Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 07, 2009

Moms. Always looking out for their kids best…a little gossip stuff helps too.

Toggle, just tell her to amscray.

While it was good for a punchline, Toggle’s mom strikes me as somewhat more perceptive and cool than this.   A different thing has been bothering me about the entire Toggle storyline: considering the nature of Toggle’s combat injuries, he is quite unblemished. Maybe that’s just Trudeau making a point about the tens of thousands of combat survivors who have unseen injuries.   However, it’s more than a bit dishonest to continually depict all these injuries (i.e., consider the entire Vet’s Center cast) as people who end up looking ‘normal,’ or even more ‘cool,’ after passing through explosions and fire. For all that Toggle went through, there is no visible scarring, for example.   We have tens of thousands of vets coming back who are so mutilated that they make horror shows look tame … yet, in the Doonesbury universe, they all look like “beautiful people.” In the current storyline, Toggle should be just about one massive scar from his left ear to the bridge of his nose. If his left ear was even still attached.   But that might ruin the love story with Alex (or anyone else, for that matter).

3Xp4t, do you have any idea how difficult it is to draw scars, and have them look the same from strip to strip?

To Roger, but not… If you can draw a whole face day after day, and make it consistent, why not a scar?

I’d say the eyepatch leaves Toggle far from unblemished. I know mom’s just worried, but I would like to see the strip move on to just Toggle and Alex. It’s going to be interesting to see how things progress.

Moms with shoulder tattoos and short cherry red hair are always so protective. XD

For those who want grizzly, mutilating, disfiguring damage, has anyone looked under the eye-patch, under his shirt or below the belt-line? I think Garry is very considerate of both vets AND his audience sensibilities here. If you want gore, watch TV.

Anyone else get the feeling that Mrs. DeLuca might be concerned that Alex might pull Tog away from her and the trailer?

–Ed

RinaFarina-

They’re cartoon faces. They’re not photo-realistic, and they’re almost always drawn in three-quarter or full profile. It’s a testimony to the cartoonist’s skill that we easily mistake them for real faces, even to the point of recent debates here about whether Alex was “beautiful” or “homely.”

@ RinaFarina - I was probably not being serious. On the other hand, who knows what I was doing?

Oh, terrific! A smothering mother.

Moma’s gonna lose her little boy!