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Tracking the D'bury Universe
We won't post new stories on this page every day, but when we do put something up you have our word: It will be about the strip. Guaranteed.
Garry Trudeau ’70 ART ’73 has broken one too many barriers. For starters, he has written his own obituary...
Critics often look down their lorgnettes at comic strips, but what a singular niche they occupy. Novelists don’t parcel out a single work over an entire lifetime. Broadway plays may enjoy long runs, but the story doesn’t evolve from week to week, much less decade to decade. The best comic strips do all of these things. Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” turns 40 this month. To call it satire is only half right...
When viewed as a single, uninterrupted work of historical fiction, the collected Doonesbury reads less like 14,000-plus reasons to chuckle over your morning coffee and more like this era's War and Peace. Trudeau achieves this the same way Tolstoy did: by methodically constructing a large cast of complex and intriguing characters whom the reader comes to care about, then letting the great tsunami of current events envelop them all. The cumulative result is as affecting and richly felt as any narrative produced by an artist of Trudeau's generation...
I have long felt that Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau hasn't received adequate recognition for his talents as an artist and graphic designer. His strip, which earned a reputation for being poorly drawn in its early days, has been one of the most graphically innovative strips on the comics pages since the mid-'80s. And Garry's art has never been confined to the strip. In 1983, I curated the Doonesbury Retrospective at the Museum of Cartoon Art. While researching this exhibition, I had seen illustrations, sketches, and designs Garry had done for special projects. I knew there was a wealth of other material waiting to be uncovered. So in 2008, I suggested to Garry that we do a book on the art of Doonesbury and, after getting his approval, sent a proposal to Yale University Press...
Slate: Many great cartoonists of your era—Gary Larson, Berkeley Breathed, Bill Watterson, for example—have hung up the pen, but you seem to have Charles Schulz-ian stamina. How have you avoided burnout?...
G.B. Trudeau’s 40-year legacy of hard-hitting truths, sugar-coated with just enough laughter to make them palatable, is all the more awe-inspiring when viewed as a collection, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s “Doonesbury in a Time of War” exhibition...
Forty years after the comic strip began, its commune-dwelling characters—Mike, Zonker, B.D., Joanie, and the rest—have moved on to Boomer adulthood. Their evolution offers a telling chronicle of the past four decades, and what it felt like to live through them...
NASHVILLE, TN--(Marketwire - June 25, 2010) - Stadium Entertainment Holding Corp. is proud to announce the release of MY COUNTRY: SMASH HITS on Tuesday, August 24, 2010. The CD is a compilation of hits from a superstar line-up which includes Rascal Flatts, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Lady Antebellum, Trace Adkins, Darius Rucker, Reba McEntire, Blake Shelton, Dierks Bentley, Rodney Atkins, Jypsi, Randy Houser, Big & Rich and Montgomery Gentry. The project is a multiple CD series with each annual volume benefiting the Fisher House Foundation.