Holy #%*&!, he killed B.D.

I was at the breakfast table, swearing like a comic-strip sailor because my favorite comic-strip soldier, Doonesbury's B.D., had been felled while on duty in Iraq. It turned out that he was severely wounded, not slain, but I wanted to know more about Garry Trudeau's decision to dismember a character he has been drawing for more than 35 years.

I asked Trudeau if he knew B.D. would lose a leg when he first deployed him to Iraq, or if the idea came as the story developed, in the comics and in the real world. "It was a decision made along the way," he replied by e-mail. "I barely plan more than a week or two out -- not because I like to live in uncertainty, but because there's never time. I simply pick a path that looks promising and hope I don't hit a cul de sac."

In this case, the course of the real war influenced Trudeau's decision to depict its toll. "We sustained over 600 wounded in the first three weeks of April," he said. "It seemed time to focus on the extreme sacrifices some of our troops are making in our name."

I wondered if B.D.'s lost leg is a political statement, or a moral one, or a dramatic device. "All of the above, although the human story of one person's journey from trauma to recovery is my main preoccupation," said Trudeau, who has covered everything from Vietnam to Watergate to the technology bubble in Doonesbury, becoming in the process the first comic-strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

B.D.'s pain seems to reflect Trudeau's own feelings about the war. I asked him to compare Iraq to the war in Vietnam that shaped much of his early work. "Iraq feels like a compressed version -- Vietnam on an accelerated timetable," he said. "The sorts of mistakes we're making are unique to Iraq, but their consequences are just as dire as they were in Vietnam. And the outlook is just as bleak. The professionals gaming and planning this war must be in despair -- none of the indicators are good, and the public will likely not tolerate Vietnam-era levels of pain, especially for a discretionary war. And if they bring the draft back -- especially a fair draft -- there'll be hell to pay."

Trudeau started drawing B.D. while an undergrad at Yale in the late '60s, but until the current series of strips we had never seen B.D.'s hair -- the former football star was always shown wearing a helmet of some sort, no matter what he was doing. "The idea was twofold," said Trudeau of his suddenly bare-headed hero. "To convey a sense of vulnerability and helplessness, and to signify that his life had been permanently altered."

Doonesbury readers can form strong feelings about the characters, and some have reacted to B.D.'s fate as if he were a real person. "It's amazing -- and humbling -- how many people have commented that B.D.'s misfortune has given them an emotional stake in the war," said Trudeau (you can see some reader responses at www.doonesbury.com/strip/blowback).

That may sound like a lot of emotion to expend on a pen-and-ink drawing, but Trudeau thinks the medium lends itself to long-term relationships. "One of the great things about a comic strip is that the narrative moves forward in tiny, daily increments," he said. "The artist can keep a theme alive in the readers' minds for weeks. That lends it a power that sometimes eludes daily journalism. It's a great opportunity for me to explore this subject in depth, and I hope I get it right."

What about his own feelings for B.D., who survived earlier tours of duty in Vietnam and Gulf War I pretty much unscathed? "I'm afraid that dispassionately placing characters in jeopardy is just one of those things that writers do. It's part of storytelling," he said. "I didn't make the decision rashly or thoughtlessly, but I did approach it as a creative problem to be solved, not an emotional experience to work through."

Trudeau sounds more wistful about the late Lacey Davenport, the eccentric congresswoman he killed off several years ago. "Well, obviously a death is different from a wound because of its finality. I can't write Lacey any more, and since she was a favorite character, I did give up something real. But again, the loss served a narrative purpose -- an opportunity to describe the slow-motion death, the disappearance of self, that is the signature of Alzheimer's."

So what happens to all the Doonesbury characters when Trudeau decides at some future date to stop drawing the strip? "They retire, too," he said. "By then, I don't think anyone will mind."

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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