50 Years Ago: Doonesbury Debuts
Today in 1970, Gary Trudeau launched the first daily political comic strip
Cathy was fluff. Blondie was dopey. And Doonesbury? Doonesbury was work.
For many children of the ’80s and ’90s, the comics page was our first daily media routine. Squeezed in the deep recesses of the daily newspaper, Garfield and Marmaduke made many bowls of morning Cheerios go down. Most comic strips were pablum, but Doonesbury was another story. One morning, a talking feather might be introduced as a character, and the next, a fused bomb. It was surreal and hard to follow. There was no binging — you had to keep the myriad characters in your head for weeks, months, years.
For a kid weaned on Family Circus, this was complex storytelling. And for many, our first introduction to satire. It was sometimes hard to grok, but paying attention paid off. Knowing that Dan Quayle was the feather, and that the bomb symbolized Newt Gingrich, felt like an initiation into a secret club. (Bill Clinton’s metonym became a waffle; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, a giant groping hand. That was another Doonesbury lesson: Metaphors don’t have to be subtle.)
Prior to Doonesbury, which made its debut in 26 papers 50 years ago today, there were no daily political comic strips. There were editorial cartoons, but those appeared as stand-alone art on the opinion page. Doonesbury paved the way for long narrative arcs in daily strips and upgraded the intellectualism of the comics page. Soon, other big idea-makers took hold: The Far Side (1979), Bloom County (1980), and Calvin & Hobbes (1985).
Doonesbury is still around, but only publishes on Sundays. Unearthed old strips are more likely to go viral than new ones. The strip atop this email, from 1999, went viral four years ago because it seemed to predict Trump’s candidacy. What a crazy idea.
Did you know? Doonesbury was named after Charles Pillsbury, the great-grandson of the Pillsbury founder and Trudeau’s roommate in college.
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