Welcome to the Nerd Farm!

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Welcome to the Nerd Farm! (Andrews McMeel, 2007).



At last, I have purchased the only outstanding hole in my Doonesbury library. I put it off because I was just completely certain that somebody was going to announce the incredibly long-overdue comprehensive reprint program that I have been hoping to see around the time of the 40th anniversary celebrations this year, but, well, as 2011 comes to a close and we still don't have one...

(We do have two more recent collections than this. I received 2009's Tee Time in Berzerkistan as a gift when it was released. Red Rascal's War, the latest collection, is quite new and on my to-do list to pick up sometime.)

It took me a long time, but I recently reread all of Doonesbury that is in print, which is about 70% of it. I had been keeping a blog which detailed what strips were missing, but man alive, did that ever turn into a chore. It's much more satisfying to just read without letting it turn into work. Around 2002, the books entered their sixth design incarnation - oh, my poor, ugly shelves! - and at least seemed to finally start collecting every strip without skipping any. These are easily picked out as the large format books, about 8x11, with black spines.

The principal storylines in this collection, which is set during George Bush's second term and cover all the empire-crumbling shenanigans around it, include Alex's first hectic year at MIT, BD's PTSD, and Mike attempting to convince his mother to come live in Seattle with him and his wife Kim. As always, the cast grows, and there's plenty of self-aware humor in the reader mail. Creator Garry Trudeau never goes for the easy answer, and keeps complicating things for his characters. It's a terrific, and very funny read. Recommended.

Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons (Sheed and Ward, 1973).



I've been telling myself for years that I should track down the little reprint of Bull Tales, the comic which preceded Doonesbury, and found it surprisingly easy to find once I put my mind to it. Garry Trudeau started the strip when he was an undergraduate at Yale, and it appeared in the student paper there. After a few years, he felt ready for the big time, and reworked almost all of the comics into what became the first 18 months of the daily Doonesbury; material which later appeared in the 1972 collection Still a Few Bugs in the System.

If this isn't a unique experience in comics, it's certainly a darn rare one. I'm ready to stand corrected, but I can't think of another example of getting to see a cartoonist's "rough drafts," as you might call them, available so extensively as these were. Comparing the two is completely fascinating and fun for amateur archaeologists like me, and I could spend all day telling you about odd little differences between what the Yale students got to enjoy while waiting in classrooms for their profs to show up, and what those first dozen or so subscribing papers bought from the syndicate a couple of years later.

Most striking, in a broad sense, is that there are Mike-n-Mark strips, and there are B.D. football strips. The characters never meet, at least in the sequences reprinted here. One disagreeable flaw in Sheed & Ward's collection is that it is never clear whether this is a complete reprint of all the original comics, or perhaps it's an omnibus of the two small albums that Yale University Press had previously released, so it's possible that Trudeau did have the characters interact in strips we cannot see today.

The awkward roommate strips of Doonesbury's earliest days, with Mike and B.D. failing to get along, take on a completely different tone in Bull Tales, because it's a girl named Cathy Dillworthy who gets Mike as her dormmate, and that's what the original phrase "still a few bugs in the system" referenced. You can almost picture the meetings with the syndicate, can't you? I can imagine they were excited to try and sell something so daring, from such a strong new talent, but still realistic enough to know that middle America in 1970 was not ready to confront the possibility of cohabitation between co-eds over their Corn Flakes and coffee. So out went Cathy and in came the "odd couple" pairing of a jock and a turkey.

Plenty more was ditched for fear of offending the general public's sensibilities, including profanity and an amazingly tasteless rape reference, and if the 1971 Doonesbury sequence where a dean of admissions at then-unnamed Walden instantly admits a blonde wearing a little black dress seemed outre, consider that his Yale antecedent admitted the same blonde, not wearing anything.

Compared to the comics you can find on the web today, there's nothing shocking about Bull Tales, but I can see how this became such a big event at Yale forty years ago. This may not be an essential recommendation, but if you like Doonesbury or are interested in the evolution of newspaper comics, you should certainly hunt for a copy of this, and shouldn't find it too difficult to locate.

Dare and Doonesbury

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Dan Dare: Reign of the Robots (Titan, 2008) and Doonesbury: The War Years (Gramercy, 2006).



The previous Dan Dare serial, also available from Titan (and reviewed by me in brief here) had ended with a spectacular twist: Dan and company, having saved the day in a remote galaxy, would be returning to Earth a decade after they left. Then they return to find that the old home was conquered by the Mekon's robot army nine years ago, the entire population enslaved in his immortal enemy's concentration camps, providing fodder for bizarre scientific experiments. Since this is a 1950s kids' serial, little space is devoted to the horrific premise, but the only time this really felt to me like something truly dated and eye-rolling comes in the follow-up serial, also collected here, called "The Ship That Lived." Having liberated Venus and Earth in a rollercoaster thrill ride of unexpected, weird plot developments and derring-do, Dan's first priority is not to oversee the great redevelopment and economic recovery that must come, but to... well, extract his old spaceship from a bog. It takes weeks. It's mostly wonderful, but I can't call this a real priority.



For much of the last decade, Doonesbury has been compiled in 150-page editions which aren't complete. You can always tell, because they lay them out with a week of dailies over two pages, but slowly the storyline starts to creep because a strip gets left out. And there are no dates for you to confirm when they originally appeared either, making it a real chore to go look up the missing ones on the web site. Doonesbury's remarkably poor track record in collected form is one of my biggest bugbears about the comic hobby, which is why I feel quite strongly that it should be reprinted properly, and soon.

But, lacking any progress on that front, we make do with the books we've got. The War Years is an omnibus reprint of the earlier collections Peace Out, Dawg! (which I bought) and Got War? (which I should've), in hardcover for about the original price of either of the originals. So this covers most of the material from 2001-2003, tracking the deterioration of G.W. Bush from beleagured all-hat-no-cattleman into wannabe imperial. Duke gets some great storylines playing fast and loose with double-crossing Enron execs (was Jim Andrews "born" for that role or what?) and their wives, and setting himself up for a reconstruction role in Iraq that leads to him working the black market. Zonker wages war against David Geffen and Boopsie coaches B.D.'s football team, and it's genuinely great stuff. Which I'd swap in a heartbeat for a complete edition with some annotations. Sorry, I know I harp.

(Originally posted July 16, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)