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.
I guess I am that old, since I remember being called “Baby Skeezix” by my parents.
He now lives in the Comics Retirement Home. How hard should that be to find?
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.
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”.
« Guilty, guilty, guilty! » was the break point, I think.
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.
First words: “Big Mac”
Someone told me once that Alex has Mike’s nose and J.J.'s eyes, but I’m not sure if that’s true.
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?
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) which makes her 88.
Next words: “Creamy cole slaw”
(Kim learned English from watching American TV. I particularly remember her singing the Burger King jingle at Christmas dinner)
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
And that “should” there is the critical part.
The liberal/progressive effort is to make it the default.