Behind the Scenes at Walden

One of my biggest holiday presents last year, measured by weight, was the forty-year collection of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips.

I grew up on that daily comic in the Boston Globe. I thumbed through the first anthology, The Doonesbury Chronicles, so often in high school that I could annoy my college roommate by reciting the punchline to a strip as soon as he read the first panel. But I didn’t keep up so closely after that.

I had completely forgotten, for example, Mike Doonesbury’s younger brother Sal, who peddled safer-sex products in the 1980s. And that Sal’s original name was Benjy, which explains Mike’s brother at Widow Doonesbury’s funeral this month.

The giant anthology contains loads of strips, but only about six pages of additional matter. I like reading behind-the-scenes stories, and they’re not in that book. But I found them in Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau, compiled by Brian Walker and published by Yale University Press.

This volume discusses Trudeau’s down-to-the-wire working method and his collaborators, including long-time inker Don Carlton, designer and colorist George Corsillo, and others. Such teamwork is common in daily comics, but the Wall Street Journal tried to make political hay of the fact that Trudeau didn’t handle final inking in 1991. This book contains plenty of Trudeau’s pencil sketches and strip drawings to refute the notion that he doesn’t do the basic artistic work.

Still, the most visually striking item in the book is an 1841 portrait of James de Berty Trudeau by a son of Audubon. It shows an astonishing resemblance to his descendant as a young cartoonist and grad student.

Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau left a few of my questions unanswered. Was it more than coincidence that Jim Andrews, late cofounder of the United Press Syndicate and Andrews and McMeel publishing company, shares a name and physical appearance with Jim Andrews, the strip’s plutocratic oil executive? Wikipedia says Trudeau named the character in honor of his editor, though I can’t tell whether that’s more than convincing supposition.

Is the author of this book, Brian Walker, a son of Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker? Yes, he is, and he’s also taken over his father’s Hi & Lois strip with his brother Greg. Mort Walker’s Backstage at the Strips is one of the best portrayals of how newspaper comic strips were created through the 1980s, and father and son ran the International Museum of Cartoon Art, a collection now at Ohio State University.

Didn’t We Pass This Point Nine Years Ago?

The news media has begun a foofaraw about broadcaster Juan Williams’s departure from NPR for what he called a “gulag” which will merely pay him millions of dollars. But I haven’t seen anyone note that the point Williams was apparently trying to make had already been explored incisively nine years ago in the comic strip Doonesbury.

Williams told Bill (“Muslims killed us on 9/11”) O’Reilly:

when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

In a strip published on 9 Oct 2001, less than a month after kamikaze hijackers attacked New York and Washington, cartoonist Garry Trudeau showed his central character Mike Doonesbury on a plane next to an Arabic man. After portraying Mike’s reluctant nervousness, Trudeau revealed that the man was a PDA salesman. A later series of strips showed the same man detained and interrogated by US agents.

Williams was trying to get to the point that the overwhelming majority of Muslims on American plans are neither zealots nor murderers, and deserve legal rights. But along the way he said he agreed with O’Reilly, and expressed some clumsy bigotry about Muslims. Williams never pointed out how misguided his feelings were, and how they amounted to ignorant bigotry. (And in follow-up comments he reaffirmed his initial remarks.)

The atmosphere on Fox News undoubtedly encouraged Williams to make such statements. It’s the only “news” channel run by a longtime presidential campaign aide, serving to feed Republican propaganda into the public discourse. It employs people who say things like, “All terrorists are Muslim.” By Fox News standards, Williams’s remark was unexceptional.

NPR, on the other hand, likes its news analysts to actually analyze the news for readers, to dig past first impressions and lizard-brain reactions. A true news analyst might point out, for example, that not one of the Islamist terrorists who have attacked planes and other transportation was dressed in “Muslim garb.” So getting worried about people who are supposedly “identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims” is stupid even for a paranoid on Fox News.