25 Sep 2016

Trump, the comic book

Plus: A tech site's big Apple scandal

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Doonesbury

HuffPost Must Reads: Trump, The Comic Book    

Last week, Twitter retrieved the comic strip above — a 1999 Doonesbury classic in which Garry Trudeau, the strip's creator, saw Trump-the-candidate coming a mile away. Trudeau has been drawing the racist presidential nominee since 1987. The strip is one of many collected in an anthology of cartoons called “Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump,” which came out in July. Trudeau responded to questions about the viral strip, his career and the book by email on Friday. 

Your 1999 strip went viral, so much so that the myth-busting site Snopes created an entry to dispel the rumor that you predicted the Trump presidency. You've been drawing Trump for almost 30 years. Could you talk about the first time you drew him? What in particular made you want to satirize him? 

I’ve never had a strip fragment go viral before, so maybe punchlines are overrated. This one appeared 12 years after Trump made his initial head-fake toward the White House, which is what first prompted me to write about him. He’s been running election simulations in his head his entire life, but it took Twitter to put the dream within reach. My first raw impression? Biggest. Asshole. Ever. Must draw.

Over the summer you published an anthology of your Trump cartoons, "Yuge." What observations did you make going through those old strips? How has Trump's narrative changed through the decades, if at all? Or how has he not changed?

The underlying pathology has been remarkably stable. Trump himself has said that he’s changed little from grade school, where he punched out his music teacher. I’ve always felt that this election comes down to a referendum on mental health. The GOP candidate displays the classic symptoms of a sociopath — grandiosity, manipulative behavior, chronic lying, lack of empathy, etc. — whereas Mrs. Clinton does not. It’s true that I’m not a trained psychiatric professional. But I’m also not a trained ornithologist, and yet I know a duck when I see one.

Let's talk about caricatures. There's so much to exaggerate in Trump's physical appearance. Can you speak to the nuance of that from an artist's point of view? What about his physicality stands out and how do you interpret that in illustration? 

My approach has evolved — a journey, not a destination. Trump used to have medium brown hair, which everyone knows turns a lovely shade of strawberry blond as one ages. Well, actually, I didn’t know that, but it’s been fun to observe. At some point, he rebuilt the underlying structure of his coif, using some combination of combover, weave and taxidermy. Meanwhile, his face has melted into a waxy pile of gilded bloat, held up by pouts and scowls and a contemptuous tilt of the head. I’m afraid I still haven’t quite done it justice.

Where is political cartooning happening today? We ask because the once obvious place, the daily newspaper, has declined, and political satire, especially in cartoon form, lets the public see the truth in a way that words can't communicate. Tell us about cartoonists you admire today and why, and where we can find them.

Look for Ann Telneas and Tom Toles, both masters, both at The Washington Post, but as you might imagine, this is a subject that saddens me. When I first started out, the only rapid-response satire in the culture was provided by editorial cartoonists. Now there’s a surfeit of political satire, much of it brilliant, on late-night TV, online and elsewhere. The instantaneous Twitter response to Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles bowl, for instance, had me laughing all morning. But it’s true our craft has become marginalized — there’s only a small band of survivors who can still make a living at it — and as much as I miss the days when newspapers set the agenda, the comedy-craving consumer is being better served than ever. There’s a lot of funny out there.

With the country as bipartisan as ever, any temptation to bring back a daily strip? If so, what issues would you tackle that we are not talking about enough?

There’s always been a misperception that Doonesbury is primarily a political project, when in fact, 90 percent of what I write about has no overt political content. What I miss is not the opportunity to engage more broadly politically, but the space to tell stories with my cast. The Sunday sections are more like mini-essays; it’s hard to move things forward narratively, unless your feature has a rigid serial structure like "Prince Valiant." So I do miss engaging more completely with the characters.

Want more Trump or Doonesbury? Start here.

Love,
Nick and Sam

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What We're Reading

The deputy editor of a tech site that covers Apple secretly worked at Apple for two months. (Michael McLaughlin, HuffPost)

Trump used one-quarter of a million dollars from his charity to settle legal problems. That's probably illegal. “I represent 700 nonprofits a year & I've never encountered anything so brazen," says one tax expert. (David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post)

"Taxpayers are now picking up most of Donald Trump’s air travel costs, unnecessarily spending millions of dollars because he insists on flying aboard his luxury 757 [with gold-plated bathroom fixtures] instead of a practical plane." (S.V. Date, HuffPost)

Eliot Nelson wrote a dictionary to help you understand how Washington works. Here's a sample entry: "Transitioning": "A pleasant-sounding term used to describe politicos’ job changes .... [that] has the salubrious effect of making even the most ethically questionable career shifts sound as natural as the processional march of turtle hatchlings into the ocean.... Transition: 'Amber Windpacker, Staff Director for Transportation Committee Chairman McNuts, is heading to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.' Translation: 'Amber Windpacker’s husband just took an advisory position on a presidential campaign and someone around here needs to pay the mortgage on their four-bedroom McLean house.'" (The Washington Post)

Emily Peck explains the infuriating reason Wells Fargo got away with ripping off its customers for so long. (HuffPost)

1. Trump sues NYC 2. Trump donates to guy who advises NYC when to settle 3. NYC settles 4. Trump profits. (Christina Wilkie, HuffPost) 

Meet the new face of Bernie Sanders' political revolution. (Zach Carter, HuffPost)

"For months, aid organizations warned of deplorable conditions at Moria camp, an outdoor Greek detention center housing some 4,000 migrants and refugees on the island of Lesbos.... On Monday, a violent confrontation between desperate refugees and migrants left people bloodied and bruised. Rumors of mass deportations to Turkey only added to the panic. Then, a fire engulfed the camp." (Sophia Jones and Danae Leivada, HuffPost)

Trump thinks he can predict terrorism. He "likened his Spidey Sense for terrorists to his ability to sniff out good locations for properties and said, 'I predicted terrorism, because I can feel it.'" Here's why that's weird. (Dana Liebelson, HuffPost)

"I am late weighing in on this election—late in more ways than one. Monday brought my ninety-sixth birthday, and, come November, I will be casting my nineteenth ballot in a Presidential election. My first came in 1944, when I voted for a fourth term for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my Commander-in-Chief, with a mail-in ballot from the Central Pacific, where I was a sergeant in the Army Air Force. It was a thrilling moment for me, but not as significant as my vote on November 8th this year, the most important one of my lifetime." (Roger Angell, The New Yorker)

Candy

The 26th annual Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded this week.

 

Classic Longform Article of the Week

"Down the Drain," by Roger Angell. The New Yorker, 1975.

Thanks!

amy p

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