Doonesbury - History

History

Doonesbury began as a continuation of Bull Tales, which appeared in the Yale University student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, beginning September 1968. It focused on local campus events at Yale. The executive editor of the paper in the late 1960s, Reed Hundt, who later served as chairman of the FCC, noted that the Daily News had a flexible policy about publishing cartoons: "We publish pretty much anything."

As Doonesbury, the strip debuted as a daily strip in about two dozen newspapers on October 26, 1970 – the first strip from Universal Press Syndicate. A Sunday strip began on March 21, 1971. Many of the early strips were reprints of the Bull Tales cartoons, with some changes to the drawings and plots. BD’s helmet changed from having a “Y” (for Yale) to a star (for the fictional Walden College). Mike and BD started Doonesbury as roommates; they were not roommates in the Bull Tales.

Doonesbury became well known for its social and political commentary, always timely, and peppered with wry and ironic humor. It is currently syndicated in approximately 1,400 newspapers worldwide.

Like Li‘l Abner and Pogo before it, Doonesbury blurred the distinction between editorial cartoon and the funny pages. In May 1975, the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first strip cartoon to be so honored. That month, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, the publishers of collections of Doonesbury until the mid-1980s, took out an ad in the New York Times Book Review, marking the occasion by saying: It’s nice for Trudeau and Doonesbury to be so honored, "but it’s quite another thing when the Establishment clutches all of Walden Commune to its bosom." That same year, then-U.S. President Gerald Ford acknowledged the stature of the comic strip, telling the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association at their annual dinner, "There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order."

In 1977, Trudeau wrote a script for a 26-minute animated special. A Doonesbury Special was produced and directed by Trudeau, along with John Hubley (who died during the storyboarding stage) and Faith Hubley. The Special was first broadcast by NBC on November 27, 1977. It won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes International Film Festival for best short film, and received an Academy Award nomination (for best animated short film), both in 1978. Voice actors for the special included Barbara Harris, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Jack Gilford and Will Jordan. Also included were two songs "sung" by the character Jimmy Thudpucker (actually actor/singer/songwriter/producer James Allen "Jimmy" Brewer), entitled “Stop in the Middle” and "I Do Believe", also part of the "Special". While the compositions and performances were credited to "Jimmy Thudpucker", they were in fact co-written and sung by Brewer, who also co-wrote and provided the vocals for "Ginny's Song", a 1976 single on the Warner Bros. Label, and Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest Hits, an LP released by Windsong Records, John Denver's subsidiary of RCA Records).

The strip underwent a significant change after Trudeau returned to it from a 22-month hiatus (from January 1983 to October 1984). Before the break in the strip, the characters were eternal college students, living in a commune together near “Walden College”, which was modelled after Trudeau’s alma mater. During the break, Trudeau helped create a Broadway musical of the strip, showing the graduation of the main characters. The Broadway adaptation opened at the Biltmore Theatre on November 21, 1983, and played 104 performances. Elizabeth Swados composed the music for Trudeau’s book and lyrics.