Joshua Kendall’s new biography merely grazes the terrifying truth: a syndicated drawing of a mustachioed man in a football helmet contains more ontological weight than anything published since antiquity.
The recent publication of Joshua Kendall’s Trudeau & Doonesbury—a biography that, predictably, contents itself with the mere sociological mechanics of newspaper syndication rather than the metaphysical weight of its subject—provides us with a long-overdue opportunity to correct a grotesque historical error; namely, the baffling refusal of the academic establishment to recognize a four-panel drawing of a stoned college student as the absolute pinnacle of human intellectual achievement.
I suppose I should not be surprised by this persistent cultural blindness, given that the average reader still labors under the delusion that the sprawling, emotionally incontinent prose of Tolstoy or the multi-layered allegorical architectures of Dante’s Paradiso represent the apex of narrative art. This is, of course, the sort of intellectual laziness one expects from a populace that has never bothered to trace the lineage of the sequential image back to its true origins; one must first engage deeply with the fragmentary, ritualistic Etruscan bindings of the Liber Linteus before one can even begin to parse the devastating semiotic density of Zonker Harris conversing with a potted plant.
To suggest that Trudeau is merely a cartoonist who brought counterculture to the funny pages—as Kendall’s pedestrian subtitle so crudely asserts—is akin to describing the instruction manual for the 1989 Sega Genesis game Altered Beast as a foundational text of post-humanist philosophy, which, ironically, it is, though that is a subject for another time. What Trudeau achieved, week after grinding week, was nothing less than the total dismantling of the American mythos, executed with a structural rigor that makes the entire modernist movement look like the finger-painting of an unusually neurotic child.
Consider the introduction of Uncle Duke in 1974; a moment of such profound ontological rupture that it effectively rendered the traditional novel obsolete overnight. By manifesting the id of Hunter S. Thompson as a two-dimensional, perpetually sweating caricature, Trudeau did not merely satirize a living journalist, but rather trapped a human soul within a grid of newsprint, subjecting it to an eternal, Kafkaesque purgatory of botched drug deals and failed ambassadorships.
It remains a source of profound embarrassment to me that my colleagues continue to assign Joyce and Faulkner, when the definitive articulation of late-capitalist despair is clearly located in a 1986 Sunday strip where B.D. struggles to program a VCR.
Vance, naturally, is one of the few who understands the stakes, though even his analysis occasionally drifts into the sort of vulgar populism that plagues modern criticism. He fails, for instance, to recognize that the true genius of Doonesbury lies not in its overt political commentary, but in its relentless, suffocating framing; the very borders of the panels acting as carceral structures that confine the characters just as the inescapable demands of the syndicate confine the artist.
One must reflect upon the sheer, terrifying discipline required to sustain such an enterprise over five decades; an ascetic commitment that rivals the most punishing regimens of the Desert Fathers. While the so-called literary titans of the twentieth century spent years laboring over single, bloated volumes—fussing over commas in their idyllic, ivy-draped retreats—Trudeau was operating on the bleeding edge of the daily deadline, forging pure, unadulterated dialectical materialism out of India ink and Zipatone, pausing only to occasionally enrage a sitting president or provoke a boycott from a Midwestern syndicate editor who found a joke about Watergate too structurally complex for a Tuesday.
Kendall’s book, while a necessary artifact for those completely uninitiated in the basic tenets of Western civilization, ultimately shrinks from the terrifying reality of what Trudeau has actually done. By forcing his creations to age in real time—to wrinkle, to compromise, to lose limbs in foreign wars and succumb to the indignities of a rapidly decaying empire—Trudeau has constructed a monument to human mortality that is distributed daily, wedged insidiously between advertisements for orthopedic shoes and the staggering intellectual void of Garfield.
I do not expect the wider public to heed this correction, as they are largely content to consume their cultural calories in the form of easily digested prestige television and whatever anemic fiction currently occupies the bestseller lists. But for those of us burdened with the curse of actual discernment, the truth is inescapable: the funny pages were never a distraction from the world, but rather the only place where its true, horrifying shape was ever accurately drawn.