Countering the Counterculture

B. D., football quarterback, views huddles as T groups and wears his helmet to mixers so the girls will know who he is. Megaphone Mark, the campus radical, has to rehearse the spontaneous outrage that he expects to deliver at his first press conference. Such characters appear in Doonesbury, a comic strip of campus life that began in the Yale Daily News in 1968, and is now syndicated in 125 papers, from the Washington Post to the San Francisco Chronicle. This week American Heritage Press will publish an anthology.

The strip's hero is Mike Doonesbury, a flaky Yalie who is unable to score even with the female roommate the college assigns him. His plights provide one of the first humorous counters to the counterculture, hinting that despite the seeming arrogance of today's undergraduates, campus life is still just a bowl of old-fashioned adolescent insecurities. Doonesbury's creator is Garry Trudeau, 22, a Manhattan blueblood (his mother is Fashion Leader Mrs. Harcourt Amory Jr.) who graduated from Yale last year. No Doonesbury himself, Trudeau is now confidently dashing off his cartoons in Colorado and plans to return to Yale next year to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree.

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