in.
I like this special a lot. I liked it even more after reading it. I"m no expert on the hippie movement, the vietnam protests, pretty much.. everything here.. but i'ts the deft character work and animation that makes you feel it, using the characters scattered viewpoints to tell the story: Mike wonders where everything went, Mark, the only protestor left int he bunch, insists everything is the same and BD insists we outta nuke cambodia. It's Zonker of all people who has the nuanced take the specail goes for: That change has happened, a lot of the idealisim is gone.. but most of it is just changed. It's shown in Joanie whose fight for women's rights and to do it the right way is made crystal clear. The way forward isn't just never compromising even in the face of armageddon or giving up on it all and growing colder or falling apart as you sell your soul piece by piece as mike would end up doing, it's finding something to fight for, to keep fighting, and even if the how changes, the message of doing the right thing and speaking truth to power remains. And the trees agree. Good Going trees.
If you'd like to check this special out it's on Youtube. The days where I had to scour the internet for it are gone. It's well worth your time.
Before I go though there's something I did want to touch on: The possiblity of a full Doonesbury adaptation. The likelyhood of it is a bit low: Most comic strip adaptations announced in the past few years have died before they ever got made. Phoebe and Her Unicorn got rejected for "not appealing to boys" which as a 33 year old man who loves the comic strip, bullshit, the heart of the city adaptation evaportated and most guttingly, the bloom county adaptation , something i'd truly dreamed of for decacdes, got silently axed by fox just after trump got elected. It still COULD happen, all the materials to make it are still made, but the fact it got struck down after all this build up was gutting.
So the odds of the VERY left leaning and increasingly less centrist , for it's own good, doonesbury, getting picked up is low. I've wanted it, but recognize it'd be hard to pull off. But this year we got a show that provides the easy blueprint for comic strips that go in real time with big sprawling years of continuity like Doonesbury or For Better or Worse to do this: Long Story Short, Ralph Bob Waskerberg's recent masterpiece that follows a jewish family non linearly. It'd make it all too easy to trapse through the very real decades of history int he strip. You could tweak a year or two to make things flow better and give it a concrete timeline, it'd take some work, but it'd allow them to keep the historical context while still allowing wiggle room to cut out some dated refrences and focus on what matters. It's something I do honestly want: Doonesbury is an honest, loving work with tons of great characters, characterwork, and satire. While this adaptation is great and w'el lsee about the musical in a week, their both from earlier states in the strips life. I want to see the later stuff especailly the deep , excellent work done humanizing our troops given the polish it deserves. Thanks for reading
April 15, 1977 – January 1, 1979 – March 13, 1982. As we finally bid a belated farewell to one of the 20th century's worst villains, some might try to claim that the contempt and disgust some of us have for the late Henry Kissinger is latter-day revisionism. Not so! Here are three vintage DOONESBURY strips that give a brief sampling of attitudes toward Kissinger in his heyday.
For a cogent summation, the ROLLING STONE obit is pretty good:
Henry Kissinger has died at age 100, his consulting firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
Seven percent of all renewable fresh water in the world is in Canada, twenty percent if you include sources considered non-renewable like glaciers and underground aquifers. For scale, Canada has about half of one percent of the world’s population. So there is water aplenty for all. But dozens of First Nations communities are going thirsty amid all that bounty.
Even communities like Curve Lake…
1983 - Doonesbury the Musical was described by the Chicago Tribune as “pathetically tame and straight-faced. There is no point of view to the show, no commentary, no insight. There are just some very conventional songs and a series of subplots that do nothing but put the personalities from the comic strip on parade.”
1999, November 14 // Gary Trudeau - Doonesbury / ο εικονιζόμενος είναι ο μελλοντικός Πρόεδρος Τραμπ // G. B. Trudeau - Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2016
