‘Doonesbury’ still feisty after 35 years

updated 8:31 p.m. ET Nov. 17, 2005

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Not long after the dust settled from the Iraqi explosion that took “Doonesbury” comic strip character B.D.’s left leg last year, the Pentagon was on the phone.

The frequent target of “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, the Defense Department offered the satirist extensive access to soldiers wounded while fighting in Iraq and the doctors and caregivers trying to put their bodies — and psyches — back together.

“There are so many ways to get it wrong,” Trudeau said of portraying the soldiers’ struggles accurately during a recent meeting of the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. “They figured, correctly, I could use all the help I could get.”

It also spoke to the fact that “Doonesbury,” an often funny, sometimes frustrating and frequently controversial comic strip born in syndication 35 years ago, is still considered weighty enough to get the government’s attention.

Over the years, the strip — born out of a cartoon that Yale graduate Trudeau, 57, wrote for the college paper — has used humor and biting commentary to address a broad sweep of society, from race relations and AIDS to same-sex marriage and stem cells.

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His huge cast of characters have aged along the way: Mike Doonesbury, the strip’s lead character, has gone from idealistic college student to befuddled dad of a college-age daughter; Zonker Harris, the former professional tanner is now a nanny; Uncle Duke, the Hunter S. Thompsonesque mercenary, ran for the presidency in 2000 and, until recently, was serving as mayor of the fictional Iraqi city of Al-Amok.

But he’s always come back to raw politics, taking a page of Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” which pioneered the use of poking fun at politicians on the funny pages. Most recently, he has relentlessly hammered the war and President Bush, who’s depicted as an asterisk wearing an increasingly battered Roman helmet.

“Well, it’s a humor strip, so my first responsibility has always been to entertain the reader,” Trudeau said in response to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. “But if, in addition, I can help move readers to thought and judgment about issues that concern me, so much the better.”

Controversy continues
Many times, those efforts have gotten him in trouble with newspaper editors who have pulled or edited his strips because of salty language, uncomfortable images or controversial subjects.

Last fall, 20 newspapers objected to a strip that had Vice President Dick Cheney using a profanity as he remotely coached President Bush through a press conference. The strip married two real-life controversies — a similar profanity Cheney said to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor and rumors denied by the White House that a mysterious bulge under the president’s suit jacket was an audio receiver, designed to help him through a debate.

His strips have also attracted the ire of his subjects, who claim he’s unfair and trying to score political points for liberals.

In 1984, a week of “Doonesbury” strips depicting Vice President Bush placing his “manhood in a blind trust” so he could serve in the Reagan White House led to this Bush retort: “Doonesbury’s carrying water for the opposition. Trudeau is coming out of deep left field.”

In a column last year criticizing the B.D. story line in “Doonesbury,” Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly said Trudeau was using “someone’s personal tragedy” to generate opposition to the war. He led off the column with an anecdote about Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels using images of fallen soldiers to encourage war against Poland.

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