Gary Trudeau and courage
One of the projects I dream of but never shall produce - because I lack the skill - is a sketch imitating Low's legendary “All behind you, Winston” sketch of 1940, but with cartoon characters instead of British politicians. It would have shown a wedge of all kind of comics hardcases - Captain America, Uncle Scrooge, Lucy Van Pelt and Snoopy with his air ace goggles, Conan, Corto Maltese, Torgal, Valerian, Laureline, Tex Willer, Diabolik, Popeye the sailor, Brick Bradford, Mandrake the magician, The Spirit, Steve Canyon, Dan Dare, Judge Dredd and so on and so forth and so following - all marching forward behind Mr.Natural and Asterix. It would have been my reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
It is my view that the Charlie Hebdo horror had a particular significance for us comics makers and cartoon and caricature artists. It was the second time in a few years that cartooning was specifically targeted - remember the Danish cartoons? Evidently, Islam's iconoclastic beliefs make the comics artform a particular target, offensive to them twice over, if it ever dares to touch their beliefs: offensive in the common way of all kaffirs daring to bad-mouth the Prophet, and doubly offensive in that we use a visual medium to do so.
Nothing, therefore, could possibly have been more disappointing than the emergence of collaborationists and compromisers from our very ranks - even as eighty-year-old Wolinsky, a historic figure of the most significant period of French comics history, lay butchered among his colleagues. Personally, I had no love for Charlie Hebdo, and if I had had to write one of my old reviews for Comics International, I doubt I'd have gone above a five. Insolence for its own sake does not delight me, and I haven't seen enough invention or elegance to make it worthwhile. But this is not about the quality or otherwise of one magazine; it is about our right as cartoonists to work in our artrorm without threats or violence. It is about basic freedom, and also specifically about our own artistic freedom. It threatens all people, but it threatens us cartoonists twice as much.
Some of our historic figures performed admirably. Dear old Albert Uderzo came out of a well-deserved retirement to produce two absolutely exquisite Asterix and Obelix sketches stating his grief and his support for the victims; and the great Robert Crumb, a resident of France these days, produced a typically marvellous piece of self-irony presenting himself a s a quivering coward terrified of saying anything, while in fact he was being about as offensive to terrorist sensitivities as it was in his power to be. That is why, in my cartoon, all the heroes and the fighters would have been led by Mr.Natural and Asterix.
But as it turned out, my never-to-be-done cartoon lacked a figure; someone visibly skulking away in the other direction, perhaps whistling “Don't let's be beastly to the Germans.” And sadly, when that jarring, discordant voice sounded from across the ocean; it came from a man who had been widely identified with political commitment and polemic. Gary Trudeau, author of Doonesbury,saw fit to condemn the content of Charlie Hebdo as provocative, blaming the victims and insinuating that we as cartoonists would be right to flatter the delicate sensitivities of mass murderers.
I will not demean the memory of Vidkun Quisling by comparing Trudeau to him. Traitor as he was,and well deserving of the death penalty, Quisling was a committed Fascist who did what he did because he really believed in Fascist doctrine. Trudeau is not man enough to be a traitor. His statement does have a smattering of the current rainbow orthodoxies, but they can hardly be noticed above the sound of quivering voice and knocking knees
It would be better if it had been a corporate clone or a talentless hack, for Trudeau's eminence is by no means undeserved. The few people who ever criticized him as a cartoonist or as a draftsman all too clearly had political axes of their own to grind. Mark Steyn made a joke of himself by calling Trudeau a poor artist whose artwork was inferior to that of Blondie & Dagwood - an opinion not worth debating. Rick Marshall somehow managed to discover a slavish imitation of Charles M.Schulz and Peanuts. Unlike Steyn, Marshall was a comics professional and should really have known better, but that shows the enormities to which party passions drive people.
