9. “Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy…” (Mar. 1976)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from Dec. 23 1974 to Aug. 2 1975
69 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list.)

This is certainly one of the more unusual Doonesbury collections. If you were following along from a complete archive, you’d suspect that the major storyline in this book should have been Uncle Duke’s tenure as Governor of American Samoa. The character, who first appeared in four July 1974 strips, returned just before Christmas and immediately took over the strip, first waking and recovering from a month-long drug-induced coma, then spending two weeks making life miserable for his neighbor John Denver and for the editor of Rolling Stone, then somehow wrangling his appointment to the government job. His new aide MacArthur meets him at the airport on January 16, and most of the next two months were spent in Samoa dealing with sacrificial volcano virgins and other disasters, almost none of which made it in, nor did any of the follow-up strips in the spring and summer, where Duke plans an invasion of Australia and siezes a cruise ship in order to get a response from the US military.

The industry standard for the large format books from most newspaper comics seems to be to only reprint some of the material that made it into the smaller books. Whether you’re looking at Fox Trot or Calvin & Hobbes or Get Fuzzy, the typical treasury edition contains about 80% of the contents of two smaller books. Interestingly, however, most of the Samoa sequences, excised from this book, were dusted off for the second treasury, Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits, appearing there in collected form for the first-ish time. Many of the Samoa strips were reprinted as illustrations in Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom, a book co-written with Nicholas von Hoffman, which I'll come back to after I finish the main feature text.

Forgotten Duke fact: At this point, he’s married to a woman named Sandy, who never appears on panel, but appears, from her long-distance dialogue, to be a really nice person…

What does make it into the book? Zonker and his plants, a government scheme to ease unemployment stress with federal film nights, lots of Phred and the re-education of new Communist Party members after the fall of Saigon, Mark convincing Benjy to take some liberal arts classes, and the introduction of future major player Kim Rosenthal as an orphaned infant.

The book’s title comes from the final twelve strips in the book, a two-week sequence where Zonker’s ancestor Nate Harris and his wife Amy deal with life in colonial Massachusetts, joining the minutemen and considering the Declaration of Independence.