The central characters from bull tales would develop into the strip’s central figures—B.D., the always-pro-American and eventual volunteer soldier in Vietnam and Iraq (two tours); the enthusiastic nerd-loser Michael Doonesbury; the bullhorn-wielding, left-wing campus agitator Mark Slackmeyer; and probably most important of all, the stoned-out but always morally-responsible-in-irresponsibility Zonker Harris, smoking weed in the football huddles, calmly conversing with his devoted houseplants, or snorkeling in a tiny pond outside the Walden commune. Zonker was always missing the beat of whatever was going on in the world, which was good for Zonker—since he managed to fail just enough at everything (except perhaps as surfer dude and tanning circuit pro) to save himself from the perils of success in a world that worshipped nothing else. Most of all, he got along amiably and playfully with everybody, functioning sort of like the strip’s eternal inner child.
For its new syndicator, the Universal Press Syndicate, Doonesbury presented an opportunity to carry the traditional comics pages beyond the postwar backwash of mundane household comedies, such as Family Circus and Bringing Up Father, as well as the fist-swinging action men like Dick Tracy and Steve Canyon. For those of us growing up in the 1970s, Doonesbury provided a space where we could read about characters who lived in a world we recognized: where the president was going crazy behind mounting walls of his own making, our college sports stars were getting lost in the Vietnamese bush, and housewives were frantic to run away to somewhere new, such as, well… “Cleveland, say?” As the soon-to-be liberated Joanie Caucus suggests to Mike and Mark when they abet her domestic escape during a cross-country motorcycle tour, Cleveland might seem the perfect destination for a woman who hasn’t been anywhere outside of a bad marriage.
But while Doonesbury started strong, quickly attracted lots of young and not-so-young readers, and earned swift praise from the comic profession’s old pros such as Charles Schulz and Milt Caniff, the best was yet to come. For it was somewhere into the second and third years of the strip’s publication that Trudeau, following the breadcrumbs laid down by already established characters, began to explore distinctly new comic territories. It would be a journey without maps into a widely unfolding landscape of characters, interrelationships and, of course, America’s televised reality. Along the way, Trudeau would report home to the rest of us so much that was beautiful, moving, and multifarious about a ridiculous country—just as Dickens had once done for Britain, or Zola had done for France.
