:dubious: Only artists who are veterans can use characters who are veterans? Try again.
There’s three fucking pages of debate, here, and all you can do is quote the OP and throw in some rolleyes?
Try again indeed.
Sorry, but I think Glutton has it right. That’s the heart and soul of the argument, and it’s absurd. All the rest of Krok’s argument is distraction from this basic point.
Yes, Krokodil hasn’t come up with any coherent objection other than a conservative Republican military veteran professor character cannot validly express this particular opinion in this particular manner if Trudeau is not himself a veteran.
Is Krokodil himself a veteran? If so, savor the irony, because then he’s a living example of exactly what’s being portrayed in a strip – a veteran who won’t accept a particular point of view unless it comes from another veteran.
Hey, cats! The OP checking in. Whoah, so many questions! But most of them boil down to the same six or seven questions, so I’m going to address those.
*
–What’s your problem with Garry Trudeau? Does his shining example highlight your personal shortcomings as a writer/cartoonist/whatever? Have you considered counseling?*
Some variation of this question has popped up several times, mostly by people who haven’t read the FAQ recently or attached much importance to it. But since the strip is the topic of this thread (specifically the strip from 12/20/2011 and the following week)), I will say that I am a huge fan of “Doonesbury” and that I come from a tradition of fandom that includes a good deal of critical analysis and of holding the cartoonist to the high standards that have made me a fan of the strip since 1971, and that he came up short early that week.
*–I don’t understand your problem with the strip. I read it, chuckled, and promptly went on to read “Garfield.” *
And what a fine and valid approach to reading the comics page that is, sir! Getting back to the strip at hand: In his scathing indictment of the Bush administration and the “neocons” who pushed this country into a very questionable war, Trudeau (or “GBT,” as we hardcore fans like to refer to him) presented his case via a character we’ll call “the Professor.” A poorly-realized character whose lack of an actual name or personality (in contrast to the rest of the rich cast this strip is famous for), the Professor is a transparent literary device: the authorial stand-in.
–What’s wrong with authorial stand-ins? Aren’t all characters ultimately authorial stand-ins?
A good character is so much more than that, and a poorly-conceived character is so much less. In “Doonesbury” alone, Zonker, BD and Mark all function as authorial stand-ins from time to time. But put them in a room together and watch the fireworks! They are dissimilar to one another and are fully-realized characters. The Professor is the Voice of Trudeau, with two additional characteristics: He is a war veteran and a political conservative. He claims to speak on behalf of these groups, something GBT is unable to do because he is famously neither a war vet nor a political conservative. This is a narrative cheat, and a rhetorical one as well.
–WTF is a “narrative cheat”? Why can’t Trudeau just tell the story he wants? We have a First Amendment, you know!
A narrative cheat is a piece of bad storytelling that undermines the integrity of everything that came before it. If you think there’s no such thing, try getting a story published with any of the following unforeshadowed endings, which are classic narrative cheats:
“In the end, everybody was run over by a large truck.”
“Because, as it turns out, the Sheriff was really a VAMPIRE!”
“And then I woke up. It had all been a dream, thank goodness!”
“Turns out Lt. Caffey had the undoctored flight logs in his possession the whole time, and Col. Jesup’s next stop was Leavenworth.”
“Because, you see, Ray and BD’s professor was a war vet, too!”
–Isn’t this kind of a picky thing to devote a whole thread to?
I’m as surprised as anybody else that this thread has lasted more than five posts (Most threads I start die after three!). Still, this is Cafe Society, a forum where phrases like “Han shot first” and “Batman, if he’s prepared” have actual and widely-understood meanings. I believe that, like water, I’ve found my level here.
–There are conservative war vet professors in the real world, too. Why do you hate veterans so much?"
I really don’t. And yes, there are. I’ve met them. They are well-rounded people who don’t talk like Garry Trudeau’s authorial voice. And while they have divided opinions on whether the war was worth fighting, the ones I’ve met really don’t embrace GBT as their spokesman.
–You still haven’t answered my question. What have you got to hide?
Technically, I have no obligation to answer any particular question. Whether or not I want to depends on a few things: Was your question adequately covered in an earlier post? Was it asked in something other than the spirit of good faith and fellowship? Did it make me wonder if you were harshly toilet-trained, or breast-fed well into your college years? Was it bundled with over a dozen other questions in the same post? Any of these can trip my alarm buzzer and inspire me to not answer a specific question. Or maybe I’m no match for you, intellectually. All of these are possible.
Well, I daresay the onus remains on you to establish that this character is so far-fetched that Trudeau’s creation of it strains and damages Trudeau’s credibility overall. The character (indeed all of Trudeau’s characters) are there to express Trudeau’s views on politics and humour, and perhaps this one is simply less subtle than most.
