By: E&P Staff On Memorial Day, May 31, Garry B. Trudeau will devote his comic strip "Doonesbury" to listing U.S. military personnel who have been killed during the war in Iraq.
More than 700 names of soldiers killed as of April 23, 2004, will appear, in very small type, across six panels in the strip.
Trudeau's character B.D. is currently hospitalized, having lost a leg in an incident outside Fallujah.
The 700-names cartoon will appear just eight days after the now-infamous "beheading" Doonesbury strip appears in many papers. Universal Press tried to halt printing of that strip, drawn weeks before, which shows a severed head on a platter, after the recent beheading of American Nick Berg in Iraq, but acted too late to keep it out of most papers.
According to a spokesman for Trudeau, he came up with idea for listing the 700 names before the recent "Nightline" memorial program, when Ted Koppel, amid great controversy, read off a similar list.
Robert C. Harvey, author of "The Art of the Funnies," a history of newspaper comics, told the Hartford Courant yesterday that Trudeau's Memorial Day eulogy "is in perfect concert with having B.D. lose his leg to draw attention to the sacrifices soldiers are making. It's a logical next step," Harvey said.
As for the likely reaction among readers, Harvey said it resemble what happened after Ted Koppel read off a similarly long list of names. "You'll get some saying it's just Trudeau being an anti-war activist, and others saying he's just recognizing the last sacrifice of these people," Harvey said. "But, you know, some people think we ought to be paying a little more attention to it."
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