One of the syndicate's founders stumbled upon Bull Tales and approached Trudeau using a pseudonym, offering him a 20-year contract, which the cartoonist resisted. The story of how Universal Press Syndicate recruited Trudeau reads like a story from the strip itself. "People were so surprised by this strip that was about sex and drugs and rock 'n roll and politics and all the things that I was concerned about and was thinking about in college that I got cut a lot of slack." "You can't exaggerate the importance of novelty in jumpstarting a career," Trudeau says. The strip caught the attention of a fledgling newspaper syndicate which told Trudeau the drawing and lettering needed work but also told him it read like dispatches from the front lines of the counter culture. Its main character was B.D., who was based on Yale's standout quarterback, Brian Dowling. It all began as an irreverent strip called Bull Tales in the Yale Daily News when Garry Trudeau was a junior. It's also been censored for some of those same reasons. It was the first daily comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize for tackling social issues, politics and war. The ground-breaking comic strip Doonesbury has been with us for a half-century.
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