♪ ♪ GRAHAM: Good evening and welcome to "P&P Live."

I'm Brad Graham, the co-owner of "Politics and Prose", along with my wife, Lissa Muscatine.

We have a great program for you this evening, featuring Garry Trudeau and a special digital package marking the 50th anniversary of "Doonesbury."

It includes a USB flash drive with all 50 years of "Doonesbury" comics, including 26 years of Sunday comics available for the first time in digital format, along with a searchable calendar archive, character biographies and week-by-week descriptions of the strips' contents.

Also, there's a user guide with a 224-page wire-bound book that takes readers through each year of the strip with historical trivia, milestone strips, features story lines and characters and much more.

And finally, the set contains a commemorative 16-inch-by-20-inch poster featuring a grid with new sketches of all the strip's characters.

Now, in conversation with Garry here this evening will be David Stanford, who's a freelance editor who has worked with Garry on a number of projects for over 40 years.

STANFORD: Thank you, Brad.

Garry!

TRUDEAU: We spent our winter working on this project, and I still haven't laid eyes on you until now.

STANFORD: It's the first book I've ever been involved in in my decades where none of us ever saw each other.

TRUDEAU: Well, I'm in your debt.

As you know, you had to reread the entire 50-year run, which even I didn't do this time around, and we got it all crammed into that one itty-bitty flash drive and with a user manual, and anyway, it was a fun project, and I'm looking forward to discussing that 50-year run with you.

STANFORD: So the user handbook, which I'm just going to hold up like we're in a car, you got to get it out of the glove compartment, the challenge there was, we took four pages for each year, right, of 50 years, minus one sabbatical.

This is also, in addition to your 50th and the strip's 50th, which was October 26th, it's the 50th anniversary of the syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate started by Jim Andrews and John McMeel, two remarkable guys, 50 years ago in last February, right?

TRUDEAU: Right.

STANFORD: I think it was February 12th, something like that.

So I want to honor them because it's the butterfly wing thing because in my reading on this from knowing you and them all, is that the Syndicate and everything happened because they became friends.

They had a beer.

They liked each other, and they wanted to do something.

John was a Syndicate sales representative.

He knew the comic strip business, which was a different business then.

Jim was a former seminarian and editor, a scholar.

The two of them found their way to this idea of doing a syndicate and what liberated them to find you was that they didn't... Every other syndicate before that came out of "Chicago Tribune" and King Feature.

They were all newspaper businesses, and these are just two guys.

We're going to find... (overlapping chatter).

TRUDEAU: Yeah, two guys, and they gave themselves a very grand name, Universal Press Syndicate for two guys who actually were working out of a mail drop.

I mean, they had no office.

They were working at their old jobs, and they were just using a Fifth Avenue mail drop with this very fancy letterhead, and they tried to represent themselves as something very established.

Sounded like James Bond's cover, "Universal Press Syndicate", and I got a letter from them in my junior year.

I had been doing the strip, "Bull Tales," which was basically a sports strip.

It was a one-off, and I had tied the strip to the fortunes of a football player on our campus at the time who had never lost a game, so everyone was fascinated by him.

His name was Brian Dowling, and so I created this character BD and just began submitting the strips to my college paper.

After they had seen... After they had run maybe six or seven strips, I got a letter from Jim Andrews basically offering me my current job, so it's a ridiculous origin story.

My kids aren't fond of it.

It doesn't imply any kind of dues-paying, any kind of preparation.

It doesn't apply a journey with any foresight or intentionality.

It just happened to me, and when I graduated, I began the strip in October 26th, 1970.

So that was the beginning of it, and I found myself on a really big stage with very little preparation, very little of the skillset that one might normally associate with a comic strip, and we tried to turn that into a virtue.

John McMeel, when faced with these little scrawls that his partner Jim Andrews had put in front of him and said, "Go sell that," I think he decided that he would market it as dispatches from the front lines, that these were... That I was in the trenches with the counterculture, and that I was throwing out these pages, and he was running to the newspapers and saying, "Print this, this is a voice of that generation," and they were of course quite concerned.

They were losing young readers even back then.

So I think I got by on the sheer novelty of the strip.

You can't really.... You can't exaggerate the importance of novelty in jump-starting a career.

It gives you the momentum to move forward until you engage, until you figure out what you're actually doing and people were so surprised by this strip appearing in their paper that was about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll and politics and all the things that I'd been concerned about and was thinking about in college, that I got cut a lot of slack in terms...

I mean, it wasn't a very professional strip.

It really did look kind of sketchy and not ready for prime time, but I think just because people were so curious as to what I was up to, I found the space and the time to start to get it right.

STANFORD: Yeah, and as you said, Jim, like you said, you said something... how did Jim look at those six, eight strips and know to write me that letter?

Because he was actually looking... TRUDEAU: I don't know.

STANFORD: He was following Malcolm Boyd's theology column, and he just saw it across the page and thought, "Huh."

TRUDEAU: He was following a column by... Back in the '60s, there were activist clergy who were public figures, and Malcolm Boyd was one of them.

He was kind of a pop version of an activist clergyman, and he wrote a column for my paper, for the college newspaper, the "Yale Daily News," and Jim, who had a background in theology, as you pointed out, he was the editor of "The Catholic Reporter," thought, "Well, maybe that's a column that I should be looking at," so he subscribed, and then he accidentally came across my little football strips, and who knows how he thought he could turn that into something with real longevity because that's the only way that syndicates make any money off a comic strip is if it has legs, if it can go the distance.

He had no way of knowing whether I could meet a daily deadline.

Comic strips are like a public utility.

They're reliably there 365 days a year, and now people entering the field, those who are still entering it, usually have development deals, which you know something about.

You've worked on those for Universal, and it gives both the syndicate and the cartoonist an opportunity to see whether they're built for it, whether temperamentally they're suited to produce on deadline and create under pressure day in and day out.

It can be ruinous to family life and to, certain people are just, can produce that great first 6 weeks, and then after that they fall apart because of the lack of time to do what they do.

So it does take a certain personality.

There's no way that Jim could have known that I was suited for that sort of work.

I was just doing three, four strips a week for the paper, but he just took a chance on me.

STANFORD: And your own professional ambitions at that point were more in terms of design, weren't they?

Weren't they kind of... TRUDEAU: Yeah, I had my sights fixed on going to graduate school in graphic design and in fact did that, and the first 2 years or... not the first year but the second and third year of the strip, I was simultaneously in grad school, which you have to be in your early 20s to pull that off just because of the energy that required, but I got through that and set up a design studio with a photographer friend of mine in New Haven, and 2, 3 years into it, I began to see what an extraordinary opportunity the strip was becoming for me to write about things that might move a rather substantial audience to thought and judgment, and I thought maybe I should be focused on the one thing, and so I closed down the studio.

And, you know, I think I made the right decision, I'm not sure how promising I was... STANFORD: You're not sure?

TRUDEAU: As a graphic designer, although that training has been useful to me in other projects through the years.

STANFORD: Well, as consuming as that work can be because I think watching cartoonists work, it's like a huge yoke, like an oxen pulling the plow endlessly, endlessly.

It's brutal in some cases.

I know it's fun and satisfying, but people, I remember some editor I was interviewing at the syndicate once about their work, and they said, "People always come up to me, and they say, 'Oh, I could do a comic strip,'" and he goes, "No, you couldn't.

You couldn't.

You have no idea.

There's not like, 'I don't feel like doing it today.'"

TRUDEAU: Yeah, well, people... STANFORD: Much of your drama was about meeting those deadlines.

TRUDEAU: People have asked me through the years, "What do you do when you run out of ideas?"

And my answer is always the same.

I just thank them for not noticing.

Not submitting something isn't an option, so you just do it.

You just come up with something.

I think part of the reason that I've survived all these years is that I do have a pretty good.

You can second-guess this answer if you want, but I think I've got a pretty good ability to compartmentalize.

When I'm not actually working on the strip, I never think about it.

I'm just off into my life.

Whatever part of that life it may be, it's not the strip.

I don't scribble notes in my pocket, "Oh, that'll be funny, or that should go in the strip."

I know some cartoonists do.

They never quite get it out of their heads, but for me, it's just as hard as it's ever been.

It's just as difficult, challenging.

It's very much work.

I do cash the checks, but it's hard to think of anything that overall that could possibly have been more satisfying, and to which it turns out I was pretty well-suited.

STANFORD: And you've managed also to do other things.

You've written screenplays.

You've done TV shows.

You had the Broadway show.

You've been able, amazingly, to work other ways to express yourself around this core task that you've stayed at so loyally, I think remarkably so, you told me you were an impresario as a young man.

You had a theater company.

You did shows.

You wrote shows.

That was sort of where you came out of that, so to end up here, this was the map we did in the 40th.

TRUDEAU: Yeah.

STANFORD: This is, like, 78 characters with the lines showing how they're all connected in a million different ways, so... TRUDEAU: And it's not because I became bored with the earlier ones.

It's when I took that sabbatical and got married and had a family.

