Are you one of the millions of American comic strip readers who've come of age alongside Michael Doonesbury and his clan? If so, you'll relish the story of Don Carlton—the man whose black ink has brought Doonesbury's cast of characters to life for nearly four decades.

Carlton, 73, of Fairway, is the Doonesbury "inker," cartoonist Garry Trudeau's meticulous assistant who, from a distance of 1,200 miles, works hand-in-hand with Trudeau each week. And after 39 years in that role, he's still mesmerized by Trudeau's genius.

We talked with Carlton in his cozy office, where each day he bends over an old wooden drafting table and then a modern computer, turning rough pencil sketches into the refined and familiar shapes many of us have come to identify with, laugh and cry with, and treasure.

Don, what's the nutshell of your back-story?

I was born in 1936 in Iowa Park, Texas, outside Wichita Falls, and grew up in Fort Worth. After three years at Arlington State College, a junior college, I studied for two years at Texas Christian University and graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1960. Through ROTC I became a member of the 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, where I was on active duty for two years. While there I met Joan, my wife-to-be, at a party. We married in 1963 when I got out of the Army, and we lived in Texas for three years.

What brought you to Kansas?

Before and after the Army, I worked as a technical illustrator at the Fort Worth General Dynamics bomber plant and as an artist with the Fort Worth Press, a colorful little Scripps-Howard paper. We came to Kansas City in 1966 when I took a job as circulation manager with the National Catholic Reporter. At that point I wanted to stop being an artist, and I worked at the Reporter for 2 1/2 years, then for Modern Handcraft for five years—until my Doonesbury gig came along.

Tell us how your involvement with Doonesbury came about.

Jim Andrews was managing editor at the Reporter, and on the day I left my job in circulation, Jim said to me, "A friend and I have a little syndicate."

That mysterious friend was John McMeel, Andrews' closest friend from Notre Dame, who was operating out of a one-room office in New York. Jim was operating out of the basement of his rented house in Leawood. That little syndicate became Universal Press Syndicate in February of 1970, and I did nighttime work for Jim on some of their projects. One of their big challenges was to find features to sell, and what they had wasn't exactly setting the world on fire!

But one day Jim came over with tear sheets from the Yale Daily News, Yale's student newspaper, containing a comic called Bull Tales, by a student named Garry Trudeau. The strip focused on local campus events at Yale. Jim asked what I thought. My general opinion was that it was wonderfully bright and brash and 'with it,' but a little salty for readers of daily newspapers. I liked it, but I didn't think it would sell.
Jim ignored everybody's advice, took it on, and changed the name to Doonesbury. I helped out with the initial promotions for the strip, without any idea that I'd ever work on it!

The first Doonesbury cartoon ran in American papers on Oct. 26, 1970. Garry did the strip completely on his own the first year, but then he realized he would need help with the inking while attending Yale grad school beginning in fall 1971. He knew about me and asked Jim if I'd be interested. I spent part of that year trying to brush aside the idea.

But then came a day when Garry was driving his Jeep from Colorado to New Haven, Conn. He was stopping in the area to see a friend in Tonganoxie, so he came by and we met. After 15 minutes of obtuse conversation, we shook hands on a deal. I would be his employee, his inker. I told my wife I had just agreed to something I didn't want to do but that it was OK because the strip would never work out. Little did I know!

Explain your role and how you accomplish it.

The essence of my role is that Garry produces a tight pencil rendering of each strip and I "ink" it, creating the more finished ink lines, filling things in, and so on. And in 39 years of doing this almost daily, I can say that Garry has never done the process exactly the same way twice!

Back in the beginning there was no FedEx or fax, so he would send each strip by special delivery. Now he faxes the sketches. The originals are 7 by 15 inches for the dailies, and those are then reduced by 50 percent. I transfer the original sketches into ink on preprinted art board using a light table. It's tracing, with little interpretation. I use fine-line technical pens to do the inking.

Each tracing is then scanned, and I pull it onto a computer screen to do the lettering and a lot of retouching in Photoshop, adding black areas and halftones. We used to do the lettering by hand, but later we developed a unique Doonesbury font, called "Doonesbury Neue."

I e-mail the strip back to Garry for his approval and then it goes to Andrews-McMeel Universal, where three editors read every strip. Their goal is to spot any awful mistakes—like the time Garry wrote "Ari" instead of "Rahm" when referring to the White House chief of staff. But the editors never censor what Garry has written.

There's a lot of waiting time in this back-and-forth process. It takes about two hours for each daily strip, and four to five on Sundays. I ink the Sunday strips, but someone else does the coloring.

How often do you communicate with Garry?

We talk virtually every week by phone, but not about content. He's definitely the creator. A comic strip's viewpoint seems to best come from one person to work well. Sometimes he'll give me a couple of words and ask my opinion about which works better—but I know he doesn't use words lightly, so I rarely argue. He has a reason for everything, even for his punctuation.

What are some of your challenges?

Well, Garry follows no truly discernable creative timetable—ever. How can you not have the same weekly schedule in 39 years?!

