Garry Trudeau has shocked his readers with a Doonesbury storyline about a soldier who loses a leg in Iraq, writes Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
For much of middle America, middle England and very possibly middle earth, the war in Iraq really hit home on April 19th this year. Opening their newspaper comic supplements or turning to the editorial page where some newspapers place the Doonesbury strip, readers were shocked by yet another piece of grisly news from Iraq. And this was news about someone they knew, some for more than 30 years.
BD, aka Brian Dowling, college football star and one of the lead characters in Garry Trudeau's strip cartoon Doonesbury, lost a leg (and, almost as shocking for aficionados, his helmet). The opening frame, a black box with the word "Hey!" in a white bubble, was the first sign that something was wrong.
The next frame had a tearful GI saying, "You stay with me, man, you hear me?" It wasn't until two days later that BD was shown lying on a stretcher, his heavily bandaged left leg stopping abruptly at the thigh. Yet while the injury to BD brought home the savage and random nature of the war, the real furore erupted two days later.
The strip for Friday April 23rd shows one of BD's buddies visiting him in hospital. As the surgeon explains about the denial phase that many amputees go through before reaching the anger stage, the words "Son of a BITCH" ring out from behind a hospital screen. "Sometimes they skip the denial," explains the surgeon. But it was not so much the obscenity of war that attracted the attention of the right-wing press and talkshows in the US. It was, absurdly, the obscenity of the language.
"I'm beginning to lose my patience with Trudeau," wrote Doug Clifton, editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. "It seems we've got to consider pulling the strip or editing it five or six times a year. \ inflict enough pain just by covering the ugly realities of today's world. The funnies ought to be the one refuge from those realities. If Trudeau insists on competing with the front page, he may find himself missing from the Plain Dealer's comics page."
Things soon got worse for Trudeau. On May 6th, in a column titled "Doonesbury crossed line", the syndicated conservative columnist and Fox News presenter Bill O'Reilly accused him of "using someone's pain to pursue a personal agenda".
The charge brought an unusual public response from the almost reclusive Trudeau. On ABC television's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, the cartoonist, who has given only two extensive press interviews since Doonesbury started in 1970, revealed some of his motives. His response is worth quoting at length: "The strips are about sacrifice, about the kind of shattering loss that completely changes lives. In BD, I've placed a central character in harm's way, and his charmed life takes a dramatic turn on a road outside Fallujah . . .
"I have to approach this with humility and care. I'm sure I won't always get it right, and I'm also sure people will let me know when I don't. But it seems worth doing. This month alone, we've sustained nearly 600 wounded-in-action. Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name."
Garretson Beekman Trudeau was born in New York City in 1948. Like George W. Bush, he attended Yale. There he studied graphic design and drew a strip for the Yale Daily News called Bull Tales, featuring a college football jock named BD. The strip got noticed, and Trudeau was one of the first signings to the grandly named Universal Press Syndicate. He is still with the syndicate, which sells his cartoon to almost 1,400 newspapers around the world, including The Irish Times.
The first Doonesbury cartoon was published on October 26th, 1970, featuring a cast of college oddballs on a fictional campus. Most of the cast are still with the strip, and while they haven't aged as quickly as might be expected, the world around them, which provides much of the cartoon's subject matter, has moved on.
But this has proved to be Doonesbury's great saviour. Unusually for a cartoon strip, and almost uniquely in the US, Doonesbury thrives on current affairs. The changing cast in the real world has provided ample passing trade for the stable cast inside the Walden College campus: Dan Quayle was - and still is - depicted as a feather; Bill Clinton is a waffle who seduces everything it comes into contact with; Newt Gingrich was a bomb that finally exploded; and Bush is an empty Roman helmet.
Bush, not one to flinch from dishing it out himself, has come under attack from Trudeau, who has mocked him for his vague recollection of his days in and out of the National Guard; the cartoon offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could prove Bush had been where he said he'd been (nobody could).
And now Doonesbury is sticking it to Bush again, this time with a six-frame cartoon strip that names every one of the 700-plus US soldiers killed in Iraq since the conflict started last March. The strip, to be published tomorrow (its Sunday newspaper strip is separate to the one that runs in daily papers) comes just a week after Trudeau uncharacteristically blundered into another war-fuelled furore. Last Sunday's strip featured a character delivering the head of the hated dean of the faculty on a plate. While the storyline had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, in the wake of the execution of the US citizen Nicholas Berg, the subject of beheadings - whether literal, allegorical or satirical - was evidently too sensitive for some.
Trudeau again went public to comment, this time on his website. Explaining that the cartoon had been drawn several weeks earlier, before Berg's murder, he apologised for the insensitivity of the image: "I regret the poor timing, and apologise to anyone who was offended by an image that is now clearly inappropriate."
While it may seem risible that an image of someone holding a head on a silver platter could cause offence, the syndication arrangement under which Trudeau operates gives him almost unprecedented reach and influence. With little or no editorial control, he talks to millions of readers worldwide. And though Bush and Donald Rumsfeld profess not to read the newspapers, even they must be wary of the potential influence of such an untrammelled mind.
The cartoonist, who lives with his wife, television news presenter Jane Pauley and their three daughters in the exclusive Central Park West area of Manhattan, claims to enjoy the fuss. "I've never courted controversy for its own sake," he told Dave Astor of the journal Editor & Publisher this week, "and am sometimes surprised at what readers find offensive. But grabbing people's attention from time to time isn't such a bad thing if it engages them in the feature and keeps them coming back." And he is unlikely to be fazed by the controversy which is sure to follow his roll-call of the US dead. After all, he says, he's been in the game a long time, and endured a rough ride from the White House under most administrations of the past 30 years. "But this has been the most sustained period of strong reaction in recent years, starting with the Bush National Guard strips in late winter."
Trudeau may rile the politicians, but it is a different matter with the military. According to his website, during the first Gulf war he drew more than 200 consecutive strips about Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Army chief-of-staff, Gen Gordon Sullivan asked the Pentagon to put together a show of the strips to tour in the war zone. Then Trudeau was invited to Kuwait by a commander who had first read Doonesbury in the US army newspaper Stars & Stripes in Vietnam, and thought the cartoonist should meet his men. When he got there, Trudeau received two medals of commendation from US army units in Kuwait. - (Guardian Service)