16. We’re Not Out of the Woods Yet (1979)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from June 26 1978 to Dec. 30 1978
37 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list.)

After several years, Trudeau finally found something to do with Boopsie. In one of the era’s most delightful sequences, she takes a two-week trip to Graceland on the first anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. From here, Trudeau finds a real voice for the character as a great way to comment on celebrity trends. Also among the Walden regulars, Mike and Zonker visit Studio 54, and Zonk takes Kirby, his often-confused teammate, under his wing as the bespectacled receiver tries to find his place in the era.

In Washington, Duke finds complications besetting his tenure as manager for the Redskins. In a week’s sequence cut from the book, we learn he’s not paying much attention to the NFL’s regulations on gambling. That he’s not paying any attention to their regulations on steroids and dexedrine is a given, but he has plenty of complications, as Lava-Lava Lenny makes a suspicious number of tackles, and a linebacker, Eddie, popped to the eyeballs on speed, clotheslines two quarterbacks. This prompts his assistant Riley, the fifteen year-old nephew of the owner, to go to the papers. Interestingly, the last line of the September 16 strip had Riley threatening to “go to the feds,” but this was changed to “papers” for the book.

Of course, the biggest complication of all comes when Duke attends a reception for Chinese students at Georgetown and learns, on November 9, that Honey has come to the States. He hasn’t entirely figured out that she’s in love with him – there’s some question as to whether he ever does – but nor does he ever figure out how to get away from her.

Also in Washington, Joanie’s old law school nemesis, Woody, gets a job with the House ethics committee, earning $6000 more a year than her. Much of the Washington material is cut from the book, including an entire three-week sequence in December where Rick is assigned to figure out just how in the world all the incumbents involved in the Korean scandal managed to get re-elected in the midterms, but we do get a couple of weeks of Roland hosting an ABC special on the Camp David summit, Cabin Fever: Footpaths to Glory.

15. “But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There” (1979)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from Jan. 9 1978 to June 22 1978
18 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list.)

After fourteen editions in the original size, the books get their first makeover. These colorful versions are an inch wider and just a hair taller, and each is labelled on the front as “a Doonesbury book.” Simultaneously, the first fourteen books were reissued in the new packaging, each as “a Doonesbury classic.”

In current events, Dr. Kissinger’s students at Georgetown, Barney and Mr. Weinburger, join a protest against the Shah of Iran, whose wife appears at a New York dinner in her honor. A mellow lifestyle and biorhythms are keys to happiness; Dan Asher becomes a regular visitor to WBBY, principally in the Sunday strips, to talk about keeping it laid-back. The Post assigns Rick Redfern to White House detail, following President Carter to Lagos because Rick’s physical, intellectual and emotional waves are all scheduled to peak there. Rick meets Roland Burton Hedley Jr., his future partner in the Press Corps, on March 30. TV programming wunderkind Fred Silverman moves from ABC to NBC, just in time to take credit for a new “jiggle” sitcom called Spa, whose teenage starlet appears fully nude in each episode.

Uncle Duke’s been unemployed for about a year. He earns a little money lecturing at colleges like Walden, but finally finds some stability putting his sports medicine background to use as the new general manager for the Washington Redskins. The team has already traded away its first six rounds of draft picks; Duke’s strategy is to raid the players’ pension fund to acquire free agent “Lava-Lava” Lenny, whom we met when Duke was governor of Samoa, from the Detroit Lions.

Phred becomes Viet Nam’s new ambassador to the UN. He meets two friends also representing the third world nations who will appear sporadically for the next few years, Victor (Benin) and Eddie (Togo), and they all enjoy listening to the sultry-voiced French interpreter on UN channel two.

At Walden, Mark has actually dropped out of school to devote time to WBBY and earn some money and make contacts bartending at reunions. He meets his father at the Class of ’43 shindig and resumes his well-intended efforts to reconnect with him. Later, he gives the booth over to Zonker while he goes to Washington to interview Lacey Davenport about the Korean scandal. At the time, the House was in no rush to investigate ethics complaints against congressmen, including Speaker Tip O’Neill, for their involvement with a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who had been throwing enough money around in Washington to raise eyebrows. On Friday, June 16, two panels of the strip were given over to a coupon intended to be mailed to Speaker O’Neill’s office, cheekily urging some action and information. The strip was hugely controversial, and really got under O’Neill’s skin.

