Doonesbury's Sandbox Chronicles

Ethan Heitner

October 12, 2006

The Sunday funnies, like the Government Accountability Office, are old-school, hardcore and something I love deeply despite (because of?) the musty smell of old-fashioned, out-of-date unsexiness they exude. Print newspapers, unfortunately, will soon die, and with them the pleasure of the Sunday funnies. But for right now, we have Doonesbury, and Doonesbury continues to give back to us. This week, in addition to the most consistent and incisive political commentary out there, Gary Trudeau has launched an effort to bring the face of the war closer to his readers.

What will happen to Doonesbury? I learned almost everything I know about 20th century American history from my parents' collections of Trudeau's Doonesbury books, and it continues to offer some of the best political content in the daily newspaper. What Doonesbury does better than any number of political commentary or "traditional" reporting is give what we all know a visceral impact. Visual narrative gives life to the abstract. How many statistics have you read about the wounded veterans of Bush's Iraqi crusade?

Do they communicate what this image does, from Trudeau's book The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time , his collection of strips regarding the homecoming of wounded soldier B.D.?

But you probably already know that. Doonesbury continues to serve up the goods every day, and in Sundays in glorious color. This week's caught my attention, as it did I'm sure readers around the world:

"It's your war, America! Check it out or you-know-who-wins!"

Trudeau has just launched a one-stop clearinghouse, similar to other milblog  (military blog) aggregators. Says the introduction to "The Sandbox :"

This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us ... The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship, but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd.

But the average Doonesbury reader might or might not be ready for that. So far, as might be expected from a truly disturbing situation, the first dispatches can be, well, disturbing :

So here I am, educated and enlisted, an infantry sergeant enamored with the violence. And to promote, among other things, the development of a good private, I suggest reading lists. I steer these buggers away from pulp and pop and more towards explorations of the dark night of the soul, hoping, somehow, to get these dudes to realize the enormity of their present baptism in world affairs. So this private, the one throwing on his gear and leaving behind the books, is my little project. A social service product, a kid with no home, a kid who tags along on leave; this is the kid I pick for everything. I hammer his genitals into the wall. I want to make him my son and I his father. I want him to trust me.

Trudeau is trying his hardest, sincerely, to show that being against the war means supporting the troops. But, as has been pointed out about Trudeau's war reporting, it's quite different from the rest of his strips in that it's actually quite explicitly apolitical. Kurt Anderson, reviewing a collection of Doonesbury for The New York Times writes:

[His] story of war and amputation and depression and physical therapy manages to be funny and, maybe more surprisingly, entirely devoid of antiwar argument. The merits of the war in Iraq are never questioned or debated ... If one weren't otherwise aware of his hard-core lefty politics, it would be reasonable to infer that the author of ''The Long Road Home'' was conventionally pro-military, maybe even a Republican. When he went on television last year to defend these strips, Trudeau had it exactly right: ''Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not,'' he said to George Stephanopoulos, ''we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.''

Is that enough?

One of Trudeau's (perhaps unknowing) children is the other great cartoon journalist of our time, Joe Sacco, who's reporting from the ground in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Israel, and the former Yugoslavia have no peer for depth and detail, both human and visual, in the field of war reporting. Not constrained by a daily newspaper strip, Sacco has already contributed a number of multi-page stories from Iraq for the British Guardian. In the first, "Complacency Kills," Sacco, used to interviewing refugees and the civillians caught in conflict, is embedded, Trudeau-like, with the U.S. Army.

But Sacco, perhaps less beholden to the American cult of "our boys" than Trudeau, is capable also of reflecting on the limits of that perspective:

There is another half to that story, the story that Joe Sacco knows is just as important as the story of our soldiers.

Fortunately, he is up to that more challenging task as well, and in his next installment, talks to Iraqis who are suing Donald Rumsfeld for the illegal detention and interrogation they faced at the hands of "our boys."

Again, a story we've heard countless times, read in countless Human Rights Watch reports or in any number of concerned op-eds, becomes much more vivid one the visual, narrative element is added.

 "Trauma On Loan," sadly, like its companion piece, was only available to British newspaper readers and those of us who are willing to wrangle with PDF files online.

Far more effectively than any blogger or newspaper reporter, the sequential artists take us to the heart of our conflict.

"It's your war, America! Check it out or you-know-who-wins!"