SINATRA SEEKS LIST OF PAPERS PRINTING 'DOONESBURY' COMIC - NYTimes.com SINATRA SEEKS LIST OF PAPERS PRINTING 'DOONESBURY' COMIC By ALEX S. JONES Published: June 21, 1985 Lawyers representing Frank Sinatra have demanded a list of the names of newspapers that published a ''Doonesbury'' cartoon strip satirizing Mr. Sinatra from the distributor of the comic so they can seek retractions. The strip, by Garry Trudeau, was published June 13. It contained an exchange between Mr. Sinatra, who was out of the picture, and a casino blackjack dealer. Mr. Sinatra's dialogue threatens to have the dealer dismissed if she shuffles the cards before dealing. The strip, using parentheses, had Mr. Sinatra saying, ''Get me your (obscene gerund) boss, you little (anatomically explicit epithet)!'' In December 1984, Mr.

Sinatra and Dean Martin were involved in an incident in Atlantic City after which a New Jersey casino commissioner, Joel Jacobson, said in hearings that they had intimidated a dealer into dealing from her hand, which is illegal in New Jersey, rather than from a plastic box. According to the comic's distributor, Universal Press Syndicate, Mr. Sinatra's lawyers said that the June 13 ''Doonesbury'' was ''false and violative of Mr. Sinatra's rights,'' and that they would take ''all appropriate steps.'' Mr. Sinatra has refused any further comment beyond the contents of the letter. Susan Reynolds, Mr. Sinatra's spokesman, said that neither Mr. Sinatra nor his lawyers would comment on what ''appropriate steps'' might be taken or on any other aspect of the situation. Mr. Trudeau was also unavailable for comment. Lee Salem, editorial director of the syndicate, said that the syndicate denied that the cartoon violated Mr. Sinatra's rights and that the syndicate had refused to provide a list of the 835 papers subscribing to ''Doonesbury.'' ''I can understand why he's upset by being lampooned, but we look at this as fair satire,'' Mr. Salem said.

According to Floyd Abrams, a lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues, Mr. Sinatra would have little chance to win a libel suit because of broad protection for expression of opinion. ''Garry Trudeau is entitled to no less expression of his views than is George Will,'' Mr. Abrams said, referring to the conservative political columnist. Mr. Sinatra was the subject of six ''Doonesbury'' installments from June 10-15 that raised hackles, which Mr. Trudeau's cartoons have been doing since national distribution began in 1970. Two of the strips included reproductions of what Universal says are photographs of Mr. Sinatra with people including Aniello Dellacroce, who was charged and acquitted in the killing of an associate of the late Carlo Gambino, who had a reputation as kingpin of organized crime in New York. The strip did not mention the acquittal. On the day the first cartoon appeared, Mr. Sinatra issued a statement saying Mr. Trudeau's work was created ''without regard to fairness or decency.'' According to Mr. Salem, 30 newspapers did not print part or all of that series, and two papers canceled the strip altogether. But Mr.

Salem said that the Sinatra series had not proved so controversial as a series in 1976 that showed two unmarried characters in bed together. Several newspapers did not publish a strip this spring that included a tangle of male and female students in a Florida motel room. More recently, Universal declined to distribute a series satirizing the antiabortion film ''The Silent Scream.'' The strips were published by The New Republic. Garry Trudeau will suspend daily “Doonesbury” strip to focus on TV show - The Boston Globe Trudeau in 1972, two years into his comic strip’s syndication run. By Joseph P. Kahn Globe Staff February 12, 2014 Saying that newspaper comic strips aren’t as influential as they used to be, Garry Trudeau will put daily production of “Doonesbury” on long-term hiatus beginning Feb. 24. Instead, he plans to focus on “Alpha House,” an original Web series that he’s helped create for Amazon. Trudeau will continue producing his Sunday strip, his syndicate Universal Uclick confirmed Tuesday.

“It’s now become common — even necessary — for my colleagues in art and journalism to move laterally as the media landscape changes,” Trudeau wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. “The comics were once an enormously influential part of the cultural conversation, but now it’s streaming video that’s a leading edge. We all have to adapt. I do plan to return to the strip — I see myself as a lifer — but the field obviously isn’t as robust as it was when I was starting out.” Advertisement A cultural force for decades, and the first daily comic strip to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, “Doonesbury” and its antiestablishment brand of social and political humor have kept readers amused, moved, and sometimes outraged over 43 years. Trudeau began the strip while attending Yale University in the late 1960s, where “Bull Tales,” as it was then known, ran in the Yale Daily News. Renamed “Doonesbury,” it began its syndication run in 1970, with the Sunday strip debuting in 1971.

Publication has continued more or less uninterrupted ever since, with the notable exception of a 22-month sabbatical Trudeau took in 1983-’84 to work on a Broadway musical based on the strip. He also wrote “Tanner ’88,” a mock political documentary directed by Robert Altman that aired on HBO during the 1988 presidential campaign. It was rebroadcast, with updates, in 2004 on the Sundance Channel. Admired for staying on top of the zeitgeist, from Beltway politics and D.C. sex scandals to AIDS, same-sex marriage, disabled military vets, and pot growing, Trudeau has often courted controversy with “Doonesbury” and its sprawling cast of characters, some real, many more invented. Some newspapers have opted to move the strip from the comics page to the editorial page. Others have dropped it altogether, at least temporarily, owing to what editors deemed objectionable material. Readers often disagreed, and vociferously so. Comics historian Brian Walker, author of “Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau” and a longtime friend of the cartoonist, says it has been difficult for Trudeau to remain fully involved in two projects simultaneously.

