Had someone told me that I'd attend an event featuring a liberal cartoonist and a retired brigadier general who was the recent head psychiatrist in the Army, I'd have said, "No way!" But that's what happened the other night as I attended a get-together with Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame and Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton as they talked about a project they're working on called Homeward Bound Adirondacks, which is designed for veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan...

doesn’t think news outlets spent enough time covering Mitt Romney’s prep-school past in the wake of The Post’s article last week about the presidential candidate’s adolescent “pranks.”

“The media dropped the story too quickly,” Trudeau tells Comic Riffs.

So in his Pulitzer-winning comic “Doonesbury,” Trudeau himself has decided to pick the story back up again. Next week’s strips will satirize Romney’s current recollections of his teen years — specifically his part in pinning down a schoolmate and cutting the boy’s hair...

Speaking Thursday at the Library of Congress, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau highlighted an intriguing dynamic of satire: The more the intended target reacts, he said, the more its practitioner gains the advantage. If the victim flinches or returns fire at a cartoon, the illustration only gains in power.

If you consider that cause-and-effect, then three editorial cartoonists around the map — in Syria, India and Iran — are presently among the most powerful practitioners in the world.

And this week, news involving that trio reminds just how perilous the act of satire can be in some countries...

On Thursday night at the Library of Congress, political satirists Garry Trudeau and Matt Bors each offered just the solution for navigating the current perilous shoals of their chosen profession. As in “The Graduate,” advice boiled down to one word — just one word:

Time-travel.

Sci-fi was deftly mined for such prime humor at the Herblock Prize ceremony, in fact, you’d have thought the two featured cartoonists had been chaffeured to the event in Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

Bors, the night’s prize-winner, joked that as a political cartoonist lacking a staff job, the best way to get a newspaper to hire the 28-year-old would be for him to leap into a time machine and dial it backward...

Before every show, Stephen visits the green room and tells that evening's guest the same thing: "My character's an idiot. Your job is to set him straight."

Easier said than done, especially since the first part's a lie. Stephen's character may ask idiotic questions, but they're so unexpected and diabolically entangling that watching his guests fight their way toward daylight is unalloyed pleasure...

Dissed again.

This time, it’s cartoonist Garry Trudeau knocking the Huffington Post for paying writers in “exposure.”

Trudeau is in good company: The Huffington Post has been dissed by the best, from Chris Hedges to Stephen Colbert. The first editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize, the Doonesbury creator was just named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine...

In March 2012 the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, together with an Honorary Committee of alumni, selected “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” The list was selected from more than 300 nominees plus write-ins and was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012...

We offer this as a disclaimer for content that will be appearing throughout the coming week on our Opinion Page.

You may have caught wind of a controversial series of cartoons from "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau. The issue was a series of cartoons focusing on a Texas law requiring ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

You can't get much more hot-button than this, especially in the wake of issues like Rush Limbaugh's on-air insults directed at a woman, health-care insurance provision of birth control, the fact that it's Women's History Month and the fact that it's a presidential election year.

For those of you who have spent the whole of the last week in your local theater watching and rewatching John Carter and so have missed the news cycles, what that scamp Trudeau did this time was to use the platform his strip affords him as a venue for bleak humor about the indignities forced by Texas poobahs – those are male poobahs – on women seeking abortion. Trudeau wasn’t attacking the right-to-lifers per se, but only an unnecessary and humiliating “medical” procedure done down where the stars at night are big and bright...

A number of readers (more than a dozen) wrote or called to express disappointment or anger that The Post-Standard chose not to run a couple of #8220;Doonesbury” comic strips by Garry Trudeau last week. Some readers were very thoughtful, some simply called us names...