14 B. The Doonesbury Special (1978)

I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure of watching the lone Doonesbury animated special, which aired on NBC on Sunday, November 27 1977, as a lead-in to Rankin-Bass’s cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit. The film, which was seen by an audience of about 18 million, was directed by John and Faith Hubley. John passed away while the film was in pre-production. It was later released on VHS and laserdisc, but has never been seen on DVD, apart from bootlegs, and has been out of print for years.

The companion book, released the following January, features the script of the film along with stills from the finished piece along with production art and designs. Hardcover and paperback editions are available.

While the daily strip tied into the special by having Jimmy Thudpucker get ready for an appearance on TV’s Midnight Special in the six days leading up to the broadcast, the film’s story actually takes place about three years earlier in the continuity, with Joanie still living at Walden and working at the day care. Some of the exchanges between Jean, Ellie and Howie (“Simone de Beauvoir’s got your number, Slim.”) are verbatim from the original strips.

14 A. Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits (1978)

According to the entry at Wikipedia, this collection contains 516 daily strips published Jan. 7, 1975 to Dec. 10, 1977 and 80 Sunday strips from Jan. 26, 1975 to Dec. 25, 1977. An editor estimates this as 55% of the printed material from the period.

As noted in the entry for book nine, “Speaking of Inalienable Rights, Amy…,” this treasury completely goes against the industry standard and actually restores some of the material that had been cut from the earlier, smaller books. Of course, they did this while at the same time chopping out material which did previously appear in them, but it remains quite remarkable to me that almost the entire two-month 1975 sequence of Uncle Duke in Samoa is available in print here, and not in a smaller book. Does anybody know of any other comic strip collection that has done this? There are also other small restorations here and there, including a Friday, July 29 1977 strip of Zonker and Duke in the southern California desert, slowly realizing they’ve been duped into a land fraud scheme, which had been cut from book fourteen.

The collection includes a genuinely fascinating foreword by William F. Buckley Jr., who had performed the commencement speech for Trudeau’s graduating class at Yale, and had never heard of Doonesbury before being surprised by the standing ovation that Trudeau received from his fellow graduates when his name was called.

14. “Any Grooming Hints for Your Fans, Rollie?” (1978)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from:
July 4 1977 to October 15 1977
October 24 1977 to January 7 1978
*October 17-22 was a repeat week.
32 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list.)

If you want to read a Doonesbry book that really defines the 1970s, this is the one. Joanie starts the book working hard for the Congressional Ethics Committee, and is later called on to sub for Lacey in a debate against Phyllis Schafly about the ERA. Mark interviews an expert on the new craze of jogging, Zonker explains the Panama Canal Treaty to the football team, and the wannabe serial killer “Son of Arnold and Mary Lieberman” pesters Jimmy Breslin for tabloid media coverage.

Just to keep things very topical, Jimmy Thudpucker cuts some new songs and frets about his forthcoming appearance on the syndicated music series The Midnight Special. His nervousness about appearing on TV for the first time came the same week that the animated A Doonesbury Special aired on NBC. More about this in entry 14B.

As for the regulars, Uncle Duke has a scheme to extract laetrile, a substance used in shady cancer “treatments” of the period, from apricots and buys a farm, only to find himself on the receiving end of a land fraud scheme. He lands on his feet and starts working the college lecture circuit. Mike and Zonker move back into their old dorm, McClatchey, roomsitting for their friend Richard Hendrie. It’s there that they again cross paths with Roland Hedley Jr., who’s now a correspondant for ABC Wide World of News, and Zonk once again completely flummoxes him about barbituate use on campus.

This time out, the book’s editors saw that it was mainly the political stuff that failed to make the cut, and not stories with the regular cast. Some storylines are chopped entirely, but these are all Carter White House weeks starring Duane Delacourt.

One final note on this period: Duke’s caretaker, Zeke, was introduced in a Sunday strip, July 24th. Zeke appeared in two further Sundays in 1977, but didn’t make his way to the dailies until 1979.

13. Stalking the Perfect Tan (1978)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from Jan. 3 1977 to July 2 1977
32 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list.)

This book isn’t a very strong ones for fans of the original cast. B.D. is nowhere to be seen, Mark gets two truncated weeks bartending the college reunion (where it is revealed that Universal Petroleum’s Jim Andrews is a classmate of Lacey Davenport’s), and Mike watches TV. A week-long sequence where the commune is snowed in is cut entirely.