And there's a slight disadvantage in living so far apart. Also, he is allowed six weeks each year for reruns, so we have to schedule our vacations around each other.

And he's a perfectionist. He'd be rewriting last week's strip if he could!

Has the strip evolved over time?

One big change came when Garry began to feel limited when the panels were static, all with the same angles and perspectives, so he changed to a more cinematic framing. That came after the hiatus he took in the 1980s; he came back with a more sophisticated look for the strip, often varying his angles from frame to frame and zooming in and out. The result was more graphically dynamic.

When Trudeau took his hiatus, did you think it was over?

Oh, no! I knew that Garry wanted some time to read, write, and travel.

Syndicates have 12-year contracts with their writers, so any significant time off has to be planned well in advance. I knew his hiatus was coming two years beforehand. In 1980, he called me to say that he was marrying Jane Pauley…and to talk about the Republican and Democratic conventions…and then, "Oh, yes…"

I managed to keep my mouth shut! Garry took a 22-month hiatus, from January 1983 to October 1984.

How would you describe Trudeau?

Garry, who is 62 now, likes virtually everybody and is a most likeable, personable guy himself. And his respect for his readers is profound. So that his work feels real, he has spent a lot of time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with veterans. He went to Iraq with the USO, and soon he's going to Afghanistan.

Some feel he has inherited the mantle of Charles Schultz, and he deserves it. He can still surprise me with his brilliance after 39 years.

What do you love about the job?

The sheer number of characters I get to work with; there've been at least 100 over the years. Many start out as "utility characters" with a specific role, but then later work into leading roles in the story.

Before he introduced the character "Duke," Garry gave me a copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 to prepare myself, since the character was modeled after author Hunter S. Thompson. All the Doonesbury characters have flaws, but Duke was fully flawed!

As jobs go, mine's about as pleasant as it gets.

Have you worked for anybody but Trudeau all these years?

I did some work with the Good Earth Almanac in the early 1970s and some retouching for Universal Press Syndicate. I also did some shading for Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, for two years.

Larsen and Trudeau are arguably two of the brightest cartoonists in history.

What's your life like when you aren't inking?

Early in the 1980s, I was active with the Theater for Young America and other companies, working on sets and acting. At one point I worked on five to six plays a year, but now I just do one or so.

I'm also involved with the Shawnee Indian Mission and the Shawnee Mission Cemetery, which dates to 1838. I researched many of the people buried there and wrote monologues that actors could deliver during cemetery tours. That cemetery represents a terribly important piece of history. I'm vice president of the Friends of the Mission.

My wife and I have three children: Brendan, a computer engineer, and his wife, Shannon, of Spring Hill, and their son, Kyle; Joel, a theatrical agent in New York City; and Rachel, an executive assistant in San Francisco.

40 years of Doonesbury

In October, Garry Trudeau published a book titled 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective, and he appeared in Kansas City. The book is available at Rainy Day Books, other local bookstores, and from online booksellers.

Hardcover, 696 pages

Andrews McMeel Publishing; annotated edition (Oct. 26, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0740797352 ▪ ISBN-13: 978-0740797354

The name Doonesbury is a combination of the word "doone" (prep school slang for "someone who is out to lunch") and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Garry Trudeau's roommate at Yale University. Doonesbury was the first humor strip ever published by Universal Press Syndicate, and in May 1975 the strip won Trudeau a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.
Doonesbury became well-known for its social and political commentary, always timely and peppered with wry and ironic humor. It is currently syndicated in about 1,400 newspapers worldwide.

Trudeau has frequently used real-life settings based on real scenarios but with fictional results. He has also delighted and intrigued readers by displaying fluency in jargon, including that of real estate agents, flight attendants, computer scientists, journalists, presidential aides, and soldiers in Iraq.

Even though Doonesbury frequently features major real-life U.S. politicians, they are rarely depicted with their faces. George W. Bush was symbolized by a Stetson hat. Later, President Bush's hat was changed to a Roman military helmet representing imperialism. Other symbols have included a waffle for the indecisive Bill Clinton, an unexploded (but sometimes lit) bomb for the hot-tempered Newt Gingrich, a feather for the "lightweight" Dan Quayle, and a giant groping hand for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

(Says Don Carlton, "Garry and I never talk about those icons. To talk about them would be to rob them of their magic.")

Doonesbury has angered, irritated, or been rebuked by many of the political figures that have appeared or been referred to in the strip over the years. Outspoken critics have included members of every U.S. presidential administration since Richard Nixon's.

The strip has also met controversy over every military conflict it has dealt with, including Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and both Gulf wars. When Doonesbury ran the names of soldiers who had died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, conservative commentators accused Trudeau of using the American dead to make a profit for himself, and demanded that the strip be removed from newspapers.

Some newspapers have dealt with the criticism by moving the strip from the comics page to the editorial page, because many people believe that a politically based comic strip like Doonesbury does not belong in a traditionally child-friendly comics section.