[150 years ago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted the first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]
On three
interesting evolutions of one of our longest-running and most
influential comic strips.
Doonesbury debuted
as a daily strip almost 55 years ago, but it actually goes back even
further than that. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau created
it while he was an undergraduate at Yale, and the comic, then known as Bull Tales,
appeared from 1968 to 1970 in the Yale Daily News. That strip focused on
very specific events and figures from the Yale community, though, and so when the
now-graduated Trudeau landed his renamed strip in syndication with the brand-new
Universal Press Syndicate
in October 1970, he revised a number of elements, including the setting (now the
fictional Walden College) and the primary situation (with the two main
characters, Mike and B.D., now roommates at that college). But it was still
focused on that college setting and stage of life, and would remain so until Trudeau
took an extended
hiatus in 1983-1984. It’s interesting to think that such a politically-minded
comic (which was the case from the jump, as I’ll discuss further in a moment)
spent its first 15 years using college students and conversations as a frame
for those political debates.
In 1975,
less than five years after the publication of that debut strip, Doonesbury
won the Pulitzer Prize
for Editorial Cartooning, becoming the first daily comic to win a Pulitzer. Also
in 1975, President Gerald
Ford tellingly joked, at the Radio and Television Correspondents’
Association dinner, that “There are only three major vehicles to keep us
informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print
media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order.” There were lots
of reasons for the strip’s very quick and impressive ascent to such heights of
prominence and acclaim, including of course Trudeau’s own unique talent for combining
humor, humanity, and biting political commentary. But if timing isn’t everything,
it’s a darn important thing, and I’m sure Trudeau would agree that the towering
presence of Watergate in those early years was instrumental in establishing his
strip as a must-read, inside Washington and far beyond the capital. To cite one
telling example, the Pulitzer committee explicitly pointed to the August
1974 “Stonewall” strip as an illustration of Doonesbury’s exemplary Editorial
Cartooning.
The 50
years since the Pulitzer have seen various, not surprising evolutions in both
the content and contexts for Trudeau’s comic: the original characters have aged
alongside the cartoonist, and their children and other new characters have been
created to extend the stories; Trudeau has gradually moved to a model where the
daily strips are reruns and only Sundays are new strips; and so on. But he’s
also been willing to evolve in more unexpected ways, and to my mind the most
striking was a
2004 plotline in which original character B.D. (a
Vietnam veteran from the strip’s early years) served in the Iraq War, lost
a leg in combat, and became both a representation of veterans’ experiences and an
advocate for their rights upon his return home. So striking and successful was
this thread that when Trudeau published and expanded those strips in book form,
as The
Long Road Home: One Step at a Time (2005), longtime Doonesbury
critic John McCain wrote
the foreword. Any strip that can stay so timely and relevant after decades
deserves all the longevity and accolades it wants!
Last strip
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?
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