Can I take a moment to yammer on about the debt I owe Doonesbury?
So when I was five years old we moved to a suburb where I didn’t know anyone, there were no neighbors my age, and school wouldn’t start for several more months. But we did live across the street from a library. So I spent a huge amount of time over there. Entire days.
I wasn’t exactly over there reading Proust. I would spend a lot of time in periodicals and a ton of time in the aisle where the comic strip collections were.
I was (and of course still am) a huge Peanuts fan. So I naturally devoured those first.
When I ran out of Peanuts, I turned on the Garfields and the Mad Magazine collections and so on, eventually getting to the older Hi & Lois and Katzenjammer Kids compilations and stuff like that. In fact, I think they even had a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book in there but I could be misrembering that.
So eventually the well runs dry. Except for the Doonesbury books. This was 1979, so there was about a decade’s worth of Doonesbury compilations there, and I had tried one before but didn’t find it all that funny. But whatever, this is what was left and I’ll be damned if I’m going to have to read … you know … books.
So now I’m left with these Doonesburys.
I remembered seeing Zonker on one of the Reading is Cool style posters the library had up, so he was my way ‘in’ as it were. A spaced-out hippie was something that I could understand.
I started working my way through the first book, which wasn’t easy – but after awhile the political references started kind of reinforcing each other, and I was too precocious to give up and let this stuff beat me. It had been around for a decade. That means it’s ‘get’ able and if it is then I’m going to hang with it till I get it.
Eventually I start looking up the political names and events referenced. Im asking my mom who “Agnew” is over breakfast, etc.
I’m not even in the first grade yet and Im already feeling like I have a bit of a grasp on the ‘feel’ of the late 60s.
I stuck with it and went through all the books, eventually re-reading them later which both reinforced what I was getting out of them since I knew more stuff now and also realizing there were whole layers of jokes that I could tell were jokes but never really really understood on first reading.
So anyway,
for teaching my 5 year old self far more about politics than I would ever have expected to learn, for giving me perspective into an era other than my own (which is an important lesson in itself – regardless of the era), and for ingraining in me the lesson that I still use to this day that just because you may not find something interesting at first doesn’t mean there aren’t other back doors into the material, for all of that I owe Doonesbury a massive debt.
I would literally be a different person without that.
—jason malmberg
Flommist Jason Malmberg is a simple man who believes in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art sometimes. Copyright © 2016 Jason Malmberg.
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