Doonesbury doesn’t carry the same cachet as it did in its heyday, but it’s popular with the readers of this newsletter, as evidenced by the number who click on the link I post to the previous Sunday’s cartoon.
So imagine my delight at last week’s book review in The New York Times on a new biography on its creator, Garry Trudeau, along with an accompanying interview with the reclusive cartoonist.
Wrote The Times reviewer:
It’s hard to overstate the impact “Doonesbury” had in the 1970s. Trudeau dragged a knowing hippie sensibility, and the tone of a wised-up opinion section, onto the playground of the comics pages, right alongside “Beetle Bailey” and “The Family Circus.” There was nothing else like it. By the middle of the decade, the strip was running in some 450 newspapers, with a total of 60 million readers. His first “Doonesbury” anthology sold 600,000 copies.
Doonesbury is rich with memorable characters, some fictional, some real life. My favorite from back in the day was Phred, the Vietcong fighter. Uncle Duke, modeled after Hunter S. Thompson, is an especially good one, too.
Journalist Nicholas von Hoffman once referred to Trudeau as “an investigative cartoonist.” When I asked Tom Toles for his thoughts on Trudeau, he referenced the strip’s take on cigarette companies in writing:
Arguably the most significant issue Trudeau took on was Big Tobacco. They pioneered the disgusting misinformation campaigns that have so plagued and eviscerated contemporary civic discourse. He was right to shine his bright light here.
With all this said, here’s Trudeau’s latest offering.
