#SAD! Doonesbury in the Time of Trump. By G.B. Trudeau. Andrews
McMeel. $16.99.
Imagine the furor – a furor fueled by and
filled with glee – at this Trump tweet: “I should own all land and buildings in
NY! Decide what gets built where! Who lives where! Who pays how much!
#MakeNYGreatAgain!” How Doonesbury
would go to town over that one! So why didn’t
Garry Trudeau make a big deal about it? Well, because the statements (modified
only slightly, and without the hashtag) actually came not from Donald Trump but
from Bill de Blasio, a hyper-liberal mayor so popular in New York City that he
won re-election in 2017 with 66.5% of the vote. De Blasio even said (on
November 28, 2018) that his strong “socialistic impulse” to have government own
and control all property, determining who lives where and at what price, is
reinforced every day by his constituents.
There is immense comic fodder in that, and
the fact that it never appeared or could appear in the Doonesbury universe is a key both to Trudeau’s popularity and to
his limitations. Like great satirists of yore – Jonathan Swift and Alexander
Pope come to mind, although both wrote far more stylishly than Trudeau does –
Trudeau hammers home the same point of view again and again, shining the
glaring light of his perceived truth on areas he considers to be filled with
darkness and falsehood. Like satirical cartoonists of the past such as Thomas
Nast – who was a better artist, albeit in a somewhat different medium – Trudeau
digs and digs and picks and picks at sociopolitical scabs, although Nast
genuinely wanted change and successfully brought it about, while Trudeau seeks
mainly to complain as loudly as possible about discerned wrongs and wrongdoing
and be the mouthpiece for his many like-minded followers.
Those followers will very much enjoy #SAD! Doonesbury in the Time of Trump,
and will enjoy being able to understand all of it – which will not be so easy
for any casual reader. Trudeau’s superb caricatures are mixed here, as they
always are, with a Doonesbury
trademark: invented cartoon characters reflecting specific aspects of society,
such as “Jimmy Crow” for the supposedly revived popularity of long-gone “Jim
Crow” laws; even “Mr. Jay,” a talking marijuana joint drawn in
underground-comic style, makes a token appearance in this book. Casual readers
will have trouble figuring this out. Even more confusing are the ways Trump
creates hilarious (to those “in the know”) but puzzling (to those not “in the
know”) representations of individuals. For example, former California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is
Austrian-American, is seen in Doonesbury
only as a gigantic, well-muscled arm and hand, and is repeatedly referred to as
“the Gröpenfuhrer.” That is, for those “in the know,” an
amusingly snide reference to his ways with women. It is also deeply offensive,
since it is a pun on “Gruppenführer,” a Nazi paramilitary rank. To understand
just how offensive this is to someone of Austrian heritage, imagine telling a
white person who dislikes spending a lot of money that he or she is a
“cheapskate,” while telling a black person that he or she is “niggardly.” The
words mean the same thing, but choosing to apply a specific one under specific
circumstances would surely cause some people to take offense. But not Doonesbury fans in the case of
Schwarzenegger. Those unfamiliar with the multi-decade evolution of Trudeau’s
strip will not know what to make of the talking arm at all (it is actually a
bit of homage to Al Capp of Li’l Abner fame:
he invented a crimefighter named Jack Jawbreaker, portrayed only as a muscular
arm).
Of course,
the main character in #SAD! Doonesbury in the
Time of Trump is Donald Trump, whom Trudeau hates with all the fervor of his fellow
coastal residents, who refer to the heartland of the U.S. as “flyover country”
and continue to ask how “they” could foist Trump on “us,” the intelligentsia
that by rights ought to be in charge. There is plenty, plenty, to dislike about Trump, but there is also plenty to dislike
about elitism and self-importance, and those have increasingly become the
characteristics of Doonesbury over
the years. That is too bad, because Trudeau is enormously talented, not only
artistically but also in managing what may be the largest cast of characters
ever assembled in a comic strip (although, interestingly, he does not seem to care about his characters: he selects
ones for specific strips based solely on the editorial point he wants to make
and the characters who can best make it). #SAD!
Doonesbury in the Time of Trump is a collection of Sunday strips from a
multi-year period, not presented chronologically but grouped loosely by
Trump-related topic. Some elements are brilliant, such as a Trump board game
that takes off (very loosely) from
one that really was a Trump offering at one time. There is also an amusing, if
self-referential, explanation of the role of the strip’s title character, in
the context of the many news reports of sexual harassment in various fields: the strip’s female
characters send Mike Doonesbury a letter saying he is “mostly a harmless
goofball, passive and inoffensive, doing the best he can.” This is excellently
descriptive as well as a nod to Walt Kelly, whose title character in Pogo was sometimes described as dull:
Kelly explained that the good-natured, moderate-thinking possum was the glue
holding the strip (also a politically charged one containing a great many
characters) together.
Readers need not wonder whether Trudeau is
really aware of where Doonesbury
stands in terms of past comic strips and past cartoonists, including high
awareness of the strip’s own history. There is an absolutely marvelous strip in
#SAD! Doonesbury in the Time of Trump
in which longtime radio host Mark Slackmeyer, commenting on ways in which Trump
“acts guilty” about a variety of topics, suddenly flashes back to a notorious Doonesbury strip from 1973 in which
Slackmeyer, obviously much younger and at the time a host on his college radio
station, comments that he thinks then-Attorney General John Mitchell is
“guilty, guilty, guilty” of Watergate-related crimes. Reproducing a color
version of the 1973 panel within the 2017 Trump-focused strip is a touch of
comic genius and ingenuity – and may make longtime readers lament the loss of
the more-stylized Doonesbury art of
earlier decades. In another Slackmeyer strip, in which the radio host
interviews a student determined to change the way Washington works,
2018-version Slackmeyer suddenly finds himself face-to-face with college-era
Slackmeyer, the comparatively urbane older host being angrily confronted by his
intense younger self. This too is marvelous, and has a cleverness far beyond
Trudeau’s comparatively mundane and ultimately not-very-interesting ongoing
attacks on Trump as a blowhard, disaster, egotist, etc. Trudeau’s political
views are the main reason for the existence of Doonesbury, but they are, by and large, unexceptional and passé.
His method of expressing them, however, and his ability to mold and model the
comic-strip form in ways unlike those of any other cartoonist working in the
medium today – those are unique to him and to this strip. And those, more than
the political jeremiads, are the reasons to revel in #SAD! Doonesbury in the Time of Trump – even though, as political
commentary, it brings very little that is new to the nation’s ongoing discussions,
debates, and demonizations.
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