“A syndicated strip is the ultimate ball-and-chain experience, and Garry worked extremely close to deadline,” Walker said by phone from Connecticut, where he’d recently dined with Trudeau. “It’s what he does, it defines him. But he really wants to do the TV show, too. At least with Sunday he’ll still have his hand in it.” Walker predicted the older strips will likely focus on character development — cast members have aged, married, divorced, even died over four decades — and less so on topical events like the Watergate scandal or Iraq war. However, not too many readers will be unfamiliar with historical reference points, he noted. “Most ‘Doonesbury’ readers today are baby boomers anyway,” Walker said. The strip itself, he added “is still just as fresh and poignant and engaging as it’s ever been. Garry has never gotten stale, or stuck in a rut. For someone like me who’s followed it from day one, it’s the chronicle of my generation.” To Tina Gianoulis, author of “The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture,” the enduring legacy of Trudeau and “Doonesbury” has been opening up the comics page to mature topics, not merely ones ripe for satire.

“A lot of good, politically savvy strips have come along since,” she said Tuesday, “but his was really the first. The comics page is not just for kids anymore, and ‘Doonesbury’ really made that happen.” By limiting himself to a Sunday strip, Trudeau may also free himself to be more creative, even daring, she suggested. “Taking on a subject like rape in the military — you usually don’t see that on the comics page,” she said. “It’ll be really interesting to see what he does with the Sunday strips.” Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com . Correction: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version incorrectly referred to the original name of the strip. It was Bull Tales. Loading comments... Garry Trudeau will suspend daily “Doonesbury” strip to focus on TV show - Names - Boston.com Garry Trudeau will suspend daily “Doonesbury” strip to focus on TV show By Joseph P. Kahn Globe Staff | 02.11.14 | 5:25 PM Saying he’s ready to take an extended break, Garry Trudeau is putting production of his daily “Doonesbury” comic strip on long-term hiatus beginning Feb.

24, the cartoonist announced Tuesday. Instead, he plans to focus on “Alpha House,” an original web series that he’s helped create for Amazon. Trudeau will continue producing his Sunday strip, his syndicate Universal Uclick confirmed Tuesday. “It’s a wonderful opportunity, but as I discovered last year, the demands of producing the show are considerable,” Trudeau said in a statement, “and my efforts to return to the daily strip while we were still in production had to be abandoned.” Trudeau put his daily strips on hold for several months last year while concentrating on “Alpha House.” Beginning March 3, the syndicate will offer older strips, in chronological order, that revisit key periods in “Doonesbury”’s evolution. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below “This time, the Sunday releases will continue,” Trudeau noted, “and we’ll be making Flashbacks available on a daily basis. With 43 years of material to draw from, there are still some 13,000 strips that haven’t been seen since they were originally published.” “There’s no way of knowing how many seasons of ‘Alpha House’ lie ahead,” the 65-year old cartoonist added.

“I could be back drawing ‘Doonesbury’ full-time in the fall. In the meantime, I’m grateful for the forbearance and past support of our longtime newspaper clients, and hope that I’ll still be welcome in their pages when I return.” The comic strip currently appears in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide. “Alpha House,” distributed via Amazon Instant Video, is a political comedy that casts a satirical eye on Beltway politicians, specifically those of the conservative stripe. Co-starring John Goodman and Bill Murray, it follows the fortunes of four Republican congressmen who share living quarters near Capitol Hill. Its premise is based on a quartet of congressmen, including then-US Rep. William Delahunt, who lived together as D.C. roommates. Since its launch last November, 11 episodes of “Alpha House” have been produced. Amazon recently announced it was picking up the series for a second season. A cultural force for decades, and the first daily comic strip to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, “Doonesbury” and its antiestablishment brand of social and political humor have kept readers amused, moved, and sometimes outraged over its 43 years.

Trudeau began the strip while attending Yale University in the late 1960s, where “Bull Tales,” as it was then known, ran in the Yale Daily News. Renamed “Doonesbury,” it began its syndication run in 1970, with the Sunday strip debuting in 1971. Publication has continued more or less uninterrupted ever since, with the notable exception of a 22-month sabbatical Trudeau took in 1983-’84 to work on a Broadway musical based on the strip. He also wrote “Tanner ’88,” a mock political documentary directed by Robert Altman that aired on HBO during the 1988 presidential campaign. It was rebroadcast, with updates, in 2004 on the Sundance Channel. Admired for staying on top of the zeitgeist, from Beltway politics and D.C. sex scandals to AIDS, same-sex marriage, disabled military vets, and pot growing, Trudeau has often courted controversy with “Doonesbury” and its sprawling cast of characters, some real, many more invented. Some newspapers have opted to move the strip from the comics page to the editorial page.

Others have dropped it altogether, at least temporarily, owing to what editors deemed objectionable material. Readers often disagreed, and vociferously so. Comics historian Brian Walker, author of “Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau” and a longtime friend of the cartoonist, says the decision to suspend the daily strip was a difficult one for Trudeau. At the same time, “Alpha House” has become so all-consuming a project, it’s difficult for Trudeau to remain fully involved in both simultaneously, according to Walker. “A syndicated strip is the ultimate ball-and-chain experience, and Garry worked extremely close to deadline,” Walker said by phone from Connecticut, where he’d recently dined with Trudeau. “It’s what he does, it defines him. But he really wants to do the TV show, too. At least with Sunday he’s still have his hand in it. I’m happy for him, but [this news] is still a little bittersweet.” Walker predicted the older strips will likely focus on character development—cast members have aged, married, divorced, even died over the past four decades—and less so on topical events like the Watergate scandal or Iraq war.

However, not too many readers will be unfamiliar with historical reference points, he noted. “Most ‘Doonesbury’ readers today are baby boomers anyway,” Walker said. The strip itself, he added “is still just as fresh and poignant and engaging as it’s ever been. Garry has never gotten stale, or stuck in a rut. For someone like me who’s followed it from day one, it’s the chronicle of my generation.” To Tina Gianoulis, author of “The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture,” the enduring legacy of Trudeau and “Doonesbury” has been opening up the comics page to mature topics, not merely ones ripe for satire. “A lot of good, politically savvy strips have come along since,” she said Tuesday, “but his was really the first. The comics page is not just for kids anymore, and ‘Doonesbury’ really made that happen.” By limiting himself to a Sunday strip, Trudeau may also free himself to be more creative, even daring, she suggested. “Taking on a subject like rape in the military—you usually don’t see that on the comics page,” she said. “It’ll be really interesting to see what he does with the Sunday strips.” Joseph P.

