Cartoonists Respond to the Gulf War

As the last issue of the Journal was being completed, the United States went to war against Iraq. In the six weeks since then, the war came to affect nearly every aspect of American life, including comics.

Expectedly, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury drew criticism for its commentary about the war. Trudeau placed Vietnam vet B.D. among the U.S. ground troops, joking about Army food, tending to a comrade injured in a missile attack, and enjoying a fleeting romance with a woman of higher rank.

On Jan. 27, Trudeau turned his Sunday space over to five one-panel cartoons by "Zorro..an airman stationed at the Central Command in Saudi Arabia" who has been corresponding with Trudeau. The panels, entitled "Living in Purgatory," depict some of the everyday frustrations experienced by the troops: slow mail, bad news from home, no rotations of troops away from the front lines, and the constant danger of Scud missile attacks or (more commonly) bus accidents. Despite Zorro's sympathetic attitude toward his fellow troops, the Naples (Fla.) Daily News ran a drawing of an American flag in Doonesbury's space that day.

Bill Griffith started drawing war-related Zippy strips the day after the air raids began... Griffith said he had not heard much response to the strips; letters, he explained, had to be forwarded from local papers to the syndicate. "I have received some positive feedback from editors and from some people who know me." He did say, though, that "in one strip I had Zippy's head replaced by a peace symbol. Somebody sent in a copy of that with an umbrella drawn over the symbol, saying that was •Neville Chamberlain's umbrella."(Chamberlain was the British prime minister whose compromise treaties failed to prevent World War II.)

In another strip, Zippy drags his fellow King Features star Beetle Bailey into the war. "I thought it was time he finally got out of boot camp," Griffith said. "I didn't know what Mort Walker would think of it. He thought it was hilarious."

You won't, of course, see any battles in the real Beetle strip. Walker told the San Francisco Examiner, "I just had lunch with a bunch of cartoonists and we were all sitting around getting mad at Saddam Hussein and wishing we could get that guy. Those kinds of emotions make it difficult to be funny. Plus I saw what happened after World War II to people like Bill Mauldin who did Up Front and George Baker who did Sad Sack. Neither strip survived because it was hard to make the transition from war to civilian life. So I decided long ago to keep my characters in a boot camp over here, a broader experience which is more peaceful by nature."

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Matt Groening's Life in Hell depicted Akbar and Jeff staring at one another through gas masks, finally sharing a single flower in the last panel. "The gas masks seemed like the first reminder that there are aspects of this war which can get incredibly ugly and don't seem to have been taken into account," Groening told the Examiner. A doll of Groening's most famous creation, Bart Simpson, was dressed in camouflage by troops at the Saudi front and presented to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Groening's response: "It's always sad when a 10-year-old gets drawn into a war." Groening told the Associated Press that he was "very opposed to the war," but that the Simpsons probably supported it: "I'm not the Simpsons. I'm smarter than they are."

Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek commented on the war while retaining its current 1960s-childhood storyline, by having young Maybonne read letters from a girlfriend's boyfriend in Vietnam. Barry also delivered a brief essay about the war on National Public Radio, later printed in her regular space in Mother Jones. She told of how her mother, who survived WWII air raids in the Philippines, would stop to tell her whenever a plane passed overhead, "'Right there. That's the sound'", Barry wrote. *War becomes a part of our DNA. It is passed on to our children, and on to our children's children. It disfigures everything it touches. How dare anyone purposefully bring it into our lives when other options remain."