David Sepulveda Photos
After several hours of signing the new book Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau by Brian Walker and additional copies of his own book 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective at Yale Bookstore Wednesday, cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau made the short trek to the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall at the Yale University Art Gallery to give a lecture. Before beginning, Trudeau was introduced to a packed auditorium by Dean Robert Storr of the Yale School of Art. Noting that Trudeau was the first cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon strip, Storr said Trudeau’s work has “tracked the vicissitudes of a generation” in a journey that began when Trudeau was a student at Yale in the early ‘70s.
Storr touched upon the mileu of the returning soldier during those years: “Soldiers that came back from the Vietnam war were demonized … but they were not responsible for the political calculations of those designing wars.”
It was such an understanding and sensitivity to the plight of soldiers and all those touched by the machinations of war that have informed much of the work of the enduring comic strip artist. Readers familiar with the Doonesbury strip know that it is not of the “ha-ha” variety, said Dean Storr, but full of the “bitter-sweet understandings that reflected critically what was [is] really going on.”
Trudeau’s first cartoon strip, “Bull Tales,” was for the Yale Daily News, debuting “B.D.,” a character named for Trudeau contemporary and Yale football star, Brian Dowling. Only six weeks into the strip, Trudeau was approached with an offer for syndication and a job that would alter his career path and create a unique forum within the comic strip pages of newspapers nationwide. Trudeau had had aspirations of becoming a graphic designer and had a design business for a few years located just off the Yale campus.
The Doonesbury strip syndicated on Oct. 26, 1970. It took its name in part from Trudeau’s “clueless” roommate, Charles Pillsbury, to create the character of Mike Doonesbury. The strip would feature characters Mike, B.D., Zonker, Mark and Joanie, and many others over the strip’s 40-year tenure. His future employers, said Trudeau, “were not interested in my skill set or virtuosity. They were interested in my point of view and generational identity was the background for everything.”
Referring to his meteoric transition from student to paid professional, Trudeau quipped, “It was ridiculous — this story nauseates my kids,” presently students on career paths of their own.
Trudeau said that as a 22-year-old peace activist, he did not see protesting as being inconsistent with patriotism. His mindset was that of “wanting everyone to get along.” His cartoon strip has never had an anti-military bent and “was never written at the expense of the troops.” Although Trudeau satirized the farcical aspects of America’s wars, such as the invasion on Grenada that netted servicemen more medals than landed on the island (with a ratio of 30 American medals awarded for every Cuban enemy combatant), or the Americans’ attack on Libya’s Tripoli, where one forth of the ordnance that reined down malfunctioned, his work was for the most part viewed as beneficial by military brass and widely embraced by the rank and file. President Reagan’s military policies proved irresistible fodder in Trudeau’s 1984 off-Broadway musical Rap Master Ronnie. “I love working in political Vaudeville,” said Trudeau, before showing a video clip to the audience on hand, explaining that unlike the ephemeral printed word, lyrics tend to gain power over time.
Throughout his lecture, Trudeau drew laughter by way of his pointed wit and charming anecdotes. He also discussed many of the serious issues that inspired story lines related to war and its consequences. During visits to military hospitals, including Landstuhl, Walter Reed, Brooke, and many VA centers, Trudeau had the opportunity to hear stories from the war’s wounded as well as from the dedicated “can-do” culture of nurses and physicians whose job it is to restore bodies, minds and spirits. Post-traumatic stress (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and military sexual trauma (MST), also known as “command rape,” have all been topics visited in the panels of his cartoon strips, drawn from real-life accounts of soldiers that have been given voice through his characters.
“I don’t write soap operas,” said Trudeau. “I’m writing satire.”
And so it is that even through the most dire and graphic story threads, the cartoonist maintains an ethic of satire, irony, and humor in all its manifestations.
Among those attending the event was New Haven resident George Corsillo, who was the designer of Trudeau’s retrospective book. Corsillo has worked as Trudeau’s graphic designer for 24 years and began his long association by designing a Doonsebury Desk Diary in the 1980’s. Since then, the pair has collaborated in designing posters, T‑shirts, book jackets, a “1991 Doonsebury Stamp Album”, a line of Doonesbury products for “Friends of Museum Park” (at the Museum of Natural History), products for Doonsebury at Starbucks, which earned over $1 million in literacy funds across the country. Corsillo has just finished designing two books mentioned above and the Doonsebury.com website. For the past ten years, Corsillo has colored all the Sunday Doonsebury comics and credits his charitable work for Starbucks with helping him create new ways of coloring the strip, using polarized photos in backgrounds, adding patterns to character’s clothing, and creating a more subtle “dirty” palette — much of it facilitated through the magic of Photoshop. Corsillo said that he and Trudeau work well together because “we think alike and Garry trusts me implicitly. Above all, we have fun, which always makes for good design.”
After the lecture, the public was invited to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for a reception and exhibition of “Doonesbury In Time of War” It was an opportunity to see many of Trudeau’s formative original strips; they will be on view until Dec. 17th. In the handsome gallery pamphlet for the show, Louise Bernard, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, writes: “Doonsebury stands, therefore, as a generational chronicle born out the counter-culture movements of the 1960’s, and its distinctive timelessness is at once an homage to an eagle-eyed commentary upon, the ever-shifting zeitgeist of which it is resolutely a part.”
Throughout the reception, Mr. Trudeau was on hand to graciously speak with fans, sign a host of paper items thrust before him, pose for photographs, and reflect on a lifetime of accomplishment that began not so far from where he stood.