The other reason for doing that, and I'm now on my third generation, and if I keep at it there could be a fourth, but the other reason for doing that is that the strip refreshes itself when I bring new characters, and particularly young ones because young characters, young people are in the process of becoming who they will be.

If I say, "How would Mike Doonesbury, the oldest character, one of the foundational characters, how would he react to that situation?"

you could probably take a pretty good swing at that, but you don't know with the young character, especially as they're being born, and then I'm giving them their own voices and their own physical appearance, and that all happens very fast when they're young, and the decisions they make are so important to who they're going to become.

That's fun to track.

That's more fun to track than what people my age, I've lost interest in trying to chronicle the generation, particularly since the generation is so diverse in the first place.

I like writing the young characters.

Of course, the trick is making sure you get the voices right, but that's always the trick.

That's always the responsibility of any writer, is to put themselves in the shoes of people they are not.

Yes, there are well-known writers who stay in a very narrow lane and write about their immediate social milieu of people that they know cold, like Cheever and Updike used to.

They would write about their world, but most writers over the course of their career will say, "I want to use my imagination to try to understand something that I am not, that I really don't know anything about, and a world that I," so in the present moment where authenticity and identity are such extraordinary drivers of public conversation in the arts, it's a little disconcerting to hear that you have to own some.

In order to own something, you have to have lived it.

It has to have been a lived experience.

Think of the masterpieces that would have blocked from being created if people didn't go outside their own experience to try to imagine that of another human.

I couldn't write about women.

I couldn't write about children.

I'm no longer a child.

It would be so limiting.

I think the most exciting time for me in terms of trying to imagine the life experience of another was when that first great wave of feminism washed over us, and it was at the time that I created the character Joanie Caucus, who was based on a cousin of mine who had abandoned her family, basically.

They had been on a cross-country trip, and she and her husband got into a fierce argument, and she said, "Let me out," and usually those arguments end with the other person driving back and picking them up.

Well, he just kept going, and she got out and hitchhiked to Aspen and started a new life, and she had been a suburban mom with three kids and had lived that "The Diary of the Mad Housewife" experience, and so I was in Colorado at the time.

I just graduated from college, and I went and spent 3 days in a sleeping bag in her bare one-room apartment kind of debriefing her.

STANFORD: Yeah.

TRUDEAU: Said, "What could possibly, what could you have been thinking?

What is this about?

What's driving this?

How are you changing?

How is your world changing?

How are the genders changing in relation to one another?"

And from all those conversations, I went back, and I came up with the character Joanie Caucus.

"Caucus" is a reference to the national and political caucus, which I volunteered for and did a lot of work for in the '70s getting women into political office.

So I think that those experiences that changed me and that changed my outlook on things are the ones that land the most profoundly and that I, looking back on, that I value the most.

There's a strip where Joanie Caucus is, is with her daycare kids, and one of the little girls' mother has a baby sister, and Ellie comes in to report to Joanie, and Joanie says, "Well, what did she have?"

And Ellie says, "It's a woman.

It's a baby woman," and I remember where I was sitting when I wrote that because it was an epiphany for me.

It was a, "That's a good line, and that is going to push me into another whole realm that I welcome because I've been given this front seat at the revolution."

You know, I was going to these Women Caucus conventions where there'd be 300 women, and I'd be the only man in the room, and I was thinking, "Wow, everything is changing now.

This is a privilege to be here listening to these women work out what that brave new world could or should look like."

And so those are the experiences that I value most deeply, the ones that I can put into my art, but also maybe change myself in a direction that's good and positive and valuable.

STANFORD: That seemed to be the period where you really engaged with the Gulf Wars must have been that experience for you as well.

You just went.

You opened yourself up to it and went to talk to people to understand what soldiers were going through because when BD was wounded and... TRUDEAU: Right.

Well, fortunately I was invited, and the story behind that is, I wrote about Vietnam early on, and it was... Oh, David, you know those strips.

It's this hippie fantasia of the GI and the VC fighter finding out what they have in common, and, "Why can't we all get along?"

And it had no authenticity to it.

There was, and actually I made very little attempt, frankly, to understand what the soldier experience was like, what the grunt experience was like in Vietnam, so I was very surprised when years later I would talk to Vietnam vets, and I'd say, "Oh, I'm so sorry about those strips," because it did appear in "The Stars and Stripes."

They all read it in Vietnam.

STANFORD: Right, right.

TRUDEAU: And I seem to have acquired some goodwill simply because the strip showed I was paying attention, that someone was paying attention to them, that they weren't seeing anywhere else in the comics, or that they felt largely forgotten.

So that did create some goodwill for me, and when the First Gulf War or the Gulf War happened, I had trouble getting over to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait early on.

