My dad went to college with Trudeau. He didn’t particularly like him - he told me that Trudeau was “just another preppie”.
To say that he “gets a beautiful, loving, engaging, whip-smart daughter to go with his beautiful, loving, engaging, whip-smart wife” makes it sound like the wife came along first and the daughter came along next. No, his daughter was with his first wife. The whip-smart wife is his second wife. The daughter has little respect for her mother.
When you say that “he gradually becomes more conservative”, you make it sound like everyone else in Doonesbury became just as conservative and respected Mike for becoming more conservative. Mike shifted to somewhat more conservative. Many of the other characters didn’t, and they clearly knew that he had become more conservative.
In the earlier strips, Walden College that Mike and many other characters studied at or taught at or worked for, was clearly based on Yale University, where Trudeau went to college. As the strip went on, it resembled Yale less and less. It became a once-good college than went downhill from 1970 to the present. It became academically weak. It didn’t get nearly as many applicants. It began having lots of financial problems.
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.
Help me out here. Which of the characters do you think haven’t aged noticeably?
Always reminded me of Antioch College.
President King of Walden College appears in today’s strip (and remember, the Sunday strips are not repeats of much older ones but are supposed to be about current times), still president 53 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day after first being introduced into the strip. He’s just begun to think about retiring. He looks just like he did when he was introduced into the strip.
Kazart.
Uncle Duke.
Bad craziness.
{hee-hee-hee}
You pretty much answered your own question here.
Lots of conservatives will freely tell you that they are the “real” liberals, a thing called a “Classical Liberal”. For most of American history, being liberal wasn’t a bad thing. It meant you were pro-liberty. This wasn’t controversial until people started kicking up the inconvenient fact that not every person gets the same amount of liberty, and in fact America was manufacturing the conditions of its own liberty by exporting some decidedly illiberal practices abroad.
When enough people decided that liberty ought to apply to every American, no matter who they are, that’s when a certain strain of conservatism decided to turn liberalism into a toxic brand, purposefully equating it with the most horrendous absurdities of the far left. The goal was to dislodge people out of the center, and it’s been astonishingly effective. And this isn’t limited to the far right by the way… spend a little time in far-left circles, you’ll see they seem to hate liberals more than they hate conservatives. Both groups hate liberals for more or less the same reason - they want to recruit the center, and the popular, normal, mainstream ideology is an obstacle to that.
Your OP is simply noting the forgotten fact that liberalism has always been the center, normal, mainstream position in US politics (excluding the former Confederate regions of course). Liberalism believes that the fringes can be persuaded to moderation (often to a self-defeating degree). Doonesbury is a story about things that normal Americans care about. Doonesbury criticizes America, but has never given up on it. That’s why Doonesbury is a liberal comic strip.
All comic strips, comic books, cartoons, animated movies and television, and whatever have the same problem. It’s just too tempting for them to keep their characters the same age forever. The characters in The Simpsons aren’t aging at all, and that began as a part of a part of The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987 and then became its own show within a couple of years. The characters in Blondie began as a comic strip on September 8, 1930. Characters stopped aging after the two children became teenagers. Some live-action things don’t have characters changing appropriately either. The creators of the television show or movie series decide that the characters should have no character arcs at all and remain the same always.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem. Calvin never aged, and we didn’t want him to.
The OP has a history of seeming to believe that anything that lampoons any aspect of liberal beliefs is hard-right. One example:
Mike realizing that he was a Republican in 1994 came out of nowhere IIRC. It was clearly a plot move to have one major character reflect the right’s pov. But not far right. He was a Steve Forbes supporter. Even so, the ploy didn’t work. It never became a big issue and quickly faded so far away that Mike supported Obama and now is as anti-Trump as anyone in the Sunday strip, which attacks Trump about every other week. Mark’s equally out-of-nowhere realization he was gay was just as much of a bump but at least Trudeau stuck with it, even after the disaster that was Chase.
Mike has always been somewhere around Trudeau’s age. He’s now a grandfather to twin boys and a girl. Alex was born/introduced in 1988, making her 35, which is about what’s she’s presented at. That makes Joanie Caucus a great-grandmother, also reasonable as she’s the oldest regular in the strip. Duke is even older, but he doesn’t appear that often and doesn’t have much to do.
Trudeau is 76 and dropped the daily strip years ago. I’m betting he stops the strip entirely in the next year or two. At that point everybody will have aged appropriately with the exception of a few spot characters who exist as markers for easy satire.
I started reading the strip in around 1980 and stopped when I stopped getting the newspaper delivered in maybe 1999. Once Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side stopped, it was the only comic that I read. I always saw it as clearly liberal.
Mike Doonesbury is four years younger than Garry Trudeau. Trudeau graduated from college in 1970, when the strip began. It began with Mike and several other characters starting college. So Mike is four years younger, making him the same age as me, incidentally.
Depends on whether you start with Bull Tales in 1968 or the national strip in 1970. Either way, two or four years is “somewhere around.”
So yes, Mike is generationally Trudeau’s peer though since about the mid 70s he consistently existed in an environment quite different from Trudeau’s. An adjustment was made to this through the mechanism of a “time skip” that then set most characters the characters to aging, though ISTM at the Speed Of Plot.
And this is one aspect of these sort of media that we need to bear in mind: in some works, like Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts, you can just exist in a sort of eternal present or an extremely limited time-bubble warp (e.g. in Peanuts little siblings like Sally and Rerun grow to becoming able to have “speaking roles” but nothing else changes). Any topical reference to current events is itself also happening in that frame of mind. But something like Doonesbury being political-topical, that cannot afford to ignore that there has been a past and positions have been taken.
Probably Trudeau’s attempt at exploring the trope of stereotypical Boomers “turning conservative”. But that had no legs as you point out. Maybe because supporting Steve Forbes in 1994 was… not really the most representative portrayal of the direction of the new thought on that side, when Pat Buchanan was already making his Culture War Speech at the GOP convention and Newt’s Contract with America was on its way.
I think you’re overlooking “For Better and For Worse”. All the characters have aged, perhaps at a slower rate than in real life, but by the end, Mike the 8 year old boy was a young married man.
In the 1980 campaign, Mike was a huge supporter of independent John Anderson. I never figured out whether this was a way of not taking sides or whether like so many other liberals he gets disappointed with the actual Democrats in reality.
They just re-ran those strips. It was openly called Microsoft.
Gasoline Alley started in 1918 and has aged its characters annually for 105 years. Its star, Walt Wallet, born in 1899 or 1900, is now the oldest person on earth.
Don’t look at me like that. I’m not that old. Nor have I have ever read the strip. I googled and made inferences.
What I said was that all comic strips, comic books, cartoons, animated movies and television, and whatever have the same problem, because it’s tempting for them to keep their characters the same age forever. Some of those non-live-action media have resisted the temptation. It’s hard to do, because too often the fans of them don’t like the changes and quit reading/watching/listening. The creators then quit doing that media.