Like many people my age (40-something), I grew up reading the comic strip Doonesbury, reveling in its subversive wit and keen outlook on current events and politics. At some point over the years, though, I became less interested in reading the funnies and would only occasionally seek them out in my perusal of the daily newspaper. As a result, I lost track of what Doonesbury’s creator, Garry Trudeau, was satirizing. I now wish I had been paying better attention, as Trudeau has been breaking powerful new ground for his medium, these last couple of years. I have discovered such after reading an excellent (and lengthy) essay by Gene Weingarten in yesterday’s Washington Post Magazine, entitled “Doonesbury’s War.� Weingarten apparently spent a considerable amount of time interviewing Trudeau and following him around. But his essay is so much more than a portrait of the artist as an older man. It describes how “something astonishing has happened to ‘Doonesbury’ in the last 2 1/2 years, after the United States invaded Iraq and Trudeau made the startling, un-cartoonish decision to mutilate one of his characters,� B.D, about which Weingarten offers the following assessment:

For simple dramatic impact and deft complexity of humor, nothing else in “Doonesbury� has ever approached the storyline of B.D’s injury and convalescence. It hasn’t been political at all, really, unless you contend that acknowledging the suffering of a war is a political statement. What it has been is remarkably poignant and surprisingly funny at the same time. In what Trudeau calls a “rolling experiment in naturalism,� he has managed every few weeks to spoon out a story of war, loss and psychological turmoil in four-panel episodes, each with a crisp punch line. [full text]

Part of the backstory of this “experiment in naturalism� involves time Trudeau has devoted to meeting and hearing the tales of actual veterans, who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan less than whole. By listening to what these men and women have to share and then, in effect, borrowing from their experiences to relate the tragicomic tale of B.D., Trudeau honors the sacrifices made by so many war veterans. They have something important to tell us, and Trudeau is helping to tell it—as, in turn, is Weingarten. “Doonesbury’s War� is highly worth reading.