Rarely has such an inauspicious personality been raised in such auspicious circumstances. Born in 1948 in New York City, Trudeau grew up in a large home atop Mount Pisgah in Saranac Lake, where the streets and local landmarks (such as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, founded by his grandfather) often carried the Trudeau name. “You could imagine what that does to a kid’s sense of himself,” Trudeau recalled. “I was a big fish in a little pond.” For many years, the telephone number for his father’s medical practice “was simply 1.” As Joshua Kendall describes in his new history Trudeau & Doonesbury, the biggest and possibly sole challenge of Trudeau’s childhood was his parents’ separation in 1959; otherwise, his upward trajectory was firmly assured.
If I got shot up during the war,Many months from now,Would you still tie my shoe for me and help me eatPre-strained prune juice, finely chopped meat.If I pass out at quarter to three,Pick me off the floor.Will you still knead me, will you still feed me,When I’m twenty-four.
Kendall’s new pictorially rich book is appreciative bio more than a grand argument about Trudeau’s life and work, which is somewhat fitting. For even though politics was often close to the surface in Doonesbury, presenting a political argument has never been exactly the point. Most of Trudeau’s characters live together fairly politely on the same pages, whatever their differences; and they still enjoy one another’s company whenever they meet up. Even when confronted by the latest, often insane and demoralizing dose of television news, they remain patient observers of the America they live in; and the strongest response they seem to feel is a sense of mildly exhausted (but never dismissive) chagrin.
At first, Trudeau borrowed heavily from his most obvious influence, Jules Feiffer, depicting jagged-faced, shaggily outlined characters who often sat immobile in frazzled chairs or face-to-face conversations, buzzing with reflections, monologues, and dialogues that filled the top half of each panel without the traditional comic “bubble.” Often a strip simply presented three or four repetitive images one after the other, such as an individual thinking out loud, or gathered with fellow athletes in football huddles, with the occasional eruption of a character’s head to speak or interject something humorous. (This repetition of a single focused image was a technique he would later use to depict the cover-up conferences being overheard outside a distantly framed White House or, later, the steadily mounting stone wall behind which Nixon gradually enclosed himself.)
The central characters from bull tales would develop into the strip’s central figures—B.D., the always-pro-American and eventual volunteer soldier in Vietnam and Iraq (two tours); the enthusiastic nerd-loser Michael Doonesbury; the bullhorn-wielding, left-wing campus agitator Mark Slackmeyer; and probably most important of all, the stoned-out but always morally-responsible-in-irresponsibility Zonker Harris, smoking weed in the football huddles, calmly conversing with his devoted houseplants, or snorkeling in a tiny pond outside the Walden commune. Zonker was always missing the beat of whatever was going on in the world, which was good for Zonker—since he managed to fail just enough at everything (except perhaps as surfer dude and tanning circuit pro) to save himself from the perils of success in a world that worshipped nothing else. Most of all, he got along amiably and playfully with everybody, functioning sort of like the strip’s eternal inner child.
Trudeau reported so much that was beautiful, moving, and multifarious about a ridiculous country—just as Dickens had once done for Britain, or Zola had done for France.
But while Doonesbury started strong, quickly attracted lots of young and not-so-young readers, and earned swift praise from the comic profession’s old pros such as Charles Schulz and Milt Caniff, the best was yet to come. For it was somewhere into the second and third years of the strip’s publication that Trudeau, following the breadcrumbs laid down by already established characters, began to explore distinctly new comic territories. It would be a journey without maps into a widely unfolding landscape of characters, interrelationships and, of course, America’s televised reality. Along the way, Trudeau would report home to the rest of us so much that was beautiful, moving, and multifarious about a ridiculous country—just as Dickens had once done for Britain, or Zola had done for France.
The low-key (and always committed to fairness) Joanie Caucus goes to work in day care, attends Berkeley Law School where she learns to abide the daily sexist jokes of her profs, rooms with the politically energized Ginny Slade, works in Washington as an aide to old-school Republican congresswoman Lacey Davenport, and ultimately finds love in the arms of investigative journalist, Rick Redfern, with whom she has a second child. Meanwhile, Mike Doonesbury marries Joanie’s no-longer-estranged daughter, J.J., a self-promoting performance artist, only to be abandoned when she runs off with Zeke, a former property manager to the always errant Uncle Duke.
A half-century in, the beautifully interwoven stories and people of Doonesbury can seem more real than the country that inspired it. While Trudeau has often been extolled (both by this admiring new book and elsewhere) as a “journalist,” he has always been more artist than anything else and the fact that he was the first cartoonist to win a 1975 Pulitzer Prize for journalism probably gives a misleading impression of his greatest strengths. Trudeau possessed one gift in the area of commentary, and that is to identify stupidity in all its crass, glaring obviousness, and to provide unforgettable snapshots of that stupidity, from Mr. Butts, the wannabe spokescartoon for Big Tobacco, all the way up to Trump.
Trudeau held the powerful to account, and at the same time, he kept his attention on the everyday people whom our politicians and television personalities often neglected.Trudeau held the powerful to account, and at the same time, he kept his attention on the everyday people whom our politicians and television personalities often neglected. Sometimes those people were returning war vets like B.D. who suffered from missing limbs, PTSD, alcoholism, and an inarticulable rage against the country they had been told they were protecting; other times they were young men dying of AIDS back when our president wouldn’t even mention the name of the disease. Decade after decade Trudeau called out the cartoonish villainy of public figures—such as the idiot-imperialist George W. Bush wearing a silly Roman helmet while uttering his illiterate one-liners; or the chicken hawks like Dan Quayle, identified by fluffy white feather.
Kendall’s new book is easygoing, much like its subject, and doesn’t really challenge readers to do much beyond enjoy what Trudeau has been doing for us over all these years, and to browse among some of his most memorable strips. At its most critical, it argues that Trudeau takes a fairly middle-of-the-road approach to our political half-century, which is perfectly fair, and part of Trudeau’s charm. And yet Trudeau’s core principles as an artist have never been, in essence, political. His primary subject has always been the range and variety of American life: going to school and falling in love and marrying and child-raising and sometimes divorcing to marry and raise children all over again. And, of course, eventually dying, which Doonesbury characters (like all of us) are prone to do. These are all things that Trudeau knows about because he did them himself, all while observing the daily horrors and absurdity of the news every morning. As the rest of us do—preferably after a quick brain-steadying dose of Doonesbury.
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