There were 2,000 journalists there, but I kept getting blocked at the Saudi Embassy, and I had written somewhat uncomplimentary material about the Saudis and how they were kind of sitting out their own war, and we were protecting the homeland, so I couldn't get a visa.

And one day I get this long-distance call from Kuwait City, and it's an Army Colonel named Bill Nash who's the commander of a tank battalion, and they were fresh off the battlefield, and he said, "I hear you've been trying to get over here," and I said, "Yeah, but it's not going to happen.

I can't get a visa."

And he said, "Well, just come anyway," so I said, "Are you sure?"

He said, "Yeah, just come."

So I got on a plane.

I flew over there.

I arrived in Riyadh about 2 in the morning, and I got closer and closer to customs and border officials, and I thought, "This isn't going to go well, showing up in wartime Saudi Arabia with no visa," and just as I got there, this side door opened, and two, they called them "chocolate chips" because their uniforms look like chocolate chip cookie dough, the camo.

Two of these guys came and picked me up by my elbows and took me out the side door and stuffed me in a chopper and flew me to Kuwait, so I had entered and left a sovereign nation without there being any record of my being on Saudi soil, and I never forgot that, and just how much power the United States had in Saudi Arabia at that time.

And when, uh, when 9/11 happened and Bin Laden made clear the cause of the attack, which was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, it reminded me of how offensive that presence might have been, of how heavy-handed it might have been.

And now we were defending them, so we... presumably that comes with certain privileges, but at any rate, I flew to Kuwait to meet this Colonel Nash, and he took me into his office, which was the only air-conditioned space on the entire base, and he said, "Okay, you're sleeping here.

You're sleeping on my couch, and the next week, you can do whatever you want.

I'll take you up in the choppers.

We'll fly over the burning oil wells and the Highway of Death, and you can see what a battlefield looks like, and you can play with the toys, drive an M190 tank, whatever you want, but you have to come back and talk to my guys because I was reading that strip when I was a green lieutenant in Vietnam, and ever since, I've wanted to meet you," not to set me straight because he knew that he was trying to hold together these mismatched conscripts, and they were all draftees and didn't want to be there, and it was unprofessional, and there were a million things wrong with how we went to war in Vietnam, but he wanted me to see how the military had changed in the interim.

He just thought that would be useful because I would write about it in the strip.

So that was the deal, was a deal that I quickly embraced, and I spent many long hours talking to these young warriors who were fresh from the battlefield, as they say.

They had led that left hook, that tank charge through the desert, and you just couldn't help but be struck by their professionalism and their lack of bravado.

They just felt this had to be done.

They saw some pretty awful things.

That's what war is.

So I started to develop friendships within the military at that time, and those associations and that goodwill spilled over into the next war after we invaded Iraq, and when I had BD wounded outside Fallujah, the Second Battle of Fallujah, and where he loses his leg, I immediately heard from my friends in the Pentagon, including a Public Affairs officer who said, "If you've got an amputee in the strip, you've got a lot of work to do.

You have to try and understand that.

That's not a week of strips."

So they invited me to come to Walter Reed, and they were right.

I knew nothing.

You may recall because you were bailing me out at that time.

I was about to go on vacation, and you did the research on what the soldier experience is immediately after receiving a battlefield wound.

What steps are taken by the medics?

What the experience of that soldier is like, and how you have to get them off the battlefield within the golden hour, how important that is.

And anyway, you did all that, so when I came back, I was able to prep myself, but I still didn't know anything.

So they worked out a protocol, a USO protocol for taking me to Walter Reed because I wasn't a journalist, and I wasn't an entertainer, but the benefit of a US protocol is that you make sure that you're welcome in any given hospital room, that the person you're going to visit wouldn't mind the opportunity to meet you and talk with you.

So in that sense, all the meetings I had in the beginning were vetted, but after a while, I became a familiar face there, and after a while I didn't really have to call ahead.

I could just show up, and I knew the doctors and the nurses and many of the patients who, once they were fit to leave the hospital, would move into the Fisher Houses, these houses for people with grievous injuries who were recovering, so it was such a privilege to hear their stories and to try and understand what they were going through.

In the beginning, it's disorienting because they're so positive.

I mean, here they are all torn up, missing arms, legs and some combination thereof, and yet I would be welcomed in the room, and at that point in their journey, they are all about their story.

That's kind of all they're thinking about is, "That happened to me, and I'll tell you how it happened," and then they live it again and again and again, and they're so wired from this experience.

They also miss their buddies terribly, and they're always asking about them, and they say, "Oh, well, so-and-so got torn up much worse than me," but that positive attitude, that can-do attitude, like, "When am I going to be back on the battlefield, doc?"

