How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’

A new book looks back at the work of artist and journalist Garry Trudeau and how he told the story of a country’s highs and lows through a comic strip

In The Simpsons, Bart is always 10, Lisa eight and Maggie a baby. In Peanuts, Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt are perpetual children. In Garfield, age shall not weary the eponymous lasagne-loving cat, nor the years condemn.

But Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons are different, with characters ageing, evolving, having children and occasionally even dying. Still active after 56 years, Trudeau’s sprawling narrative – woven through the four-panel confines of a comic strip – invites comparison with Charles Dickens.