In fact, Trudeau's style is quirky and individual, but also clean and pleasing. Not only does it have nothing to reproach itself with in terms of clarity of line, design, expressiveness and narrative drive; it is also remarkably suited to leafy, mannered, polished academic environments. The person who criticizes his draftsmanship shows that he has never touched a pencil in his life, and that he has saved the rest of us great griefs in doing so.AndTrudeau's basic subject - light comic soap opera about a bunch of people floating around on the edges of the American college and intellectual environment - is both valid and original. He was describing a relatively new social class - never before had universities been so numerous and extensive as to form a social class or area of their own - and to describe humorously their lives and attitudes was and remains a very proper and promising artistic aim.
The trouble with Doonesbury is that, not from the beginning, but from its, I think, sixth or seventh year, Trudeau has been tempted to enter a field that did not suit him and for which he lacked the depth: that is, politico-social commentary. Being good, even very good, at funny soap opera with an academic background, does not mean one has the depth, the culture, the moral intensity, that would make for properly searing politico-social commentary. Compare Trudeau with two cartoonists whose views I detest - I underline DETEST - Harold Gray and Alan Moore, and the essential lightness of his mind becomes clear. Nothing in Little Orphan Annie or in V For Vendettta is taken lightly, nothing is faced without the weight of a considerable mind behind it. Fierce and stinging points are made extempore, and the anger both cartoonists take to their work is serious and, in some ways, motivated. By comparison, Trudeau rarely even leaves the impression that he really wants to change much. When the Tapes had revealed Nixon's astonishingly vile private language, Trudeau made a gag in which each panel had the President or one of his staff uttering a [gross statement] in square brackets, climaxing in an [unbelievabley gross and obscene statement], that served as the gag. It was funny - note that, it is important: Trudeau never stopped being funny. But it hardly left the impression that he realized how offensive, and how shattering, a whole generation of Americans would have found such language from the heir to the dignity of Washington and Lincoln; it sounds, in fact, almost affectionate. There is no sense that he understands why Nixon's foul domestic idioms were an issue for many in America and even abroad.
Watergate was when it all began; Watergate and the Pulitzer that Trudeau won for his commentary on the great scandal. As it happens, I used to have the whole run of the strip during the period, and read it thoroughly. Trudeau became legendary for his comments on Watergate, taken to be bold and brave; but reading the whole thing through chronologically, you come to a different conclusion (at least, I do). Over much of the scandal, Trudeay showed no sign of either having much understanding of what is going on, or a very strong conviction of what was right and wrong about it. His gags were about the dreariness and senselessness of the proceedings, and about how everyone concerned did not seem to have an idea of where to go - classic know-nothing gags from someone observing politics from outside with little interest or understanding. More than half-way through the long struggle, however, a change comes, and Trudeau starts targeting the White House and Nixon. By this time they are easy targets; everyone knows that they have a crook for a President, and the only issue is whether he is an indictable crook. So Trudeau is really following the common path of public opinion, at the same time as he is feeling rather bold and daring. He does in fact produce some excellent work; the visual metaphor of the brick wall going up around the White House, for instance, tells everything that needed telling. This is good comics in the only sense that matters, telling a story worth telling in a clever and economical manner. But he is not being a hero at this point; and, catastrophically, the press and the commentariat build him up into one. He won a Pulitzer for saying what everyone, by then, was saying.
There was much worse, of course. In the same artform, Steve Englehart, who had been writing a lengthy, utterly unpolitical super-conspiracy story in Marvel's Captain America title, saw fit to tack on to it, at the very last minute, a panel suggesting - not stating, just suggesting - that President Nixon had been at the head of the super-conspiracy. Nothing in the previous issues had done anything to suggestor hint at it; nothing about the super-conspiracy suggested Watergate in any way, nothing showed any evidence that Englehart had started the story with any intention of making political comment. I do not think there is any doubt that he tacked on this ending to a story that did not need it.
