Donald J. Trump and the Cartoon Woman
What My Comic Strip Taught Me About the Election
My friend Jon Bloom brought up something yesterday I’d almost forgotten: the hostility some readers directed at Liz, the lead female character in my comic strips. For twelve years I drew “Denver Square,” which appeared six days a week in the Rocky Mountain News. After the Rocky folded, a redesigned version of the strip, “Freshly Squeezed,” ran in 65 newspapers around the country.
Liz, the wife and mother and center of the family in both strips, was modeled loosely after important women in my life, chiefly my grandmother, my mother and my wife, Lisa Hartman (note that she kept her own name rather than assume mine). These women were a lot alike, smart, tough, opinionated, strong-willed and independent.
Many of the women I worked with at the Rocky shared these attributes, essential qualities for the rough and tumble of daily journalism at a big-city newspaper. The fictional Liz also was emotionally fragile and prone to self-doubt when she was outside her comfort zone, especially when she made the decision to go back to work after taking several years off to raise her young son.
It was a shock to discover how many readers disliked, even hated, Liz. How could poor henpecked Sam, her husband, stand to live in the same house with her, many of them wondered. Why didn’t he divorce that nasty ball-busting witch? What kind of weak candy-ass wimp would put up with that scold, that harpy, that shrew? Why didn’t he stand his ground and take control of his own household like any self-respecting manly man would? And it wasn’t only men who expressed a visceral distaste for Liz; a vocal contingent of women despised her, as well. At the time I was surprised by the vehemence of the criticism; Liz was, after all, a pretty normal figure in my world, and I just didn’t get why people were so irritated by a character created in the image of the women I knew and admired.
When you work for a newspaper, you develop a pretty thick skin, and I didn’t worry much about what a few readers thought about her. After I stopped drawing the strip I forgot all about the criticism until Jon brought it up.
Why do mention it now? The election, of course.
Like most Americans these days, I exist in a bubble. I live in a big city, I have a college degree, I’m relatively affluent, and almost all my friends share my political and social views. Pretty much everyone I know voted for Hillary, most of them enthusiastically. None of us really understood the reflexive dislike so many voters felt for Ms. Clinton. To us she was, for all her flaws (none of which seemed that important), obviously the most qualified candidate, clearly superior in every way to that crude barbarian thug who inexplicably defeated her. In other words, like the pollsters, we flat out missed what a vast number of our fellow citizens felt about Hillary.
I suspect they were the very same things that some of my readers so disliked about Liz.
Sadly, even though I kind of know what those things are, I can’t really understand the distaste. I can’t get into the heads of those of my fellow Americans whose reality is so fundamentally different from mine. I don’t know what it’s like to live in their bubble. Worse, everything I’ve read and seen on the subject seems to trivialize their experience (as they, in turn, ridicule mine). I’ve heard multiple calls since the election for the press to pay more attention to their world, as though the mainstream media needs to conduct an anthropological study of a newly-discovered Amazonian tribe. Really what they’re saying is that they (and we) have bunkered ourselves into our own big-city multi-cultural universe. We appear to speak the same language as our cousins in the hinterlands, but the words have different meanings. Their values seem somehow quaint to us, their concerns don’t resonate with us and their anger and resentment don’t seem quite rational.
The result? When Liz speaks her mind to Sam, my friends see themselves in her. Trump voters see Hillary.
And they don’t like her.
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