That is relatively short-lived.

After a few weeks, the reality of their situation begins to dawn on them.

Now, we do in fact put soldiers back to work with these kinds of injuries, not all of them but many of them, and the rehabilitation and the sophistication in prosthetics is such that a lot of them, they may not be combat-ready again, although some of them are, but they're ready to go back into service.

But to give you an example, one of the earliest patients that I visited, one of the first people that I met when I arrived at Walter Reed was a young, I think she was a sergeant, and she was very tall and graceful, and I guess she had been a basketball star at Notre Dame, and she was missing her forearm and her hand, and so she had this big smile on her face and welcomed me in, and she'd been talking to her mother on the phone, and she handed the phone to me and said, "Here, talk to my mom!"

So I didn't know this woman yet, and she said, "How's my daughter doing?"

I said, "Well, she looks great.

She's smiling.

She's sitting upright."

And then after the call, she said, "Okay, what can I tell you?"

And I said, "Well, I'd love to hear your story," and she said, "Okay, I was, I'm an MP, and I was tasked to defend an Iraqi police station outside of Baghdad, and we drove out, and I went up onto the roof, and there were sandbags all around the roof, and I got down and hunkered down, made myself ready for whatever might come, and not soon thereafter...

Soon thereafter a missile, an RPG went right over the top of those sandbags," and blew up the wall behind her.

She got down and just out of instinct, she threw the safety off her weapon and pulled it over her shoulder and got ready to return fire, because that's the first thing you do if you're being fired upon because you want them ducking as well.

So before she can do that, a second RPG lands on her position, blows up the sandbags and covers her in sand and uh rips off her arm.

Her sergeant comes running up to the roof and sees the situation, and he grabs her, and he takes her down below, and they put her on the hood of an MV, a Humvee, and the medic starts tying off her arm.

And now, this is her telling the story.

She said, "My sergeant did something against direct orders, which he should not have returned to the roof.

He returned to the roof.

He dug through the sand.

He found my hand, and he removed my wedding ring from the hand and came down and put it in my remaining hand," and she said, "He didn't have to do that.

I could have gotten another ring, but it meant the world to me."

So this is, I was getting my first early understanding of how powerful this soldier love is, this willingness of soldiers in combat to do anything for one another, and there's a wonderful book, I think it's just called "War," by Sebastian Junger, and he's asking soldiers about this, about the acts of bravery or what seemed to all of us these extraordinary acts of courage on behalf of sometimes people they don't even like.

And he said one of the soldiers looked at him kind of confused, and he said, "If a child ran out into traffic and the mother ran after that child, would you think the mother was brave?

No, it's instinct.

It's, that's what you do.

That's what you do when it's family, and units in the military are extraordinarily close," and so those are the sorts of tales I began to gather and put in my notebook and think about, and I didn't replicate too many of the experiences directly in the strip except for the cause of BD's trauma, which for a couple years, we the readers or you the readers are led to believe it is related to his losing his leg, when in fact it's related to an entirely different incident, which was told to me by a Navy Reservist who was ordered to drive a truck filled with some kind of weaponry.

He didn't even know what was in the truck, and he had to get it to Baghdad ASAP, had to get it to the front lines, and he found himself in the middle of a town that was just crowded with refugees and people in just total chaos, and he had to get through that town, and so he did.

He just ran over people because of the urgency of his mission, so that's a pretty horrible story, and lucky BD, I gave it to him.

That's what writers do is, they give these horrible predicaments and tragedies because you don't have a story if you, there's no laughter in Heaven, right?

You have to have tragedy in order to have, I try to make comedy of it.

That's my primary obligation is to entertain people, but to tell them stories as well.

STANFORD: And that is remarkable that you're always true to the comedy.

You always have the comedy there, and sometimes it's amazing to see it happen in front of your eyes.

"How come I'm laughing?"

And yet you conveyed the seriousness at the same time.

You've said a few times, people have asked you sometimes, "Why don't you ever write about this?"

Or, "How come you've never addressed that, all these issues?"

And I've heard you say before that the problem for you is, you have to find a way within the reality you've created to do that.

And then... TRUDEAU: Yeah, and then that can just be a failure of imagination.

I haven't been able to get my arms around it.

It's not that I intentionally avoid topics.

There's plenty of things that I have wanted to write about that I just couldn't find a way in, and you can't write about everything, so... STANFORD: Still, when you lay the 50 years out, you covered an awful lot, but is there any of that that haunts you?

Do you ever have, did any of that remain a regret for you, or are you okay, just did what you did and you've moved along?

