Doonesbury


Doonesbury is a comic strip by American cartoonist Garry Trudeau that chronicles the adventures and lives of an array of characters of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, from the President of the United States to the title character, Mike Doonesbury, who has progressed over the decades from a college student to a youthful senior citizen.
Created in "the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture", and frequently political in nature, Doonesbury features characters representing a range of affiliations, but the cartoon is noted for a liberal viewpoint. The name "Doonesbury" is a combination of the word doone and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau's roommate at Yale University.
Doonesbury is written and penciled by Garry Trudeau, then inked and lettered by an assistant, Don Carlton,
then Todd Pound. Sunday strips are colored by George Corsillo. Doonesbury was a daily strip through most of its existence, but since February 2014 it has run repeat strips Monday through Saturday, and new strips on Sunday.

History

Doonesbury began as a continuation of Bull Tales, which appeared in the Yale University student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, from 1968 to 1970. It focused on local campus events at Yale.
Doonesbury proper debuted as a daily strip in twenty-eight newspapers on October 26, 1970. A Sunday strip began on March 21, 1971. Many of the early strips were reprints of the Bull Tales cartoons, with some changes to the drawings and plots. B. D.'s helmet changed from having a "Y" to a star. Mike and B. D. started Doonesbury as roommates; they were not roommates in Bull Tales.
Doonesbury became known for its social and political commentary. By the 2010s, it was syndicated in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide.
In May 1975, Doonesbury became the first daily comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize, taking the award for Editorial Cartooning. That year, U.S. President Gerald Ford told the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association at their annual dinner, "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."
File:Stonewall-clip.png|thumb|600px|right|A panel from the a Doonesbury "Stonewall" strip, referring to the Watergate scandal, from August 12, 1974; awarded the Pulitzer Prize

1983–1984 hiatus

Trudeau took a 22-month hiatus, from January 2, 1983, to September 30, 1984. Before the break in the strip, the characters were eternal college students, living in a commune together near Walden College, which was modeled after Trudeau's alma mater, Yale. During the break, Trudeau helped create a Broadway musical of the strip, showing the graduation of the main characters. The Broadway adaptation opened at the Biltmore Theatre on November 21, 1983, and played 104 performances. Elizabeth Swados composed the music for Trudeau's book and lyrics.

After the hiatus

The strip resumed some time after the events in the musical, with further changes having taken place after the end of the musical's plot. Mike, Mark, Zonker, B.D., and Boopsie were all now graduates; B.D. and Boopsie were living in Malibu, California, where B.D. was a third-string quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, and Boopsie was making a living from walk-on and cameo roles. Mark was living in Washington, D.C., working for National Public Radio. Michael and J.J. had gotten married, and Mike had dropped out of business school to start work in an advertising agency in New York City. Zonker, still not ready for the "real world", was living with Mike and J.J. until he was accepted as a medical student at his Uncle Duke's "Baby Doc College" in Haiti.
Prior to the hiatus, the strip's characters had aged only slightly. But when Trudeau returned to Doonesbury, the characters began to age in something close to real time, as in Gasoline Alley and For Better or for Worse, Since then, the main characters' ages and career developments have tracked those of standard media portrayals of baby boomers, with jobs in advertising, law enforcement, and the dot-com boom. Current events are mirrored through the original characters, their offspring, and occasional new characters.
Garry Trudeau received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1994, and their Reuben Award for 1995 for his work on the strip.

''Alpha House'', hiatuses, and Sunday only: 2013–present

Doonesbury syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced on May 29, 2013, that the comic strip would go on hiatus from June 10 to Labor Day of that year while Garry Trudeau worked on his streaming video comedy Alpha House, which was picked up by Amazon Studios. "Doonesbury Flashbacks" were offered during those weeks, but due to the unusually long hiatus, some newspapers opted to run different comic strips instead. Sunday strips returned as scheduled, but the daily strip's hiatus was extended until November 2013.
After Alpha House was renewed for a second season in February 2014, Trudeau announced that he would now produce only Sunday strips for the foreseeable future. Since March 3, 2014, the strip has offered reruns starting from the very beginning of its history as opposed to more recent ones that re-run when Trudeau is on vacation. Also in 2014, the site at doonesbury.com moved under washingtonpost.com, and since then it redirects to the latter. Alpha House was cancelled in 2016, but Trudeau did not return to drawing Monday-to-Saturday strips, and continued his Sunday-only schedule.
In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Trudeau said that while Donald Trump appears in only a limited number of strips, "for the last two years, he's been subtext in almost all of them."

TV special

In 1977, Trudeau wrote a script for a 26-minute animated special, A Doonesbury Special, which was produced and directed by Trudeau along with John Hubley and Faith Hubley. The special was first broadcast by NBC on November 27, 1977. It won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for best short film, and received an Oscar nomination, both in 1978. Voice actors for the special included Barbara Harris, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Jack Gilford and Will Jordan. Also included were "Stop in the Middle" and "I Do Believe", two songs "sung" by the character Jimmy Thudpucker, also part of the "Special". While the compositions and performances were credited to "Jimmy Thudpucker", they were in fact co-written and sung by James Allen "Jimmy" Brewer, who also co-wrote and provided the vocals for "Ginny's Song", a 1976 single on the Warner Bros. label, and Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest Hits, an LP released by Windsong Records, John Denver's subsidiary of RCA Records.

Style

With the exception of Walden College, Trudeau has frequently used real-life settings, based on real scenarios, but with fictional results. Because of lead times, real-world events have rendered some of Trudeau's comics unusable, such as a 1973 series featuring John Ehrlichman, a 1989 series set in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, a 1993 series involving Zoë Baird, and a 2005 series involving Harriet Miers. Trudeau has also displayed fluency in various forms of jargon, including those of real estate agents, flight attendants, computer scientists, journalists, presidential aides, and soldiers in Iraq.

Walden College

The unnamed college attended by the main characters was later given the name "Walden College", revealed to be in Connecticut, and depicted as devolving into a third-rate institution under the weight of grade inflation, slipping academic standards, and the end of tenure, issues that Trudeau has consistently revisited since the original characters graduated. Some of the second generation of Doonesbury characters have attended Walden, a venue Trudeau uses to advance his concerns about academic standards in the United States.
President King, the leader of Walden College, was originally intended as a parody of Kingman Brewster, President of Yale, but all that remains of that is a certain physical resemblance.

Use of real-life politicians as characters

Even though Doonesbury frequently features real-life U.S. politicians, they are rarely depicted with their real faces. Originally, strips featuring the President of the United States would show an external view of the White House, with dialogue emerging from inside. During the Gerald Ford administration, characters would be shown speaking to Ford at press conferences, and fictional dialogue supposedly spoken by Ford would be written as coming "off-panel". Similarly, while having several characters as students in a class taught by Henry Kissinger, the dialogue made up for Kissinger would also come from "off-panel". Sometimes hands, or in rare cases, the back of heads would also be seen.
Later, personal symbols reflecting some aspect of their character came into use. These included:
The long career of the series and continual use of real-life political figures, analysts note, have led to some uncanny cases of the cartoon foreshadowing a national shift in the politicians' political fortunes. Tina Gianoulis in St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture observes that "In 1971, well before the conservative Reagan years, a forward-looking B.D. called Ronald Reagan his 'hero'. In 1984, almost ten years before Congressman Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, another character worried that he would 'wake up someday in a country run by Newt Gingrich. In its 2003 series "John Kerry: A Candidate in the Making" on the 2004 presidential race, The Boston Globe reprinted and discussed 1971 Doonesbury cartoons of the young Kerry's Vietnam War protest speeches.