Anniversary: When Doonesbury Dropped the GUILTY Bomb On The National Discourse

On May 29, 1973, in the midst of the then-ongoing investigations into the Watergate DNC headquarters break-in by Nixon's campaign (and dirty works) handlers, a singular comic strip appeared in the daily newspapers crossing the lines from objective observation to subjective opinion when artist Garry Trudeau focused on John Mitchell - one of the key players in the overall Watergate scandals - and pre-judged the man with the conclusion that he was "GUILTY! GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!" (Yes, CAPS LOCK was even a thing before the Internet, kiddos)

the strip that defined not just a moment, but 
altered how we perceive political commentary to this day

The Doonesbury comic strip was merely three years young in 1973, having been bought up by a comic strip syndicate as part of an effort to infuse the four-panel humor sections of daily newspapers with younger, more college-oriented (in those days, Boomer generation) artists appealing to similar audiences.

The artwork itself was pretty basic, "fresh out of art school" kind of linear inking, with static bodies and "camera placement" with distance (and no shifting of angles or position) to set the scenes for characters to interact. There was also more dialogue than most strips worked with.

What creator Trudeau brought to the comics readership was a brash willingness to discuss modern-day topics - the political upheaval happening across college campuses in those days, the then-ongoing Vietnam War (which ended in 1972) and its immediate post-war consequences, the growing feminist movement, and the struggles to integrate schools and society as a whole in the wake of the 1960s Civil Rights battles - whereas most strips were mild observations of daily life and struggles of quiet desperation.

There'd been other daily comic strips that delved in politics with as much fervor and impact: Pogo by Walt Kelly, for example, was a "cute animal" strip that discussed issues - even political topics - of the day. Kelly famously attacked the Red Scare baiting of McCarthyism of the 1950s by exposing Joe McCarthy himself as a gaslighting bullying character Simple J. Malarkey (some scenes of Malarkey hunting down several Pogo characters are considered the scariest moments in comic strips history). Modern-day political satirists - Trudeau among them - openly claim Pogo as their inspiration. 

But where Pogo could hide on the "funny pages" by being animal characters playing out allegory and metaphor in a cartoon swamp, Doonesbury is a strip about humans in real-life environments, tackling issues with real-life ramifications, and making commentary directly on people - not a ink-suited representative, but directly named like Mitchell - who could hire lawyers and sue for defamation.

That "Guilty!" strip is the moment when Trudeau crossed a line in journalism ethics - as much as cartoon strips could be considered journalism. After all, the comics page was part of the whole daily newspaper package: Front page news, Local news, Sports, Lifestyles, and Classifieds. (With crossword puzzles and comics stuck in either the Lifestyles or Classifieds. Such was the glory years of print media. I digress)

As Paul Hebert notes on his Reading Doonesbury blog about this strip:

In response to the 1973 strip, a dozen newspapers dropped Doonesbury. The Washington Post – now (in 2017), ironically, Doonesbury’s online home – argued that guilt or innocence should be adjudicated by “the due process of justice [and] not a comic strip artist,” and maintained that it could not “have one standard for the news pages and another for the comics.” Kerry Soper, in Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire, frames the Post’s “discomfort” with the “GUILTY!” strip as a product of the “problematic” fact that Trudeau blurs the line between “comic strip storyteller, journalistic muckraker, and political watchdog...”

It's the ethical dilemma in journalism between being Subjective or Objective when reporting on an event (or a person). Subjective meaning "based on personal opinion" with an emotional or judgmental bias, Objective being more "based on facts and evidence" with an eye towards informing the audience. It's a struggle that is ongoing: Especially with the rise and domination of 24/7 cable news needing to fill all those hours with more Subjective punditry discussing topics at an emotional biased level, as well as social media overwhelming the discourse with Twitter (or YouTube) bites and badly written blog essays (stares at self in the mirror). 

This ethical conflict is what I studied as a Journalism student at University of Florida, even taking a class on Journalism Ethics. Hell, my term paper was on Doonesbury's place in print media, whether it belonged in the daily comics pages or if it belonged in the Op-Ed/Letters to the Editor sections where commentary and subjective essays were permitted. I got an A for that paper, I was very proud of that fact, although I ended up with a B for the class grade (I did poorly on a mid-term exam). It's why I joke semi-seriously that I got a B in Ethics but a D in Reporting, which is how I ended up as a librarian.

The solution a lot of newspapers took was to make that move, taking Doonesbury from the less-partisan comics pages and placing it in the more opinionated Editorial pages, as a compromise whenever facing some of the more boundary-breaking storylines Trudeau illustrated, such as introducing a gay character for the first time in comics, or showing a man and woman in the same bed post-coitus, or any of the political attacks Trudeau aimed at Reagan or conservatives in general. 

Trudeau was an unabashed liberal, and it often showed in his works. However, Trudeau did his homework: On the scales of Subjective vs. Objective, when he skewered a political figure or public celebrity, he did it based on the facts he could uncover through basic research. Although he'd reach into levels we'd consider slander - such as the series of strips he inked pointing out how Frank Sinatra had questionable connections to mobsters - he at least based the attacks on provable facts. It still made for interesting reads.

I grew up as a pre-teen - I was eight or nine years old - reading Doonesbury collected paperbacks in the Young Adult section of the Dunedin Public Library (back when the library occupied a refurbished Publix storefront). I was a bit ahead of my fellow classmates having gotten bored with the juvenile lit (stop killing puppies, you damn juvenile writers!) and preferred the sci-fi and humor novels for the teens where my older brother hung out. It surely disappointed my dad somewhat as part of my left-leaning ideology comes from that exposure, but I still remember Trudeau's work being more of a gentle skewering of ideologies of the 1970s and 1980s. He would attack liberals - more of a chiding out of disappointment - for some of their follies - obsessing over symbolism more than the issues needing work - as much as attacking conservatives for their disdain and self-serving actions.

One thing that Trudeau excelled at was being sympathetic, even empathetic, towards the targets of his criticism. Even at their worst, the harshest Republican characters - especially the real-life figures like both Bush Presidents - received some level of bathos that made them human to readers (even as they didn't appear on-screen except as floating hats, waffles, or air bubbles). Save for donald trump: Even in the 1980s, his excessive greed and narcissism was on full display whenever he appeared in a Doonesbury story arc.

Compare Trudeau's character building to the likes of Bruce Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore, which never rose above caricature and attacked only one side of the political spectrum (liberals) with ire and excessive outrage. That strip essentially devolved into an Author Tract instead of any kind of running commentary. Whereas Trudeau aims for a punchline at the end of every strip, Tinsley often has no punchline, just punches.

Doonesbury itself is rarely in the papers anymore, as much as there are any newspapers still surviving. It's a question of how soon Trudeau will retire for good instead of the extended vacations he's been known to take. It may depend on whenever donald trump ends up physically in jail after all the appeals on his felony convictions are exhausted a few years from now, at which point Trudeau might put up a final Sunday strip of a large banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED."

We'll see.

In the meantime, Trudeau just keeps rolling with the hits.

from October 22, 2017
History does repeat, first as tragedy and then as farce...