With ‘Doonesbury,’ Garry Trudeau Found a Way to Inform and Entertain a Generation of Newspaper Readers, One Panel at a Time

A new biography chronicles the history and evolution of the reserved artist who has always let his pen do the talking

Brandon Tensley

April/May 2026

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It's a bit difficult today to imagine a comic strip wielding serious political power. But Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” which ran daily from 1970 to 2014, got famous by helping millions of Americans make sense of the radical shifts in their country. So immense was Doonesbury’s influence that President Gerald Ford quipped in 1975, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media and ‘Doonesbury’—not necessarily in that order.”

Trudeau has long managed to stay out of the public eye. In Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art, the first major biography of the artist, journalist Joshua Kendall offers a definitive and inviting account of Trudeau’s career, based on archives and interviews—including with politicians who were on the receiving end of his barbs.

Kendall takes us from Saranac Lake, the village in the Adirondack Mountains where Trudeau, as a precocious elementary schooler, exactingly directed plays in his family’s home (“I was a little dictator,” he jokes), to Yale University. There, as an undergraduate, around 1970, Trudeau first confronted war, as the Vietnam draft lottery loomed over him and his classmates. A scarred upper digestive tract saved Trudeau from being conscripted.

The social environment wasn’t the only thing that was changing; Trudeau was, too. He started drawing a strip called “Bull Tales,” first published in the Yale Daily News on September 30, 1968, which contained the seeds of “Doonesbury.” In those early days, Trudeau was, per his editor at the Yale Daily News, “a classic male chauvinist pig.” That changed when he fell for Annie Hurlbut, one of the first women to enroll as a Yale undergraduate, in 1969. At first she described his work as a “sexist piece of crap.” Yet the two dated, and Trudeau’s time with Hurlbut made him a lifelong feminist. “Doonesbury” debuted in 28 newspapers in 1970, and Trudeau created bold women characters such as Joanie Caucus, introduced in 1972, who embodied a new liberation. 

By the new century, “Doonesbury” was appearing in around 1,400 newspapers. Trudeau also made innovations in more recent years, creating the Amazon sitcom Alpha House (2013-14), starring John Goodman. “Goodman calls me the script Nazi,” Trudeau told the New Yorker in 2014, “which means I protect every period and comma.” The “little dictator” was still at work. 

Trudeau drew in readers “by focusing on the often bizarre and confusing daily life faced by baby boomers,” Kendall writes. And unlike the artist’s role model Charles Schulz, the “Peanuts” creator, whose “terrain is our often painful inner life,” Kendall notes, “Trudeau’s is the absurd external reality that envelops us.” 

Editors' note, April 16, 2026: This article has been updated to reflect the correct date that the strip in the lead illustration originally appeared.

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Brandon Tensley is a national political writer at CNN, where he covers culture and politics. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Time and the Washington Post.