Lovable Mike, the Pinocchio-nosed schlemiel who seems to have finally made good, is the "Doonesbury" figure who most captures the tenor of the times. Starting out as the most adrift of the Walden commune members, he entered the '80s as a classic Reagan Democrat, later to turn Republican. Trudeau, cynically but tenderly, led Mike further and further down the sellout trail, until he went to work for an ad agency and created the enduring Mr. Butts character for the tobacco industry. (His ex-wife, J.J., sold out, too, making art for Donald Trump, who, now that he's seeking the presidency on the Reform Party ticket -- real-life here, folks! -- is already beginning to suffer some fresh barbs from Trudeau's pen.)

Mike, relocated to Seattle with his computer-genius daughter, Alex, has borne the brunt of Trudeau's Internet Age satire. As a non-computer-savvy baby boomer, Mike found himself in a bewildering culture of e-mail chat groups, programming geeks, corporate downsizing, Microsoft domination, venture capital and initial public offerings. In one of "Doonesbury's" current story lines, Mike has launched on IPO on the struggling Internet start-up he runs with his new Gen-X bride, the Vietnamese Kim. Trudeau takes this opportunity to bash an industry that seems bent on rewarding money losers, and along the way he gets in some scathing shots at Nike, which employs one of Kim's relatives in a Vietnamese sweatshop.

Neither has the rest of the "Doonesbury" crew sat still. Mark became a left-wing radio host, came out of the closet and married a conservative businessman. "I can't imagine what you have in common with my son," Mark's appalled father, Phil -- a former Reagan official who served time for insider trading and who's now a tobacco lobbyist -- says to Chase in one strip. "Well, it's physical, of course," chimes in Mark.

Eternal hippie and ever-unemployed Zonker achieved glory as a competitive tanner, served as nanny to the children of Mike and J.J. and B.D. and Boopsie, won $20 million in the lottery, purchased a British peerage title and squandered all the dough. Feminist icon Joanie Caucus got a law degree and went to work first for liberal Republican Rep. Lacy Davenport -- who later developed Alzheimer's disease and bequeathed her fortune to a homeless woman -- then President Clinton. And Zonker's drug-addled, gun-crazed Uncle Duke, modeled on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, has been involved in adventures ranging from being ambassador to China to turning up as the 53rd Iran hostage to cocaine smuggling to working for David Duke, Oliver North and Donald Trump to running an orphanage to becoming a zombie who gets sold into slavery in Haiti. "He could use the discipline," one of his friends says.

Then there's the politics -- the ruthless savaging of politicians, public figures and attending sycophants that drives so many newspaper editors crazy. Trudeau's treatment of his first presidential victim, Nixon, was almost tender, such an easy target was he. President Ford had to veto a bill Congress passed to lay him off; the Carter administration was dominated by his Secretary of Symbols, who really flourished on the Jerry Brown campaign; Reagan was so baffling that even his own handlers couldn't fathom him, much less the press corps; Bush was the invisible man, unable to take a position on anything, who when campaigning had his manhood placed in a blind trust; Quayle was and continues to be depicted as a feather; Newt Gingrich was a bomb that Trudeau took great pleasure in finally exploding; Clinton is a waffle who seduces not only woman but all the reporters covering him.

And that's just the presidents. Trudeau has delivered indelibly sly, vicious portraits of Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Pat Buchanan, Eldridge Cleaver, Alfonse D'Amato, Ed Meese, Jesse Jackson, Michael Huffington and on and on and on.

Trudeau has rendered an account of our times so rich in detail it makes you gasp. And if he has proven one thing in the nearly 10,000 strips he's drawn, it's that there's nothing new under the sun. Think George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" slogan is an original concept? Zap back to a "Doonesbury" from 1981, when Walter Mondale describes his philosophy as "neo-nice." Was it not clear that the Desert Storm invasion of Iraq was for the benefit of big oil? Well, Zonker learned something like that in 1980 when, while registering for the military as per President Carter's request, he was asked, "If called upon by your country, would you be willing to give your life to protect the interests of U.S. oil companies?" (When Zonker screeches "OIL COMPANIES!?" the clerk responds, "It's only hypothetical. We're just trying to get a head count.") Was it funny to you when Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs, Calif., in 1988 and later to Congress? At a benefit concert he was about to play in 1976, rock star Jimmy Thudpucker says, "Awe-inspiring isn't it? One vibrant kinetic mass of 30,000 sun-bleached Santa Monica rock junkies. You know, it's a good thing that vote can't be harnessed, or our next governor would be Sonny Bono." Remember Dana Carvey, doing his spot-on impression of George Bush at the debate with Clinton on "Saturday Night Live," waving his arms around and pleading, "Please, oh please, don't let me be a one-term president!"? Wonder if Carvey had in the back of his mind the 1980 "Doonesbury" in which Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations and a presidential candidate, is summing up his storied career to a group of prep school kids. When one asks him how long he'd like to be president, Bush replies, "The big four. I'm an optimist. I think I can go the distance."

A steady stream of news items, editorials and letters to the editor about "Doonesbury" has served as a kind of chorus to Trudeau's influence. Newspapers have taken reader polls asking if "Doonesbury" should stay or be banished. Editors pondering killing certain strips or moving them to the editorial pages question Trudeau's fairness. In a 1990 interview with Newsweek, Trudeau said fairness isn't the issue: "Criticizing a political satirist for being unfair," he said, "is like criticizing a nose guard for being physical." Trudeau said he's propelled "by a sense of moral indignation, which you hope doesn't slip into malice when you're executing. The critical difference is that you're not only against something, you're for something. It springs out of a sense of hope. The day I start writing from a scorched-earth viewpoint is the day I don't think I can justify my presence in the business."

And it's true, nobody thinks of Trudeau as a curmudgeon. "Doonesbury," harsh as it can be, has a warm, fuzzy quality that celebrates the inherent absurdity of Homo sapiens. And he rarely takes himself seriously. One color Sunday "Doonesbury" from '93 had Zonker picking up the White House while explaining to readers that it's just a scale model. Then he tosses it, with a little Clinton voice yelling, "Aiee!" and says, "Of course, what really counts are the regular characters." In another strip, an especially sexily drawn, bikini-clad Boopsie, getting photographed for Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue, wonders if there's a sweeps week on the comics page.

And you gotta love a guy who wants to better himself. In the winter of '83 he began a 21-month sabbatical from the strip to try his satirical hand at play writing, collaborating with musician Elizabeth Swados first on the Broadway version of "Doonesbury," which ran for about five months, and then on a musical revue called "Rap Master Ronnie," which traveled around the country for several years. He returned to the strip with a bigger-is-better approach, enlarging his characters literally and philosophically, and using his clout to demand that editors run "Doonesbury" at least 7.33 inches wide, which was a former standard that cost-conscious editors had been steadily eroding. Other comic strips ended up running larger as well, thanks to Trudeau's influence.

Later in the decade he demonstrated his writing chops for a brilliant HBO film series (available on video) called "Tanner '88." Directed by Robert Altman, it introduced a fictional neoliberal presidential candidate into the '88 campaign, pitting him against the real contenders. Like "Doonesbury," only live-action, it blended fact and fiction to mordantly skewer political institutions and the press that attends them.

But Trudeau has insisted that pumping out "Doonesbury" is his primary gig, one he'll continue unto old age. At this point, it's hard to imagine living without it. It almost makes you happy that George W. Bush could be elected our next president. On the other hand, that might just drive Trudeau crazy.

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