You don't sit there thinking, "Dang, the one thing I wish I had written about was" something.

TRUDEAU: No, I eventually get to it if it's that important to me, if it's going to kind of linger in my thoughts.

I have probably shockingly few regrets about things that I've written.

There have been a few things that have been off a beat or two or a fact or two, and we've had to send out a correction, like any quasi-journalist enterprise.

You try to get it right, and in the creation of a comic strip, that typically happens in the first panel.

You may have noticed this, that the exposition, such as it is, the setup, if it's going to be a setup based on things that are true, that's the place to put them, and then you can kind of riff going off of it, but um... and you have to develop a kind of relationship with the reader that permits that, and they've seen it enough so that they recognize that, "Oh, this is a recap, or this is restating something that's more or less true."

It is a comic strip.

STANFORD: Yeah, right.

TRUDEAU: But if the message is strong, you want to get the facts right, so we have had, I don't know, two or three times through all these years where we've actually had to send out corrections.

STANFORD: Yeah.

TRUDEAU: And I argued on some of them.

One of them, I had the name absolutely correctly, but the proofs go out weeks in advance, and sometimes people see them, and they will object if the wrong person sees it, if an editor calls up somebody that I'm writing about, and it was a middle initial that was missing, and Jim, or not Jim then.

It would have been his successor, Lee Salem, said, "Well, we felt it was important to put that initial in to differentiate the person that you were having fun with from somebody else," but that's just good editing, I guess.

I wasn't too happy about it at the time, but they're on the ball.

STANFORD: Yeah.

Well, the transition you've made very nicely, gradually, gently over the past few years when you were at "Alpha House" and for Amazon and then dropped the dailies for that period of time, and then transitioned over to where we are now, which is classic "Doonesbury" which is a curated flow through the history of the strip, very gradual, just selecting episodes, and so you have 1 day a week now.

I know from, I've heard you say that a person might think, "Wow, he's got 6 free days a week now.

It must be great," and yet it doesn't sound like that's the case.

Are there dynamics in that that are difficult for you, or do you miss the dailies?

Do you miss, what do you, how is it working for you?

TRUDEAU: Well, there are a handful of people who have done something similar who have cut back to just the Sunday, and what you do here, from what I have heard from colleagues, is that somehow it manages to fill up the week anyway.

It just expands to fill the available time.

That hasn't been generally true for me.

It has without question freed up time.

Now, the reason I did it initially, I stepped aside from the daily strip because I was working in television, and I had been working in television before, but not to this extent where I was the show runner, and I just had all these responsibilities on a show called "Alpha House," which was the first streaming TV for Amazon, and I just, I tried, but I got a few weeks into it, and it's just impossible to manage both full-time jobs, so I stepped away from the daily strip, and a couple years later when it might have been time to come back after the second season, I thought to myself, "I've been doing this for 40-some-odd years.

I'm kind of enjoying having this extra time to work on things other than just the strip," and so that's what I've been doing, and then I now have four grandchildren, and alas, I have not been able to see much of them in the last 6 months or so, but they are a joy, as any grandparent will tell you, and time spent with them is the best time I spend on anything, so I don't see myself going back to the daily strip.

What I miss: I had a kind of project for the last 4 years, the project being Trump, and as you know, there's, we issued a trilogy of Trump books, Doonesbury in the time of Trump: "Yuge!

", "#SAD!"

and the one last summer, "Lewser!

", which turned out to be fairly prescient, but I thought, "That's not a bad thing to do."

I did that once before during the first Gulf War, which all the strips for about a 10-month period related to the war.

I figure, if we have a half million of our citizens over there fighting this war, that that's going to impact on a wide array of people and my characters, and so I could write, I could look at it from different perspectives over the course of that conflict.

So I decided to do the same thing with Trump.

I thought, "You know what?

He's so much subtext to everything that's going on, every conversation that I seem to be having no matter with whom, that it seems to make sense to just kind of generally speaking keep the focus on the life and times of Trump as our president, and so I have to uh, you know, figure out what comes next from that.

People have been offering me condolences for the outcome of the election, assuming that there's this golden age of political satire that's about to draw to a close, but from my perspective, surprisingly little has changed.

Trumpism will be with us for years to come.

I believe that's also a fact.

The president has scarred the political landscape so deeply, and our innocence, in our illusions about the sturdiness of our democracy has been so battered.

If a few hundred thousand votes had gone the other way, Trump's endless abuses of power would have been in a certain way legitimized, leaving him totally unconstrained in a second term to do unimaginable further harm.

So let's be clear, over 70 million of our fellow citizens said that they prefer an avatar for their grievances over a vessel for their hopes.

