Doonesburied

The decline of Garry Trudeau -- and of baby boom liberalism.

Jesse Walker from the July 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Duke: Oh...Springfield, what's the idea of sneaking up on me like that? I coulda blown you away!

Springfield: I'm sorry. That would have been your right.

Now jump to 1993, as a giant cigarette and a giant bullet prepare to lobby Congress.

Mr. Butts: Still on a tear, Mr. Dum-Dum?

Mr. Dum-Dum: Hey! The N.R.A. never rests! The gun-control nuts keep trying to slip the Brady Bill past us! But it ain't gonna happen! No way! We've been shooting our way out of tight squeezes since 1871! And look at the results! Over 70 million happy gun owners ready and able to defend our way of life!

Mr. Butts: Wow...are we safe yet?

Mr. Dum-Dum: Not yet. Tragically, many children are still unarmed!

I disagree with Trudeau about gun control, but I still think the first strip is funny. The second one just hectors us. It isn't controversial so much as it's annoying.

Trudeau is not the only cartoonist to decline with age. Frank King's Gasoline Alley brought high art to the Sunday funnies in the 1920s and '30s, but it never matched those masterpieces in the decades that followed. Charles Schulz's Peanuts was in top form from the mid '50s through the mid '70s, then grew blander; by the end, it was not so much a comic as an outgrowth of the greeting card industry. Even Pogo peaked early, in the 1950s, though it stayed funny, relevant, and controversial until its creator's death in 1973.

If Trudeau's only sin were not living up to his early work, that would be understandable. But he's moving toward a far less pleasant future, toward a fate like that of Li'l Abner auteur Al Capp. Capp's strip, insightful and hilarious in its day, was little more than a permanent tantrum at the end; it felt like the product of a befuddled old man, desperately angry at the youth movements of the '60s but too far removed from them to lampoon them effectively. (There was sharper satire of the hippies in the underground comics of Robert Crumb, wiser cracks about the New Left in -- well, in the early years of Doonesbury.) There's an unpleasant parallel between Li'l Abner making dumb jokes about "Joanie Phoanie" Baez the millionaire folk singer and Doonesbury shooting witless potshots at Mr. Dum-Dum. And there's another parallel, no less ugly, between the decay of Capp's generation of liberals and the decay of the later left that shocked Capp in the '60s, reinvigorated liberalism in the '70s, then suffered its own sad decline.

If Doonesbury is still sometimes interesting, it is because its world is so vast, so sprawling, that it cannot help intersecting with ours. After losing his way in the late '80s, Trudeau recovered, temporarily, with the Gulf War. His barbs weren't as sharp as they were during Vietnam, but the universe he'd built allowed him to examine the new war from multiple angles -- one week in Iraq, the next in Washington, the next in Hollywood. Even Mr. Butts briefly became funny, putting down his satiric sledgehammer to tend bar in Kuwait, where his fumes mixed with those of the burning oil wells.

In that way, occasionally, Doonesbury returns to form: when the strip's Vietnam veteran returns to Southeast Asia, when its title character starts a dot-com, and even, yes, after September 11, when each of the comic's scattered characters responded to the crisis in his or her own context. Garry Trudeau's fans surely enjoyed such moments, and perhaps a crank or two even sent some angry e-mail to the cartoonist.

It's not clear, though, that anyone else noticed. The strip still appears in almost 1,400 newspapers, but it's lost its cultural cachet. Years ago, Henry Kissinger remarked that the only thing worse than being in Doonesbury would be not to be in Doonesbury. At some point since then, the strip simply stopped being a fashionable place to be seen.