Across the last half-century or so, Doonesbury has been one of those rare institutions that could always be counted on—even while the political world it described seemed to be run by people who couldn’t be counted on at all. Whether it was following the daily trials and pleasures of the lovelorn, the divorced, the dying, the homeless, the enlisted, or those Zonker-like individuals who felt estranged from the whole ugly process that calls itself civilization, G.B. Trudeau’s comic provided a dependably absurd chronicle of American life. It may turn out to be the most reliable record the United States will ever have about itself—at least one that, despite the horrors and hypocrisies it depicted, almost never failed to raise a laugh.
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.
And yet he found inventive ways to stray from his assigned path—such as departing the normal studies of a Yale art major to draw spiky caricatures for the school humor magazine, and to turn his personal anxieties about being drafted into a self-illustrated song, sung to the tune of “When I’m Sixty-Four”:
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.
In many ways, Trudeau spent his years at Yale like the famous British double agent Kim Philby did at Cambridge: He never fit in among the nation’s future leaders as much as he appeared to, and nobody got to know him as well as he got to know them. Among classmates like biographer Ron Chernow, future Vice President Al Gore (and Gore’s roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones) and the even-then unlikable George W. Bush—who, as frat president at Delta Kappa Epsilon, endorsed branding new enrollees with coat hangers—Trudeau was shy, maybe less by disposition than in an act of judgment. In a 2008 interview with The Washington Post he called Bush “all noblesse and no oblige,” and decades after graduation, he wrote some of his funniest strips about the frat-boy Bushes being admitted to top-secret society (and CIA-feeder) Skull and Bones. Growing up with these entitled, keg-loving, spoiled elites, Trudeau managed to never feel intimidated by them; instead, he treated them like tawdry relations he could cheerfully expose to the rest of us.
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.
Perhaps it doesn’t take that many hardships to forge a sympathetic soul, and Trudeau certainly made good use of all the hardships available to him. A relatively short man, as an undergraduate at Yale he wrote some of his earliest cartoons about characters who felt awkward around women, and his apparent sense of social disconnect led to spending lots of time alone, doodling unproductively. The doodling developed into caricatures of friends, which were incorporated into illustrations for the college paper, The Yale Daily News, and eventually led to his first serial comic strip, bull tales, based around the exploits of popular Yale quarterback Brian Dowling, later immortalized as the football-helmeted B.D. According to Trudeau’s editor at the time: “When he asked me if we would publish them ... I confessed that we print just about anything. I thought the strips were interesting, but the sketches were very primitive.”
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.)
Between 1968 and 1970, Trudeau developed an unremitting work schedule, published two reasonably successful collections of bull tales, and earned a contract with Universal Press Syndicate, granting him an escalating pay scale over six years and “copyright ownership of the strip from the get-go—a concession rarely granted.” It was a job that kept him working, creatively engaged, and successful for the rest of his life. As he recalled for NPR in 2010: “It’s a ridiculous story, and it nauseates my children that I would find my life’s work six weeks into it.”
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.
For its new syndicator, the Universal Press Syndicate, Doonesbury presented an opportunity to carry the traditional comics pages beyond the postwar backwash of mundane household comedies, such as Family Circus and Bringing Up Father, as well as the fist-swinging action men like Dick Tracy and Steve Canyon. For those of us growing up in the 1970s, Doonesbury provided a space where we could read about characters who lived in a world we recognized: where the president was going crazy behind mounting walls of his own making, our college sports stars were getting lost in the Vietnamese bush, and housewives were frantic to run away to somewhere new, such as, well… “Cleveland, say?” As the soon-to-be liberated Joanie Caucus suggests to Mike and Mark when they abet her domestic escape during a cross-country motorcycle tour, Cleveland might seem the perfect destination for a woman who hasn’t been anywhere outside of a bad marriage.
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.
One of the greatest pleasures of following Doonesbury over the decades hasn’t simply been the individual story lines, or how they jived with the historical reality in which we read them, but also the depth and breadth of human experience they charted. Trudeau left no character behind for very long, however incidental or insignificant they seemed. So, for example, B.D.’s one-time nemesis and eventual friend Viet Cong guerrilla Phred, would, over the decades, go on to run budget tours for returning American vets, represent his country as U.N. ambassador, and help bring capitalism (and terrible working conditions) to Vietnam through the Nike Corporation.
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.
Zonker’s Uncle Duke—a continually self-serving, self-medicating, gun-happy former journalist for Rolling Stone—was prepared to go anywhere on any mission that promised unearned treasures. He moonlighted as governor of American Samoa, ambassador to China, manager of the Washington Redskins, and as college dean for an unaccredited medical school in Haiti … okay, I’ll stop. His career eventually led him to captain a luxury cruise ship for Donald Trump, and later took him to Washington, D.C. with the future president. Twice. Clearly these two were meant to be together. (And like another comic vision of sometimes very unfunny American history, The Simpsons, Doonesbury was quick to identify the real Trump as a con man who loved nothing so much as hearing himself speak—especially when he was selling crap to suckers.)
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.The greatest and most memorable “revelations” in Doonesbury were always hiding in plain sight—such as when the strip presented two color memorials to the dead soldiers in the second Iraq War, or took us on a tour through the neon-lit, glitch-ridden corridors of Reagan’s dizzyingly self-reflective brain, or introduced us to the crudely mugging Arnold Schwarzenegger as a large groping hand named the Gropenführer. While most news reports at the time analyzed who said and did what, Doonesbury rendered these stories in larger-than-life detail.
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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