30 Years Ago In TIME

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau said he would never have drawn the image of Muhammad, but his DOONESBURY strip has met its share of controversy.

The panels are so volatile that half a dozen editors regularly run the strip on the editorial page. Sometimes they don’t run it at all. The Los Angeles Times yanked a 1972 Trudeau strip about a diplomatic visit by Nixon and Kissinger to a distant and alien land: [the poor Los Angeles neighborhood of] Watts … Trudeau’s most inspired excess was the Nixon-era strip in which Radical Disk Jockey Mark Slackmeyer ends a surprisingly fair “Watergate Profile” of John Mitchell with the remark that “everything known to date could lead one to conclude that he’s guilty. That’s guilty, guilty, guilty!” Trudeau later explained that he was only trying to parody the hysteria of Nixon foes, but dozens of papers excised the panels. In an editorial, the Washington Post huffed: “If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty, it’s going to be the due process of justice, not a comic-strip artist. We cannot have one standard for the news pages and another for the comics.” –TIME, Feb. 9, 1976

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