Kahn can be reached at jkah n@globe.com . Most Popular Garry Trudeau: 'Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble' | Books | The Guardian Comics and graphic novels Garry Trudeau: 'Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble' The creator of America's first and best satirical daily newspaper cartoon talks about 40 years of upsetting politicians and editors Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau in his New York studio. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian Monday 25 October 2010 19.04 EDT First published on Monday 25 October 2010 19.04 EDT Share on Messenger Close The first Doonesbury strip, published 40 years ago today, seems naive looked at through modern lenses. It begins with a character so sparsely drawn he barely exists, though you are intrigued immediately by the American football helmet he is wearing while sitting in an armchair. He is joined by a scraggy-haired young man with a pencil for a nose and the letter O to represent his glasses. This is Michael Doonesbury and the helmeted football player is his new college roommate, BD.

Little did their creator Garry Trudeau know when he sketched out that first awkward encounter between them, published on 26 October 1970, that he had just made comic history. Nor did he have any idea that he was embarking on a journey that would stretch into the indefinite future and that those scratchy beginnings would turn into a chronicle of modern times . The strip had come about almost by chance. Trudeau had been having a bit of fun as a third-year Yale student, dabbling with a sports cartoon called Bull Tales based on a real-life quarterback in the local team called Brian Dowling. Trudeau expected the strip to die at the end of that football season. But the cartoon was spotted by a book editor who thought he'd take a punt on it. Out of the blue, Trudeau, at the tender age of 21, was invited to turn the strip into a syndicated newspaper feature, an extraordinary privilege given the national exposure and the almost tenure-like terms it offered – with contracts lasting 20 years. "I had given no consideration to a career in cartoons," Trudeau says now. "I thought I was on track to become a graphic designer. So I asked for a one-year contract.

My editors howled with laughter." You could say that was the first Doonesbury joke, and readers have been howling with laughter ever since. And not just laughing. They've been frowning, shouting, crying, blushing – the full gamut of emotions – as a result of a strip that broke the mould of the comic page and shattered countless conventions. Over the last four decades Doonesbury has established itself as so much more than a traditional cartoon. It is a soap opera, a tragedy, a comedy, an investigative agency, a liberal political commentary, a scourge of pomposity and corruption, a humanitarian exercise, all rolled into one. We are sitting in the east-side Manhattan apartment that Trudeau uses as a studio. I'd expected some scruffy garret quarters, a sort of scraggy-haired bricks-and-mortar equivalent of that first Doonesbury. Instead Trudeau welcomes me into a very light and pleasant space with a wonderful view over Roosevelt Island. The room is richly carpeted and the walls lined with pictures by New York artist David Levinthal. The centre of the room is dominated by a draughtsman's board, on which the latest strip is being crafted.

Trudeau's working day has changed remarkably little in 40 years. He begins it by what he calls "marinating the news", devouring the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal at home a few blocks away in the company of his wife, former television journalist Jane Pauley. "Mostly I'm just waiting for something to happen, in me, and mostly it does." He starts with a subject, and from that the week's offering evolves, produced as a block of six days' strips. The one he's currently working on sees Jeff Redfern in Afghanistan trying to sell the products of his company Overkill to Hamid Karzai. That's pretty typical of what he does, Trudeau says, "taking these highly improbable characters and having them collide with real events". Trudeau takes me to a back room where volumes of his past work are stored in a cupboard, with his original pencil drawings stacked alongside the inked versions that are done for him by an associate. "In the old days I didn't much value the pencil originals," Trudeau tells me.

"So for the first 20 years my Friday ritual would be that as I faxed the last one I would take the six drawings and throw them in the trash can." Lining this back room are framed magazine covers, six Newsweek and two Time, each one devoted to Doonesbury. That in itself tells a story. When Trudeau began his syndicated cartoon he entered a world where the comics page was almost entirely non-topical and devoid of any political reference. That was partly the result of logistics – strips had to be drawn six weeks in advance in order to circulate them to newspapers across America – and partly because cartoons were meant to be just that: politics-free, family-friendly fun. Within a year of those tentative beginnings Trudeau had torn up the rules of the cartoon strip and begun rewriting them, one strip at a time. His work was risque, spikey and above all of the moment. "I was writing about the issues of my day – sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, politics. That was wholly new to comics, which were broad in their humour and rarely touched on anything remotely topical." Was he aware of what he was doing?

"One of the great things of being young is that you're not aware, you lack self-consciousness," he says. "I was wholly clueless about the things I was not supposed to be doing. I didn't set out to be a troublemaker, though quite quickly the strip became a cause of trouble." That's an understatement. In contrast to his fellow cartoonists, who were busily drawing fluffy animals and naughty schoolchildren, Trudeau waded into Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, abortion, hypocrisy in the White House, pot smoking and sex. Though he himself came from a moderate Republican background, Trudeau found himself manning the barricades of the counter-culture. "It was the cauldron, the late 60s, when I began to think as an adult. All hell was taking place, the Black Panthers were on trial, students were shot in the Kent State protests, war was waging on the other side of the globe, it was very hard not to be swept up in all of that." Printers loved him. He pushed his deadlines further and further back, to make the strip more and more live.

