# How is Doonesbury liberal? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** comic-strips\ **Created:** [January 7, 2024, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716 "2024-01-07T01:01:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2024, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/41 "2024-01-07T22:12:54Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Its star, Walt Wallet, born in 1899 or 1900, is now the oldest person on earth. And he has to constantly move from place to place, hiding himself from everyone else, because he knows that the Guinness World Record people are searching for him to see if the rumor is true that there is an older person than they have records of. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2024, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/42 "2024-01-07T22:31:12Z")
I guess I _am_ that old, since I remember being called “Baby Skeezix” by my parents. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2024, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/43 "2024-01-07T22:36:24Z")
He now lives in the Comics Retirement Home. How hard should that be to find? > **[GASOLINE ALLEY: The Comics Retirement Home](http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2013/05/gasoline-alley-comics-retirement-home.html)** > > GASOLINE ALLEY is copyright 2013 by Tribune Media. Jim Scancarelli takes Walt Wallet and Slim to the Comics Retirement home in GASOLINE... ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2024, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/44 "2024-01-07T22:38:00Z")
I wasn’t around in the early days of the strip. But as people here said, things like long hair, smoking marijuana (while playing football!), opposing a major war, protesting against the university establishment or questioning the presidency were controversial things. However, I think it was the treatment of presidents that cemented this reputation. Reagan was charismatic and was perhaps forgiven by the press for being light on facts and heavy on anecdotes. Doonesbury did not shy away from this side of Reagan (whom I like as a person and whose policies were mixed). This pattern started during Nixon but became more pronounced as the political roles changed. I learned a fair bit from Doonesbury. In the early days of the Interwebz Trudeau actively sought opinions from university students (and hoping to use current slang in his strips). I had a few brief web conversations with Garretson Beakman - getting the impression of an egotistical genius extremely full of himself. The strips are groundbreaking, and often very sharp, but it is easy to see why he offended bigwigs on both sides. I see his strip as depicting a number of different views, but by including the ones at the beginning of this post he would not be seen as anything else in the US, surely. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2024, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/45 "2024-01-07T23:28:32Z")
It’s weird to put a political label on a strip like _Doonesbury_. It was originally about college life in the early 1970s, so, of course most of the characters are going to be immersed in the counterculture and the squares (B.D.) ridiculed. I never really understood the decision by some newspapers to move it to the editorial pages. I doubt it was because they thought the strip had a liberal bias but rather the subjects were just too mature for the “funny pages”. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/46 "2024-01-08T00:10:09Z")
« Guilty, guilty, guilty! » was the break point, I think. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/47 "2024-01-08T00:43:52Z")
That strip was run in 1973. It was a statement from the “counterculture,” which by then constituted a large percentage of the public, not a small group of hippies. Remember, I said that Trudeau won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He was an almost instant sensation after his early weird and incredibly badly-drawn strips were replaced by better art (drawn by Donald R. Carlton over Trudeau’s rough sketches) and trenchant political commentary. The 1975 prize went for strips published in 1974. That was the year Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal for any lurkers who are too young to remember it first-hand. Those strips were deeply political and stridently anti-Nixon. I understood why editors at more conservative papers either canceled him or consigned him to the editorial pages where an alternate viewpoint to the right-wing domain could be allowed. It’s true that Gerald Ford did not offend in the way Nixon had - SNL was lucky it started under Ford, at a time when people pretended that the horror was over and normal times had returned - so the strip no longer needed to attack on a daily basis. Fortunately that just drove Trudeau into subtler but sharper satire. Kim, who became Mike’s second wife, was originally put into the strip in 1975 as the last baby orphan airlifted from Saigon, adopted by a Jewish couple, the Rosenthals. That’s not explicitly political but is holy shit he put that on the comics page? commentary. Of all the orphans in all the comic strips over history (Gasoline Alley alone is littered with them) Kim is the most cutting edge characterization. That ability for finding the thread that says the most in the least amount of space makes Trudeau the standout genius that I and so many others consider him to be. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/48 "2024-01-08T00:53:59Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Kim, who became Mike’s second wife, was originally put into the strip in 1975 as the last baby orphan airlifted from Saigon, adopted by a Jewish couple, the Rosenthals. First words: “Big Mac” ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/49 "2024-01-08T01:04:22Z")
