Didn’t she vote for McKloskey?
Yep. Zonker’s mom was a delegate at the RNC in 1972. In the strip dated 25 August 1972, she was the lone holdout for McCloskey over Nixon. She wasn’t from Walden, she was from California.
Just checked my Doonesbury CD! 
Quite frankly, I find the current story line an example of the main problem with “Doonesbury”:
The need to have as many important characters appear fairly regularly as possible.
As a result, Trudeau tends to drop interesting story lines (such as B.D.'s mission to get Duke) and forget them for a while, changing focus on less interesting story lines.
Of course, I am a Californian…
Wait, wait. Maybe she appeared twice! I remember strongly… I think it was the cycle trip… “The chair recognizes the honorable delegate from Walden Puddle!” Zonker’s head whips around. “MOM?”
Why I remember this, I have no idea.
…and a governor…
The delegate from Walden Puddle cast his vote for the Lone Ranger.
Zonk’s mother was in the same convention, nominating Zonker himself on the first ballot (a literary device if there ever was one) as a Favorite Son candidate. After that, she pushed for McCloskey. “Mom’s a very determined delegate.”
Good Lord, the amount of unadulterated crap stored between these eardrums of mine…boggles the mind.
Prince Valiant? They’re still doing Prince Valiant. Good Lord, I haven’t seen that strip since 1958 when I left Ohio and lost contact with the Columbus Dispatch. It’s still going? Really?
How about Mark Trail? Has that asexual forest ranger and naturalist gotten Cherry in the sack yet? I did not see the humor in that name until years later–the virginal Cherry. Or was it Chery?
And Dan’l Hale–last I saw of him he had just escaped from the River Raisin Massacre? And Snuffy Smif? You can’t in all good faith say that Doonesbury isn’t funnier than Snuffy Smif. Sure, it isn’t Pogo, but Doonesbury a damnsight funnier than Snuffy Smif.
Yes, Snuffy Smith is still around, unfortunately. It’s even online.
So’s Marmaduke, Broom Hilda, Shoe, Heathcliff, Cathy, Apt 3G, Spider-Man and Fred Basset.
My gripe is that at least three strips (Shoe, Peanuts and another I can’t recall at the moment) have been kept even after the original authors have died.
Okay, they’re decent strips, some good jokes, and there’s enough Peanuts strips that it’ll be decades before they have to repeat anything.
But for chrissake, there’s literally thousands of new, more up-to-date comics out there, and recycled slot-fillers by dead artists just take up room that could be used to get a fresh face out there.
Look at the webcomic resource Keenspace or Keenspot- they have something like 4,000 webcomics listed. Sure, a lot of 'em are crap- bad art and/or an excess of toilet humor- but there’s a hundred gems.
Dump Peanuts and plug in Schlock Mercenary. Toss that old Shoe and try on some Ozy & Millie. Put Marmaduke and Heathcliff down- it’d be a mercy- and use the space for Sluggy Freelance and Day by Day.
Heck, if they gotta recycle the old stuff, why not a good run of Rick O’Shay and Hipshot? I can’t even find that stuff in books.
I must second that and add a plug for my favorite WebComic – Achewood www.achewood.com. What the Hell People!
Peanuts must never die. NEVER.
Good grief.
The rest of the world is not ready for Sluggy Freelance. Hell, something as simple as summoning a demon for a six-pack of beer would get the strip banned in nine states alone.
Well, maybe, maybe not. Didja see how fast Bill Amend managed to get a blackout-themed sequence printed? That was pretty amazing, I thought.
It’s already dead, and it’s getting riper by the day. It needs to be buried.
Prince Valiant is still going. So is Mark Trail. He and Cherry finally tied the knot, by the way. I don’t know why people read these comics.
I have to say, while there are plenty of good new comics, there are even more bad new comics. However, I think that there are enough good new comics that there’s no excuse for running Marmaduke, Family Circus, Ziggy, and the like. Berke Breathed, Gary Larson, and Bill Watterson were RIGHT to leave us wanting more.
Taste, indeed. And generally when I see someone complaining about Doonesbury, it’s pretty hard not to leap to the conclusion that “septic partisanship” is involved.
I say bring back Jerry on the Job!
Hey, don’t rag on the Circus. It’s an original and hilarious strip. Let me give you an example: There was this one where one of the kids had to run an errand next door. When he arrived, his mom asked what took him so long. And there is this dotted arrow that shows the roundabout path he took. HA!
Good times.
Ah, rj . . . I shoulda knowed you was a Sluggite.
Apart from Sluggy, Homestar, and KoDT, I get all my comics daily in my email from www.mycomicspage.com. It doesn’t catch all the syndicated strips I’d like (no Zits, no Bizarro), but it gets most of 'em, and editorial toons as well.
Oh, and I get Calvin and Hobbes reruns. And Bloom County, too, Sprix.
/shameless plug
I gotta agree with bringing back Rick O’Shay and Hipshot. Stan Lynde was a rare beast as far as comic strip artists go, and his stuff, being set in the old west, was quite literally timeless.
…but after reading Watterson’s explanation of why he quit doing “Calvin and Hobbes,” I begin to see why he isn’t the only one to go out of the business. The Syndicates are heavy-handed masters, and once a comic strip author starts to succeed, they begin to put the screws to you. Watterson left because he didn’t want to merchandise his characters, or hand over any rights.
…and both Watterson and Lynde were such talented guys, there was no way in hell the syndicates could have gotten anyone but them to do their strips… at least, not in any manner that the public would have accepted.
Peanuts is dead. Long live Peanuts. Let it go out of print, and be remembered and celebrated forever in omnibus editions… because I have objections to allowing new artists and writers to take over strips like Peanuts.
When this happens… when a creation of one heart, one mind, one hand… goes over to a committee… and worse, a committee in the grip of a syndicate… you begin to get Zombie Strips.
It has been pointed out that many of the great strips of yesteryear ain’t what they used to be. Garfield, one of the mightiest heavy hitters in my lifetime, is now pretty much written and drawn entirely by a committee of assistants, from what I’m told… and it isn’t funny. Hell, it’s not even remotely interesting any more.
“Nancy,” to me, is the great grandmother of all zombie strips. The original writer/artist died DECADES ago, and the strip has just kept marching along ever since, safely in the hands of the syndicate, telling its odd little hollow jokes with its odd little hollow characters in such a way that will offend no one. It’s dead, but it’s still being written, and drawn, and printed, every day. It’s a zombie. The only thing missing is Sluggo staggering around, muttering “brains… brains…”
Let them die. Let the new generation of artists and writers have a chance. Some of them aren’t bad, and some are so good it’s scary.
Every generation is that way.
Actually, they have been re-running old Peanuts from the early '70s. Which means, oddly, that suddenly it doesn’t suck.
Zombie Strips. Perfect name for them, Wang-Ka. Somehow these strips have Gotten Tenure and it’s well-nigh impossible to get them off the comics page, so they continue to lumber along without the original minds and hearts that gave them life. Some of them stink outright; others just inoffensively lie there taking up space that could better be used by a newer, livelier strip.