By Shary Flenniken
Introduction by Emily Flake
Published by New York Review Comics
There’s a lot of truth in Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie and it’s the kind of truth that scares people.
Funny, radical, innocent, gorgeous, subversive, thoughtful, pornographic, satirical, feminist, cute, shocking, questionable, classic, old-fashioned, goofy, poignant, socially conscious, ahead of its time, creative, stinging, deep, whimsical, dangerous, immoral, politically incorrect, understanding, surprising, realistic, and revolutionary—all words that can be accurately used to describe Trots and Bonnie, a comic strip likely to have made a lasting impression on anyone who ever saw it during its long run in National Lampoon.
No comic strip before or since has so consistently managed to be both pointedly outrageous and yet practically wallow in its own childlike innocence.
At first glance, cartoonist Shary Flenniken’s work with its note for note vintage art style could easily pass for hundred-year-old reprints. But then you notice certain words or certain images and your second glance is a lot more along the lines of WTF!?
For those of you who have never encountered it, Trots and Bonnie is the story of a young teenage girl—Bonnie, with her Little Orphan Annie eyes—and her faithful talking dog—Trots, as they stumble through the mysteries of life and deal with parents, friends, school, bad influences, growing up, and most of all, sex.
There have been a lot of calls for a complete collection of this delightful but darkly satirical strip over the years from fans who seem to have forgotten just how extreme and uncensored it was. It seemed obvious to me that would never happen in today’s much more puritanical social environment…and yet here we are. Well, it isn’t quite a complete collection. Flenniken explains in the book that she personally chose to leave out a number of the strips for various reasons. I looked back through the DVD of reprints the National Lampoon released some years back and found some of those missing strips. Good call.
But what’s still there remains genuinely shocking as the strip is keenly aware of the role sexuality plays in teenage life and the discussions and actions of Bonnie and her cheerfully anarchic friend Pepsi are guaranteed to make Betty and Veronica blush if not faint flat out. Pepsi is that friend we all had who knows everything, and since you know nothing you have no idea that Pepsi is simply wrong most of the time. Trots and Bonnie was probably one of the first things I ever saw that made me realize that maybe teenage girls thought about sex as much as teenage boys did. I have to admit though, that some of the strips seem a lot “squckier” now that I’m 62 seeing them than they did when I was reading them at 14.
While the topic of sex is never far away, the main focus of the strip overall is to comment satirically on growing up, one of the scariest things we all have to do, and in this Flenniken admirably succeeds.
Some of my favorite strips here, though, are the ones where Trots takes center stage, particularly the one commenting on the canine way of leaving messages or his visit to a very confused and self-righteous therapist.
Adults throughout are shown mainly to be self-centered predators of one type or another, objects to be successfully dealt with and defeated so one can get on with one’s life.
Many of the strips are in a Sunday funnies format but some extend to multiple pages. Most are, as they were originally, black and white but there are a handful of gorgeous multi-page color strips as well.
The earliest strips here pre-date the National Lampoon run, having originated in various underground comix. At the back of the book, Flenniken gives brief but very telling annotations on all of the preceding strips and in so doing quite a bit of background on herself as well. The text material in the book does an overall excellent job of putting Trots and Bonnie in perspective as far as its wide-ranging influence and popularity.
As I wrote above, Trots and Bonnie made an impression, leaving fans screaming for this collection for decades, and now, as unlikely as it seems, here it is, with nearly all its risky post-pubescent craziness intact. I can’t even begin to imagine how any modern reader encountering Trots and Bonnie for the first time might react.
For the open-minded, though…
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