Defining Moments in Torture

Editor & Publisher has confirmation from Trudeau that
last Sunday's strip was indeed “fact-based.”

"Totally fact-based," replied Garry Trudeau, in
response to an E&P e-mail query. "Bush's comment in
panel seven is a direct quote, which is why I put it in
quotation marks. In the original Yale Daily News
expose, we ran a photo of a pledge's seared backside."

The branding, which was exposed by the Yale paper,
was first covered by The New York Times in a Nov. 8,
1967, article. Trudeau much later told Rolling Stone in
an interview that he drew his first editorial cartoon for
the Yale Daily News during the branding controversy.

According to that 1967 Times article, "The charge that
has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is
that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a 'hot branding iron' to
the small of the back of its 40 new members in the
shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately a half
inch wide, appeared with the article." It added that a
former president of Delta revealed that "the branding is
done with a hot coathanger. But the former president,
George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting
wound is 'only a cigarette burn.'"