New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
”Doonesbury” has a centerfold, and it’s not Boopsie.
If you pick up the latest collection of comic strips by Garry Trudeau, you will be impressed by its heft — at nearly 11 pounds, it is not the floppy little compilation that fits neatly atop the toilet tank. The new 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Andrews McMeel, $100) gives this venerable comic the luxe treatment. Not just a coffee-table book, it could come with legs and be a coffee table.
Even so, the work here comprises just 13 percent of the 14,000 strips Trudeau has made in the last 40 years. Let that roll around in your head for a while: it’s been 40 years — 10 years longer than a standard mortgage, and rarely subprime.
Trudeau’s creation, which started as a jokey commentary on campus life at Yale, has evolved into a sprawling masterwork with a cast of characters big enough to make Tolstoy wonder if he was trying hard enough.
Which brings us to that centerfold. Four pages wide, it displays a chart that purports to make sense of all the major relationships in the strip, linking characters via lines and symbols, with all the clarity of the Tokyo subway map.
It didn’t start out that way, of course. The early strips orbited around B. D. — a football-playing student based on the Yale celebrity quarterback Brian Dowling — and his roommate, Mike Doonesbury, a weenie at large. The story and its roster of players grew as the outside world leaked in: Vietnam; gullible, shallow newsmen; and, of course, Richard M. Nixon, whose panel-by-panel demolition helped earn Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. (“Doonesbury” was, for kids like me, what “The Daily Show” is today for a lot of young viewers: a smart take on the news by somebody standing in as your hip older cousin.)
The characters didn’t age, but the strip did, and Trudeau took it offline in 1982 to regroup. When he revived it nearly two years later, his settings spread out to the rest of the country, and by the late 1980s, the comic had 40 recurring characters. As Trudeau writes, the second wave experienced more than a little “midlife sprawl.” But he juiced things up with the lives of a new generation, including Mike Doonesbury’s brilliant and neurotic daughter, Alex, and Jeff Redfern, who fecklessly winds up with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and, failing upward, recreates himself as the mythical Red Rascal. (“FREEDOM is my mistress!”)
The comic remains amusing, and most of us would still check in now and then if that were all Trudeau offered. But in 2004, he served up a stunner: B. D., who had returned to active military service and headed to Iraq, was gravely wounded. In the April 21 strip, B. D. is stretched diagonally across the frame, his head to the upper right corner, where the eye usually goes first. What many readers initially noticed, with shock, was that B. D. had his helmet off for the first time in over 30 years. Mystery revealed! Good hair — he wasn’t hiding a bald dome!
That’s when we took in the rest of the frame and saw that B. D.’s left leg was gone at the knee.
For many fans, it was like finding out that a buddy from high school we’d fallen out of touch with had suffered a personal tragedy. The subsequent strips, informed by cooperation from military sources, constitute a moving recovery narrative. But even more important, they show the pain and confusion that arise from war.
Remarkably, this stuff is still funny. There are laughs through the tears, and Trudeau continues to find time to taunt George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and, as it happens, himself. He scatters longer profiles of the major characters throughout the book, in which we learn that J. J., Mike Doonesbury’s ex-wife and a deeply annoying, narcissistic artist, is, Trudeau confesses, something of a stand-in for him — or at least for someone dealing with the “improbable success” that he seems mildly amused at having survived. Unlike J. J., he writes, he “waited anxiously for the jig to be up” and made Paul Simon’s “Fakin’ It” a personal soundtrack.
After 40 pretty amazing years, it’s safe to say he can find a new song.
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
If you pick up the latest collection of comic strips by Garry Trudeau, you will be impressed by its heft — at nearly 11 pounds, it is not the floppy little compilation that fits neatly atop the toilet tank. The new 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Andrews McMeel, $100) gives this venerable comic the luxe treatment. Not just a coffee-table book, it could come with legs and be a coffee table.
Even so, the work here comprises just 13 percent of the 14,000 strips Trudeau has made in the last 40 years. Let that roll around in your head for a while: it’s been 40 years — 10 years longer than a standard mortgage, and rarely subprime.
Trudeau’s creation, which started as a jokey commentary on campus life at Yale, has evolved into a sprawling masterwork with a cast of characters big enough to make Tolstoy wonder if he was trying hard enough.
Which brings us to that centerfold. Four pages wide, it displays a chart that purports to make sense of all the major relationships in the strip, linking characters via lines and symbols, with all the clarity of the Tokyo subway map.
It didn’t start out that way, of course. The early strips orbited around B. D. — a football-playing student based on the Yale celebrity quarterback Brian Dowling — and his roommate, Mike Doonesbury, a weenie at large. The story and its roster of players grew as the outside world leaked in: Vietnam; gullible, shallow newsmen; and, of course, Richard M. Nixon, whose panel-by-panel demolition helped earn Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. (“Doonesbury” was, for kids like me, what “The Daily Show” is today for a lot of young viewers: a smart take on the news by somebody standing in as your hip older cousin.)
The characters didn’t age, but the strip did, and Trudeau took it offline in 1982 to regroup. When he revived it nearly two years later, his settings spread out to the rest of the country, and by the late 1980s, the comic had 40 recurring characters. As Trudeau writes, the second wave experienced more than a little “midlife sprawl.” But he juiced things up with the lives of a new generation, including Mike Doonesbury’s brilliant and neurotic daughter, Alex, and Jeff Redfern, who fecklessly winds up with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and, failing upward, recreates himself as the mythical Red Rascal. (“FREEDOM is my mistress!”)
The comic remains amusing, and most of us would still check in now and then if that were all Trudeau offered. But in 2004, he served up a stunner: B. D., who had returned to active military service and headed to Iraq, was gravely wounded. In the April 21 strip, B. D. is stretched diagonally across the frame, his head to the upper right corner, where the eye usually goes first. What many readers initially noticed, with shock, was that B. D. had his helmet off for the first time in over 30 years. Mystery revealed! Good hair — he wasn’t hiding a bald dome!
That’s when we took in the rest of the frame and saw that B. D.’s left leg was gone at the knee.
For many fans, it was like finding out that a buddy from high school we’d fallen out of touch with had suffered a personal tragedy. The subsequent strips, informed by cooperation from military sources, constitute a moving recovery narrative. But even more important, they show the pain and confusion that arise from war.
Remarkably, this stuff is still funny. There are laughs through the tears, and Trudeau continues to find time to taunt George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and, as it happens, himself. He scatters longer profiles of the major characters throughout the book, in which we learn that J. J., Mike Doonesbury’s ex-wife and a deeply annoying, narcissistic artist, is, Trudeau confesses, something of a stand-in for him — or at least for someone dealing with the “improbable success” that he seems mildly amused at having survived. Unlike J. J., he writes, he “waited anxiously for the jig to be up” and made Paul Simon’s “Fakin’ It” a personal soundtrack.
After 40 pretty amazing years, it’s safe to say he can find a new song.
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