One printer in Kansas City, Trudeau learned years later, did so much overtime setting his strips that he bought a yacht with the extra earnings and called it Doonesbury. But editors had kittens. And the owners of local newspapers had fits. Several began cancelling the strip altogether, or censoring its wilder equence in which Zonker extols the virtues of "fine, uncut Turkish hashish" to a young child. Dozens more dropped the sequence in February 1976 when Andy Lippincott was introduced, the first gay character to appear on the comics page. In November of that year more than 30 newspapers scrapped a four-day tease in which Joanie and Rick Redfern (who later spawned Jeff) end up lying in a postcoital embrace in bed. The Bangor Daily News blocked out that final frame with the weather forecast ("Fair, cold, highs in the 30s"). Censorship was straightforward, and Trudeau never complained because he says "I knew the editors were caught between a rock and a hard place". More sinister was the decision of about a third of the papers that carried him to switch him from the comics to the editorial page alongside their political commentators. "We resisted the move," Trudeau says.

"For the simple reason that there are far more readers on the comics page than on the comment page and you want to be where the reader is." Watergate was the point of no return. Trudeau provoked indignation and adoration in equal measure when his character Mark Slackmayer, a radical DJ, declared Nixon's former attorney general, John Mitchell, "guilty, guilty, guilty!" even before he had been charged. The Washington Post commented sniffily that "If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty, it's going to be the due process of justice, not a comic strip artist." But the Washington Post hadn't counted on the tenacity and the thick skin of Garry Trudeau. As he wrote on the 25th anniversary of Doonesbury, "Satire is unfair. It's rude and uncivil. It lacks balance and proportion, and it obeys none of the normal rules of engagement. Satire picks a one-sided fight, and the more its intended target reacts, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. And as if that weren't enough, this savage, unregulated sport is protected by the United States constitution.

Cool, huh?" But it must have been scary, I ask him, having such opprobrium thrown at him when he was still so young and so new to the trade. "Yes I suppose it was. And very distracting. I found myself crisis managing almost as much as I was creating. I made a decision about three or four years into it, that I better step back from giving interviews. Once I did that I found it quite suited me. I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be. It also had the unintended consequence of creating a mystique of Trudeau as a hermit, but that wasn't it at all." Trudeau has maintained that publicity blackout, and with it the mystique of the silent artist, right up to this day. Our meeting marks something of an emergence for him, out of the cave into which he crawled in the 1970s and back into the glare of a public existence. The reason for his decision to end his almost four-decade-long state of purdah is that he wants to lend his support to a new collection of his work, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective.

The book is a vast tome that runs to 695 pages, yet it contains just 13% of the total strips produced. Trudeau explains that he and his collaborators decided to focus on the characters and their relationships, rather than the more topical storylines, which in many cases would now have lost their relevance. "There is nothing worse than annotated humour," he says. The characters resonate over the years, starting with that initial odd couple. Trudeau invented the name Doonesbury by combining doone – boarding-school slang, he says, for "a good-natured dufus, a clueless sort without any mean to them" – with the ending of the name of his friend Charlie Pillsbury. "Charlie was like that, innocent but with a kind of grace, and to my amazement he's been perfectly happy with this association, which just proves he's a doone." Then there was BD, the original star of Bull Tales. Trudeau's BD was as obtuse and arrogant as the real BD was admirable and self-effacing. Trudeau didn't know Dowling, but much later they met and became friends, and the former quarterback has been supportive of his fictitious namesake.

Such positive feedback was not forthcoming from the model for Duke, the self-obsessed, utterly unscrupulous epitome of evil who has sent a chill down readers' spines for all these years. He was a parody of gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, who was deeply resentful of it, seeing his Doonesbury appearance as a form of copyright infringement. Thompson sent an envelope of used toilet paper to Trudeau and once memorably said: "If I ever catch that little bastard, I'll tear his lungs out." "One never knew quite how seriously to take that, though he did shoot his assistant in later life," Trudeau notes. Other public figures whom Trudeau targeted were no less undignified in their responses. Donald Trump called him a "jerk" and a "total loser". When Trudeau invoked Frank Sinatra's links with the mafia in an astonishing strip that ended with a photograph of the singer cavorting with his mob friends, Ol' Blue Eyes made the mistake, during a concert at the Carnegie Hall, of attacking not just Trudeau but also his wife – who was a big television sweetheart at the time. "Well, that's the first rule of the neighbourhood, you don't go after the women and children," Trudeau says.

"The audience booed him, which must have come as a shock to Sinatra." The lesson of all this is that when Doonesbury comes calling, do not react, no matter how hurtful the things the strip says about you. It will only make Trudeau redouble his attack if you do. It was funny how few of his victims understood that basic principle, not least the politicians. Dan Quayle, whom he depicted as a feather, wailed that Trudeau had a vendetta against him. George Bush the elder was incapable of not responding, saying he wanted to "kick the hell out of him". Jeb Bush once came up to Trudeau at a Republican convention and cautioned him to "walk softly". "And of course that just encouraged me, I knew I was on the right track. I could never understand why they took it so personally. Satire is a form of social control, it's what you do. It's not personal. It's a job." Trudeau is now on to his eighth president, who turns out to be one of his hardest. Obama he sees as a "raging moderate"; and satirists don't do well with moderates as "there's not a whole lot to get hold of".

He's also on to the third generation of characters. Doonesbury and BD have both procreated and now, he says, "it's about time for the second wave of characters to have children. That's a frightening thought." Though the original duo have grown older, they continue to be anchors of the strip. BD led the way into Trudeau's current passion, exploring the traumas and travails of the wounded warrior. It's been Trudeau's device for dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanisatan – opposing the wars, yet honouring the men and women who have given everything to them. BD's loss of a leg at Fallujah, followed by his removal, finally, of his helmet, was a poignant symbol of sacrifice. "He had had his helmet on him for 35 years. When it came off it conveyed that he was now vulnerable and his life had changed for ever. I had to figure out who the new BD would be." So many years, so many characters , so many strips. Fourteen thousand in all. Doesn't he ever fear he will grind to a halt, lose his edge, have nothing more to add? "I try not to permit myself that feeling.

