Garry Trudeau on the comic strip business and his Pulitzer win

(Rick Marschall intro)

[Trudeau] also broke with tradition in the early 1980s by taking a vacation from his own strip..and after his sabbatical Doonesbury returned to more client papers than ever before.

Through it all Trudeau has never lost sight of the fact—or the pride—that he is a comic-strip cartoonist. Indeed, he mounted a one-man crusade for the retention of respectful scale in strip reproductions. Translation: through the years, newspapers have gradually been reducing the size of their comic strips. In the 1920s, daily strips sometimes ran seven columns across a newspaper; this shrank to four columns in virtually every paper... and, additionally, newspapers have shrunk the pica-width of columns themselves. Sunday pages have shrunk from full pages to, sometimes, fourth-pages and smaller. Moreover, newspapers now print offset from plastic plates, instead of letterpress from metal plates, so that details are invariably lost-not just crosshatch shading, but often characters' faces and the very dialogue.

In the face of all this, Trudeau recently said, "Enough!" He issued an ultimatum to his client papers that Doonesbury was not to be reduced to less than 44 picas (approximately 7 1/4 inches) instead of a new standard of 38 picas or 6 1/4 inches.

If they declined to comply, he would decline to provide his strip. (He had earlier issued a similar request-once again asserting his proud identity as a strip cartoonist-that Doonesbury appear on comics pages, not editorial pages.)

Trudeau's syndicate, Universal Press, headed by John McMeel, supported him, but otherwise there were howls throughout the industry and, generally, silence from his fellow strip cartoonists.

Following is Garry Trudeau's gauntlet to the industry, thrown down before the Associated Press Managing Editors convention on November 27, 1984.

The text is instructive on several counts: it is a superb statement of a cartoonist's bill of rights; to date only a handful of Trudeau's newspaper clients (750 daily, 450 Sunday) cancelled Doonesbury over his unprecedented stand; and not one other strip cartoonist has followed his lead on behalf of his own comic strip.

...

(from Garry Trudeau speech)

Happily, some editors resisted the temptation to make the return of Doonesbury the ultimate test of their authority. James Minter of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, having been one of the first to publicly denounce our request, later called to tell me that he had taken a hard look at his 38-pica page. considered it a mistake, and was changing all of his comics back to the old size. Matt Taylor of the Tampa Tribune couldn't even find an issue to get upset about. in a column he wrote: "I think some newspaper editors take a proprietary interest in the concept of arrogance. It's as though they think they are entitled to make all the decisions they want, and anytime someone else even expresses a viewpoint, it's an invasion of their turf. Garry Trudeau will not be able to force a newspaper editor, anywhere, to do anything. As the matter now stands, the editor's choice is his or her own: Run Doonesbury at 44 picas wide or don't run it at all. That's the limit of the artist's power: to withhold his goods from the market."

When it comes to how much space is actually involved, some editors can't seem to make up their minds whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. When the issue is their own reasonableness, they point out they have shrunk comics by "only" 3/4 inch. When the issue is my unreasonableness and egotism, they complain I am demanding a full 25 percent more space than other comics. One editor was so outraged that he wrote a long column to his readers, printed all responses agreeing with him, and then published a follow-up column. By the time he was finished, he'd devoted more column inches to venting his spleen than would have been required to accommodate the space increase for a full year's worth of Doonesbury.

So much for the value of discretionary space.