Trudeau & Doonesbury, A (Joint) Review

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Trudeau & Doonesbury, A (Joint) Review

Skip to commentsPublished: October 2, 2026Updated: October 2, 20261 minute0 comments

Bill Cooper for Spectrum Culture reviews the new biographyTrudeau & Doonesbury by Joshua Kendall.

“Garry Trudeau, lives privately and shuns interviews. Freelance journalist Joshua Kendall shines some light on the creator in his latest biography, Trudeau & Doonesbury.

“Though Trudeau & Doonesbury covers politics, it focuses on Trudeau’s life and how it impacted his comic strip.”

“While illustrating an artist’s journey, Trudeau & Doonesbury explores 20th and 21st-century American politics and pop culture through Trudeau’s lens.”

I am in agreement with Cooper’s view of the book up to a point – because I am only up to the Reagan years. It is an enjoyable and engaging read and as the reviewer mentions:

“Readers will likely be impressed by Kendall’s copious research on Trudeau. He interviews numerous subjects and provides early photographs of Bull Tales and Doonesbury strips. Kendall accurately portrays how Trudeau, as a person and artist, developed over time, much like the characters in Doonesbury.”

“[A] minor complaint — these reprinted comic strips and images are sometimes too small and hard to read.”

Especially the early Yale Bull Tales strips before Trudeau’s lettering talents had been trained. The small size, less than 5½ inches, of the horizontally reproduced dailies in this regular sized vertical book is especially conspicuous when it tells of Trudeau returning from his first sabbatical and demanding that newspapers run Doonesbury at 44 picas (roughly 7 and 3/8 inches) – across the page is one of those small reproduced dailies.

Let it be noted that the Sundays are printed sideways taking up the full page in full color and high definition (from original art and syndicate proofs, as are the dailies) are much easier on the eyes. No magnifying glass needed.

Something else Cooper observed that I also noticed:

“Still, Kendall’s choice to document seemingly every incident of the ‘70s while skimping on the 2010s and 2020s political landscape feels like a misstep.”

Now to a pet peeve.

On page 2 of the Prologue, the fourth paragraph of the book, introducing the cartoonist and his magnum opus Kendall writes:

“Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to nab the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.”

From the very beginning, 7 of the first 8 Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonists, had been comic strip artists before winning their Pulitzers though they didn’t win the prize for their comic strips. Maybe most famously Rube Goldberg had decades of comic strips behind him when he won his Pulitzer in 1948.

More precisely the credit should read: “Garry B. Trudeau became the first to win the editorial cartooning Pulitzer Prize for a comic strip” or “Garry B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury was the first comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize.”

Despite the nit-picking Cooper recommends the book:

“Still, despite Kendall’s biases and sometimes spottier coverage later in the book, Trudeau & Doonesbury illustrates an artist’s growth while covering the Boomer era of politics, pop culture, and beyond, by focusing on a career path that very few people will ever experience or understand fully. For those reasons, this biography should prove enjoyable.”

As do I. (Full disclosure: The Daily Cartoonistgets a note in the book as a

The current practice of including a drawing in the Doonesbury title panel began on Sept. 16, 2001.