That's just, those are the numbers.

Trumpism started with a TV fan base, then grew into a cult, and now has metastasized into a kind of full-blown movement, and it may have temporarily lost its leader, but there will be others who will soon enough rush in to fill that void, only next time that leader may be much smarter and more competent, and therefore much more dangerous, think President Ted Cruz, and then of course the possibility that Trump will announce for 2024 maybe right away, which will freeze any potentials in place and leaving him the titular head of the Republican Party, so we haven't broken the fever, and a sidelined Trump will crave attention and stoke chaos just as avidly as the one in power, and it won't abate until Trump has to perhaps surrender his iPhone to the intake clerk at Allenwood.

Either way, there'll be plenty to write about.

Remember, despite my focus on Trump in recent years, "Doonesbury" has not, well, you know it's not been primarily a political project over the years.

In a non-presidential election year, I'd say 10, 15% of the scripts are about politics.

It began as a strip about football.

You know this.

You just finished reading them all.

STANFORD: I remember when you, at one time we were getting a lot of mail, and you just went down, and you counted all the strips, and you kept a tally, and you said, "15%."

TRUDEAU: Oh, were you around when we did that?

STANFORD: Yeah.

TRUDEAU: We did.

STANFORD: And I thought, "Well, now we sell that because it seems that way to me."

How many people who say, "Oh, it's a political strip."

Well, there's a lot in there that's... TRUDEAU: Yeah, well, a lot of politics... STANFORD: It's a cultural strip.

TRUDEAU: Is personal, and certainly culture can be very political, but I, I, I... yeah, the one thing I miss, to answer your question more directly about not being able to write the individual strips is that I can't tell stories anymore, and I can advance the story lines a little bit, and I do worry that people are kind of losing track of the individual characters and their story lines, and I gave J.J. another child just, it was Sunday.

I just gave it to her.

She was as surprised as... STANFORD: She didn't know.

TRUDEAU: As the readers were.

She didn't know, but you can't do that.

You have to take the time to put each little piece in place.

You have to create those mosaics, so the strip has turned into something a little different.

They're more kind of visual essays now.

STANFORD: Yeah, and beautiful, the visuality, the color... TRUDEAU: Well, I have more time to... STANFORD: The work you guys are doing... TRUDEAU: Work a little on the art, which isn't a bad thing.

STANFORD: Chaz Miller wants to know, he's delighted that Mike Doonesbury is from Tulsa and he would like to know, why was his home state so fortunate as to have that happen?

Is there a story there?

TRUDEAU: No.

When you're first starting out in any kind of creative endeavor, you're just using bits and pieces, and in some cases, there were little bits of inspiration.

Some of the names evolved out of people I knew, but for the most part, it was pretty random, and I think I just thought, "Okay, let's just pick a Heartland city, and that's where Mike will be from."

It's not more complicated than that, but sometimes it works in your favor if you pay attention, and not to Oklahoma's credit, but it did become a very newsworthy state back in the '80s.

There was a huge scandal with the county commissioners taking bribes, and so I decided to make one of Mike's uncles one of those beneficiaries of the bribes, and he gets nabbed, and Mike has to go back and deal with a criminal in the family.

It probably wasn't the best publicity Oklahoma could ever have, but it was one way of circling back to his roots.

The other has been his mother.

His mother is a for real farmer.

His father has passed away, and she grows Milo, or I think the last thing I had her grow was rice, and of course like many farmers had a side business.

She was also worked at a car dealership, and then she finally retired, but I had plenty of strips in Oklahoma as a result, but I wish there was some more interesting reason than that, but it was a pretty random choice I made.

STANFORD: I notice that no matter what, how strange a name you might assign to a new character or someone who's a walk-on perhaps, somebody will write and say, "Is that, you talking about my dad?"

Or, "That's my uncle.

You know my".

TRUDEAU: You try to make names that are a little improbable, and what I have done I think unintentionally at first was to combine surnames and family names so that one is kind of normal sounding and the other is unusual.

Not to pick on the creator, but "Funky Winkerbean," I always thought the mistake of that name was that both names were odd and that it should have been Funky something or... STANFORD: That's interesting, like Zonker Harris and Mike Doonesbury... TRUDEAU: So Zonker Harris, Mike Slackmeyer, Mike, yeah, I just think that it makes less self-consciously odd that the, and I had a family friend, a very close friend of my mother's, who, she was a very outgoing, gregarious woman, and she used to make up just odd names for not just her own children and her own friends but other people's, and she called her daughter Natasha Crunchbacher and her son Geoffrey Slackmeyer, and I'd completely forgotten that that's where I had found Slackmeyer was from this friend of my mom's who when I was a kid called her own kid, her last name was Lynn, and she called her son Geoffrey Slackmeyer, and it just stuck in my brain.

