Garry Trudeau continues to draw controversy
Readers of tomorrow's comics pages may want to keep a magnifying glass handy, or else don a blindfold. Six of the nine "Doonesbury" panels list the names of US military personnel killed in Iraq. The list, timed to coincide with Memorial Day observances, covers the US casualties up to April 23, the date that cartoonist Garry Trudeau submitted the strip for publication.
"Doonesbury" serves up the names without comment. For most readers, however, decoding its antiwar message will be no harder than brewing their morning coffee. Some comic strips grind their political axes with noisy fanfare. This one is as muted as a bugler playing "Taps." Suffice it to say, it will not be hung in Donald H. Rumsfeld's office.
What's curious about the strip, beyond the power of these names to inflame passions in both hawks and doves (as they did when ABC's "Nightline" listed them during its April 30 broadcast), is that after 34 years in the cartooning business, from Watergate to Abu Ghraib, Trudeau is still capable of making readers wince. Editors, too.
A month ago, it was Army reservist B. D. getting his leg blown off in Iraq and uttering the epithet heard round the publishing world. About a dozen papers either spiked the strip or edited out the rough language. The Boston Globe did not run it.
Last Sunday, it was the head-on-a-platter image and its unfortunate association with the murder of Nicholas Berg. The strip had nothing to do with Iraq; it had been drawn before Berg was beheaded. Nevertheless, several papers ran notes warning readers of what was coming, and Trudeau himself issued a statement regretting the strip's "poor timing" and apologizing for any offense the image may have caused readers. (None of the 1,400 newspapers that subscribe to "Doonesbury" have informed its distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, that they are pulling tomorrow's strip.)
Trudeau is making no apologies, however, for B. D.'s salty language or his own dim view of the Bush administration.
"It's not exactly a secret that I opposed this war," he writes in an e-mail interview with the Globe. "Anyone who reads the strip knows that. But it's no contradiction to want to honor the warriors who've made the ultimate sacrifice in our names."
The inspiration for tomorrow's strip, he continues, was the famous issue of Life magazine that cataloged the US war dead during one week in Vietnam. "Listing the individual names dramatizes our nation's loss," Trudeau writes, "in a way that's not conveyed by a numerical total."
Is he surprised by the uproar over some recent strips?
"Not really," Trudeau replies. "Some of it's over the top, such as Bill O'Reilly invoking [Nazi Joseph] Goebbels in a column condemning the B. D. strips." (The Fox TV host and conservative pundit accused Trudeau of "using someone's personal tragedy to advance a political agenda.") "But these are politically charged times," the cartoonist notes. "Simply writing about any controversial issue at all invites a certain amount of blowback."
While characterizing the current political climate as being "more greatly polarized" than any in recent memory, Trudeau, who attended Yale University when George W. Bush and John Kerry were there, denies there's anything personal to his public pummeling of the president.
"For me, it's never personal," Trudeau says. "At the risk of sounding like Tony Soprano, it's my job."
He adds: "I will say, however, that my belief that this is the most reckless president in our history has overwhelmed me creatively. I wake up thinking about the astonishing amount of harm these people have done to our national interest on every level, and it takes a tremendous act of will not to write about it every day. I've never felt that way before -- not even during Nixon's run."
Strong words from a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who drew Dan Quayle as a feather and Bill Clinton as a waffle, and who's currently portraying California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a groping hand. "Doonesbury" has been denounced in the US Senate (by John McCain) and sniped at by a sitting US president (George H. W. Bush). In February, the strip offered $10,000 to anyone who could verify George W. Bush's service in the Alabama Air National Guard. If not motivated by personal animosity, Trudeau's satirical swipes at the White House are not subtle, either.
"All Garry's work is driven by the same impulses that drove Jonathan Swift," says writer Roger Rosenblatt, a close friend of Trudeau's. "However much he makes you laugh, he fundamentally wants to improve things."
Do the claws still hurt? Sharp-clawed and left-leaning? Clearly. But funny? Relevant? These questions dog the cartoonist many regard as the foremost satirist of his time, a writer and artist who has guided his cast of characters through not only wars and political scandals but premarital sex, drugs, homosexuality, divorce, AIDS, and other signposts of social change.
"As times get worse, satire gets better -- and right now I think his work is as good as ever," says Christopher Lamb, an associate professor of media studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, of Trudeau. In a forthcoming book, Lamb chronicles the decline of editorial cartooning in America, brought on, he argues, by newspapers shying away from rocking the boat.
"If he weren't so influential, people wouldn't get upset about" his work, Lamb says. Contrary to what Trudeau says for the record, Lamb adds: "With him and the Bushes, I believe it is personal."
The New York Times cultural affairs columnist, Frank Rich, says Trudeau's longevity and success have earned him a measure of immunity that other artists and pundits probably don't have.
"He's been able to navigate this increasing tide of censorship better than, say, the `Boondocks' guy," says Rich, referring to Aaron McGruder, another Bush-bashing cartoonist. "In the entertainment marketplace, Trudeau has the clout to practice sharp political and social criticism with minimal interference. And to his credit, he's using that clout."
To be sure, not everyone is standing up and saluting "Doonesbury" these days. Besides conservatives such as O'Reilly, critics such as Reason magazine managing editor Jesse Walker, a self-described libertarian, say the problem with the strip is that the older and angrier Trudeau gets, the less consistently funny and cutting edge it becomes.
"He's a cartoonist whose best days are behind him," says Walker, who is 33. "He's become more like a Democrat than a humorist. At times, he just seems mad at Bush or the NRA. Even when he's kind of `on,' he's lost that edge."
According to John Smyntek, special features editor of the Detroit Free Press (which ran the B. D. strip unedited and got no complaints), readership polls show a fairly steady decline in the strip's popularity since the late 1970s. This makes Smyntek wonder whether its recent controversies are a caculated attempt to draw attention to the strip.
"In several instances the syndicate has sent out warnings [to subscribers], which makes you wonder," Smyntek says. Trudeau's readership, while loyal, is both shrinking and aging, he adds, and that could signal a drop in influence. "More and more see it as an insular strip for the inside-the-Beltway crowd and New York elite," Smyntek says.
A world of material Not all controversies have been rooted in politics. In 1976, a Sunday "Doonesbury" showed then-unmarried Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus in bed together, causing many papers to drop it. A 2003 strip alluding to masturbation was likewise spiked by many papers. Some have shifted "Doonesbury" from the comics page to the editorial page in an effort to mollify readers who object to its tone and subject matter.
At The Green Bay News-Chronicle, which published the B. D. strip with the epithet taken out, editors argued over its propriety yet never seriously considered not running it, according to news editor Ray Barrington.
"We felt the language had crossed the line, and we're in a conservative community," Barrington says, adding that he's not surprised Trudeau is ruffling feathers with the country so at odds over Bush and Iraq.
As Barrington points out, a recent "Doonesbury" story arc depicts a college reunion class so bitterly divided over Bush that members refused to cross a tent to greet one another.
In his e-mail, Trudeau writes that he has no intention of getting tougher or meaner as Campaign 2004 plays out. "I don't think people look to a comic strip for wisdom or guidance in shaping their political views," he writes. "As for sharpening my claws, I really don't know how. I just do what I do. Sometimes it draws blood; sometimes it doesn't."
Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.
