HE'S GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!
Oct. 1st, 2006 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phamosI've added the newest Doonesbury book, "The War Years", to my books sidebar on Vox. It is actually just a compilation of two earlier books, "Peace Out Dawg" and "Got War", but it's all nice and hardcovery and shiny shiny. I like buying the Doonesbury books when they come out in larger format, as it...well, it just looks nicer on my shelf, and I am anal and obsessive compulsive like that. Why buy coffee table books if they're not going to look nice on your coffee table?
I think another reason I am invested in the large-format Doonesbury books is because that's how I first read the strip. My parents had a copy of the very first large-format Doonesbury book, "The Doonesbury Chronicles", when I was a child. Honestly, I think my mom got it as a present or something, because I never saw her reading it, but I picked it up at some point and loved it.
Of course, I only got half the jokes. I remember very specifically asking my mom "What's Turkish Hashish?" after reading one strip in particular. And "What's a honky?" So I've been invested in the strip for a long time. I think it goes through strong periods and fallow periods, though I'm pretty much always happy when it focuses on Alex, Mike's teenage daughter. She's been a hoot for years now, starting with calling her mother's boyfriend "Uncle Stupidhead". It's so dumb, and yet something about the way Trudeau phrases it every time makes me laugh.
A couple of years ago, B.D., one of the main characters since the very first strip, lost his leg in Iraq. I remember that I happened to read the strip online that day, even though I hadn't read it in months, and I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. And yet what was really shocking, and really hit home, wasn't that in the last frame his leg was missing. It was that his helmet, which you never saw him without, was off. It was just this incredibly fragile moment, rendered really beautifully, that was designed to particularly affect people who had been reading for years. And I was so afraid he was going to die. I really was. Trudeau hasn't killed off a character in quite some time, and given that he's been doing the strip since the late '60s and the characters, though their ages have certainly been fudged quite a bit, are firmly in middle age now, they're due to start dropping if the strip keeps going. The only people that have died are Andy, a very minor character who appeared briefly in the late '70s as the token gay character and was then brought back in the late '80s to die of AIDS, Lacey, the congresswoman who was in her 80s even when she first appeared, and Mark's father, who was probably around 80 in the strip when he died. No primary characters. I fear for Joanie -- she's about 70 now. Yikes. 70. That seems impossible, but I was just reading strips in the book from 2002 and she cops to being 66. So yeah, 70. I kinda dread the potential for total baby-boomer angst as these characters age even further, but it will be interesting to see what develops. In the meantime, I will continue to laugh at Uncle Stupidhead, Zonker, and even Duke, though his prominence irritates me a lot of the time.
I think another reason I am invested in the large-format Doonesbury books is because that's how I first read the strip. My parents had a copy of the very first large-format Doonesbury book, "The Doonesbury Chronicles", when I was a child. Honestly, I think my mom got it as a present or something, because I never saw her reading it, but I picked it up at some point and loved it.
A couple of years ago, B.D., one of the main characters since the very first strip, lost his leg in Iraq. I remember that I happened to read the strip online that day, even though I hadn't read it in months, and I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. And yet what was really shocking, and really hit home, wasn't that in the last frame his leg was missing. It was that his helmet, which you never saw him without, was off. It was just this incredibly fragile moment, rendered really beautifully, that was designed to particularly affect people who had been reading for years. And I was so afraid he was going to die. I really was. Trudeau hasn't killed off a character in quite some time, and given that he's been doing the strip since the late '60s and the characters, though their ages have certainly been fudged quite a bit, are firmly in middle age now, they're due to start dropping if the strip keeps going. The only people that have died are Andy, a very minor character who appeared briefly in the late '70s as the token gay character and was then brought back in the late '80s to die of AIDS, Lacey, the congresswoman who was in her 80s even when she first appeared, and Mark's father, who was probably around 80 in the strip when he died. No primary characters. I fear for Joanie -- she's about 70 now. Yikes. 70. That seems impossible, but I was just reading strips in the book from 2002 and she cops to being 66. So yeah, 70. I kinda dread the potential for total baby-boomer angst as these characters age even further, but it will be interesting to see what develops. In the meantime, I will continue to laugh at Uncle Stupidhead, Zonker, and even Duke, though his prominence irritates me a lot of the time.
