Storyline

FAQs

Beta-fresh answers, uploaded occasionally

Lets face it, our favorite comic strip is often obscure or inconsistent, and key characters are sometimes left stranded for years. Long-suffering readers are within their rights to demand some clarification. Use the "Ask GBT" form to email us your questions, and we will answer those we can on the Blowback page, and also archive the answers here.

Q: Thanks to Bill O'Reilly's criticism of the 10-12-08 "family values" strip, the DTH received an outpouring of unusually acerbic email. Rather than overload BLOWBACK with a surfeit of posts on one topic, we are providing a generous sampling of the reaction on this dedicated page.
Storyline | October 16, 2008 16:53
A:

How can you portray Governor Palin the way you did in your boring cartoon and live with yourself? Your crap is something I don't read and after this latest BS I know why. (I only know about it due to press coverage not because I have read your cartoon crap.) Cartoons should be humorous. Yours are not. No laugh from me. And how about Osama Obama -- how many colleges did he go to? And how did he pay for college? Drug dealing or radical Muslim support? Did he ever actually work? Oh yes, it must have been his white grandparents that supported him, not the black grandparents. Who are they anyway? Maybe they were building his radical Muslim funds in Africa.

-- Pam Mrjenovich, Aurora, CO

I just read your smear of Sarah Palin and her family. If anyone had said anything remotely as vicious about Saints Barack and Michelle Obama, you and every other goddamn liberal would be screaming "racism, racism, racism - mean-spirited, mean-spirited!" All you leftist liberals are assholes.
-- Leon McKinney, St. Louis, MO

How does anyone call this funny? Your comic strip has sucked since the beginning. The end of your commentary would make this country a better place.
-- T. M.

Trudeau is an idiot for his latest work against Palin. He makes all of us liberals look bad.
-- L.N., Pittsburgh, PA

How do you pass yourself off as being funny? You are just spreading hate. But then, I think you stopped being funny when you started your political agenda. My voice will now be heard by the papers that print your radical prejudiced pictures (can't call them "comic strips").
-- Cindy, CA

Talk about a herd mentality. You just couldn't resist attacking the most honorable female candidate we've had on a national basis, could you. Cheap. Damn cheap-ass. You want a little credibility? Try attacking Dems. Then maybe you will be taken seriously.
-- Charlie Springer, Louisville, KY

Dude, you are so far off base with running down Mrs. Palin. Grow up, lose the self righteousness, and change your diaper, k?
-- Mickey, Greenville, SC

Have you ever thought about the likelihood of your parents aborting you? If your parents are anything like you, and found out that you may have some sort of deformity, we would not have to worry about your thoughtless so-called art, because there is no doubt your mind is warped.
-- Michael Crowley, NY

How lame! Is this the best you can do? I would expect better satire than cheap crap than this. If this is the attitude and what passes for humor back in the States from the left, I am so glad I decided to bring my family back to Europe.
-- Michel, Toulon, FRANCE

I respect your First Amendment rights, and I respect your opinions. However that does not give you the right to bash Sarah Palin in your comic strip. It is one thing to criticize her policies, but you should not be going after her personal life. If you want to go after someone's personal life why not go after Tim Mahoney, the Florida Congressman who had the affair, or why not John Edwards, who cheated on his wife when she was fighting for her life against cancer. I have read and often enjoyed your comics, however I will refuse to read your comics until you apologize. All I ask you is for you to not involve personal lives in your comic strip.
-- Will Parker, CO

It's easy to take cheap shots at Palin when you know that you can shade any aspect the way that you want to and have no fear of being shown as a biased political hack.
-- David, Richmond, VA

I've enjoyed your comic strip for so many years I can't remember, but I'm determined to wean myself off of it, at all cost! Your Palin rant went off the deep end, and while I like poking fun at others in a fun manner, this is just hypocrisy of the left, screaming out at the world "Do what I say not as I do!" You should be ashamed to have printed this, as an American and as a professional. I'll find other entertainment to read.
-- John Quintero, Houston, TX

Most of the time I enjoy Doonesbury comics. But the Oct 12th strip made me angry. This was a low. All you can do is print cheap shots at the candidates, like a couple of kids getting together to insult each other's mothers.
--Iran Cooper, Lebanon, OR

Character assassination of Sarah Plain is not funny. I am tired of court jesters like Trudeau trying to influence the people. Doonesbury no longer will be read by me and I will share my influence on all that I come in contact with. Good riddance.
-- Joel G.
Q: I've noticed that for several years now, conservative commentators and bloggers have used the Condi Rice/Brown Sugar strip as evidence of Trudeau's contempt for black conservatives. Any reaction?
-- Stanley M., Santa Cruz, CA | Storyline | October 16, 2008 14:53
A:

That criticism only makes sense if you strip the Rice cartoon of all context. It appeared as part of THIS WEEK of dailies commenting on George W. Bush's life-long practice of assigning demeaning or diminishing nicknames to those around him. For instance, he dubbed Karl Rove "Boy Genius" (notice the "boy") and "Turd Blossom" (as apt as it is vulgar). Giving out nicknames is both cocky and controlling -- and a revealing signifier of character. The Rice strip, shown below, simply depicts Bush, who feels he's being patronized, reining in his advisor in trademark fashion. To isolate Bush's fictional words and reassign them to Trudeau himself is to deliberately miss the whole point of the strip, if not satire generally.



