March 09, 2005
TRIBUTE TO EL DUQUE
Don't know if you've caught it, but Doonesbury all this week has drawn a series of tributes to Hunter S. Thompson. Seems apt, since Garry Trudeau's character Duke was based on HST.
But this series of panels from Tuesday's strip caught my attention: [Link]
It reminded me of the strip he drew in May that showed one of the characters, Joanie, daydreaming about avenging the firing of a friend from a university coaching job. In the last frame, she was shown carrying the head of the university president on a platter.
The problem was that the strip ran the week that the decapitation of American Nicholas Berg was shown on video on a Web site.
Trudeau later said he he regretted the poor timing and apologized to anyone offended by the image "that is now clearly inappropriate."
How many calls and e-mails have there been about this week's panels showing Duke's head exploding, a la Thompson's gunshot to the mouth?
None. Nada. Zilch.
Guess it all depends on whose head it is.
UPDATE: The Washington Post addresses the head explosion and the rest of the week's strips and talks to Trudeau about the tribute. [Link]
Posted by Jeff at March 9, 2005 08:06 AMI guess I've been reading Doonesbury too long, and have seen Duke's head explode too many times, but this totally went past me, and the connection never even occurred to me until I saw the Post story.
(Ah, for the days when Duke was coach of the Redskins! Or governor of American Samoa!)
Posted by: JD at March 9, 2005 11:28 PMI also missed the current head-damage connection; to me, it was just a convention of Duke's warped state of existence.
I'd forgotten about the previous decapitation coincidence, though. Maybe Trudeau has a fetish for this?
He seems to be aware of the potential controversey ahead of time: His Washington Post email was crafted before the Duke strip ran (turns out there were two complaints, but no strips were pulled). And when he ran a strip that mentioned masturbation in Sept. 2003, he issued preemptive damage control for that in the form of an alternate strip for more squeamish editors to run (which about half of them did).
Posted by: CT at March 10, 2005 11:00 AM