It's like climbing a mountain – you don't look down. I don't want to contemplate the possibility too deeply that one week I'll come up blank." Has that ever happened? "Oh yes. All the time. Thanks for not noticing." 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective is published today by Andrews McMeel, priced £65. We have five copies to give away. For your chance to win, visit guardianbookshop.co.uk/competitions . Doonesbury | Sarah Palin's Breasts | Cartoon | Mediaite Doonesbury Cartoon Makes Punchline Out Of Sarah Palin’s Breasts Doonesbury Cartoon Makes Punchline Out Of Sarah Palin's Breasts by Tommy Christopher | 10:52 am, September 6th, 2011 Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters has taken appropriate umbrage at Cartoonist Garry Trudeau‘s latest Sunday Doonesbury strip over its use of a sexist (and, frankly, lazy) joke about Sarah Palin‘s breasts. The strip feature Palin on TV telling an interviewer that her recent Newsweek cover story “shows that as president, I’d be totally ready if called on to fill out a tight sweater.” No, you haven’t forgotten to laugh.

Perhaps a bit of background is necessary. Doonesbury is a comic strip that appears in a thing called a “newspaper,” which is, as the name suggests, made of paper and has news printed on it. The strip has been around for 41 years now, and in its heyday, was known for its subversive edge (subversive compared to Marmaduke, I suppose). Doonesbury is a mixture of ensemble narrative and liberal doses of political commentary. The Palin strip actually does contain a few funny lines(once it gets going. The first 2 panels are of a character whistling and making Jiffy Pop), but misses badly with its sexist dismount. Perhaps this was an attempt to regain some edge ever since Dennis the Menace went emo, but it ends up being offensive and unfunny, especially in a strip that’s supposed to appeal to liberals. Here’s Newsbusters’ description : In the strip, long-time character B.D. is watching a televised interview with Palin in Iowa. She’s asked, “What do you think of Michele Bachmann’s early success here?” In the second to last frame, the faux Palin said, “And did you see me in Newsweek?

That article shows that as president, I’d be totally ready if called on to fill a tight sweater.” In the next frame, B.D. thinks to himself, “Good one. Advantage Palin” as her interviewer asked, “Are you saying Bachmann wouldn’t?” The faux Palin responded, “We don’t know. The lamestreamers won’t get the facts out.” Wow, I haven’t read Doonesbury in a really long time. Doesn’t B.D. always wear a helmet? Many conservatives have no problem with Sarah Palin as affectionate sex object , and while Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard is rightly offended, he sees this as mainly a partisan issue: Now imagine for a moment Barack Obama was a Republican, and both Palin and Bachmann were Democrats. Would Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau be using cheap boob jokes to mock two prominent liberal women? Yes, that was rhetorical. Well, allow me to respond anyway. While Garry Trudeau might be less likely to target Democrats, there are plenty of media types, left, right, and center, who have no problem making sexist remarks about liberal figures like Hillary Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama, Janet Napolitano, and so on.

It seems the only time conservatives care about sexism is when the media they hate fails to call out sexism against a conservative. Sexism, as any woman will tell you, is not a partisan issue. Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com Follow Mediaite Doonesbury (Comic Strip) - TV Tropes And Then Uncle Duke Was A Zombie Animated Adaptation : A rarely seen Doonesbury primetime cartoon special was made and aired in 1977. Anyone Can Die : Doonesbury was the first mainstream humor comic strip to kill off a character, which caused quite a stir at the time (1986) and landed it on the cover of Time magazine. The deceased, Dick Davenport, was an elderly birdwatcher who had been a recurring character for years. He suffered a massive heart attack while birding but managed to stay alive just long enough to fulfill his life's dream of photographing an extremely rare bird (his last word, spoken right after snapping the picture, was "Immortality.") Andrew, a college friend of Joanie's, died of AIDS just after hearing the CD of The Beach Boys ' Pet Sounds. Later, Dick's wife Lacey joined him in the hereafter.

We get to see her death from her point of view, as Dick ushers her into heaven. Her first impression of the place is to say "What horrid drapes", to which Dick replies "Quiet! Mrs. God picked them out!" Averted with Uncle Duke, even after he was buried six feet under in a coffin. Turns out he was zombified for a while. Considering the man never ages with the rest of the cast, even after Hunter S. Thompson died, you have to wonder. (When Duke read Thompson's obituary, his (Duke's) head exploded and he spent a week in a sort of hallucinatory fugue state. Appropriate, all things considered.) Archive Trawl : As mentioned above the full archive of strips is available at at GoComics.com, previously it was a rare example in print comics in that you can read today's strip from 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 years ago (and this presentation continues). All this counterbalances the fact that the print collections for the strips routinely go out of print.

Art Evolution : From background-less scribbles in the 1970s to highly detailed and colored artwork in the 1980s. The Artifact : B.D.'s signature headgear was a helmet which he never, ever took off (though its type could vary between football player's, police patrolman's, and soldier's). Trudeau finally found a way to justify dropping the gimmick when B.D. was seriously wounded in an ambush while deployed in Iraq; since then he has been depicted bare-headed. Artificial Limbs : Played realistically with B.D., who lost a leg in the Iraq War and has been wearing a prosthesis since then. Asexuality : Zonker has repeatedly disavowed any interest in romance. This has been variously explained as the unfortunate outcome of a crush he had at the age of ten, or (more likely) a manifestation of his general discomfort with the nature of adult reality. Author Filibuster : Played straight, averted and subverted multiple times over the years.

Author Tract : One Sunday strip during the Second Gulf War had Mark and Zonker ranting at "France-bashers" in French mixed with English, in part for not considering "the feelings of patriotic Franco-Americans" such as the author of the strip. Mark finished off by calling the France-bashers " jingoistic, self-regarding conquer-monkeys !" Babies Make Everything Better : Discussed, but it works. Sorta. Bluff the Eavesdropper : While Zonker is being kept in a hotel awaiting trial for possession of marijuana, Mike finds a bug under a lamp. The two start very obviously acting, talking about how completely sober Zonker is in order to tip off the prosecutors that yes, they know there's a bug in the room. It gets the case thrown out of court. Book Snap : In Roland Hedley's first appearance, Walden's commune residents give him outlandish BS for a report on youth trends. When, Zonker and Mike avow "We give you our word of honor we represent a national trend." he snaps his reporter's notebook shut and takes their word for it. For example, the line, "Pretty good, actually.