Mostly, the action is still centered around Joanie and Rick. He takes a five-month job at People magazine and has to spend two weeks at a seminar for celebrity gossip while Joanie finishes her collegiate career and graduates from law school. They move back to D.C. and Rick resumes his position at The Washington Post while Joanie gets a job from Lacey as a counselor on the House Ethics Committee.

In other stories, Jimmy Thudpucker and his wife Jenny have a baby. Jimmy is shown to be a good pal of Bob Dylan, who becomes a character via off-panel voice. Henry Kissinger, who’s been seen both in the flesh and an off-panel voice in the past, takes a new position at an unnamed college – revealed in 1978 as Georgetown University – teaching a political science seminar. This brings two new characters into the rotation. We learn very little about them. The nervous one who keeps interrupting Kissinger with questions is named Barney Perkins; his laid-back friend with the moustache’s last name is Weinburger. Another new character is Carter’s Secretary of Symbolism, Duane Delacourt.

In China, Uncle Duke has a few last weeks of triumphant silliness – he’s mostly on the Sunday pages during this period – in which he finally learns that Honey has been taking liberties with her translations of his speeches, and that he’s being replaced as US Envoy by Leonard Woodcock. In a huff, he storms back to California and looks up the Harrises, where Zonker is spending his fourth summer on the “Cocoa Butter Circuit” of competitive tanning. The other fellow on this book’s cover is Cornell, an old buddy who comes to visit Zonker and talk up EST, and also, in a strip cut from the book, to borrow Zonker’s coke spoon.

12. As the Kid Goes for Broke (1977)

This collection reprints 124 daily strips from June 28 to Dec. 31 1976
36 strips from the period are not included (see comment for list).

The major storyline in the book is the California congressional race. The incumbent Democrat, Ventura, who had previously beaten Ginny in the primary, is caught in a hotel sex scandal by Washington Post reporter Rick Redfern, who makes his first appearance in the strip on July 1. Rick flies out to cover the race and meets his future wife, Joanie, on August 22, but unfortunately that's a Sunday strip. Jimmy Thudpucker continues campaigning for Ginny, recording a single, “Ginny’s Song,” with the help of some top sessioners. The B-side is a disco remix. In the end, the opposition vote to Ventura is split between Ginny and Republican Lacey Davenport, whom everybody had overlooked for years. Lacey had first appeared in a one-off strip from 1974, reprinted in book seven.

Ginny drops out and asks her supporters to back Lacey, who wins with 63% of the vote. Joanie and Rick finally hook up after weeks of teasing the night after the election. The incredibly famous sequence from November 11-13, where Trudeau spends three days panning across town, ending with the shot, reimagined on the book’s cover, of Joanie waking in Rick’s arms, was hugely controversial and was apparently not printed by several newspapers.

In other storylines, Bernie gets a couple of weeks’ spotlight after several years in the background, visiting Scotland to search for the Loch Ness Monster. Zonker returns to college after the campaign and somehow gets back on the hapless football team, 0-7 this season, after missing two months of classes, and Uncle Duke, still in China, contracts appendicitis and later spends four weeks (heavily truncated in the book) learning how to read Shanghai’s political wall posters in order to help his wagers against other foreign consuls about the power vacuum in the wake of Chairman Mao’s death.

A two-week sequence from September, in which Democratic strategists arrive in Plains, Georgia to prep Jimmy Carter for his debates with Ford, and to get grifted at the lemonade stand by Amy, is not cut entirely, notably pruned down for print, from twelve strips to just four. Another interesting change for the book comes from Lacey’s post-election interview with PBS host Adam Paine. The reprints on The Bundled Doonesbury show him with a white jacket, but this was zip-a-toned black for this book. Then again, The Bundled Doonesbury features a 1974 Phred strip in place of the July 12 story of Dan Rather investigating the Ventura sex scandal, so who knows?

The book also cuts two strips that establish Tina Tibbit, the woman in the Ventura scandal, posed for Playboy, leading to a reference later in that week where Lacey acknowledges that she’s looked at men with lust in her heart, notably the 1929 Yale rowing crew. This is a playful and timely jab at Carter’s similar admission in the October 1976 issue.