Saranac Lake Winter Carnival 2024 Button Design Revealed

Pulitzer-prize-winning Doonesbury cartoonist and Adirondack native son Garry Trudeau debuts designs for the 2024 Saranac Lake Winter Carnival.

Doonesbury cartoonist and former Saranac Lake resident Garry Trudeau has unveiled his 2024 Winter Carnival button design. Inspired by 1940s horror comic books and the Creepy Carnival theme, Trudeau’s creations show Doonesbury character Michael James “Mike” Doonesbury cowering in fear with skis askew as he’s accosted by a giant green monster in an icy pond.

Saranac Lake Winter Carnival 2024

A long tradition of designing the Saranac Winter Carnival graphics.

Trudeau has designed every Winter Carnival button since 1981 when staff at the Chamber of Commerce thought it would be nice to have a hometown celebrity design a button for Winter Carnival.

They asked his father, Dr. Frank Trudeau, to invite Garry to participate. Garry agreed — he once told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that only later did he realize he had made a long-term commitment.

As the Doonesbury creator considers which characters to feature in his button designs, he said he develops the idea first, then casts the design with whichever character seems most apt.

“Mike has a history of haplessness, so he came to mind first,” Trudeau said.

“I use Zonker a lot because he’s so adaptable and recognizable. Like Snoopy, he lives in his own head and has unfettered access to a life of fantasy. He never seems out of place.”

Saranac Lake’s 2024 Winter Carnival “Creepy Carnival” theme proved challenging.

“At first, I was confounded,” Trudeau said. “The theme was described to me as ‘Halloween-based,’ and I wasn’t sure how welcome Halloween imagery (witches, goblins, etc.) would be a mere three months after the real deal. Americans overdo all their holidays, and there’s a reason we only stage them once a year. So I decided to focus on the ‘creepy’ component — being terrified isn’t seasonal.”

Trudeau said as he designed the button, he took inspiration from horror comics with names like “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.”

Winter Carnival Committee Chairman Rob Russell holds the design for the 2024 Winter Carnival poster.

“They were so graphically violent, they provoked widespread moral panic, prompting public burnings, bans, even a series of Senate hearings,” Trudeau said. “A Comics Code Authority was set up, and by the mid-’50s, most of the goriest titles were gone. While all of this pre-dated me, I always found the covers campy and fun, so settled on the horror comic book aesthetic as a place to start.”

Storytelling is at the heart of the artist’s process.

“The genre also lends itself to storytelling — the cover is always a tantalizing slice of the story within — which makes for a richer image,” Trudeau added. “Most years, I’m just illustrating the theme. Here there’s a bit of narrative — Mike, cross-country skiing in the moonlight, breaks through the ice of a frozen bog, awakening a menacing creature. and then there are the cameos of supporting characters — for a moment, you might wonder how they fit into the story. Spoiler alert: they don’t.”

Trudeau says he isn’t very much into horror or creepy things himself — the last scary movie he went to was “Wait Until Dark,” which was released in 1967.

“But if I had to recommend anything, pick up a copy of ‘Misery’ (or any other Steven King novel). Come for the gore; stay for the craftsmanship,” he said.

A highly-regarded editorial cartoonist with roots in the Adirondack Park.

Trudeau, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip launched 53 years ago and is now syndicated to 1,000 newspapers nationwide, has deep ties to Saranac Lake. His father, Dr. Frank Trudeau, and grandfather, Dr. Francis Trudeau, were prominent Saranac Lake physicians. His great-grandfather, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, was a world-renowned pioneer in the field of public health who essentially founded this village as a tuberculosis cure center in the late 1800s.

Garry attended the former Lake Colby School in Saranac Lake through sixth grade before being sent away to boarding school. He attended Yale University and majored in art. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree and started Doonesbury initially as a continuation of Bull Tales, which appeared in the Yale University student newspaper, the Yale Daily News.

A beloved Saranac Lake Winter Carnival tradition.

Over the years, Garry’s button designs have become a beloved Winter Carnival tradition, collector’s items, and treasured mementos for many residents and visitors.

The button sales also serve as a fundraiser for the following year’s Winter Carnival. To find out where to purchase yours, visit the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival website.

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