Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf

In the beginning, there was B.D. In the first block of the first strip of "Doonesbury," the football-helmeted, stone-faced character sits in an armchair, with a blank college pennant hanging on the wall. Then Mike Doonesbury walks in. Over time, the rest of the cast-mark Slackmeyer, Boopsie, Zonker and the rest-climbed out of Garry Trudeau's brain and onto his drafting table. At first, their lives swirled around dorms and football fields. Then B.D. dropped out of college to fight in Vietnam. Mark latched onto the war as well-from the other side. (Lucky callers to his radio show received not t-shirts or records but free copies of the Pentagon Papers.)

The characters had entered history. And history answered back. "If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty," The Washington Post scolded after a series of merciless strips on Watergate, "it's going to be the due process of justice, not a comic strip artist." Years later, Trudeau tore into the town of Palm Beach, Florida, where blacks and Hispanics were randomly stopped by police under a law that required domestic servants to register with the police. The law was repealed. The ultimate example of life imitating Doonesbury came out in 1994, when a stolen carton of Brown & Williamson documents arrived at the office of a University of California professor; the return address read simply "Mr. Butts."

"Doonesbury" is a paradox-politico-cultural satire that rans alongside "Marmaduke" and "Cathy" in hundreds of American newspapers (and on editorial or feature pages in others); a comic strip as comfortable with wars and financial crises as with domestic humor. (The Persian Gulf War occupied the strip for almost 250 straight days.) But the principal peculiarity is this: hi a fictional world populated by a car-rot-nosed ad man, a retired sustaining champion, two homeless eccentrics, and two Slackmeyers--the inside-trading, Reagan-loving, tobacco company-lobbying father and his liberal, gay, public radio host son--Trudeau creates a world that is in many ways more real than the world viewed through traditional journalism. Blending actual figures and events with fiction, Trudeau achieves a clarity that often eludes more restricted forms. His portrait of Jimmy Carter manning the White House switchboard or Ronald Reagan carrying cue cards for a cabinet meeting--("Sit down in chair. You unbutton coat (optional). Do not remove shoes")--are strinkingly authentic. By collapsing entire industries into a single character--Sid...