Garry Trudeau's Iconic Comic Strip ‘Doonesbury’ Turns 50 Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply. Close

Doonesbury Turns 50 Garry Trudeau Reflects on the Iconic Comic Strip

Cartoonist gives his take on success boomers and political satire

Garry Trudeau, 72, launched ‘Doonesbury’ as a syndicated comic strip 50 years ago. Andrew Hetherington Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. The high likelihood of feeling entitled. All the bad stuff flows from that. I was lucky enough to meet someone [] who was also experiencing early attention. That's a huge thing we have in common. There were a few other things as well, so we got married. And we've tried to keep each other grateful and grounded. When our daughter was young, she decided her mother wasn't actively leveraging her status and accused her of being a “bad celebrity.” She was right.

Doonesbury began as dispatches from the front lines of the generational divide but it evolved into something far more complex What was the key turning point for you

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This month you release a package called DBury@50 which will contain all 50 years of the strip Who influenced you the most

Jules Feiffer, whom I discovered first as a playwright, only later as a cartoonist. His was the first strip I ever saw that was about ideas, not punch lines. Robert Altman also had a profound effect on me. Especially his insight that people don't really listen carefully to one another. In real life, most conversation collides, overlaps and trails off, with none of the clean back-and-forth of scripted dialogue. And none of the jokes. Altman understood that the richest humor comes from people just being themselves. AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe was a hippie fantasy about a Vietcong fighter and a GI grunt learning what they had in common. My stories couldn't have been less grounded in reality, and yet the strip ran in Stars and Stripes, which signaled to the troops that at least someone was thinking about them. That earned me enough goodwill that, later, an Army colonel who'd served in Vietnam asked me to embed with his troops in Kuwait following Operation Desert Storm. The relationships I formed there proved invaluable when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. After [my character] B.D. lost his leg in Fallujah, the Department of Defense invited me to talk to amputees at Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center]. I strongly opposed the war itself. Fortunately, the military seemed mostly unfazed by that. I even found myself signing books inside the Pentagon. The last time I'd been there was to protest the Vietnam War.

If you were a Doonesbury character how would you portray yourself

As a left-of-center moderate with a steady job, a stable family and a normal nose. I'd be the most boring character in the entire strip and I'd be cut within a few weeks.

Has the strip gotten easier as you ve aged

As hard as it's ever been. There's nothing I'd rather be doing, but it's still work. And I never think about it when I'm not doing it.

Any thought about when the strip will end

To be honest, I've been so preoccupied with my 50th year in the business that I haven't given any thought to my 51st. We'll just have to see. The continuing collapse of the newspaper industry may make the decision for me.

What is the legacy of Doonesbury

I'm not sure it's healthy for anyone to dwell on legacy. There's no danger of my writing a memoir. But I will say that I have made comics safe for bad drawing. Without “Doonesbury,” there's no “Cathy,” “Bloom County” or “Dilbert.” Nobody's ever thanked me for lowering the bar and democratizing comics, but it may be my greatest contribution. More on entertainment AARP NEWSLETTERS %{ newsLetterPromoText }% %{ description }% Subscribe AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS