40th Anniversary of Doonesbury

Cafe Society
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Tomorrow, Oct. 26, is the 40th anniversary of the first syndicated Doonesbury strip.

Slate.com is going all out on this. Rare interview with Garry Trudeau.

Doonesbury’s 200 Greatest Moments.

Real-life weirdness from Uncle Duke.

Though I can make cases for other strips, particularly Pogo at its peak, in honor of its anniversary I’ll make the temporary pronouncement that Doonesbury is the greatest strip of all time. Trudeau’s genius comes from three basics: he has the largest cast of regulars ever; he allows them to age; and his world is the real world.

The cast is maybe the most important. He can comment appropriately on anything and everything with characters who can be slotted into the stories behind the headlines. How many other strips can say this? Brenda Starr?

Aging the characters gives the strip depth. For Better or Worse was always a better strip than Family Circus or Dennis the Menace, because 50 years of jokes about kids who stay the same age runs you out of jokes. Aging has problems. I can’t really bring myself to care about daughter Doonesbury or Joanie’s idiot son. But aging makes for better possibilities for new stories. Even Charles Schulz ran out of stories for the Peanuts crew after the first 25 years, and he was the best ever at turning kids into universals. Strips like Gasoline Alley and Jump Start create better characters than those who get stuck in place like Blondie. (If you can find it, read the first year or so of Blondie, in which Dagwood’s the pampered son of wealth who falls in love with a bubbleheaded flapper. It will blow your mind.)

Taking characters out of the real world allows for wonderful imaginative exaggeration, the kind that made Calvin and Hobbes great. Peanuts doesn’t really exist in our world, especially the best Snoopy episodes. Pogo’s swamp was a garden of innocence where anything was possible. But sooner or later the strain starts to show. Everything has to become an allegory, retold in terms of your fairy world. Some episodes work better than others when pushed into a distance and reworked. The real world always is real because it has to be.

I know people will start pouring political biases all over the strip, so I left the politics out entirely. Even during the formative Nixon years, Doonesbury covered a much wider swath of American culture than just politics. The proportion of political strips is probably even less today. Doonesbury is great without even needing to go into politics. Nobody will ever do retrospectives of Mallard Fillmore, no matter how right-wing they are.

Doonesbury is today’s nominee for GOAT, Greatest of All Time. Thank you, Garry Trudeau.

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I’ll say it unequivocally: Doonesbury is the greatest comic strip of all time. There will never be another that equals it.

Oh, and Happy Birthday! :stuck_out_tongue:

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The only real contenders are The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts - maybe Bloom County…

I prefer The Far Side, but it is not really comparable other than in popularity in its day. Chalk and cheese compared to Doonesbury.

Calvin and Hobbes - I dunno, it also seems different to me because it couldn’t be nearly as topical.

I prefer Doonesbury to Peanuts - but the Peanuts I knew by the late 60’s and 70’s was innocuous stuff that led to the kids’ TV specials…

Bloom County had its moments but I always thought of it as a Burger King to Doonesbury’s McDonalds…

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I’m not sure if it is the best, but it definitely is one of the best ever.
Having the characters interact with real people is far better than the caricatures you found in Pogo or the far inferior Lil Abner.
In addition to the characters aging, things happen to them. BD loses a leg. Lacey dies. We’re not positive, but I think Havoc, Joanie’s son’s CIA boss, bought it. And the characters are among the best in comics. Wanna bet that 30 years from now few people will remember who Duke was based on, but will remember him?

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Doonesbury is one of the very few comics that I try to read every day.

However, I’m finding that in recent years I have trouble keeping track of all the characters.

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Hmm methinks we have a poll idea here…

I can either

A. Just put down a list of 30 putative all-time classics, and let everyone at it

B. Do a preliminary nomination thread first before the poll

C. Run it as one of those elimination games, albeit in the GR. I probably don’t have the patience for this one tho (unless someone else wants to run it).

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Going back into the Wayback Machine in the link is enlightening. Mark in retrospect does seem to come across as a bit gay (specifically his mannerisms), tho I doubt that was the conscious intent back then. There was a lot more LOL humor than there is today, certainly.

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And I’ve been reading it for 40 years. Granted, it’s had some slack periods, but for the most part it’s been the highest quality for the longest time.

Trudeau had a lot of guts to take a sabbatical (a year, IIRC) and then reboot the entire strip with all the characters aged 10 years.

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Congrats, Gary. I don’t always agree with your political views, but you (almost) always are entertaining to read.

As long as we’re on the subject: Is that short bearded guy “Overkill” supposed to be based on anyone real? I get the essence of his character from the strip, but I got the feeling that we’re meant to recognize him from the real world, and I don’t at all.

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I’ve been out of the loop and haven’t been reading Doonesbury since 2002, and so I’m trying to get back into it, but it sucks to be so far behind. I do hope he releases an electronic disc or online version where I could read all his strips and catch up on the ones I missed.

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Well, here you GO!

(GOcomics has full archives of all their comics; I once spent a few weeks reading 9 Chickweed Lane from the beginning.)

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That’s what has always amazed me about Doonesbury. Even if he has to go deep into the archives, there always seems to be someone who can be a natural part of any situation.

How long were Bernie and Kim out of the strip before becoming part of the story again?

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I’m 43 years old and learned about the Vietnam War through Doonesbury books my parents owned in the late 70’s, early 80’s.

I still want to marry Zonker.

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That’s interesting, because in today’s strip there was some pretty overt foreshadowing that the formerly celibate and non-dating Zonker will be looking for a bride.

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The best Doonesbury ever:

The tale of Douglas

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Does Slate even have any proofreaders? Their 200 greatest moments list has “Jan. 13, 1972: B.D. volunteers for Vietnam”, but the link went to the strip for Jan. 13, 1971, with Mark broadcasting from a sit-in of the college president’s office. So, after a bit of hunting, I found Slate’s e-mail address for corrections and sent them a message. Now the link goes to the strip for Jan. 13, 1972, with Rufus eating a free breakfast provided by the Reverend (Scot, presumably).

I’ve sent them another message.