Doonesbury, the brilliant comic strip by Garry Trudeau, and Andrews McMeel Universal, parent company of Andrews McMeel Publishing, have a shared history. In 1970, Trudeau was a Yale student drawing a sports comic strip called Bull Tales for the Yale Daily News. Jim Andrews and John McMeel had just started the Universal Press Syndicate and were looking for comic strips to distribute to newspapers. Andrews read Bull Tales, encouraged Trudeau to create a new national strip, and the rest is comic strip and book history.
To celebrate, today Andrews McMeel Publishing is publishing 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective--exactly 40 years to the day since B.D. and Mike Doonesbury met as college roommates in the very first Doonesbury strip.
The book is "especially important to us because it's about our history and how we started," Kirsty Melville, president of the book division of Andrews McMeel Publishing, said. She called Trudeau "one of the most insightful and best observers" of the country's history for the past 40 years, going back to the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency. "Doonesbury is a satirical analysis and commentary on American political life. His contribution to American life validates what our company is all about."
Rather than offering just a chronological history of the strip, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective celebrates and tells the stories of the characters who have starred in the 14,000 Doonesbury strips published during the past four decades. In a four-page center foldout, Trudeau offers what he calls a "clarifying, if vertiginous," annotated chart of the more than 60 characters--from Zonker, Joanie, Ginny, Duke and Honey to newer characters like Zipper, Alex and Toggle. He charts relationships and notes status in Doonesbury ways (one symbol indicates that the character "lived on Walden Commune"; another shows "Married by Rev. Scot Sloan"). And in 18 essays interspersed throughout the book, Trudeau focuses on particular characters and groups of characters. Some 1,800 full strips are included in the book.
Amusingly, a minor character in Doonesbury mentioned in the book is "petroleum industry bigwig" Jim Andrews, whose Doonesbury wife is Kathy Andrews. (In real life, Kathleen Andrews, wife of the late Jim Andrews, is vice-chairman of Andrews McMeel Universal. At the family-owned publishing company, Hugh Andrews, Jim's son, is CEO and president, John McMeel is chairman and James Andrews, Hugh's brother, is v-p of licensing.)
In his introduction, Trudeau observes, "The matrix of relationships at the heart of Doonesbury yielded endless narrative possibilities. I didn't have to find a new twist on old themes as most legacy strips do--or rethread the needle every day like a gag cartoonist. I simply followed the characters into their quotidian lives, played out against a scrim of cultural and political context, and occasionally bumped them into that thicket of coincidence that only fictional characters must endure. Honey reencounters her old roommate J.J. on Donald Trump's yacht! Mike marries Kim, introduced twenty years earlier as a Vietnamese orphan! Alex and Toggle find each other on Facebook! Think of the odds! All storytellers stand on the shoulders of Dickens."
"The book is a celebration and portrait of the Doonesbury characters and shows the history of the last 40 years through their eyes," Melville said. "Doonesbury exemplifies the comic strip as a form of art. This is one of the greatest graphic novels one will ever see."
Trudeau, who over the years has avoided the limelight and let his characters speak for him, is doing a variety of media for this book. In the next few weeks, he will be interviewed by NPR Morning Edition host Renee Montagne, Charlie Rose, CBS News Sunday Morning, the Guardian, the BBC World Service and BBC Newsnight. He is the subject of the cover story for the October issue of the Atlantic, Vanity Fair is doing a one-page feature, and Rolling Stone will highlight him and the book.
There's another publicity peg: Yale University Press yesterday published Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau by Brian Walker, which is a scholarly review of Trudeau as an artist, tracing how Doonesbury has developed, how he works, what has influenced his style and discusses his non-Doonesbury work. Trudeau worked with the author and press and has supplied commentary. "We're working in tandem with Yale," Melville said.
Originally Andrews McMeel planned to do a first printing of 60,000 copies of the $100 book. "But as we went out and talked about the book, there was more demand and interest than we anticipated," Melville said. The first printing now stands at 100,000 copies.
Andrews McMeel has some experience with this kind of definitive comic tribute, befitting the genre's role as "a cornerstone of the company," as Melville has said. In 2003 it published The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson, a $150, two-volume book, and two years later it came out with The Complete Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Last year it published Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years, a $75 collection that marked the official 60th anniversary of the beginning of the iconic strip. Collectively the books have sold more than a million copies.
The Doonesbury Legacy
"Humor and satire" are one of the biggest exports of intellectual property for the United States, and Doonesbury, with an estimated readership of 100 million around the world, is a prime example of this, Melville noted. Melville can personally attest to the long reach of Doonesbury: as a student in Australia in the 1970s, she read the strip regularly in the Guardian Weekly.
Trudeau calls himself a satirist rather than a humorist, writing, "A satirist who tries to be even-handed is more correctly called a humorist. Humorists tend to be cynical, whereas satirists are generally hopeful. We actually believe that society can do better."
Doonesbury also has a non-satirical, non-humorous side. Many strips in the last decade have dealt with the consequences of war on soldiers. As Melville said of Trudeau, "He feels very passionate about the veteran experience." Trudeau has been to Afghanistan and met with U.S. soldiers as well as with veterans who have returned home. "Maybe Doonesbury has been as successful as it is because it comes from the heart and provides an inspired perspective on the most relevant issues of our day," Melville said.