Quote of the Week: Another Morning

I thought about sitting up. The various governing bodies in my mind all agreed that this would be a good thing, but there were disputes over the timetable.

 - Walter Mosely, Blonde Faith, p.174

Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall

I was an avid Doonesbury reader in my youth; I assembled all of the books eventually (up to about 2009, though I might have missed the rare one about the TV special) and read it daily in the paper. But I lost all those books in my 2011 flood, and never felt the need to either re-buy the old ones or get any of the new ones since then. G.B. Trudeau, the strip's creator, went to Sunday-only not too long after that, too, which killed one of the best aspects of the strip: its density and the way it told extended stories among a large cast, intersecting with the issues of the day. Doonesbury as a Sunday-only isn't the same thing at all; in a very real sense, the strip ended a decade ago.

But a decade after something ended is a good time for a retrospective, isn't it?

Joshua Kendall, a Yalie like Trudeau who has been a noted reporter and the author of several previous biographies, tells the story of Doonesbury the strip here, along with some biographical material about Trudeau. The book is called Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, but it's not that much of a biography and it's much more Doonesbury than Trudeau.

On the other hand, Kendall actually got what seem to be extensive interviews with the famously reclusive and press-shy Trudeau - who famously went seventeen years at the height of the strip without speaking to a single reporter - and got him on the record at least a little bit about his personal life. So I'm not exactly complaining: Kendall probably delivered as much of a biography as the reclusive Trudeau would allow.

Also, Trudeau has had a frankly boring life, in the best WASP preppy manner. A WASP's name famously should appear in the paper only three times: birth, marriage, and death. Trudeau is already way over-exposed by the standard of his people. He had a big success right out of college with his first major project, and stuck mostly with permutations of that project for fifty years. He married another media figure (TV host Jane Pauley), which sounds like it could lead to drama, but they have had a quiet, apparently entirely happily life together, with three kids and no scandals, from all accounts. Add to that the fact that Doonesbury is an outward-facing strip, about things in the real (political, social, entertainment) world, not about anything personal, and Kendall had a much harder job than someone like David Michaelis, who wrote about Charles Schulz and his strip full of personal psychological insights.

Kendall does have the usual initial couple of chapters to cover Trudeau's ancestors and young life (through college and the proto-Doonesbury Bull Tales); it's the most interesting, new, and fresh material in the book, telling us the things we don't already know. (Trudeau had an ulcer in middle school! That was actually the reason he was classified 4-F in the draft! He also wrote and staged plays for years as a kid - which is interesting and new but deeply unsurprising once you learn about it.) After that, the book's chapters mostly align to eras of Doonesbury: Watergate, the rest of the '70s, Trudeau's first hiatus and the Reagan years, the big shift to post-college life, B.D. and the focus on wars and warriors, and one last chapter on Trudeau's long history mocking Our Current President.

It is not quite a critical reappraisal of Doonesbury; Kendall stays primarily on the reporting side. But he does map out the eras and major concerns of the strip, so this is a valuable book for anyone who might want to do that critical reappraisal.

Kendall also takes advantage of being an official biography to use a lot of Trudeau materials: there's a relevant Doonesbury strip on about half of the pages, including a lot of Sundays at full-page size. He also reprints other letters and ephemera throughout, since the book was already being designed that way - it's a much more intensely designed and carefully laid-out book than the standard biography, and a fine model for anyone doing a biography of a visual artist or cartoonist. (That old standard, the insert section, is nice as far as it goes, but having the art actually on the same pages as the relevant text is vastly superior.)

So Trudeau & Doonesbury is perhaps not as surprising or informative as one might hope: Trudeau is still private, and more than a little boring. Kendall does a good job with the materials he has, and the access Trudeau gave him, but the back half of the book does somewhat turn into "and then there was a two-week sequence about Dan Quayle, who Trudeau depicted as a feather." It's worth it for fans of the strip and political junkies of the last few decades, and those who still get a frisson from the iconic strips like "Guilty! Guilty! GUILTY!"

Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection by Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet

On this side of the Atlantic, they all hit at once: in 2018, Europe Comics published (digitally) translations of the three Cosmonauts of the Future books, all turned into English by Mercedes Claire Gilliom.

But, in their original life, the first two both came out in 2000 and this third and final book - Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection - was four years later. So that original audience might have expected, or at least have a reasonable suspicion, that the characters were a few years older this time.

A reader who pays really close attention and has the details of the first two books at his fingertips could have figured that out from the early pages of the book, too - our heroes, Gildas and Martina, are taller, and there's a reference to something "eight months ago" on the first page, an event that didn't happen in the previous books. They also think it's 2033, which would place it more precisely in time if I remembered what year they thought it was in the previous books.

(They are not quite correct, for reasons which become clear as the book goes on.)

They're not on the planet Mawis anymore; they're traveling around in a spaceship, along with two aliens (one in a human suit, their former teacher for killing stinky aliens). They don't say why, but we assume they're looking for the rest of humanity: Gildas and Martina are clones of space explorers who died in a crash on Mawis, and, now that they're growing up, it makes sense that they'd want to find their own people.

They do find a human-crewed space station, which confusingly (for them) seems to be a museum of their lives, exactly like the Mawis-created replica of their childhood that they grew up in. And that's somewhat how this book goes: it's simulacra and clones all the way down.

Gildas and Martina don't learn this for a while - they are very confused, and running about at high speed, often chased by clones of themselves using dangerous weaponry - but they have found human civilization, and it is not at peace. There's a faction run by their daughter Celta and a faction run by Gildas's sister Gaelle, and both use clones of the two of them - the obviously perfect human beings - as soldiers. Both sides are heavily armed; each is dedicated to the extermination of the other; neither is particularly amenable to persuasion or anything more peaceful than a ray-gun.

Do Gildas and Martina manage to bring peace to human civilization, leaning somewhat heavily on the fact that they are "the originals"? (I don't see why their clone-ness is terribly different from the hordes of clone soldiers, but it works, so I won't sweat it.) Yes, they do.

The story is a bit more confused than the first two books, and ramps up the slapstick running-and-fighting material from the second book as well. It does feel a bit like writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Manu Larcenet were escalating with each book, and hit their limit quickly with this third one. It is still fun, zippy adventure, but a reader can definitely see why they would think they'd exhausted the premise by this point.