Doonesbury wins the cartoons war
Harsh Desai

The Long Road Home
One Step at a Time
by G.B. Trudeau. Andrew McMeel Publishing. Pages 93. $ 9.95

For me a new Doonesbury book by G.B. Trudeau is always a matter of celebration. And, when I got The Long Road Home — One Step at a Time, the story of the former American football coach B.D. whose leg has been amputated following an RPG attack on his Humvee outside Fallujah, I wondered what Trudeau would do with this one. It is never easy to write a cartoon strip about a war and following a soldier from his injury in Iraq to his home in California a year later was not going to be easy. But Trudeau passes the test with flying colours and makes you laugh, cry and choke along the way and you leave with a better understanding of the plight of an individual American soldier fighting a war in Iraq. The humour is not black and as Senator McCain has written in a forward to the book there is no cynicism.

The transformative power of Trudeau’s pen is particularly obvious when, for instance, B.D.’s daughter Samantha — a young schoolgirl makes a class report about her father’s leg — and all the other students complain that they can never compete with the seriousness and substance of Sam’s report. There is good old Zonker Sam’s male nanny (one of the most loveable of the Doonesbury gang), who flits in and out of the pages, including once with a cache of medical marijuana. But, one misses the other characters like Mike and J.J. Alex and Mark who frequent the Doonesbury cartoon strip, giving it that unique brand of levity and toughness which so characterise the strip. Arnold Shwarznegger makes a brief guest appearance in the strip picturised as a hand but no American President is depicted in the strip and the rationale of the war such as it is, is not discussed or examined.

The war is accepted as a fact of life and a given and one can easily imagine that B.D.’s heartache would have gone up several times if he would have started doubting the rationale of the war.

This well may be your introduction to the strip as it is not so popular in India but Trudeau as a cartoonist has achieved cult status in the US for his relentless liberal attack on a Washington and America fast turning right and if you manage to lay your hands on the book, I assure you that you will have a whale of a time.

HOME