Doonesbury: What if McCain had won?

Cafe Society
1

Things sometimes don’t go the way it seems they will. My understanding is that the comics in the newspaper are done weeks ahead of time. But Doonesbury this week has Obama winning. What if McCain had won? Did the papers have two copies of this weeks strips? Does anyone know?

2

I believe they had some rerun strips ready in the unlikely case that had happened…

3

If McCain had won, Doonesbury would have gone into repeats for those affected days. Several newspapers were more than a little miffed that Trudeau didn’t send them two scenarios.

4

The LA Times said they thought they wouldn’t be able to go to press before the election results were certain, so initially they weren’t going to post the cartoons where Obama won. Then they changed their mind, and just went with it.

So it seems they wouldn’t have been able to choose reruns anyway.

5

Thanks, all. The rerun thing makes sense.

We can close this up, mods.

6

The Sacramento Bee had an “Editor’s Note” at the top of the comics page on Wednesday saying:

“Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau predicted the winner of the presidential election in strips he drew for this week. The Bee will publish the strips as drawn…

Presumably the Editorial Note itself was written before the results were known on Tuesday night, leaving me to assume that the paper intended to run the strips as written regardless of the outcome of the election.

7

Here’s an AP article about this: “‘Doonesbury’ strip assumes Obama will win”.

Trudeau picked reruns for newspapers to publish if they didn’t want to plan in advance to run the Obama victorious ones.

8

What is Trudeau using to represent Obama?

9

The Thinking Ape Blues did the same thing, calling it the “Gary Trudeau Gambit”.

10

I thought this bit from silenus’ link was interesting…

So, either Mr. Bounds had hoped that McCain would lose, or else he’s a Doonesbury fan. Which do you think it is? :wink:

11

The “Stars and Stripes” military newspaper was just going to run them as is. In the event of error, they’d be collector’s prizes.

12

In one interview with Trudeau, he teased that even if he was wrong, he would continue drawing the strip with Obama as president…taking place in an alternate timeline I guess.

That would have been cool.

13

Closed at the request of the OP.