Cal - Charlie Brown - Doonesbury
Cal goes down hard. Nothing redeems this season, which I began looking forward to with CW and Mike in June. Again I must say: "just wait 'til next year, damn it!"
Moving right along, I loved the "Peanuts" as a kid. I collected Charles Schulz's books and clipped the dailies and taped them into filing folders. At one point, I broke into a green recycling both at the Kensington hight street (Berkeley) for back newspapers. Funny what one remembers. I loved the story lines and got some weird thrill owning them to completion. Ob-ses-sion, dude.
On comics and football, Gary Trudeau celebrates 40 years of Doonesbury and interviewed on Radio 4. Doonesbury started in the Yale Daily News in '68 as "Bull Tales" when star Quarterback "B.D." meets Mike ("My name's Mike Doonesbury. I hail from Tulsa, Oklahoma and women adore me! Glad to meet you roomie!"). The Daily News's executive editor, Reed Hundt, eventually chaired the FCC and noted that the Daily News had a flexible policy about publishing cartoons: “We publish pretty much anything.” Doonesbury debuted as a daily in 1970 in two dozen newspapers following an offer Universal Press (Trudeau says Bull Tales meant for one semester or two semesters tops). He is still with UP today. Trudeau describes this early period as the Golden era of comics.
As a 7th-grader, I learned American history from Doonesbury: A November '72 strip of Zonker telling a little boy in a sandbox a fairy tale ends with the kid awarded “his weight in fine, uncut Turkish hashish” caused an uproar. During the Watergate scandal, a strip showed Mark on the radio with a “Watergate profile” of John Mitchell, declaring him “Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!” Trudeau sent B.D. to Viet Nam and Joanie to graduate school in her middle-age to begin a law career (Hello, mom!). Trudeau, in '76, introduces Mark as a homosexual (in the early- mid-80s my dad's law firm lost their mail-operations employee to AIDS; Moe's firm with him until the very end). There is much more, of course, covering Kissenger to Ford to Clinton. Trudeau took on the cigarettes industry for its lying and thieving and the Iran Contra affair. He famously depicted el Presidente as invisible. That was a good one. And then there is Zonker's uncle, Duke.
In '75, the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first strip cartoon to be so honored. It was a Nominated Finalist in 1990, 2004, and 2005.
“The way I see it, it doesn't matter what you believe just so you're sincere.”
--Charles M. Schulz