Someone told me once that Alex has Mike’s nose and J.J.'s eyes, but I’m not sure if that’s true. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Kim, who became Mike’s second wife, was originally put into the strip in 1975 as the last baby orphan airlifted from Saigon, adopted by a Jewish couple, the Rosenthals. One of the things I love about _Doonesbury_ is that, no matter what was happening in the world, Trudeau seemed to already have characters that he could drop into the situation to make fun of it. How many years passed between Kim’s original arc and her return; and how was it revealed that she was the same Kim from before? For that matter, didn’t Mike and Kim both work for Bernie, another character from the strip’s early days? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/50 "2024-01-08T01:21:16Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > That makes Joanie Caucus a great-grandmother, also reasonable as she’s the oldest regular in the strip. Joanie Caucus is one of the few characters in the strip who have a clearly established birthdate. She was born on July 21, 1935 ([cite](https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1974/03/03)) which makes her 88. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/51 "2024-01-08T02:21:25Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > First words: “Big Mac” Next words: “Creamy cole slaw” (Kim learned English from watching American TV. I particularly remember her singing the Burger King jingle at Christmas dinner) ---
**Author:** ![DKW](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dkw/32/3118_2.png) [@DKW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DKW)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 8:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/52 "2024-01-08T08:00:33Z")
Dang, 50 already? 😲 It’s getting late and I don’t have time to read all the responses right now (and I really want to; this is a fascinating discussion!), so right now I’d just like to do a little clarification on one point. Yes, there was opposition to the Vietnam War, but the strip never directly dealt with the consequences of war. We don’t see POWs, deaths, war atrocities, starvation, etc. Yes, there were black activists, but they’re shown as just as useless as everyone else. Yes, there were anti-establishment protests, but more often than not they couldn’t even stay on message. Yes, Nixon got a ton of heat…just like in real life. My point is, there’s a big difference between simply _being honest_ about how things were and actually _taking a moral stance_ on these people and events. As a point of comparison, whenever Dykes to Watch Out For dealt with a heavily politicized subject (e.g. the Iran-Contra hearings, the OJ Simpson murder trial, Clarence Thomas being nominated to the Supreme Court, the Telecommunications Bill), Alison Bechdel was staunchly, sometimes vehemently, on one side. She didn’t just call the Thomas nomination an embarrassing farce, she _denounced_ this miscarriage of justice. Simply saying that gutting environmental regulations is going to hurt the planet isn’t a “liberal perspective”, it’s the _default_. (Or at least it _should_ be.) A liberal take would involve taking direct action to _combat_ the gutting (and with something a little firmer than Dick Davenport’s birdwatching group politely asking James Watt to resign). Anyway, that’s more or less where I stand. Lots more tomorrow. ---
**Author:** ![LurkMeister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3da27b/32.png) [@LurkMeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LurkMeister)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/53 "2024-01-08T16:36:02Z")
Minor correction: Walt does not live at the Comics Retirement Home. He visits there occasionally (at least twice, possibly three times in my recollection) but lives in his own home, with a caregiver whose name escapes me at the moment. ---
**Author:** ![Dallas\_Jones](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dallas_jones/32/3277_2.png) [@Dallas\_Jones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dallas_Jones)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/54 "2024-01-08T17:01:54Z")
My local newspaper no longer carries Doonesbury, but when it did it was not on the comics page but ran on the editorial page because it was considered too political. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/55 "2024-01-08T17:27:17Z")
I’d say Doonesbury is liberal because conservatives think it is. They don’t go painstakingly go over the finer details like you did. They just see their favorite icon being mocked, point and intone “WOKE!” ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/56 "2024-01-08T17:46:59Z")
