not since Peanuts

Not since the 50th anniversary of Peanuts - which also started in October - ten years ago has there been as much attention to a comic strip anniversary as Doonesbury's 40th. Peanuts was already the walking undead by the time it turned 40 - its great days were pretty much limited to its first two decades - but Doonesbury remains interesting and has even grown in depth and range. Trudeau in an interview attributes his longevity over great strips with shorter lifespans to his having given himself a more flexible task: instead of focusing on a single relationship like Calvin and Hobbes or having to create entirely fresh ideas every day like The Far Side, he writes a long-running narrative with the ability to introduce new major characters or re-purpose old ones at any time.

I've been reading Doonesbury since its earliest days. I had the advantage of being sufficiently older than Phil Nugent to appreciate the political references from the beginning, and also of having a newspaper that subscribed to it from about the start. At first, the Chronicle didn't put Doonesbury in the daily comics section, nor the editorial page where a lot of papers run it. Instead, it had the custom of running a miscellany of editorial cartoons at the bottom of the pages of a weekly political-commentary roundup section, and in 1970 or '71 the more politically-oriented Doonesbury strips began to appear there. They were immediate standouts. I remember that when the paper changed to carrying the strip daily, they ran a large announcement house ad explaining the story set-up and introducing the characters. One strip they ran there never appeared in any of the early book collections I saw, and nobody else I ever mentioned it to remembered it, until I began to wonder if it was mythical. But it's in the online archives now: the explanation of why B.D. wore his helmet all the time.

(The girl he's talking with is not Boopsie; this is before Boopsie. The very early Doonesburies had a regular cast of male characters but the females were constantly changing and often nameless.)

A little later on, this strip is still sometimes implied to be the first appearance of Joanie Caucus, but it's obviously a follow-up. Again, the strip that immediately preceded it and that actually introduced her, a Sunday strip, was never collected in the books, and I once delved into newspaper microfilm archives to confirm my memory that it existed.

I don't have much to say about Doonesbury as political commentary that hasn't been said often before, except to point out that to call it a left-wing partisan strip is entirely mistaken: from the beginning, Trudeau has been out to puncture the pretensions of the left as well as the right. For instance:

If he's tougher on the Republicans, it's because they've offered a much bigger target. When serious, Doonesbury can be memorably searing, but when Trudeau is trying to be funny, he always succeeds, unlike certain right-wing competitors - and you know who I'm thinking of - who are never funny, even on the rare occasions when they're not talking about politics. Whereas Doonesbury covers much of life - that's what makes its regular characters so memorable - satirizes all kinds of things, and is not just an editorial cartoon.