So yeah, most of these things are accidental.

STANFORD: Well, I know we're getting near the end.

I wanted to pass along another commenter said, "Just wanted to express appreciation for all the Jimmy Crow strips," the return of Jim Crow that you've been doing, and this person is hoping and assuming that you don't plan to leave that storyline in... (overlapping chatter).

TRUDEAU: Oh, no, no, no, I won't do that because as long as the Republicans continue to come up with these creative ways to get the outcomes they want in elections, Jimmy Crow will be around.

In fact, I just did in the last 2 weeks two more Jimmy Crows, one of them based on a not very well-known race that just concluded down in Florida for the state.

The Republicans were hoping to get enough new republican, I'm sorry, the democrats to get enough new candidates into office in the last election so that they could be in the majority in the Senate in Florida, and somebody, it's still unknown who, formed a political action committee and created two third-party candidates, and one of them had the same last name as the Democratic candidate, and the candidate was a real person but never ran, never did anything, never spoke, never debated, never sent out a pamphlet.

The idea was to get that third name on the ballot so it was Garcia, Rodriguez, Rodriguez.

Well, you know what happened, 6,000 people voted for the wrong Rodriguez, and then the other, the Republican won, so it's perfectly legal, and Jimmy is very excited about this, that he thinks this is... And so he tries to recruit Zipper Harris to run along with a republican, a democratic character named Tipper Harris.

Doesn't work, but anyway, so I riffed off of this actual race and this actual dirty trick, and yeah, so Jimmy will be around for a while.

And there's a brand-new character coming along in the next few weeks as well, so... STANFORD: Oh, good.

TRUDEAU: Yeah.

STANFORD: I see good wishes here to you and people hoping, would like to hear, "You're not planning to stop, are you?

You're still going, aren't you?"

That's what this reader is asking.

TRUDEAU: I'm still really enjoying it, and as long as people keep reading, I am so grateful to all those newspapers that run what we call the classics and keep "Doonesbury" alive in their newspapers.

They don't have to do that, and I'm so glad they do, and it supports the Sunday, and it's a perfect arrangement for this grandfather of four, and I have no intention of hanging up anytime soon.

STANFORD: I like the way that you do as often as possible, you put in an actual newspaper, an actual comic section.

You have Zonker explaining what that is.

You keep the tradition alive even within itself.

TRUDEAU: Got to love newspapers, right, David?

STANFORD: Yes, absolutely.

TRUDEAU: Yeah.

I'm going to miss that industry.

I'm a legacy strip obviously, so I'll probably be one of those guys, if I'm still around, to turn out the lights, but I try not to get too nostalgic about it because I love all the changes.

I love what digital media has done for democratizing the public conversation.

I'm no longer part of a privileged few.

There are many folks out there who are getting their voices heard, and they should be.

STANFORD: And if there's time for one more question, this one is asking, "Looking back from where you are now at 50 years, what are the strips that continue to inspire you from your earlier years, the strips that helped you become interested in the art form?

What are your favorites?"

TRUDEAU: Well, "Peanuts," and of course you worked with the great Sparky Schulz yourself on many of his books, and he had a profound effect on any cartoonist of the last two generations.

He changed everything, and it always saddened me that it didn't seem to bring him more pleasure.

He was a fairly melancholy guy, but he took his work very, very seriously.

He was very professional.

He was a great man, and all those little guys just had a real impact on my work, him and Jules Feiffer, which my strip kind of resembled in the early years.

It was the same repeating panel and no balloons and all of that, until I regressed back to more standard cartoon form, which frankly is more fun to do.

STANFORD: You always said Sparky was the gold standard.

TRUDEAU: Yeah.

STANFORD: I agree with that, and also the similarity in that he had his theater company.

He had 15 sets that he could go to, right?

TRUDEAU: Right.

STANFORD: Same idea.

TRUDEAU: Right.

Okay, thanks, David.

This has really been fun.

GRAHAM: You guys are great.

I can tell that you've worked together before.

David, great moderating, and, Garry, what a remarkable 50-year run.

It's really impossible for many of us of a certain age at least to imagine what the past half century would have been like without "Doonesbury."

TRUDEAU: Oh, you're very kind.

GRAHAM: Thanks to all of you for tuning in.

From us here at "Politics and Prose", stay well and well-read.

TRUDEAU: Good night.

STANFORD: Thank you.

ANNOUNCER: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations, or online at www.politics-prose.com.

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