Of course, we all have our own standards of credibility, so all I can say is you haven’t sufficiently argued to convince me, for what that’s worth.
BTW, I loved today’s strip. BD’s daughter crossed the line from wide-eyed “tween” to adult-eyed teen. Bravo!
It doesn’t convince me, and you’ll have to take my word on that.
Well, neither of us really “has” to do anything, but I’ll venture that you’ve been unfair to Trudeau and to some of us.
I’ll note that you’re just picking off the easy questions, cheap shots, and half-baked snipes.
Waitaminit. B.D., Mike, Zonker, Mark and several others are main characters who have been developed over a period of 40 years or so. Does every single figure that expresses a point of view in Doonesbury have to start out with that same level of development?
Whenever a new character is introduced to the strip, that character starts out with a shallow persona and develops layers over time. When the strip started, B.D. was nothing but a humourless jock with a ditsy bimbo of a girlfriend, Mike nothing but a sexually unsuccessful dweeb, Zonker nothing but a stoner freak.
And your conclusion that the professor is different because he is nothing more and nothing less than the “Voice of Trudeau” in a manner that no other character is really just personal baggage on your part. It’s saying too much and too little. It’s saying too little because all fictional characters are to some extent the Voice of the Author. It’s saying too much because the professor, as we know him so far, a conservative Republican war veteran is 100 percent plausible as someone who holds these particular opinions. Participants in this thread have already told you that they know people who are just like this.
Your personal set of acquaintances doesn’t represent the universe of human possibility. But as an author, you know that, right?
Trudeau isn’t acting as the spokesman for anti-war conservative Republican veterans in portraying this character any more than he is acting as a spokesman for any other group who might be similar to one of his other characters.
Your mini-lecture on narrative cheats was interesting, but your conclusory assertion that this particular character fits any of that stuff is unpersuasive. Remember, this is the beginning of this particular story line. The fact that the professor is who he is is one of the premises of this episode. It’s not a rabbit-out-of-the-hat resolution, like your other examples.
Premise: B.D. meets an anti-war veteran. What happens next? There has been no opportunity yet to find out how this story will be resolved, whether in a valid manner or in a cheating manner. B.D. has had a long journey since his days as a college football quarterback.
Was it a narrative cheat when B.D. became friends with a Viet Cong guerilla? Was it a cheat when he moved into the commune? Was it a narrative cheat when B.D. became injured and suffered from P.T.S.D.? In all those instances, Trudeau was depicting a character whose life story and viewpoints were entirely outside his own personal experience. Was that cheating?
And why just him? Was it a narrative cheat when Mark Slackmeyer came out as gay? Is it a narrative cheat that ultra-conservative Duke enthusiastically indulges in illegal recreational mood-altering substances? Was it a narrative cheat that in a parody of The Bridges of Madison County, J.J. became a flakey adulterer? Was it a narrative cheat that housewife Joanie Caucus abandoned her family to become a feminist, day-care worker, law student, and Republican congressional aide? Was it a narrative cheat that Mike Doonesbury became an enthusiastic supporter of John Anderson?
As an aside, I thought I had read that Trudeau had stopped drawing the strip himself since the Broadway sabbatical. Is that not true?
It sounds so dirty when you put it that way! My intent was to clear the decks of the questions that keep getting asked over and over even though (a) they’ve been answered earlier in the thread or (b) are kind of irrelevant or borderline personal.
I’d say a lot of these characters were pretty well-developed within a few months of their introduction, and were actual characters instead of transparent literary devices.
The upside of using a transparent literary device is that the reader can project whatever he wants onto it, like a Rorschach blot. The downside is that, like the blot, there’s really not much of anything there.
True enough, in a “So what?” kind of way.
It was actually the rabbit-out-of-the-hat resolution of an earlier episode, when the Professor was first introduced a month or so ago. Maybe Trudeau has plans to flesh him out as a more convincing character in upcoming storylines, but it hasn’t happened yet and “transparent literary device” kind of sums up why I don’t find the character all that credible.
I’ll concede that the story is in progress; should that make it immune to commentary as it’s unfolding? Given the leisurely pace at which GBT reveals these things, I’d have to say no.
No. In the context of the strip, these are all people we know, believably doing the things we know they’re capable of.
Let me focus on Mark Slackmeyer for a minute: Contrast him with Andy, Lacey Davenport’s assistant. When Andy was revealed to be gay, it wasn’t a particularly big deal because none of the readers had any emotional investment in this minor character. He was a literary device, invented solely to showcase Trudeau’s take on the gay experience, the AIDS crisis, and mortality. When Mark discovered he was gay, it was a somewhat bigger deal. We knew this guy from a pup! He was one of the core characters, one the readers had some emotional investment in. And while he certainly hasn’t been put through the wringer as badly as Andy was, we feel for him a lot more.
