Doonesbury Goes to War

In 1971, a year after he graduated from Yale, Garry Trudeau went on the game show To Tell the Truth. He had just launched a crudely drawn comic strip called "Doonesbury," but nobody knew who he was: Only one celebrity panelist correctly guessed his identity. "I don't remember which one picked me," Trudeau says with a laugh. "Orson Bean?"

If Trudeau repeated his appearance today, even hard-core media junkies would still have trouble identifying him. His work appears in 700 newspapers worldwide, he was nominated for an Academy Award for a "Doonesbury" special, he is the only artist ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize for a comic strip, and he is married to Jane Pauley. But Trudeau gives so few interviews -- he's appeared on TV only once in the past three decades -- that he has earned a reputation as the J.D. Salinger of cartooning. The low profile is mainly an act of self-preservation: His daily strip generates so much controversy that putting out fires could consume all his time. "I didn't need to do it," he says with a shrug, "so why not save myself the aggravation?"

Breaking his long silence, Trudeau sat down with Rolling Stone in the modest studio in Manhattan where he creates "Doonesbury." Despite the flecks of gray in his hair, at fifty-six he has the easygoing, curious manner of a grad student still fascinated by the world around him. It's no exaggeration to say that Trudeau revolutionized the funny pages, creating a space where reactionaries and radicals alike squabble over the issues of the day. His style is part Charles Schulz, part Charles Dickens. Over the years his characters have grappled with everything from AIDS and abortion to Alzheimer's. But with the election of George W. Bush, who attended Yale with Trudeau back in the Sixties, "Doonesbury" has taken on an urgency and relevance reminiscent of its early, gleeful assaults on Nixon. Trudeau offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could verify that Bush fulfilled his duties in the Air National Guard, and he brought home the reality of the war by having his character B.D. lose a leg while fighting in Iraq. For the first time, Trudeau also drew B.D. without the helmet he has worn since the days when he enlisted in Vietnam to get out of writing a college term paper.

You're focusing a lot on the war in Iraq. I've noticed that your military characters, like B.D. and Ray, sound like real soldiers. Have you been talking to the troops for research?

Yeah. During the first Gulf War, I'd meet them because they contacted me. This war is a lot easier, because it's an e-mail war. I hear from soldiers who are actually in the field. That changes all the rules of the game. They can't censor soldiers with laptops -- it's literally impossible. It's a way for somebody like me, sitting in this office, to get a view of what soldiers are experiencing.