So here's the setup: The legendary gonzo journalist kills himself, with a handgun bullet through the head, while seated in his Colorado kitchen on a February afternoon. A couple of weeks later, KA-BOOM! The comic-strip character based on the legendary gonzo journalist has his head blown up in the second frame of the strip.
Not funny, you might think. The kind of outrageous violation of community standards that gets cartoonists' work suppressed by editors. The kind that, if the strip does run, is guaranteed to generate outraged complaints.
Except . . .
This is Hunter S. Thompson we're talking about, a man immortalized both by the "Fear and Loathing" persona he created for himself and by the one cartoonist Garry Trudeau hung on him as Uncle Duke in "Doonesbury." The former was a loose howitzer who positively gloried in outraging community standards. The latter is a paranoid substance abuser currently helping the Bush administration govern Iraq.
Let's face it: Neither one of these characters stood much chance of surprising us anymore.
'He didn't kill Duke, did he?'
After the literally explosive "Doonesbury" strip ran yesterday, neither the cartoonist, his syndicator nor the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors -- a newspaper group that keeps an eye on such potential controversies -- reported any blowback. There were no complaints, said Universal Press Syndicate editor Lee Salem. "We've had nothing move over our listserv about it," said Penny Bender Fuchs, the AASFE's executive director.
Fuchs, as it happened, hadn't seen Trudeau's strip yet. Told about it, she expressed serious concern. "He didn't kill Duke, did he?" she asked.
No, Trudeau said, he had no plans to have art imitate life that way. Reached by phone in his New York studio, he said that he had done a week's worth of strips as a tribute to Thompson and that he hoped Tuesday's would not be misinterpreted.
The series began Monday with a strip in which Duke and his faithful would-be spouse equivalent, Honey, suddenly appear as if drawn by Ralph Steadman, illustrator of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and numerous other Thompson works. It continued with yesterday's strip, which Trudeau described as "basically mind-blowing" for Duke. In it, he reads of Thompson's death, his head is obliterated by a sudden explosion, and then he reappears, thinking: "That can't be right. Better Google it." At which point there's another "KA-BOOM!"
Exploding Duke's head for years
The Thompson strips will continue through Saturday, but Trudeau was reluctant to discuss their story line. "I hate to talk about it until people have seen it," he said. Later, in an e-mail, he pointed out a reason that his readers may not have found Tuesday's strip unusual.
"I've been exploding Duke's head as far back as 1985," he wrote. "I also had a rocket burst out of his head, a flock of bats, and during Duke's run for president, Mini-D, a tiny self that conducted Duke's business, even gave speeches when the candidate was incapacitated."
After he'd established his original Thompson parody, Trudeau noted, he soon moved his story line away from the writer's real life. This was in part because sticking to Thompson's personal narrative "would have been very limiting." But it was also because Thompson himself "seemed so aggrieved by the character."
As well he might have.
For Trudeau's Duke, in the end, is a character far more sinister than the self-created, self-destructive gonzo artist who shot himself last month.
Duke has a "predatory nature," the cartoonist explained. Once parachuted into a hot spot like Haiti, Kuwait, Panama or Iraq, his "relentless opportunism" will always take over. He stands for "a certain kind of mad unconditionality. Duke is never ambivalent, never in personal conflict. His take is resolutely binary: Is this in my self-interest or not? It's a kind of weird state of grace."
Hunter Thompson he's not, then -- though the writer might have seen something of himself in that last phrase.
