womzilla | It's a bad week to be a comic strip character

Spoilers for this week's Doonesbury, Get Fuzzy, Gasoline Alley, and Heart of the City are ahead.

Get Fuzzy's main human character, Rob Wilco, has a brother in the armed services. Monday it was announced that he'd lost a leg in battle in Iraq.

One of the three foundational characters of Doonesbury is the former football star B. D., who has never been seen without some sort of helmet, either football or (during his frequent military call-ups from the Army Reserves), infantry. Monday, he was badly wounded in Iraq; today it was revealed that his left leg is gone above the knee. His helmet was also amputated, which seems like an even greater wound.

In Heart of the City, Heart's (nameless) mother lost her job. Monday's strip is one of the best cartoonish visual expressions of despair I've ever seen.

And, finally, Gasoline Alley. Gasoline Alley is one of the Grand Old Strips, introduced at the end of the Great War. The original star was Walt Wallet, proprietor of a gas station (hence the name of the strip), who discovered an abandoned baby and raised him as his son. Gasoline Alley has always been best known for the fact that, unlike almost all other strips, its characters age in real time, which means that Walt is now somewhere around 105 years old. He's outlived Frank King, his creator, by thirty-five years. It's very clear from the events of the last week that Walt has driven his last drive.

I don't disapprove of any of these artistic choices; comic strips should feel free to incorporate the entire range of human experience. It's just a bit much all at once. But that's how life is.

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That's a horrible week! Thanks for the background on Gasoline Alley - I didn't know about it.

Seeing B. D. without his helmet made me feel real old.

Maybe I'll start reading daily strips again - it's been awhile. "Heart of the City" and "Rose is Rose" have always been two favorites.

And "Zippy", of course, although he's a little limited.

The Doonesbury strip is mightly powerful and understated.

The same panel revealed BD without his leg and without his helmet; it was the helmet's absence that shocked me more.

Who knew B.D. even had hair?

Actually, a few years ago, B.D. himself explained that he always wears the helmet because he has "crappy hair", or words to that effect. Now we know.

"his left leg is gone above the knee."

But it's still there below the knee?

I suppose "severed above the knee" would have been more accurate, except that Thursday's strip makes it clear that, in fact, they managed to save the knee. I gather from the doctor's comment that this means B.D. will have an easier time with a prosthetic.

Today's Get Fuzzy makes a strong statement on the official reaction to war injuries and deaths. To me, that and Doonesbury go with the Seattle paper printing the picture of flag-draped coffins.

Maybe I need new glasses, but it never occurred to me that it was B.D. who was hit until I read the strip today. I thought he was the one talking and his friend was shot. Oh, well.

I think this is the right move for Doonesbury. It has been lackluster for a while and something was needed to move the characters along.

I could be picky and point out that for a field hospital, they did a very quick and neat job of amputating his leg without damaging his pants, but I won't. Wasn't B.D. a POW during Viet Nam? Seems to me I remember Phred as part of that.

IIRC, B.D. got separated from his platoon and ended up roughing it for a couple of weeks in the wild with Phred the Viet Cong. I don't think he was ever an actual POW. (This was, of course, from before the period when the characters started aging in real-time, so B. D. was around 20 in 1973 and around 21 in 1982 when he graduated....)

It seems appropriate the the one character whose politics have remained pretty much unshakable from day-one be the one this happens to.
I grew up with his strip, and a part of me always used to think that B.D. was an inflexible jerk. So now, I wonder, what happens?

Merely quibbling, but in Get Fuzzy, it's Rob's cousin Will who lost the leg, not his brother.

A 9/11 sequence in Get Fuzzy showed that Rob's dad was a retired firefighter.

Non Sequitur, Sylvia, and a few other mostly non-political strips are starting to post pretty angry strips about how this war is being run; Bush is losing the comics page. I wonder if that means anything?

Thanks for the correction about Rob's cousin.

I wouldn't call "Non Sequitur" a non-political strip. While it's not as unrelenting as Boondocks, it indulges in political humor pretty often, especially on Sundays.

Sylvia less so, though it doesn't suprise me that it has turned that way--less surprised than if, say, Cathy or For Better or For Worse did so.

It's a bad week to be a comic strip character

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Strange wound

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On B.D.

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