It may be suggested that this is a classic instance of of entertainment media's habit of exploiting popular and current topics, but I doubt that Englehart's reason was that crass. His self-image at the time, like that of the generation of former fans that had been taking Marvel over from Stan Lee, was that of a bold and independent artist. It seems likelier, to me, that he tacked Nixon on to the story because he wanted to say something about Nixon somehow. Watergate affected many, perhaps most Americans, like a personal tragedy. And in that sort of situation, people want to talk about it. Talk about the Roman Empire, and you end up talking about Watergate; talk about tennis, and you end up talking about Watergate; talk about toasting marshmallows, and you still end up talking about Watergate. And so did Englehart, like everyone else (though Englehart actually did a lot better in an issue of Dr.Strange in which the face of Nixon was revealed as the mask of ambition and paranoia - a haunting idea).
But Trudeau's strip had a much broader reach and had been on the case much longer. And to be fair, it had been talking about Watergate first, not tacking a mention of it on whatever else it had been doing at the time. A grateful public and a grateful media invested it with the mantle of prophet, because it had been saying what they all had ended up saying.
From then on, Doonesbury became the politico-social comment strip. Because Trudeau really is a funny man, a number of ideas are memorable; "in search of Reagan's brain", although a mere flattery of commonplace left-of-centre opinion, is a superb invention in and of itself, and is carried out very well. His comments on Edward Kennedy's aborted presidential run - "A verb, Senator, we need a verb" were hard to forget. But a lot of it, reading it twenty or thirty years after, is just embarrassing, such as practically anything he said about Vietnam. Can anyone remember Phreddy the cuddly terrorist without cringing? Did anyone not cringe, even then? How could Trudeau possibly deliver such a picture of a power that had hundreds of thousands of men in the field, let alone of the belief, convinction and ferocity of Communism as it was? The fact is that such things were beyond him; in the same way as he could not possibly have done comprehending work about Auschwitz. Think about it,a nd you will realize that you cannot imagine him doing so. He remains at heart the superficially clever observer of the intellectual/academic class, and that is what he should have been doing all along.
There was, in short, a complete misunderstanding of the nature of his own talent, caused by mass emotion. Far from being a daring radical, Trudeau is natively middle-class and not particularly brave. And, alas, his own lack of courage has come up to the surface exactly when his own artform needed his support. For decades, this unwarranted image clung to him, until he found himself showing what he was really made of - alas, at the worst possible time. And what this tells us is that few things are more important than to try and keep a clear vision and sound critical standards, even at times of universal and terrible grief and fear.
It is my view that the Charlie Hebdo horror had a particular significance for us comics makers and cartoon and caricature artists. It was the second time in a few years that cartooning was specifically targeted - remember the Danish cartoons? Evidently, Islam's iconoclastic beliefs make the comics artform a particular target, offensive to them twice over, if it ever dares to touch their beliefs: offensive in the common way of all kaffirs daring to bad-mouth the Prophet, and doubly offensive in that we use a visual medium to do so.
Nothing, therefore, could possibly have been more disappointing than the emergence of collaborationists and compromisers from our very ranks - even as eighty-year-old Wolinsky, a historic figure of the most significant period of French comics history, lay butchered among his colleagues. Personally, I had no love for Charlie Hebdo, and if I had had to write one of my old reviews for Comics International, I doubt I'd have gone above a five. Insolence for its own sake does not delight me, and I haven't seen enough invention or elegance to make it worthwhile. But this is not about the quality or otherwise of one magazine; it is about our right as cartoonists to work in our artrorm without threats or violence. It is about basic freedom, and also specifically about our own artistic freedom. It threatens all people, but it threatens us cartoonists twice as much.
Some of our historic figures performed admirably. Dear old Albert Uderzo came out of a well-deserved retirement to produce two absolutely exquisite Asterix and Obelix sketches stating his grief and his support for the victims; and the great Robert Crumb, a resident of France these days, produced a typically marvellous piece of self-irony presenting himself a s a quivering coward terrified of saying anything, while in fact he was being about as offensive to terrorist sensitivities as it was in his power to be. That is why, in my cartoon, all the heroes and the fighters would have been led by Mr.Natural and Asterix.
