"Doonesbury" at war. (Book review)

[praxiz]

'Doonesbury at war.

''Doonesbury'' collections ordinarily have titles that are funny (''The Revolt of the English Majors''), funnyish (''Talk to the Hand'') or at least jaunty (''Flashbacks''). The title of this compact new anthology -- ''The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time'' -- is earnest, without any wink or embedded irony whatsoever. And that's because it is all about the disabling war injury suffered by B.D., the quarterback-cum-coach serving as an Army officer in Iraq. In April of last year, a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humvee near Fallujah, nearly killing him, and ''The Long Road Home'' is just that -- B.D.'s evacuation to Baghdad, recuperation at Army medical centers and convalescence with his family back in the States. The cover illustration shows B.D. in a wheelchair with an artificial leg and (for the first time ever) without a helmet. There is no joke in the first strip, or the second, or the third. And the whole 84-episode series is thick with arcana about Army hospitals and prosthetics and rehabilitation.

But Garry Trudeau has not, thank goodness, fallen victim to Woody Allen Syndrome, neither Stage 1 (trying too desperately to be serious) nor Stage 2 (losing the ability to be funny). There's certainly more bittersweetness and melancholy here than in, say, ''Buck Wild Doonesbury,'' but only as a matter of degree. Trudeau has always leavened his main dish -- social and political satire, bobo comedies of manners -- with flavors from the wistful and elegiac end of the shelf. And there are plenty of chuckle-out-loud punch lines in the book. As when, during B.D.'s first phone call to his wife from the hospital, he beats around the bush about the particulars of his injury: ''Well, the good news is I'm finally down to my ideal weight.''

Much More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/books/review/19COVERANDER.html

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