Created in "the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture",[1] and frequently political in nature, Doonesbury features characters representing a range of affiliations, but the cartoon is noted for a liberal viewpoint.

The name "Doonesbury" is a combination of the word doone (American prep school slang for someone who is clueless, inattentive, or careless) and the surname of Charles Pillsbury, Trudeau's roommate at Yale University.

[2] Doonesbury is written and penciled by Garry Trudeau, then inked and lettered by an assistant, Don Carlton,[3] then Todd Pound.

Zonker, still not ready for the "real world", was living with Mike and J.J. until he was accepted as a medical student at his Uncle Duke's "Baby Doc College" in Haiti.

Doonesbury's syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced on May 29, 2013, that the comic strip would go on hiatus from June 10 to Labor Day of that year while Garry Trudeau worked on his streaming video comedy Alpha House, which was picked up by Amazon Studios.

[11] "Doonesbury Flashbacks" were offered during those weeks, but due to the unusually long hiatus, some newspapers opted to run different comic strips instead.

[13] After Alpha House was renewed for a second season in February 2014, Trudeau announced that he would now produce only Sunday strips for the foreseeable future.

[14] Since March 3, 2014, the strip has offered reruns starting from the very beginning of its history as opposed to the recent ones that re-run when Trudeau is on vacation.

In a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone, Trudeau said that while Donald Trump appears in only a limited number of strips, "for the last two years, he's been subtext in almost all of them.

With the exception of Walden College, Trudeau has frequently used real-life settings, based on real scenarios, but with fictional results.

Trudeau has also displayed fluency in various forms of jargon, including those of real estate agents, flight attendants, computer scientists, journalists, presidential aides, and soldiers in Iraq.

The unnamed college attended by the main characters was later given the name "Walden College", revealed to be in Connecticut (the same state as Yale), and depicted as devolving into a third-rate institution under the weight of grade inflation, slipping academic standards, and the end of tenure, issues that Trudeau has consistently revisited since the original characters graduated.

Some of the second generation of Doonesbury characters have attended Walden, a venue Trudeau uses to advance his concerns about academic standards in the United States.

Originally, strips featuring the President of the United States would show an external view of the White House, with dialogue emerging from inside.

The main characters are a group who attended the fictional Walden College during the strip's first 12 years, and moved into a commune together in April 1972.

The original Walden Commune residents were Mike Doonesbury, Zonker Harris, Mark Slackmeyer, Nichole, Bernie, and DiDi.

In more recent years the second generation has taken prominence as they have grown to college age: Jeff Redfern, Alex Doonesbury, Zonker's nephew Zipper Harris, and Uncle Duke's son Earl.

Doonesbury has covered numerous political and social issues, some of which were pioneering and others that drew criticism: When the strip became a success, veteran cartoonist, Al Capp grudgingly admitted, “Anybody who can draw bad pictures of the White House four times in a row and succeed knows something I don’t.

[57] Liberal politicians skewered by Trudeau in the strip have also complained, including Democrats such as former U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill and California Governor Jerry Brown.

In some papers (such as the Tulsa World and Orlando Sentinel) Doonesbury appears on the opinions page alongside Mallard Fillmore, a politically conservative comic strip.