By Bob Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 9, 2005
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....
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." ...
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18756-2005Mar8.html>
BTW, Trudeau's "tribute" to Thompson can be seen on Slate starting here: <http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050307>
Carl