To read an essay that GBT wrote for Time magazine about Bush's use of nicknames, click HERE .
Q: I've noticed that for several years now, conservative commentators and bloggers have used the Condi Rice/Brown Sugar strip as evidence of Trudeau's contempt for black conservatives. Any reaction?
-- Stanley M., Santa Cruz, CA | Storyline | September 30, 2008 14:25
A:

That criticism only makes sense if you strip the Rice cartoon of all context. It appeared as part of THIS WEEK of dailies commenting on George W. Bush's life-long practice of assigning demeaning or diminishing nicknames to those around him. For instance, he dubbed Karl Rove "Boy Genius" (notice the "boy") and "Turd Blossom" (as apt as it is vulgar). Giving out nicknames is both cocky and controlling -- and a revealing signifier of character. The Rice strip, shown below, simply depicts Bush, who feels he's being patronized, reining in his advisor in trademark fashion. To isolate Bush's fictional words and reassign them to Trudeau himself is to deliberately miss the whole point of the strip, if not satire generally.


To read an essay that GBT wrote for Time magazine about Bush's use of nicknames, click HERE .
Q: The Sunday 9/21/08 strip mentions a GOPAC document written by Newt Gingrich. Can you direct me to it somewhere on the web? Thanks.
-- Bruce V., Olympia, WA | Storyline | September 22, 2008 20:10
A:Certainly. The full document referred to is somewhat longer, but you can find the relevant page here.
Q: I don't remember Doonesbury ever including Santa Claus in the strip, or addressing the holiday at all. Is GBT part of the War on Christmas?
-- Hank I., Galesburg, IL | Storyline | January 09, 2008 15:58
A:If we didn't know better, we'd take this to be a thinly-veiled attempt (a successful one, we might add) to summon visitations by a few of our favorite ghosts of Doonesbury Christmases past. Merry Holidays!
Q: We now interrupt nearly three weeks of great cartooning to plug the next great internet venture...Pandora. What's the deal? Does GBT have an early stake in this company?
-- J.T., Tivoli, NY | Storyline | December 10, 2007 13:38
A:Not yet. Nor do his fortunes seem likely to improve, as 37 years of references in the strip to products, trends, bands, movies, books, TV programs, websites and celebrities have inexplicably failed to yield anything more fungible than the case of Wild Turkey he received in 1977. GBT didn't help his case in the Toggle series by mocking Celine Dion; Pandora founder Tim Westergren, it turns out, is a big fan.
Q: Okay, so what is MST? It's mentioned in the 6/22/07 strip. I'm guessing it's not "Mountain Standard Time."
-- Dave Gracer, Providence, Rhode Island
Storyline | August 11, 2007 09:42
A:MST stands for Military Sexual Trauma -- and it's not surprising you haven't heard it before. Although the problem is not new, the coinage is recent enough that it's not yet included on some military acronym lists. Here's some background on the subject.
Q: In light of the recent passing of journalist David Halberstam, do you have any plans to re-run those terrific strips in which he was a character (and which he apparently loved)?
-- Alex Balk, New York, NY | Storyline | May 17, 2007 21:31
A:We do now. Thanks for asking. Here's the two-week 1979 series in which David "Tome" Halberstam interviewed Rick Redfern to within an inch of his life.
Q: A longtime fan, I bought all of the "smaller" books up to You Give Great Meeting, Sid, and all of the anthologies up through Doonesbury Deluxe. But as our kids got older and more expensive I was forced to realign my spending priorities.
In 2005, Hurricane Rita (not Katrina, the other one) blew our house down and ruined all of our possessions. In "starting over", one of the top things on my list has been replacing, if not the smaller Doonesbury books, at least the anthologies -- and acquiring the ones that I never owned. Could you give me a list of all of them? I'd like to get them in hardcover, but have only been able to do so up to (once again) Doonesbury Deluxe. Were any of the later ones released in that format?
-- Bob Martindale, Nederland, Texas | Storyline | January 22, 2007 22:56
A:In the original Doonesbury publishing cycle, small-format books were published every six months and periodically anthologized into larger volumes (with a few strips edited out in the process). This gradually evolved into the current program, in which a large-format book appears more or less annually. The following large-format titles will put the vast majority of the Doonesbury canon on your shelf: The Doonesbury Chronicles, Doonesbury?s Greatest Hits, The People?s Doonesbury, Doonesbury Dossier, Doonesbury Deluxe, Recycled Doonesbury, The Portable Doonesbury, The Bundled Doonesbury, Buck Wild Doonesbury, Duke 2000, The Revolt of the English Majors, Peace Out, Dawg!, Got War?, Talk to the Hand!, and the recently-published Heckuva Job, Bushie! There are two large-format special-themed volumes: Action Figure!: The Life and Times of Doonesbury?s Uncle Duke, and Dude: The Big Book of Zonker. The only Doonesbury book published in hardcover after Doonesbury Deluxe was the twenty-five-year retrospective Flashbacks
Q: Re: this week's "King George" strips. GBT did this once before, in the Nixon era. I remember the punchline "Tricia, however, looks forward to becoming a princess," or something like that. Could you please give a link to those archived strips?
-- Mary, Port Moody, B.C., CANADA | Storyline | September 15, 2006 16:11
A:A timely question, which we are happy to answer in the affirmative. The series you refer to concerned purloined IT&T memos which revealed a plot to crown Richard Nixon. The scandal was uncovered by young Rufus Jackson, Mike Doonesbury's precocious tutee, and made public by Zonker Harris. Herewith a link to the 1972 episode known as THE ZONKER PAPERS.