If you want to put the Professor on a par with the core characters, ask yourself: Do you feel like you know him? Do you give much of a crap about him? If your honest answer is “no,” should he really be the one carrying the load he’s carrying?
Accounts vary. He has claimed that he sends a rough sketch of the idea to the syndicate, that they have embellishers and production staffers flesh it out into a functioning strip, and that to the best of his knowledge, this is the standard arrangement most cartoonists have with their syndicates. Some time later, a national magazine (Newsweek? Rolling Stone? It’s been a while) ran stats of thes “rough sketches” and they looked pretty tight to me.
Wow, talk about your cheats. These absurd straw-men depictions of what people are saying are consummate debate cheats. Nobody is saying these things, and your belief that you’ve “answered” the points you’re parodying here is immaterial. People have responded to your answers, explaining why your answers are unsatisfactory. You on the other hand, have responded a few times with a hint that you think the unpopularity of your position gives it some sort of legitimacy, an approach to life we should all have outgrown with our teenage years.
Snerk. I seem to recall several strips way back in the day that were just rando character sitting in a chair watching TV. The only dialogue would be a newscaster and then the character would mug at the reader at the end to punctuate whatever feeling you were supposed to have. Even if we allow the Doonesbury of a few months after he started being as fully realized as the Doonesbury of today, by your own metric aren’t you being just a tad premature in deriding the professor character as not having depth?
Pick the one that you find most egregious, LHoD, and I’ll tell you which post the actual question appeared in.
This isn’t General Questions, where there’s a single clear-cut factual answer to every question posed; nor is it Great Debates, where Oxford rules encourage the determination of a clear winner and loser of each discussion. This is Cafe Society. Opinions here are based on very subjective criteria, often of an aesthetic nature, and there’s more than one “right” answer (especially to the question “Was this well-done?”).
I am expressing and defending my views, not drumming up popular support for them. I may adjust my views based on a compelling counter-argument, but not on how unpopular they are. I don’t, for instance, like Tequila; If it turns out that every other poster here loves Jose Cuervo with salt and lime, it’s pretty irrelevant to the physical revulsion I have to the stuff. Some things can’t be arrived at democratically.
So Krok your critique still boils down to some combination of
The professor is not a fully realized character within the first several strips of his creation. My gosh, compare him to all these characters who “GBT” (if someone who is not such a huge fan may also use the initials) have had years to develop and who are, at this point, often well developed, and only sometimes cut outs for throw away jokes or editorializing.
You believe that the professor “claims to speak on behalf of these groups” (vets, conservatives …), because he, as a character, is a member of those groups, despite the fact that the character does not claim so, and there are other vet characters who are each of different POVs (albeit those POVs may be evolving, just as real POVs do).
You believe that introducing such a character somehow “undermines the integrity of everything that came before it”, and is, thus, a narrative cheat. But no one else seems to be able to understand why you’d think so. A narrative cheat is when suddenly Batman develops superpowers out of the blue … this is not that.
And the character is a conservative expressing an idea a liberal thinks a conservative should have. That’s somehow a no no.
Right?
Trudeau has farmed out the art for decades. (In the 80s, one of the ghosters visited an illustration class I was taking.) Possibly Trudeau’s sketches are less detailed as the years pass; that wouldn’t be surprising as the longer people work together, the less supervision is needed.
And Mr. Krododil, The 12-28 strip is indeed fine. Subtle, self-referential, and ending with both legitimate sentiment and cynicism.
Not exactly. He’s barely a character at all; just a plot device. His function is to speak in GBT’s voice, except for when he’s claiming to be things that Trudeau isn’t and could never seriously claim to be. If you’re counter-claiming that a lot of other characters in the strip can also be described thusly, I’d enjoy seeing an example.
I believe he’s Trudeau in disguise, claiming to speak for conservatives and war vets. I find this distasteful, but you sure don’t have to.
A more on-point superhero example might be from Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man, where a thinly-disguised version of the writer appears to explain the weird goings-on of the previous year’s stories and makes them disappear with a wave of his hand. Mark has a socio-political epiphany at the hand of a Garry Trudeau stand-in. It might have been more believably delivered by, say, the counselor at the vet center. You’re satisfied with this, I am not. Honestly, I don’t think less of you for it.
Um… I’ll go with that, sure.
Holy fuck is this thread still active? WHY?
Seriously? You don’t see how your questions were straw-men? Ooookay, let’s start with a lowball. "I don’t understand your problem with the strip. I read it, chuckled, and promptly went on to read “Garfield.” " Who, other than you, sees an equivalence between this strip and Garfield?
And what’s your evidence for this claim? You’ve made it several times, but your only evidence that he’s claiming to speak for conservatives and war vets appears to be a gut feeling.