Media

...In fact, the silence of the third frame-where you and I pause for our own reflections on the unspeakable-is an act of pacing and wit that deserves the name of genius...

...They are chronicles, in the best sense of the word: not documentary photos, but a connected series of psychic snapshots, showing Us again the world we lived through as it was perceived (which is always more important than as it was) by at least one decent and humane man...

...And both, in their very disreputability, can manage a power, a pure moral anger, beyond the reach of more official forms...

...3) Silence...

...Certainly graffiti include some of the most urgent, acid, and immediate satire most of us have seen...

...But to say that is also to say how much Doonesbury will be missed-and how very good it was...

...And Mailer's remark helps us see how much a really good comic strip has in common with the art of graffiti...

...And Doonesbury has already spawned a number of imitators, "intellectual" or college-humor strips of varying degrees of merit, from the whimsical Bloom County to the unrelievedly dumb Funky Winkerbean...

...Drawn by a former Yale undergraduate throughout the seventies, it was the eloquent expression of an imagination caught between the horror of the Vietnam war and the memory of the hopes of the early Kennedy years...

...Jerry Brown's California/cynical attempt to turn jargon into presidential rhetoric ("Governor, if we turned the cameras off would you still exist...

...Both are arts of the moment (even the most provident cartoonist works with only a three-week or so lead time...

...The medium may be the message...

...The writer's purpose is to reconcile the ethical and the aesthetic (or so says Kierkegaard), and if that single strip doesn't do it, then I don't know what does...

...Gasp...

...It is a sad, sobering time for those of us who have followed and delighted in Doonesbury since its inception in the late sixties...

...But Trudeau's sometimes clumsy drawing is the perfect complement to his unerring ear for the phony, the manic, and sometimes the lyrically gorgeous in the American dialect...

...And Doonesbury was the product, as well as the barometer, of its age...

...And like Twain, he is willing to let his fools reveal their foolishness through their own language...

...For looking back over all three collections, we can see that they are indeed one of the most efficient histories of those years...

...It is, indeed, a kind of reincarnation of the world of Huckleberry Finn-that most persistent of American mythologies-a world where innocence, though endangered, still has claims to recognize, if not absolutely triumph over, the surrounding bog of hypocrisy...

...there again is the absurd wedding of politics and showbiz which was Elizabeth Taylor's brief career as a Washington hostess ("A tad overweight, but with violet eyes you could die for-it's on their bumper stickers...

...It is the vision of a New Deal-or, more properly for Trudeau's generation, New Frontier-idealism...

...Far from being a "lack of commitment," this can be taken as a very strong commitment to something that goes beyond ideology-to the decency of speech itself...

...Let me give on example, an example that dates itself...

...and a great deal more...

...The first massive paperback anthology of the strip was called The Doonesbury Chronicles (the next two, Doonesbury's Greatest Hits and The People's Doonesbury...

...Hurry back...

...Be that as it may, the suspension of Doonesbury leaves breakfast-and the national stock of sane writing-much the poorer...

...The purpose of the suspension-among other things, one presumes-is to give Trudeau a chance to rethink his characters, and to re-imagine their roles and relationships for the world of the eighties...

...If there is a theme that runs through all the best and most memorable of the Doonesbury strips, it is this very simple one: people who lie to themselves tend to make themselves look silly by maintaining their lies...

...Media ZONKER'S SUNSET STRIP CLAIMS OF ENDANGERED INNOCENCE ZONKER HARRIS is in danger of graduating from college, Joan Caucus-Redfern is about to have a baby in her middle age-thereby suspending her promising career as a Congressional legal advisor-and even Uncle Duke, manic apostle of irresponsible journalism and "recreational drugs," shows distressing signs of slipping into something like rationality...

...Trudeau, in other words, has left his mark on the American comic strip, whether he chooses to return or not...

...Simple, as I say: and also, if world and national politics, the N.F.L., television, and fully sixty percent of normal discourse is any indication, nearly impossible to remember...

...So perhaps it is appropriate that the ongoing world of Doonesbury should suspend operations during the Reagan Years...

...FRANK McCONNELL (Frank McConnell is a member of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...For Doonesbury, taken altogether and taken at its astonishingly frequent best, has grown into as good a "novel" as any I know of in the last twelve years...

...2) "They say it was very pretty a year ago today, at Kent State...

...And maybe it makes sense that the cartoon hero of the present should not be the dazed but still confident hippie Zonker, but another kind of character altogether: Garfield, cynical, voracious, self-indulgent-the perfect fat cat...

...The strip has been getting a little tired, the situations have been becoming a little stereotyped, over the last few months...

...It was a "novel" -about growing older and sadder during a time when the national imagination seemed to be fighting against sclerosis of the conscience, and struggling to remember what it was like to be proud...

...4) "Have a nice day, John Mitchell...

...In four identically-drawn frames, Zonker and Mike stare across a peaceful countryside...

...but it is also, for the harried cartoonist or the desperate scribbler on the John wall, the weapon...

...Good luck at graduation, Zonker...

...So far, so good: one was beginning to wonder if those preternaturally-archetypal students (hippie Zonker, armchair liberal Mike Doonesbury, football/Republican B.D., radical disc jockey Mark Slackmeyer) would ever leave college, or if they were doomed, like Little Orphan Annie and Dagwood's son Alexander, to a four-panel-a-day timewarp, getting never older and a little less relevant with each repetition of their pre-ordained gestures...

...Heavy sigh...

...His twenty or so major characters are much more voices than they are faces-walking, and brilliant, graffiti, as it were...

...Maurice Horn, in his indispensable World Encyclopedia of Comics, faults Doonesbury and Trudeau for lacking an ideology, for attacking the absurdities of left and right with equal vigor, assuming that irony is a valid substitute for commitment...

...In this respect, at least, Trudeau has written what is simply some of the most unforgettable prose of his decade...

...Gary Trudeau has announced that he will suspend the comic strip in January of 1983, for perhaps as long as two years...

...Previous strips, like Al Capp's Li'l Abner and Walt Kelly's wonderful Pogo, often managed the same sort of bitter comedy-and, indeed, Capp and Kelly were both better draftsmen than Trudeau...

...That they are not so doomed is an indication of how seriously Trudeau takes the strip: as seriously, I would think, as an exceptionally good novelist takes his fiction, and rightly so...

...Both are arts midway between the "public" and the intensely personal...

...Zonker speaks: (frame 1) "They say it's very pretty in Ohio this time of year...

...There again is the paranoid comic-opera of Watergate (caught in Trudeau's drawing of a White House progressively obscured by an ugly brick wall...

...Like Mark Twain, Gary Trudeau is willing and eager to recognize and name fools when and wherever they appear...

...And the term"Chronicles" was well chosen...

...Norman Mailer once observed that some of the best prose in America was written on bathroom walls...

...And that is why Doonesbury matters, because it reminds us again that no art, nothing made by man, is incapable of beauty and moral force in the hands of a serious enough artist...

...But Horn has a French idea of what "commitment" means-i.e., uncompromising and arrogantly abstract righteousness-and such an idea simply does not apply to the more spacious, and perhaps more livable, tradition of American (or Anglo-American) satire...