But as it turned out, my never-to-be-done cartoon lacked a figure; someone visibly skulking away in the other direction, perhaps whistling “Don't let's be beastly to the Germans.” And sadly, when that jarring, discordant voice sounded from across the ocean; it came from a man who had been widely identified with political commitment and polemic. Gary Trudeau, author of Doonesbury,saw fit to condemn the content of Charlie Hebdo as provocative, blaming the victims and insinuating that we as cartoonists would be right to flatter the delicate sensitivities of mass murderers.
I will not demean the memory of Vidkun Quisling by comparing Trudeau to him. Traitor as he was,and well deserving of the death penalty, Quisling was a committed Fascist who did what he did because he really believed in Fascist doctrine. Trudeau is not man enough to be a traitor. His statement does have a smattering of the current rainbow orthodoxies, but they can hardly be noticed above the sound of quivering voice and knocking knees
It would be better if it had been a corporate clone or a talentless hack, for Trudeau's eminence is by no means undeserved. The few people who ever criticized him as a cartoonist or as a draftsman all too clearly had political axes of their own to grind. Mark Steyn made a joke of himself by calling Trudeau a poor artist whose artwork was inferior to that of Blondie & Dagwood - an opinion not worth debating. Rick Marshall somehow managed to discover a slavish imitation of Charles M.Schulz and Peanuts. Unlike Steyn, Marshall was a comics professional and should really have known better, but that shows the enormities to which party passions drive people.
In fact, Trudeau's style is quirky and individual, but also clean and pleasing. Not only does it have nothing to reproach itself with in terms of clarity of line, design, expressiveness and narrative drive; it is also remarkably suited to leafy, mannered, polished academic environments. The person who criticizes his draftsmanship shows that he has never touched a pencil in his life, and that he has saved the rest of us great griefs in doing so.AndTrudeau's basic subject - light comic soap opera about a bunch of people floating around on the edges of the American college and intellectual environment - is both valid and original. He was describing a relatively new social class - never before had universities been so numerous and extensive as to form a social class or area of their own - and to describe humorously their lives and attitudes was and remains a very proper and promising artistic aim.
The trouble with Doonesbury is that, not from the beginning, but from its, I think, sixth or seventh year, Trudeau has been tempted to enter a field that did not suit him and for which he lacked the depth: that is, politico-social commentary. Being good, even very good, at funny soap opera with an academic background, does not mean one has the depth, the culture, the moral intensity, that would make for properly searing politico-social commentary. Compare Trudeau with two cartoonists whose views I detest - I underline DETEST - Harold Gray and Alan Moore, and the essential lightness of his mind becomes clear. Nothing in Little Orphan Annie or in V For Vendettta is taken lightly, nothing is faced without the weight of a considerable mind behind it. Fierce and stinging points are made extempore, and the anger both cartoonists take to their work is serious and, in some ways, motivated. By comparison, Trudeau rarely even leaves the impression that he really wants to change much. When the Tapes had revealed Nixon's astonishingly vile private language, Trudeau made a gag in which each panel had the President or one of his staff uttering a [gross statement] in square brackets, climaxing in an [unbelievabley gross and obscene statement], that served as the gag. It was funny - note that, it is important: Trudeau never stopped being funny. But it hardly left the impression that he realized how offensive, and how shattering, a whole generation of Americans would have found such language from the heir to the dignity of Washington and Lincoln; it sounds, in fact, almost affectionate. There is no sense that he understands why Nixon's foul domestic idioms were an issue for many in America and even abroad.
