WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. (AP) – In a rare public appearance, Garry Trudeau spoke to students at the Center for Cartoon Studies about his work process and challenges he’s faced over his nearly 40-year career as the creator of the Doonesbury comic strip.

“I find it really hard,” he said of his work. “It’s no less hard than when I started.”

He said the syndicated political satire, which has 30 ongoing characters has been pulled from newspapers because of its content and political themes.

But he said he doesn’t see it as censorship. “I’ve been careful not to call it that … I call it editing.”

A newspaper in Maine “got so freaked out” about a strip that showed a man and woman in bed together in the ’70s that they replaced it with the weather report, he said. Another paper yanked the whole strip for a week.

“That always backfires for them,” he said.

But he said topics that were at first shocking to some aren’t so anymore, such as one character’s revelation 30 years ago that he was gay.

“Now I can pretty much write about gay issues and not hear from anyone,” he said.

“Certainly popular culture has a role to play in destigmatizing,” he told the three dozen students, before he planned to speak at a fundraiser for the school founded in 2004 that now offers a masters’ degree.

Student Blair Sterrett, 31, of Ogden, Utah, asked Trudeau if he works with a team.

“These people are almost inhuman to us. You often wonder, ‘Are these people really doing their own strip?”‘ he said.

After 40 years, the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist still draws the strip in pencil and sends it to a man who inks it and another assistant who adds color.

In recent years with children grown he said he’s had more time to do research.

He’s met with soldiers and created a military blog site for their stories, called “Sandbox,” collecting the best entries into a new book.

He said he decided, “The one thing the global war on terrorism doesn’t have is its own literary magazine.”

In an effort to dramatize how serious the war is he had a main character B.D. lose his leg in Afghanistan.

Using black frames, he showed B.D. fading in and out of consciousness and another character trying to keep him alert. The next frame zeroed in on B.D. in a stretcher, without a leg.

But just as shocking to readers was that the veteran character was missing his signature helmet.

“I heard over and over that that was what really hit people,” Trudeau said.

After treading into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trudeau said the Pentagon called him offering him help and access to soldiers. He visited Walter Reed hospital and met with wounded soldiers.

“That’s the big danger for any writer. You’re not out there experiencing,” he said.

As serious a topic as the war is, he said he’s always felt an obligation to include humor, albeit the kind of humor used in extremely stressful situations by soldiers.

“That humor is very necessary for them,” he said.

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