Although it lost some of its countercultural edge,
shunning the drug humor that had been a mainstay
earlier in its run,Doonesbur ywas still capable of gen-
erating controversy. In 1980, during the presidential
election campaign, the strip ran a week-long attack
on Republican candidate Reagan’s intelligence, en-
titled “The Mysterious World of Reagan’s Brain.”
More than two dozen newspapers refused to publish
part or all of the series, claiming that such pointed
political commentary had no place in the comics
section (as opposed to the political cartoon section
of the editorial page). Indeed, some newspapers
chose to moveDoonesbur yto their editorial pages
or otherwise to segregate it from their main comics
pages. At the other end of the decade, in a sequence
beginning in 1989, character Andy Lippincott, among
the earliest gay male characters in mainstream com-
ics, sickened of AIDS. (He would die in 1990.)
Trudeau set a precedent for star cartoonists when
he took a lengthy vacation, or “hiatus,” in 1983 and
- Trudeau was not the first strip creator to take a
vacation, but he did not employ the techniques
of earlier cartoonists to fill the space occupied by
his strip during his absence. He neither stockpiled
strips in advance to run during the hiatus nor hired a
ghostwriter to fill in anonymously for him. Instead,
his departure was openly acknowledged—earning
the scorn of older creators, such as Charles Schulz of
Peanuts—and his syndicate printed “reruns” of pre-
viously publishedDoonesbur ystrips in place of new
material. On his return, Trudeau finally took his
core cast—the Everyman Michael Doonesbury, the
activist Mark Slackmeyer, the football jock B.D., and
others—out of college and into the working world.
For a successful strip,Doonesbur yattracted surpris-
ingly few imitators. One of the few was Berkeley
Breathed’sBloom County, which ran from late 1980 to
1989.Bloom CountymixedDoonesbur y’s political sat-
ire and liberal advocacy with child and animal char-
acters reminiscent of humor strips such asPogoand
Peanuts. Breathed followed Trudeau in 1987 as the
second strip cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize for edi-
torial cartooning.
Apolitical Fantasy Comic Strips Despite the suc-
cess ofDoonesbur yandBloom County, most comic
strips stayed well away from politics. Bill Watterson’s
Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from late 1985 to the
last day of 1995, focused on the adventures of a six-
year-old boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger
Hobbes.Calvin and Hobbescontrasted a child’s imag-
ination—Hobbes is alive when perceived by Calvin,
a motionless toy when perceived by others—with
mundane reality in a way reminiscent of such earlier
twentieth-century works as Windsor McKay’sLittle
Nemo in Slumberland. Watterson combined stunningly
creative visual artistry with an uncanny ability to cap-
ture in a few well-chosen words and images the es-
sence of childhood logic, winning wide popularity
and acclaim. He also attracted attention for his stub-
born refusal to license his characters to appear as
toys or in other media, despite enormous pressure
from his syndicate.
Watterson’s refusal to commercialize starkly con-
trasted to one of the pop culture phenomena of the
1980’s, Jim Davis’sGarfield, a strip centered on an
overweight cat and his dim-witted owner and de-
signed to offend as few people as possible, even at the
price of blandness.Garfield, which began its run in
1978, became a marketing juggernaut, as paperback
strip compilations bestrode the best seller lists and
the image of the fat orange cat became ubiquitous
and was even parodied in the form ofBloom County’s
defiantly unlovable Bill the Cat.Garfieldwas also the
subject of several animated television specials, as well
as a Saturday morning cartoon. It was the spring-
board for Davis to launch another and far less success-
ful strip,U.S. Acres, which ran from 1986 to 1989.
Another of the most successful and distinctive
strips of the 1980’s was the single-panel comicThe
Far Sideby Gary Larson. Featuring a decidedly idio-
syncratic perspective that embraced absurdism and
grotesquery in equal measure, the strip often em-
braced the perspectives of animals at humans’ ex-
pense, as in a strip in which polar bears are attacking
an igloo and one exclaims, “I just love these things!
Crunchy on the outside and a chewy center.” Larson,
too, registered his disapproval ofGarfield, when he
drew a strip featuring a python with a large lump in
its stomach—lying directly behind Garfield’s water
dish.Realistic Comic Strips More realistic strips com-
peted with those featuring imaginative children and
talking animals. Continuity-heavy “soap opera” strips
such asRex Morgan, M.D.and humor stalwarts such as
BlondieandBeetle Baileycontinued to run as they had
for decades, while attracting little attention outside
their fan bases. One of the most popular strips of the
1980’s,Cathy, by Catherine Guisewite, had debuted in234 Comic strips The Eighties in America