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

‘I tried to bring his voice into the story but he has this reputation of being the JD Salinger of cartoonists’ … an image by Garry Trudeau. Photograph: Courtesy Garry Trudeau Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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.