American Notes Comics Shelving

Along with Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, little Timmy, a twelve-minute-old embryo, is a character in a recent Doonesbury comic series. The sequence, entitled Silent Scream II: The Prequel, pokes fun at the recent antiabortion documentary Silent Scream. But readers of the 835 newspapers in which Garry Trudeau's comic strip appears will never meet little Timmy. Last week Trudeau withdrew the six strips after discussions with his distributor, Universal Press Syndicate. "We thought the sequence was done well," said Lee Salem, editorial director of Universal. "But we finally decided that the whole question of abortion was so sensitive that it would cause too many problems for editors." )

In one panel, Trudeau's narrator introduces Timmy, a tiny dot on the television screen. "While his main preoccupation at this point is cell division," the narrator says of the embryo, "in most respects he's as human as you and I." When he later calls abortions "nothing less than a holocaust," the next panel shows a voice from the White House saying, "Gosh, there's that word again." The strips will appear in the New Republic's June 10 issue. This is the first time since he became a syndicated cartoonist in 1970 that Trudeau has withdrawn his work.