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Garry Trudeau | page 1, 2, 3

Garretson Beekman Trudeau starting drawing "Doonesbury" while he was a student at Yale in the late-'60s. The strip evolved from an earlier comic he drew for the Yale Daily News called "Bull Tales," which gently but piquantly satirized campus life through the prism of a cast of college characters, primarily a football jock named B.D., who was based on Brian Dowling, the Yale -- and later professional -- gridiron hero. "Bull Tales" caught the eye of an entrepreneur who wanted to start a comics distribution outfit, and who convinced the 20-year-old Trudeau to sign on, thus launching the Universal Press Syndicate, which continues to handle "Doonesbury" along with strips like the afore-scorned "Garfield" and "Cathy." Trudeau got the title of his new strip by combining the word "doone" -- which today would translate as "dweeb" -- with the name of his roommate, Charles Pillsbury. It's also the name of the strip's putative central character, Michael Doonesbury, who back then was a nebbish who could never get a girl, and who now is a divorced dad and head of an Internet start-up that has just had an IPO.

Like George Bush Sr., who also attended Yale and whom Trudeau has savaged with special relish, the cartoonist is well-pedigreed, with ancestors who landed in the colonies in the 17th century. His father is a doctor, as was his grandfather and great-grandfather. Other relatives include former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a treasurer of the United States under Lincoln and the financier after whom New York's Beekman Place was named. Garry grew up wealthy in the upstate New York town of Saranac Lake, attended St. Paul's boarding school, then Yale. In 1980, while he was still living in New Haven, Conn., he married TV personality Jane Pauley, and they're now raising three teenagers on Manhattan's Central Park West. The family is serious about privacy -- Trudeau has submitted to only two major print interviews in the past 20 years, although he delivers an occasional speech.

"Doonesbury" premiered on Oct. 26, 1970, united around a group of misfits, including B.D., Michael and Zonker, who attended fictional Walden College and lived together in a commune, making wry observations about their personal lives and world events. Trudeau thus became a member of an elite tradition of humorists who have constructed well-defined communities from which to aim their satire. His primary influences are two late comic-strip legends: Walt Kelly, whose brilliantly drawn Okefenokee Swamp critters in "Pogo" waxed on about the vagaries of life while occasionally being visited by real-life politicians in animal guise, and Al Capp, who relished deflating the rich and powerful from hillbilly Dogpatch in "Li'l Abner." Also in this place-based camp are radio's Garrison Keillor, who lampoons society from Lake Wobegon on "A Prairie Home Companion," and perhaps Trudeau's greatest progeny -- Matt Groening, whose "The Simpsons" and its cast of characters did for TV what "Doonesbury" did for the comics page.

But while "Doonesbury" has unquestionably earned its way into the canon of great comic strips, it's through no thanks to Trudeau's drawing skills. He's the first person to denigrate his own draftsmanship, and indeed, his characters are simply drawn, distinguished from one another by hair, nose and head shape variation alone. If Trudeau had come along in the golden age of strips when people like Elzie Segar ("Popeye"), George Herriman ("Krazy Kat") and Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo in Slumberland") ruled the comics pages, he would have been laughed out of the newsroom. Al Capp once said of Trudeau, "Anybody who can draw bad pictures of the White House four times in a row and succeed knows something I don't. His style defies all measurement."

Drawing strips consisting of four panels of the same static object, whether it be the White House or somebody watching TV, is a trick Trudeau learned from Jules Feiffer, another political cartoonist with lots to say, and it's effective. As the words tell the story, the artwork sets the scene, and a slight modification in the last panel's image, say, a change in facial expression, serves as a rim shot to the punch line -- badda-boom! But the static-image formula is only one option available to Trudeau, and the way he alternates it with strips featuring more varied panels gives rise to a kind of meta-rhythm for "Doonesbury" over the weeks and months.

But Trudeau's major contribution to the genre is of the content kind. He was the first -- and is still one of the only -- strip artists to pick real people and real current events as the targets of his humor. This was nothing new to editorial cartoonists, of course, but they didn't have the luxury of being storytellers. Trudeau could creep up on his targets and then destroy them like a great stand-up comic. Ah, but if only Lenny Bruce had had an audience of millions every day.

Trudeau is dangerous -- arguably the most powerful voice for truth and justice in American journalism -- and he's hilarious. Steve Benson, widely syndicated editorial cartoonist for the Arizona Republic and president of the Association of Editorial Cartoonists, calls Trudeau a "demigod." "He takes on all comers. He's like a junkyard dog -- he just doesn't let go. But he mixes up his punches. Sometimes he can work like a skilled surgeon. Sometimes he can be like a chainsaw. And I think he's at the top of his game."

Trudeau had the luck to introduce "Doonesbury" in a defining moment of postwar America, when a youth counterculture preaching equality, fraternity and love was hitting the streets and trying to take back a country deemed hijacked by war-making white men driven by greed and indifference to human life -- Richard Nixon, of course, being the epitome. But if all Trudeau had to offer was anti-war propaganda, "Doonesbury" never would have succeeded. He was as apt to make fun of his campus radical exemplar, Mark Slackmeyer, as to give him a platform, and the same could be said for all his characters. With the possible exception of B.D. and his bimbo wife, Boopsie, who are reactionary comic foils, each member of the "Doonesbury" crew is as multidimensional and fully realized as humans can be in a comic strip. They've earned their characterizations over 29 years. And each has evolved, in synch with Trudeau's finely tuned radar for the themes that have defined the American landscape.

Next page | Leading Mike further and further down the sellout trail