There are very few times in life when a sentence written in the first person can be opened with the words “Like Flannery O’Connor,” but this is one of them: Like Flannery O’Connor, I was a cartoonist before I was a writer.

Because my professional life has become crowded with other titles—film critic, book reviewer, classical-music and dance columnist, arts reporter, and, Heaven help me, ersatz political commentator—I myself sometimes forget that my original dream job was daily newspaper cartoonist. 

I settled on this goal early and pursued it ardently.  

I had long been bewitched by the comics pages folded into each edition of the Times-Picayune, the newspaper with which I grew up in my suburb of New Orleans. The pages stood out because of the implicit respect they accorded their seemingly inconsequential inhabitants, including Charlie Brown, Garfield, and Mr. and Mrs. Bumstead. The comics were printed large enough for an attentive reader to discern their artistry; they were also run in sufficient numbers—dozens of strips and panels spread over multiple broadsheet pages—to suggest that each had a fan base. Indeed, I can remember few events more noteworthy in the life of any newspaper I faithfully read than when a cartoon was canceled or replaced. 

By the age of 8, I had become sufficiently enamored with what I knew of the cartoonist’s life to make the informed decision that I wished to make it my own. Undoubtedly, the apparent ease of this assignment made it appealing when compared to a real job—one that, for example, required leaving the house or, in fact, my desk—or even real writing. My short stories seldom filled more than a page-and-half in my ruled journal, but my cartoons would not require even that much creativity. To write and draw a daily comic strip—four, maybe five panels topped by a punchline—seemed accomplishable. Cartooning was not only an agreeable gig, I reckoned, but a secure one: I could not, in the very early 1990s, foresee a time when newspapers would cease being permanent features of American life. 

Quickly, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury made an unlikely claim on my imagination. Much of its humor—about commune-residing, marijuana-smoking permanent collegians and, later, angst-ridden, Reagan Revolution-hating yuppies—would have been completely lost on me back then. Yet, precocious kid that I was, I picked up on some of its topical humor, which I appreciated for its patina of sophistication rather than its particulars. I was surely the only second-grader in my class who, when asked to draw a picture of the cover of a recently read book, drew a near-perfect replica of the cover of a Doonesbury anthology that had a place of honor in my collection, Check Your Egos at the Door. 

Although I now wince at his reflexive liberalism and lame anti-Trumpism, I cannot deny that Trudeau was legitimately my hero. Although I got my hands on each new Doonesbury anthology as it appeared at the local B. Dalton, I nonetheless took my scissors to the newspaper to clip each strip for preservation in albums intended for family photos. (I later read that John Updike, another cartoonist-turned-writer, did the same thing.)

When I was perhaps 10, I remember reading about a cartoonists’ conference in New Orleans in which, apparently erroneously, Trudeau was named as one of the participants. My parents drove me to the downtown hotel where the event was taking place, and while there were lots of cartoonists happily chatting with fans, Trudeau was absent. I managed to get the attention of one cartoonist—I wish I could remember who—and he told me that, no, he didn’t think “Garry,” as he called him, was there. Strangely, I counted this encounter as a success: I had met someone in my future field who seemed to know “Garry”! That Trudeau was married to the former Today Show co-host Jane Pauley only contributed to my impression that an exciting, glamorous life could be wrung from a trade as juvenile-seeming as cartooning. I am sure I imagined a future for myself in which I scribbled away while my wife appeared on TV or maybe in the movies. 

Later, my father prevailed upon a Doonesbury merchandising outfit to forward my cartoons to Trudeau in New York. Unbelievably, Trudeau wrote me an unsolicited typewritten note graciously praising my primitive, imitative but earnest work. This letter, typed on Doonesbury stationary and bearing what was, for me, its writer’s inimitable signature, arrived at my father’s office, and he called me at home to give me the news—undoubtedly interrupting one of my cartooning sessions in a spare bedroom that had been converted into a “studio,” complete with an angled drawing table and a T-square. Much to his credit, Trudeau would answer all of my subsequent fan mail.

As far as I can remember, a cartoon of mine was published just once, in my school’s student magazine, but for years I continued to churn out my comics as though they had a destination and I had a deadline. When I began to be homeschooled in the third grade, I lost an automatic outlet—that student magazine was, obviously, no longer available to me—but I gained oodles of time to doodle. At age 12, I was featured on the front page of my hometown newspaper, the now-defunct Slidell Sentry-News—the unintended outcome of my having submitted my portfolio in the hope of winning a regular spot on their comics page. I had to settle for a long and flattering profile with the headline KID CARTOONIST—“settle,” because the profile was a one-time event, not a recurring presence in the funny pages. 

Reading the story again today, I am not convinced that I was as busy as I had claimed—evidently, I had said that I drew five strips per week, each taking two hours—but I had worked long and hard enough for my cartoons to clearly resemble a Doonesbury knockoff. The reporter who interviewed me described my efforts in the most charitable manner possible: “Trudeau’s influence on the strips is instantly obvious. Tonguette uses many of the same techniques: disembodied icons to represent people, a dedicated stock of adult, college-educated characters, and a sharp, insightful wit.”

This is much too generous, but I won’t deny that, just as Trudeau had his preferred satirical targets, such as Bush and Quayle, I had mine: Martha Stewart, whose maniacal commitment to home economics struck me as very comic strip-worthy. 

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Yet after the newspaper profile appeared, my interest in my vocation, chosen so confidently at eight, waned. I was probably disappointed that no syndicate called to pick up my work, and I know I was discouraged when a friend of my brother, upon looking over the article, seemed decidedly unimpressed when I explained that, no, I was not the sort of cartoonist who worked in animated cartoons.

For me, it was onto other enthusiasms—the films of Orson Welles, the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, the reviews of John Simon. In many ways, I have attained the easy way of life I had hoped for. I have ended up parked at my desk in much the manner I predicted, and producing 800 words a day is not really so much more arduous than dreaming up a gag at the conclusion of a couple of panels. Plus, my career has occasionally brought me into contact with the dreams of my youth. I have reviewed exhibitions of original comics art and crossed paths with a hero or two, including Jules Feiffer, whom I interviewed for a 2020 profile in the Christian Science Monitor. Once I fully grasped Doonesbury’s politics, I ended up largely not sharing them, but I now see that Trudeau got some things right, including his opposition to the Iraq War and scorn for the president who initiated that woebegone conflict. 

Things worked out, but it saddens me when I read what my father told the reporter about my seemingly indefatigable cartooning so many years ago. “He just does it all on his own,” my dad said. “We as parents don’t do anything but encourage him. . . . It isn’t something that’s a passing fancy.” Alas, it turned out to be just that—an 8-year-old’s dream of adult life that was as susceptible to fading as newsprint. My cartooning ended before its time, but don’t all things?