And That's My Final Offer! (His A Doonesbury book)

Rating:
Summary: Enter Joan Jr. and Exit (?) Duke in the Doonesbury roster
Review: When Owl Books was publishing these "Doonesbury" collections during the seventies and eighties the back covers always had some quotation from the legitimate press (or better) regarding the comic strip's impact on American culture. For "And That's My Final Offer!" the blurb is from "The Chronicle of Higher Education" and suggests that the characters of Doonesbury deserve to hold the cornerstone spot in a new mythology for the Age of the Incredible.

Gee, I just thought Trudeau's strips were outrageous satires of the times in which we lived.

The cover shot for "And That's My Final Offer!" shows a blindfolded former Ambassador Duke calmly facing an Iranian firing squad. This collection of 1979-1980 "Doonesbury" cartoons is one of the most thematic collections of reprinted daily strips because most of these comics focus on two main topics. The first is how Duke came to be representing the interests of Universal Petroleum in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis and the exaggerated reports of his death. The second is the arrival of Joan Jr. on the doorstep of Joanie Caucus, which would have worked a lot better if she had been home instead of Rick Redfern, who is rather stunned to discover the love of his life has never said anything about having a daughter about to start at Georgetown. Joan Jr. actually helps tie these two major threads together because her roomie at Georgetown turns out to be Honey, who is upset by the fact that her boyfriend has been condemned to death. Of course, once we get to Georgetown we have to visit once again the classroom of Dr. Henry Kissinger.

There are other lesser concersn in this volume, such as David Halberstam interviewing Rick for his new book on power, Senate hearings on "Operation Manhood," and the assault on the citizens of New Hampshire by godless reporters during the primary season. But my favorite are the more subtle strips having to do with Mike Doonesbury's "Fin de Decade Party" that said goodbye to the Seventies, "a kidney stone of a decade" in Zonker's estimation. Of course, this is where it becomes clear that if you did not live through these times you are never go to get the humor: e.g., Mike shows up dressed as Steven Weed (He was Patty Heart's fiancée, and if you do not know about Patty Hearts, the "myth America" of the Seventies, then how did you ever get this far down into this review?).

This is one of the better of these collections from this period in the history of "Doonesbury," and while I am not willing to count Trudeau's characters amongst the pantheon of a modern American mythos, I still think these are pretty fun satires of American politics and culture during this period. Especially considering they came during a Democratic administration instead of the heady days provided for a liberal gadfly like Trudeau during the Nixon and Reagan years.