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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.
Forty years ago this morning, nerdy freshman Mike Doonesbury met his roommate at Walden College, and since that day, the funny pages haven't been the same. Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched...
The year 1968 was one of heartbreak and division, marked by assassinations, war, and war protests. Campuses were riven with contending passions. But at two schools there were oases of agreement, uniting students, faculty, and alumni. Harvard and Yale had stellar unbeaten football teams. Yale’s was the more glamorous, with quarterback Brian Dowling, who had not lost a game since the seventh grade. His team-mates called him “God,” and soon the whole campus was doing it. The team’s black running back, Calvin Hill, was hardly less celebrated—he would go on to a famous professional career...
Oft-reclusive cartoonist Garry Trudeau is treating himself to a well-deserved victory lap, making the rounds in conjunction with the publication of 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective and Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau by Brian Walker, the son of “Beetle Bailey’’ creator Mort Walker. It’s impossible not to admire Trudeau, who is often dismissed as a left-wing firebrand. I’ve always thought he was an equal-opportunity balloon-popper. Anybody who figured out that John Kerry was a narcissistic blowhard as a Yale undergraduate is someone who sees the world through a wide-angle lens, taking in all azimuths of social and political tomfoolery.
There are various legends and half-truths surrounding the “real’’ identities of many of the bedrock “Doonesbury’’ characters..
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...