It's a comic strip" when he lampshaded the One Degree of Separation between Alex and Leo/Toggle. Also, "You'd get confused. We're in them," discussing Newspaper Comics . Bunny-Ears Lawyer : B.D.'s [formerly] ever-present helmet, which he wore even in bed. Canon Discontinuity : Trudeau has pretty much disowned strips from the early years of the series, which involve B.D. joking about date rape, refusing to let them be collected in book format. Captain Ersatz : Uncle Duke is a reference to Raoul Duke, one of Hunter S. Thompson's aliases. Thompson was not pleased. Characterization Marches On : JJ was originally a normal, sweet girl who seemed to take Joanie's leaving in stride and Zonker once complained about hippie surfers all over the beaches. Several, but most notably Boopsie; she started out as a rather dim-witted blond who constantly giggled and who only seemed to care about fawning over B.D. Thankfully, she grew out of it and became (after the hiatus) a well-adjusted adult who is quite intelligent and willing to give B.D. hell when he screws up. B.D.

also counts; while he started out as a jerk-ass jock who was selfish and ultra-conservative, he ends up maturing into a reasonable adult after the hiatus and while he has his moments of jerk-ass conservativism, he has mellowed out a good deal. Cloudcuckoolander : Zonker and Zipper/Jeff Redfern. Boopsie was one too when she first appeared, but quickly outgrew it when she married B.D. Alex now has the crown, given how over the top her fantasies about life with Toggle are. Comically Missing the Point : Toggle's reaction to Zipper's tour of Walden College — since Zipper is basically Zonker Junior, his tours are focused on the slacker-friendliness of "America's safety school". Toggle is a wounded Iraq vet from a working-class family who actually wants an education. When Joanie asks her first husband Clinton for a divorce, he claims to have "started to think out some of this women's movement stuff" and offers a compromise to save their marriage. Unfortunately, he apparently didn't do very much research . Clinton: Look, I'm meetin' you halfway, aren't I?!

Coming-Out Story : Andy's ghost helped Mark realize he was gay. Continuity Nod : In the 1970s, Duke is appointed governor of American Samoa. His mere presence (compounded with an unfortunately timed, sudden shortage of virgin sacrifices) causes disasters, such as volcanoes and tidal waves, which his assistant MacArthur claims is the work of angry gods. Duke dismisses these claims until it actually starts to snow on the tropical paradise: "I'm a reasonable man, MacArthur, so I know this isn't snow". Three decades later, Mark Slackmeyer and his lover Chase are looking to get married. They travel to Samoa in the hope that their love will be accepted there. MacArthur agrees to sanction the gay wedding, but as they prepare their vows everything starts to go wrong...including volcanoes and tidal waves. MacArthur decides the gods are a little too conservative to be comfortable with this after all, and asks the couple to leave, even mentioning that nothing like this has happened since Duke was governor. Mark and Chase protest until guess what happens.

"We're reasonable men, MacArthur, so we know this isn't snow." Over an even wider period of time, Zonker is told of a connection between marijuana and communism- and there's even a flashback. It's (*sob*) so beautiful... Kim was introduced around 1975 as "the last Vietnam war orphan," as a baby. Decades later, when she was a young woman, she reappeared and ended up marrying Mike. Dare to Be Badass : When Joanie Caucus applied to law school, her young friend Ellie encouraged her to think big ; like a run for the U.S. Senate. Ellie: Dare to be great, Ms. Caucus. Joanie Caucus: (smiling) Oh, all right. Demoted to Extra : Sort of. While Mike's still part of the main cast, since the mid-2000's Alex has taken over this position, with most of Mike's appearances based around her (with the exception of his mother moving in). J.J. and Honey Huan have been demoted to extra, rarely appearing anymore.

Same with Mark, as far as the fact that Mark only shows up in the occasional Sunday strip or whenever the strip needs a non-Hedley related media talking head and pretty much only contacts the others via phone. A byproduct of Loads and Loads of Characters . With Trudeau continuing to create new characters all the time, it's inevitable that some old ones will find their roles scaled down or eliminated . This is lampshaded in a 2012 arc, where with No Fourth Wall , Mike announces that the strip is being handed over to Alex to run. Her move to change the name of the strip to "What Up, Alex?" appears to have been shot down, however. Disabled Love Interest : Alex's boyfriend Toggle, a young Iraq war vet with PTSD and some brain damage. The Ditz : Boopsie, though she outgrew it upon getting married. In the Blood : Duke and his son Earl. Deconstructed with Joanie and her children: her emotional abuse/neglect of J.J. turned her into a self-absorbed wreck that ultimately abandoned her daughter and husband for a slimeball biker.

Yet when it came to her son Jeff, who she did her best to raise properly and avoid the mistakes she made with her daughter, she created an evil bigger monster. Informed Judaism : In one of the older strips Daddy Slackmeyer tops off a rant at his son/disgrace with, "I bet you're even seeing some Jewish girl.." but Mark cuts in, "Dad, we're Jewish!!" Invisible President : Various icons have been used over the years: '70s/early '80s: Establishing Shot of the White House, and occasionally off-panel dialogue at press conferences and the like. Bill Clinton : A floating waffle. George W. Bush : Originally invisible, like his father. Prior to his election he wore a cowboy hat. After the disputed 2000 election he became a large asterisk. The cowboy hat changed to an Americana-themed Roman Legionnaire helmet after the invasion of Iraq got underway. It got progressively beaten up as Dubya's term ended. Barack Obama : So far, a return to the exterior establishing shots. Icons have also been used for other political figures including Dan Quayle (a feather) and Newt Gingrich (a lit bomb).