Watergate was when it all began; Watergate and the Pulitzer that Trudeau won for his commentary on the great scandal. As it happens, I used to have the whole run of the strip during the period, and read it thoroughly. Trudeau became legendary for his comments on Watergate, taken to be bold and brave; but reading the whole thing through chronologically, you come to a different conclusion (at least, I do). Over much of the scandal, Trudeay showed no sign of either having much understanding of what is going on, or a very strong conviction of what was right and wrong about it. His gags were about the dreariness and senselessness of the proceedings, and about how everyone concerned did not seem to have an idea of where to go - classic know-nothing gags from someone observing politics from outside with little interest or understanding. More than half-way through the long struggle, however, a change comes, and Trudeau starts targeting the White House and Nixon. By this time they are easy targets; everyone knows that they have a crook for a President, and the only issue is whether he is an indictable crook. So Trudeau is really following the common path of public opinion, at the same time as he is feeling rather bold and daring. He does in fact produce some excellent work; the visual metaphor of the brick wall going up around the White House, for instance, tells everything that needed telling. This is good comics in the only sense that matters, telling a story worth telling in a clever and economical manner. But he is not being a hero at this point; and, catastrophically, the press and the commentariat build him up into one. He won a Pulitzer for saying what everyone, by then, was saying.
There was much worse, of course. In the same artform, Steve Englehart, who had been writing a lengthy, utterly unpolitical super-conspiracy story in Marvel's Captain America title, saw fit to tack on to it, at the very last minute, a panel suggesting - not stating, just suggesting - that President Nixon had been at the head of the super-conspiracy. Nothing in the previous issues had done anything to suggestor hint at it; nothing about the super-conspiracy suggested Watergate in any way, nothing showed any evidence that Englehart had started the story with any intention of making political comment. I do not think there is any doubt that he tacked on this ending to a story that did not need it.
It may be suggested that this is a classic instance of of entertainment media's habit of exploiting popular and current topics, but I doubt that Englehart's reason was that crass. His self-image at the time, like that of the generation of former fans that had been taking Marvel over from Stan Lee, was that of a bold and independent artist. It seems likelier, to me, that he tacked Nixon on to the story because he wanted to say something about Nixon somehow. Watergate affected many, perhaps most Americans, like a personal tragedy. And in that sort of situation, people want to talk about it. Talk about the Roman Empire, and you end up talking about Watergate; talk about tennis, and you end up talking about Watergate; talk about toasting marshmallows, and you still end up talking about Watergate. And so did Englehart, like everyone else (though Englehart actually did a lot better in an issue of Dr.Strange in which the face of Nixon was revealed as the mask of ambition and paranoia - a haunting idea).
But Trudeau's strip had a much broader reach and had been on the case much longer. And to be fair, it had been talking about Watergate first, not tacking a mention of it on whatever else it had been doing at the time. A grateful public and a grateful media invested it with the mantle of prophet, because it had been saying what they all had ended up saying.
From then on, Doonesbury became the politico-social comment strip. Because Trudeau really is a funny man, a number of ideas are memorable; "in search of Reagan's brain", although a mere flattery of commonplace left-of-centre opinion, is a superb invention in and of itself, and is carried out very well. His comments on Edward Kennedy's aborted presidential run - "A verb, Senator, we need a verb" were hard to forget. But a lot of it, reading it twenty or thirty years after, is just embarrassing, such as practically anything he said about Vietnam. Can anyone remember Phreddy the cuddly terrorist without cringing? Did anyone not cringe, even then? How could Trudeau possibly deliver such a picture of a power that had hundreds of thousands of men in the field, let alone of the belief, convinction and ferocity of Communism as it was? The fact is that such things were beyond him; in the same way as he could not possibly have done comprehending work about Auschwitz. Think about it,a nd you will realize that you cannot imagine him doing so. He remains at heart the superficially clever observer of the intellectual/academic class, and that is what he should have been doing all along.
There was, in short, a complete misunderstanding of the nature of his own talent, caused by mass emotion. Far from being a daring radical, Trudeau is natively middle-class and not particularly brave. And, alas, his own lack of courage has come up to the surface exactly when his own artform needed his support. For decades, this unwarranted image clung to him, until he found himself showing what he was really made of - alas, at the worst possible time. And what this tells us is that few things are more important than to try and keep a clear vision and sound critical standards, even at times of universal and terrible grief and fear.