{"id":15247,"date":"2016-09-25T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T08:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=15247"},"modified":"2016-09-19T15:49:05","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T15:49:05","slug":"yuge-30-years-of-doonesbury-on-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2016\/09\/25\/yuge-30-years-of-doonesbury-on-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Yuge! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy G. B Trudeau<\/strong> (Andrews and McMeel)
\nISBN: 978-1-44948-133-9<\/p>\n

According to one of the two frontrunners in an upcoming electoral contest somewhere over the Pond, Garry Trudeau is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sleazeball\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153third-rate talent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who draws \u00e2\u20ac\u0153overrated\u00e2\u20ac\u009d comic strip Doonesbury<\/strong>, which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very few people read.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

He lives in New York City with his wife Jane Pauley, who \u00e2\u20ac\u0153has far more talent than he has.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

For those who prefer recorded facts to illiterate, made-up gibber-jabber from the terminally biased and proudly uninformed, Garry Trudeau converted his comicstrip Bull Tales<\/em> – which ran in the Yale University student newspaper Yale Daily News<\/strong> from 1968-1970 – into a satirical, comedy commentary on politics and contemporary society. He then managed to make it one of the most popular syndicated strips in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Starring\u00e2\u20ac\u009d an everyman liberal college grad, Doonesbury debuted on October 26th<\/sup> 1970, and consequently got to immortalise, lampoon and pass judgement on some of America’s least finest moments and personages, casting a jaundiced eye over domestic and global events and converting them into wry, trenchant comedy gold. He is despised by many conservatives and immoderates on the Right of America’s political spectrum\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Over the years, as well as amusing millions of folks over there and around the world, the strip has aroused the ire of plenty of political, sporting and media figures – you can call them celebrities if you’re so inclined – whilst winning the cartoonist acclaim, fame and praise from some quite unlikely sectors of the society he perpetually regards with his gadfly’s eye.<\/p>\n

Trudeau’s strip was the first to win a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning<\/em>, and he was awarded Certificates of Achievement<\/em> from the US Army for strips dealing with the first Gulf War. In 1995 he won a Reuben Award<\/em> from the National Cartoonists Society<\/em> and in 2006 was given the US Army’s Commander’s Award for Public Service<\/em> for strips about his character BD<\/em>‘s recovery following the loss of a leg in Iraq.<\/p>\n

His Mental Health Research Advocacy Award<\/em> came from the Yale School of Medicine for his depiction of mental-health issues facing soldiers returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

The Doonesbury strip proceeds in real time and his large, broad cast of regulars has aged over the decades, whilst always interacting with the causes c\u00c3\u00a9l\u00c3\u00a8bres of the moment. As such, he has made a fair few enemies by enlisting many real-world oafs and bugbears amongst his long-lived itinerary of returning characters.<\/p>\n

Generally these flesh-&-blood interlopers are represented by an icon – such as a waffle for Bill Clinton, a lit bomb for Newt Gingrich or a Stetson (later a Roman helmet) for George W. Bush \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but that’s not always the case.<\/p>\n

One of the most vocal – if not necessarily intelligible – over the years has been Donald J. Trump (who is usually depicted as a decadent, fat old white guy) and this superb collection gathers most of the best moments of cartoon lampoonery from three decades of less than cordial interaction.<\/p>\n

It all begins with a Preface<\/em> describing a rather fractious relationship and just why \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Donald\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had to become a semi-regular in a comedy feature. The moneyed bully has never been slow to react to perceived criticism, and he and his lawyers first became acquainted with Doonesbury<\/strong> after Trump’s original timid \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Kidding, I was only kidding!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d dalliance with running for President in 1987.<\/p>\n

That came to nothing but the big wind kept blowing and Trudeau kept pointing out a life of hubris, bad taste and excess played out on the screens and in the headlines of the Land of the Free.<\/p>\n

Divided into discrete decades, Trudeau’s razor-sharp wit and crushing comedy critiques are re-presented here in full colour, spotlighting the vaulting ambition, sordid deals, shady landlord practises, tawdry hucksterism, serial misogyny, juvenile sexual bragging, grotesque bullying and blind narcissism of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the most unqualified candidate to ever aspire to the White House\u00e2\u20ac\u009d over the numerous occasions he almost ran for office before bottling out at crunch time.<\/p>\n

Capping all that cartoon japery is this time when he finally put other people’s money where his mouth is and found himself actually in contention for the most important job in the world\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 one even his own bewildered, terrified party faithful don’t want him to have\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

And the best of all is that Trudeau has had an unwitting collaborator for so much of this material. Most of the baffling blather on those world balloons coming out of cartoon Donald’s mouth originated with the big orange blowhard himself\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Outrageous, alarming, more informative than any cartoon collection has a right to be and side-splittingly funny, Yuge! <\/strong>is a devastating tool of political instruction and character assessment which even the most deplorable basket case can enjoy, because it has loads and loads of really good simple pictures in it.<\/p>\n

Most of us in the rest of the world can’t vote in November’s election, but we can all buy this book and make it a global bestseller. That’s the only real way to make your voice heard in a modern plutocratic democracy\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6
\n\u00e2\u201e\u00a2\u00c2\u00ae\u00c2\u00a9 2016 G. B. Trudeau. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By G. B Trudeau (Andrews and McMeel) ISBN: 978-1-44948-133-9 According to one of the two frontrunners in an upcoming electoral contest somewhere over the Pond, Garry Trudeau is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sleazeball\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153third-rate talent\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who draws \u00e2\u20ac\u0153overrated\u00e2\u20ac\u009d comic strip Doonesbury, which \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very few people read.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He lives in New York City with his wife Jane Pauley, who … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Yuge! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[78,125,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comic-strip-classics","category-humour","category-satirepolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-3XV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}