> [@DKW](#): > > Dang, 50 already? 😲 It’s getting late and I don’t have time to read all the responses right now (and I really want to; this is a fascinating discussion!), so right now I’d just like to do a little clarification on one point. > > Yes, there was opposition to the Vietnam War, but the strip never directly dealt with the consequences of war. We don’t see POWs, deaths, war atrocities, starvation, etc. Yes, there were black activists, but they’re shown as just as useless as everyone else. Yes, there were anti-establishment protests, but more often than not they couldn’t even stay on message. Yes, Nixon got a ton of heat…just like in real life. My point is, there’s a big difference between simply _being honest_ about how things were and actually _taking a moral stance_ on these people and events. As a point of comparison, whenever Dykes to Watch Out For dealt with a heavily politicized subject (e.g. the Iran-Contra hearings, the OJ Simpson murder trial, Clarence Thomas being nominated to the Supreme Court, the Telecommunications Bill), Alison Bechdel was staunchly, sometimes vehemently, on one side. She didn’t just call the Thomas nomination an embarrassing farce, she _denounced_ this miscarriage of justice. Simply saying that gutting environmental regulations is going to hurt the planet isn’t a “liberal perspective”, it’s the _default_. (Or at least it _should_ be.) A liberal take would involve taking direct action to _combat_ the gutting (and with something a little firmer than Dick Davenport’s birdwatching group politely asking James Watt to resign). > > Anyway, that’s more or less where I stand. Lots more tomorrow. Sounds like you got a lot of rules as to what it means to be liberal. Compared to Blondie, Peanuts and Garfield, Doonesbury was radical and political. Compared to a strip published online and in LGTBQ publications its not radical. Is that surprising? Doonesbury was a radical departure from the norm but it still has to conform to the medium it exists in, the mainstream funny papers. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/57 "2024-01-08T18:35:08Z")
Yeah, I later read the entirety of that sequence and saw that Walt went home. I tried to do more checking but I quickly learned that the name of the retirement home seemed to change every time it was mentioned. He did appear to be at home but I couldn’t confirm it without more effort than I wanted. Since this is a hijack I figured I’d just let it lie. ---
**Author:** ![That\_Don\_Guy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/that_don_guy/32/538_2.png) [@That\_Don\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/That_Don_Guy)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/58 "2024-01-08T19:58:23Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Doonesbury has had a minor version of the problem that all comic strips have - failing to acknowledge that the characters should be getting older. Trudeau took care of some of this by having some of the character die. He didn’t take care of this by having other characters change in the ways that they should have. Different strips have different ways of handling this. There was a time when _On the Fasttrack_ announced that its characters would be aging in real time, but then quietly stopped aging (my guess: the characters in _Safe Havens_ weren’t aging, and he didn’t want the crossovers mismatched). Also, _Sally Forth_ occasionally references an event that happened years in the past, but in the strip, it always happened “last year,” although Ted usually remarks, “I could have sworn that was years ago.” As for the original question: the best example I can think of, other than things like when the strip pretty much attacked Frank Sinatra (and, in fact, the San Francisco Chronicle refused to air at least one of those strips), or quoted someone who accused Dan Quayle of being a drug dealer or came up with “proof” that the Catholic Church once sanctioned same-sex marriages (since they were “for love” while most different-sex marriages at the time were “for political reasons”), is [Election Day, 2000](https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2000/11/07). ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/59 "2024-01-08T20:49:14Z")
> [@Loach](#): > > Sounds like you got a lot of rules as to what it means to be liberal. > > Compared to Blondie, Peanuts and Garfield, Doonesbury was radical and political. Compared to a strip published online and in LGTBQ publications its not radical. Is that surprising? Doonesbury was a radical departure from the norm but it still has to conform to the medium it exists in, the mainstream funny papers. This. I love the irony of complaining about mainstream _Doonesbury_ on a message board that started with a column gleefully tackling issues that could only be talked about in alternative newspapers. How many mainstream outlets did “Dykes to Watch Out For” have? Did Bechdel keep the same tone when she drew for _The New Yorker_? _Doonesbury_ was essentially an editorial cartoon as early as 1974. That could easily have sunk a career that was just starting. The Pulitzer Prize saved him, giving editors a shiny object to deflect the rage coming from conservative owners. (The vast majority of newspapers leaned conservative in that era.) That rage never abated. [Nor has Trudeau ever backed down](https://readingdoonesbury.com/2017/10/25/this-week-in-doonesbury-guilty-guilty-guilty/). ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2024, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716/60 "2024-01-08T20:55:25Z")
> [@DKW](#): > > Simply saying that gutting environmental regulations is going to hurt the planet isn’t a “liberal perspective”, it’s the _default_. (Or at least it _should_ be.) And that “should” there is the critical part. The liberal/progressive effort is to _make it_ the default. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-doonesbury-liberal/995716.md?page=4)