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University Daily Kansan, September 19: 1983
'Doonesbury' artist Carlton doesn't fit counterculture image
By CHRISTY FISHER Staff Reporter
When people first meet Don Carlton, they seem let down.
The 46-year-old "Doonzbury" artist is not a leftover from the counter-culture era; he doesn't look like Zonker Harris, and he is not famous.
"I don't look like someone who works on "Doonesbury," he says, "People seem disappointed. I don't have long hair."
CARLTON IS A typical middle-class family man who lives on a quiet tree-lined street in Fairway, the heart of suburban Kansas City. Although Garry Trudeau is the creator, writer and mastermind behind "Doonesbury," Carlton draws the final version of each strip.
"When someone asks me how do I enjoy being famous, I laugh," says Carlton, a commercial art graduate from Texas Christian University. "I don't consider myself famous, or even halfway."
Instead of making guest appearances on talk shows or attending exotic parties, Carlton is likely to be found meeting with the St. Agnes Parish Church congregation in Young America or presiding over the Johnson County Catholic School Board.
He says he is occasionally asked to make speeches or to appear on local television, but it makes him feel silly.
"I especially don't like TV. You have
all these cameras pointed at you while they make a pretty uninteresting person interesting," he says. "I know I'm not important. It's just an accident that I'm associated with a well-read comic strip."
On Jan. 2, Trudeau began a 20-month vacation from writing "Dooebury," saying he wanted to rethink the future of newspapers, which were filled in more than 790 daily newspapers.
THE VACATION HAS left millions of Americans wondering whether Uncle Duke will escape the long arm of the criminal Zonker will enroll in college, again.
Carlton also eagerly awaits the answers to these questions.
"I'm 'Doonesbury's No. 1 fan," he says. "I miss reading it, but I respect what he's doing. I think it's a good idea. Anyone who works on a creative product as hard as Garry does runs the risk of it becoming a sweet, but huge, burden. You don't want to risk what you love become a burden."
Even though he isn't drawing the strip, Carlton still is employed by Trudeau doing various jobs such as creating covers, title pages or doodling art.
Carlton is now working on promotional art and stage sets for Trudeau's musical, "Doonesbury — A New Musical," which will open in late October in Boston. Its Broadway premiere is scheduled for early November at New York City's Biltmore Theater.
"I'M CRITICAL OF American institutions. In outlook, I'm not a whole lot different from Garry. I find a lot wrong with him. He's an extreme behavior. I am critical, but not as articulately as Garry. He's the genius behind the strip." he says.
Carlton also didn't care for. The famous strip was first published in 30 newspapers on Oct. 26, 1970, but Trudeau worked on it alone. When he decided to return to Yale to get a master's degree in art, Carlton was asked by Andrews if he was interested in drawing the strip.
And Carlton emphasizes that Trudeau is the strip's mastermind. Carlton says he does not work diligently in the shadows while Trudeau basks in glory, as some reporters have erroneously told the story.
"I wasn't well interested. I didn't think a comic strip would support me as a full-time job. But I spoke with Garry at the minutes and we decided to try it," he says.
"I will personally give him all the credit," he says. "He does not need me. There are a thousand other artists who could do it."
Trudeau went back to New Haven, Conn., while Carlton stayed in Fairway to practice drawing "Doesbury" Three weeks later, Carlton was put to work doing six weeks of strips at a time — five weeks before they were to compete. Trudeau would send a pencil sketch, and Carlton would ink in the graphics.
While Carlton may not look like a "Doonesbury" artist, he says he does identify with the strip.
mail. If Trudeau needs every second
plane to Kansas City by
commercial airline.
FOR THE PAST five years, Carlton and Trudeau were doing the strip one week at a time, a week and a half before it appeared in the newspapers. We had to work under deadline pressure, often sending strips at 9 p.m. by overnight
EDGINESS OCCASIONALLY strains the Carlton household when a package gets displaced and the deadline is extremely near. Calls between Carlton, Trudeau and the overnight mail delivery service tie up on the phone lines until the package is found or Trudeau rushes to the airport to send another conv.
One of the advantages of the job, Carlton says, is that he works at home. As he prepared a pot of spaghetti sauce for dinner, he explained:
Fall Student Discount
"Friends say I'm lucky. I'm away from the rat race, and traffic. But, sometimes I yearn for offices. I guess they are happy. I'd like to have other people argue."
"It seems unnatural. It's not the American way of life. I'm also concerned about what it does for my kids to learn how to deal with snow if it prepares them for real life."
Carlton's comic-strip career unexpectedly began while he was working as a graphic artist for Universal Press Syndicate in 1969. His boss, Jim Andrews, asked him what he thought of a strip called "Bull Tales." The artist was a Yale senior named Garry Trudeau.
As for the future, "Doonesbury" is to return by autumn of 1984 or sooner, according to the contract agreement with UPS.
"Having me aids him so he can be a specialist in writing it and perfecting it. Garry works very intently — every word is important to him. He carries it to the extreme, for what he hears must ring true and funny. Doing it this way, he doesn't have to worry about the more mundane stuff that is time
"I told him I didn't think it would sell. It was not traditional, safe or common," he says. "It was not normal comic strip material — I felt the topics were too sensitive for newspapers. It also wasn't drawn like a normal comic strip, and it lacked a professional touch.
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"Well, Jim proved me wrong."
"The PLEASURE AND fulfillment is having done it — that is the satisfaction, not fame. Happiness is the process of getting there," he says.
ANDREWS WORKED WITH Trudeau and improved the strip and renamed it "Doonesbury" a name
Fall Semester, August 22 to December 17.
1972 MA LARRKEVEN 60049
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The Kansas City Times THE KANSAS CITY STAR Know all about it.
Carlton instead, gets his satisfaction,
of knowing that he is successful at
hitting the target.
--consuming without being terribly creative work."
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A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT DOWNTOWN DEVELOPMENT AND FREE ENTERPRISE
This collective failure to comprehend left them unable to see the injustice inherent in, for instance, New York City, which owns Shea Stadium, using tax revenues to refurbish this structure and thereby persuade the Jets to retain it as their home field while a growing percentage of Gothamites suffer physical abuse in their public institutions, streets and homes because an understaffed law enforcement apparatus is all the Big Apple can afford.
During a recent conversation with several probable beneficiaries of the controversial Downtown Development, I discovered that these practitioners of free enterprise didn't know the difference between the public and private sectors. Each found acceptable public funds being used to bring profits to a few because not one of them understood that the private sector is, in the words of one dictionary, "That part of the economy composed of consumer expenditures for goods and services and business expenditures for plants, equipment and inventories" while the public sector consists of "Federal, state and local expenditures for goods and services" intended to benefit the public.
Perhaps we're facing a comparable situation here. Isn't a public transportation system more important than an enlarged airport? An orderly education network more important than a dictatorial 'anchor store'? A lower crime rate more important than a transplanted industry? Quality nursing home care more important than a distant developer's gluttony?
These local needs can only be met when tax revenues are properly used to provide the public with "goods and services."
"These unhappy times call for the building of plans...that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."
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