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.