Fitz interviews Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau

I had the pleasure to interview one of my heroes, a Tucson Festival of Books Crowd Cast Guest, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, digitally on the rounds promoting “Dbury@50: The Complete Digital Doonesbury.” I was cool. I didn’t gush. I should have asked him about his middle name, Beekman, but instead we talked about cartooning.

The Star is publishing Doonesbury on Sundays on the Opinion page.

Here’s our conversation:

When cartoonists Gary Larson (The Far Side) and Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) quit after 10 years I understood their exhaustion. You took a sabbatical years ago. Do you have hills, valleys or rhythms you see when you look back on the body of your work?

Not that I’ve really noticed (although readers may have). Larson quit because of burnout, and Watterson started worrying about repeating himself, and those are very different creative concerns from mine. My motivation for a break was the desire to work in other arenas, and a weekly deadline was preventing that. And remember, my job requires me to watch the passing human parade in a general sense — I don’t need a jolting turn of events to get me going.

As the liberal son of a military family, I found your realistic, empathetic depiction of military life profound, essential and revolutionary. What moved you so to devote your pen to such an effort?

That’s a very long story, but the synopsis is this: My early strips about Vietnam were so uninformed by either research or lived experience that it earned me an invitation to the Gulf War from a colonel who had read them while serving there. It was an extraordinary opportunity and a profound learning experience.

The friends I made in Kuwait during that period in turn invited me to Walter Reed after B.D. lost his leg — again, in the hope it might be better if I got it right. So I had a lot of help. The hard part was making it funny, an inviolable part of my pact with readers.

We both skewered Sen. John McCain yet ended up in a mutually respectful relationship with the man. Did you meet him?

I did. McCain actually censured me on the floor of the Senate for a strip I did about his friend Bob Dole, but after an exchange of letters, he cooled off. By the time we met on the campaign trail in 2000, we had, as you say, developed a mutually respectful relationship. He later wrote an introduction to one of my wounded-warrior books. There was much to admire about the senator, and like you, I miss his presence on the national stage.

Exhausted by Trump. I feel obligated to my republic to soldier on until his influence fades. You, too?

Absolutely. Trump is gone, for now, but Trumpism not only survives, it seems to be metastasizing in the GOP. And its mutant offspring, QAnon, is also still an active infection that bears watching. Our greatest hope lies in Biden remaining above the fray, competent and boring, until the fever breaks. Forgive the sustained analogy to disease, it’s kind of in the air.

With 24 fully formed complex fictional humans in your head, and then some, do you ever worry about your sanity?

My characters are only in my head when it’s time to work, when summoned. Otherwise, I never think about them. That probably sounds too compartmentalized to be credible, but writing is hard; I never do it by accident.

I am delighted the Star is publishing you again. Thinking of sitcom-writing friends (a very poor comparison) who are completely fried after a year — how do you keep your fire stoked and lit?

Deadlines help, a lot. I work best when I run out of other options. Even writing for TV, where the stakes are much higher, I was sometimes only a few scenes ahead of the actors. As for staying engaged generally, I have one rule. Only write about what I’m interested in. I’m still very curious about the world, and when I discover something new, I want to share it. If I’m bored, it’s guaranteed to show. That’s why there are so few repeating set pieces in Doonesbury.

I read an interview with the late savage and brilliant Paul Conrad by Mr. Fish. Conrad came across as surprisingly bitter, pained his cartoons did not change the world. I soothe my fretting over such thoughts with philanthropy. What do you think? Is what we do meaningful and do you have evidence? (Insert smiling emoticon here)

I once had dinner with the columnist Mary McGrory, and she confessed she couldn’t think of a single piece she’d written over many decades that had actually changed anything. I imagine that’s generally true of cartoonists as well, that affecting social change is largely aspirational. But perhaps that’s looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps contributing to the public conversation — and entertaining people in the process — is a meaningful end in itself. Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted does have real social usefulness, even if it doesn’t affect real-world outcomes.

Are we outdated, circling the drain?

Well, I guess the dwindling numbers speak for themselves. And it really doesn’t matter how much value editors place on the contributions of their cartoonists if the newspapers themselves stop being viable. You and I are lucky — we’re legacy acts who get to turn out the lights as we retire. I tell talented young artists to head for Pixar or switch to graphic novels. Every art form has its day, and ours is almost over. But like stained glass windows, we had a pretty good run.