[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?
Leave a Reply