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.