It's All About Me : Pathetic would-be suitor Jeremy Cavendish at Lacey Davenport's funeral. Later J.J. at that of the Widow Doonesbury. Laser-Guided Karma : Mike Doonesbury's mother burns her Medicare card to protest Obama's health care reform and hurts her hand because of it; the karma comes when she can't get treatment without the Medicare card she burned. One of the murderous dictators that Duke has been keeping in power has decided that he'll be living with Duke after he was deposed by his people and had to flee the country (against his will, as he remained ignorant until he was literally dragged out of the palace by the Red Rascal). So now Duke is forced to play slave for the dictator, simply so that he can get the money from the dictator to pay off the mercenary company that rescued him, lest he get stuck with the insanely expensive bill for said rescue. Jeff Redfern has been unapologetically rubbing the millions he has made from his fraudulent "Red Rascal" alter ego in the face of his father Rick, who has gone from award-winning journalist to unpaid blogger in a reflection of the decline of print journalism.

However, in October 2012, Jeff's profligate spending has led to his mansion and Porsche being repossessed, forcing him to move back in with his parents. Rick, who tried to alert Jeff to his precarious financial situation only to be ignored, is completely unsympathetic. Loads and Loads of Characters : So many that occasionally they devote an entire Sunday strip to a chart which lets readers know how everyone is related to each other. To new readers, it may seem the show's huge cast has nothing in common, as they come from all walks of life, ages, races and even different countries. But every last character (except for caricatures of real people such as the President) is connected somehow to title character Mike Doonesbury, making him the strip's resident Kevin Bacon. One of the chart strips had Zonker ask the reader "aren't you tired of keeping track of the gigantic number of characters in this feature? Aren't most 19th century Russian novels more intelligible?" To the point where, in the late 2000s, two characters met for the first time on the internet.

When Jason Fox of FoxTrot "drafted" a website for the strip, it allowed the viewer to download a list of characters, but suggested a 56k or better connection. (It was the 90s.) by Mike and Zonk in reference to Alex's about-to-be-born twins: Mike: "Legal occupancy for this strip is only 80 characters, and we hit that ceiling years ago." Lysistrata Gambit : Inverted (Zeke threatens to freeze out JJ) and subverted ("Do you even know how blackmail works?"). Medium Awareness : The characters are perfectly aware that they are appearing in a comic strip. Morality Chain : Boopsie to B.D. The Musical : Trudeau spent the hiatus writing a musical adaptation of the strip (with Elizabeth Swados) that had a short run on Broadway. The plot takes place before and during the core characters' graduation from Walden, thus setting up the post-hiatus aging of the characters.

My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels : In the strip's take on the 1985 USA for Africa "We Are The World" sessions (which it tied into the strip's universe by having Jimmy Thudpucker take part in), Stevie Wonder asks Quincy Jones if they can sing "milleloo shalanga" during the fills after the chorus, explaining that it's a Swahili phrase he once heard. Jones asks the Ethiopian observer if it would be offensive to Ethiopians, and the observer says no, so they begin singing it. However the observer (outside the frame) adds "It's not a very nice thing to say about your own sister, though." This all actually happened up till the punchline. In reality, it was innocuous, but they chose not to sing it because Ethiopians don't speak Swahili. Never Bareheaded : For many years, B.D. was never seen without his football helmet. When he was called up from the Army reserves for the Gulf War in 1991 he wore a military helmet instead. For decades he wore a helmet until it finally came off on April 21, 2004, when B.D.

lost a leg while serving in Iraq. His only reflection on losing the helmet was on July 31, 2004, when he thought to himself: "Oh yeah, my helmet. What the hell was THAT all about? " A decade earlier, when BD first joined the military, he fretted that he would have to "get his football helmet removed." He then explained to his wife that it was "a simple procedure" where the surgeon freezes the helmet and then "cuts it off like an avocado." The next time we see him, he's wearing an almost identical army helmet. Also, Elmont and Zeke. No Celebrities Were Harmed : Politicians, mainly Presidents, routinely appear in this strip, but are either depicted as meaningful icons (such as a waffle , a cartoon bomb , or a floating feather ), or simply represented as speech balloons coming out of the Capitol or the White House. Also Duke is a thinly disguised and parodied and totally distorted Hunter S. Thompson . When Thompson died Duke experienced some strange things (well, not too strange for him). John Negroponte was called by his nickname "Proconsul" and portrayed as a guy dressing in Roman attire.

No Fourth Wall : Part of the Medium Awareness noted above; the characters often address the reader. No Name Given : The initials B.D. don't appear to stand for anything, as he's an expy for old Yale football hero Brian Dowling. They've diverged a lot over the years. When B.D. is about to get married, and somebody asks for his last name, he says just: "D". His wife is later sometimes referred/addressed as "Mrs. D". Not Allowed to Grow Up / Comic-Book Time : Played straight, then averted since the 1983-84 hiatus. Strangely enough, while everyone else has aged normally since 1984, Uncle Duke does not age, appearing to be constantly in his late 40's since he first appeared more than 30 years ago. This means that his nephew Zonker, who was a college student when he first met Duke, is now about the same age as him. No one appears to have noticed. Roland Hedley, the amoral TV news reporter, has never aged either, perhaps because he's more of a representation of the media itself than a character in his own right.

Duke's erstwhile business associate Jim Andrews also hasn't aged in about 30 years...and he was clearly in his fifties when he first appeared. Not So Remote : In the "Wreck of the Rusty Nail" arc in The '80s , Duke and Honey spend months shipwrecked on what they think is a deserted island in the South Atlantic. It turns out to be Matagorda Island off the coast of Texas. Off Model : Kim looks a bit odd in the June 18, 2012 strip. Looking a bit like she's stoned. One Degree of Separation : Seen when Toggle meets Alex over the internet. It's also lampshaded. BD, on discovering that Toggle is dating Alex, says, "She's my college roommate's kid! That's crazy! What are the odds?" The narration replies, "Pretty good, actually. It's a comic strip." One-Two Punchline : Doonesbury was the first newspaper comic strip to regularly use this, and was directly or indirectly the inspiration for most modern uses. O.O.C.

Is Serious Business : The only time Zeke is ever seen with his hat off and eyes showing is when his car is run off a cliff and lands upside down, making the hat fall off. Playing Games At Work : One strip has Mike tour his software company, and happen upon one of Kim's hires playing solitaire. The testy fellow claims he's developing a new paradigm. Mike: Red queen on black king. Jerkass: Yes, I know. Do you mind? Precision F-Strike : B.D. on learning he lost a leg. B.D.: Son of a bitch! Refuge in Audacity : A comparatively subtle example, if such a thing can be imagined. Jeff's fantasies as "The Red Rascal" aren't taken seriously even within the context of the strip, so it might take the reader a while to fully grasp that in one of them, printed in family-friendly newspapers across America, he disemboweled a Mook in full color. Rogue Juror : A 1994 story arc dealt with the tobacco executives who claimed under oath that they did not "believe" nicotine is addictive, despite the vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. In the strip, the executives are prosecuted on perjury charges.

Every member of the jury is convinced they are guilty, except for Jeremy Cavendish, who canï¿½t decide if the executives are "monsters or idiots." The other jurors argue with him for a long time and he eventually agrees the executives are guilty. He later reveals his change of heart was motivated by his desperate need to visit the restroom. Straight Man : For Mike, it should be written as Painfully Straight Man . Rick Redfern to his son Jeff. Strawman Political : Somewhat unavoidable by the nature of the strip, and rarely avoided. Sucky School : Walden College, "America's safety school", with a less than 20% graduation rate that's worse than some for-profit colleges. Suddenly Sexuality : Mark Slackmeyer was written as a girl chaser in the strip's first two decades. Even more jarring with Roz, whose entire characterization went from "soldier who revels in the attention she gets from men" to "lesbian soldier" after the ending of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Justified in that up until then she had a very good reason to hide her sexuality.

Sunday Strip Tactful Translation : Honey Huan's original purpose was translating and "softening" Duke's speeches and words during his stint as ambassador to China. Her previous assignment was as translator to Mao himself. She revealed to Duke that she was one of the few people who still understood him with his rural dialect and health problems, and even she wasn't sure what he said sometimes. Specifically, she's afraid that she might have caused the Cultural Revolution by mistranslating a lunch order. Not to mention her having to take Mao's indecisive nature into account when she translated for him. One occasion had him tell her to send word for the Great Wall of China to be destroyed. She tells him the next day that it had been dismantled. A week later, he told her that he changed his mind and that he wanted the entire Wall rebuilt exactly as it was. Honey tells the Chairman that she had personally devised a plan which got the entire wall rebuilt in one day.

Honey reveals that she actually spent the whole week watching TV, but "He thinks I'm a genius." (to which Duke replies "In a way, Honey, you are.") Take That : In the 00s, there were many strips that took a negative view on Zonker; from Zonker being yelled at by his illegal immigrant co-worker at a fast food restaurant over the fact that Zonker was a burnt out hippie working a minimum wage job while all of his friends were successful professionals (which was what said co-worker longed to be), to his disdain at being asked to help his best friend BD (who was letting him live rent free with his family on the condition that he babysit for them from time to time) to help out after BD lost his leg during the Iraq war. T-Word Euphemism : Played with when Lacey Davenport's political opponent challenged her to mutual drug tests — "Any time! Any place! I will fill any bottle!". When Lacey's husband commented dryly, "It would appear the contest has turned into a p—-ing match," Davenport replied, "A what?

You know I can't understand you when you use hyphens, dear." The Unfair Sex : Inverted: JJ left dependable nice guy Mike for complete loser Zeke, and is portrayed as a fool for doing so. The Unpronounceable : The leader of Berzerkistan, Trff Bmzklfrpz. Wham Episode : Several over the years, including several character deaths (such as Dick and Lacey Davenport, Andy Lippincott, and Mother Doonesbury) and the loss of B.D.'s leg in Iraq. THIS JUST IN: ‘Doonesbury’ to go on sabbatical as Amazon Studios officially picks up Trudeau’s Capitol Hill comedy, ‘Alpha House’ - The Washington Post THIS JUST IN: ‘Doonesbury’ to go on sabbatical as Amazon Studios officially picks up Trudeau’s Capitol Hill comedy, ‘Alpha House’ The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set!

By Michael Cavna By Michael Cavna May 29, 2013 Follow @comicriffs THIS SUMMER, Garry Trudeau will be working on a new way to skewer Washington. The cartoonist-screenwriter will put his Pulitzer-winning comic strip, “Doonesbury,” on the shelf this summer as he works on his new live-action Capitol Hill comedy, “Alpha House,” which has just been officially picked up by Amazon Studios, reports Variety. The strip’s syndicate, Universal Uclick, says that Michael Doonesbury and the rest of Trudeau’s troupe will go on sabbatical from June 10 to Labor Day. (“Doonesbury Flashbacks” will run during those weeks.) Trudeau will spend that time working on “Alpha House,” one of five series that Amazon Studios has just greenlighted as it moves into the world of original scripted programming. The other four series are the comedy “Betas” and the childrens’ shows “Annebots,” “Creative Galaxy” and “Tumbleaf,” reports Variety. “Alpha House,” which stars John Goodman and Clark Johnson, centers on the lives of four Republican senators who share a residence.

The Beltway-savvy satire was inspired by the true-life living arrangements of four prominent Democrats — after Trudeau read a news story in 2007 about “Real World”-esque roomies Rep. George Miller, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Bill Delahunt, who were sharing a two-bedroom house in the shadow of the Capitol Dome. The series pilot, which Amazon made available for viewing last month, also featured Matt Malloy and Mark Consuelos, and featured a performance by Bill Murray and a cameo by Stephen Colbert.

Question: Name Garry Trudeau's army-related cartoon strip?
Answer: Doonesbury