When did you stop reading Doonesbury?

Just a random poll idea I had this morning.

Doonesbury is a strip that meant a lot to me in my youth but by maybe 2004-2006 I’d gotten as much as I needed out of it.

He peaked during Watergate.

sometime in the early-to-mid-00s i guess... whenever it really started to feel like the "young" characters (Zipper, et al.) were taking over the strip without ever coming into focus for me.

but i guess there were only a few years of me being a regular daily reader --- i loaded up on the paperbacks (and that CD-ROM) in the late 90s, at which time i still lived at my parents' place and had the daily newspaper around the house. but i held onto the paperbacks until maybe as late as 2009, and probably was viewing the strip at the website for some of that period. all hazy now. those paperbacks were incredible though.

I stopped reading Doonesbury when I stopped living with my parents and having a newspaper subscription. Early 2000s.

I enjoyed reading it throughout the 90s and made some forays back to the 1980s via paperback collections. It was weird trying to pick up in the middle of the soap opera-esque storylines and also trying to parse Reagan-era political commentary that I hadn't really been conscious for. I also eventually got a copy of the first collected edition - Doonesbury Chronicles - that I read to death and just replaced in hardcover (although I'm sharing it with my sister, and she has custody at the moment).

I get the international NY Times and they keep running a 'Classic Doonesbury 1996' strip. God knows why.

The Trump era was not good at all. I love the 70s strips.

As a child of the 70s, it strikes me as very odd that 1996 Doonesbury is considered "classic." Also makes me feel old af.

This thread made me sad because I realized I'd forgotten Calvin's name

I started reading in the 1980s. For me the 70s to mid 80s is the peak, and if the urge to revisit struck that’s where I’d go.

saw it as a teenager and didn't understand it. thought the politics were over my head.

as an adult i realized that the politics were generic (although i agree with them) and the humor wasn't funny.

Yes but did anybody see the musical?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnOCJ672TCE

Never felt quite the same when it came back after the 83-84 hiatus. But continued reading semi-regularly into the early 90s. Can’t remember the last time I read a strip.

I kept reading after it got moved off the comics page, but probably stopped in the early 2000s

Sometime between the end of Bill Clinton’s Presidency and 9/11.

xp: oh, yeah, that's right. It was moved to the editorial page at some point.

I read it occasionally into the early W. years, the invasion of Iraq etc. These days I'll sometimes come across a strip somebody links to on social media, but it's been probably nearly 20 years since I went looking for it on purpose. Definitely agree it peaked in the '70s.

xp: oh, yeah, that's right. It was moved to the editorial page at some point.

This was an individual decision by newspaper editors, not a single switch that happened in every newspaper around the world at the same time

iirc it was related to the size of the strip, that Trudeau wasn't willing to reduce it?

I sort of preferred it in the old paperback collections - I saw it in the paper so infrequently that I never knew who anyone was anymore, or what the hell was going on

The last one I saw had a guy die the day after he gets to hear the remastered cd of “Pet Sounds”

I think I saw about ten, in total

Andy.

Joanie’s friend Andy, a lawyer who was gay and had AIDS.

Like Dr. Casino, stopped reading around the time of Doonesbury Babies.

Was about to say the 90s, but then I remembered Bush-as-Waffle, Schwarzenegger-as-Groping-Hand, etc.

i feel like it never got more or less funny, but theres just a finite amount of doonesbury that any one person needs.

^^^I think this is a lot of it.

“Characters aging in real time” is an attractive concept but, as someone noted upthread, if one doesn’t feel as drawn to subsequent character generations it’s hard to hang in there for too long.

Trudeau shoulda never killed off Farley.

"I have no son."

When the drawing got all professional and stylized-looking, maybe? Not sure if that's accurate because I can't remember when that happened.

i'd still read it if i still got a physical paper that carried it and he was still writing new strips (i thought he'd peaced out years ago for some video venture?)

I get a physical paper and don't read any of the comics. To be fair, I don't read beyond the front news sections.

He still does one a week for the Sunday papers.

Oh, and I started in the 70s and have never stopped. Still worth the 10-20 seconds/day that it takes (I even read the 90s reruns).

I know it's selfish on my part, but it lost something when he quit lettering the strip on his own.

I read a lot of the old collections as a kid, I remember getting the sense that it had lost most of the goofy and light sensibility by the mid-80s, though i appreciate the genuine anger at what Reagan was getting away with. (Was also baffled and slightly creeped out by the Duke-becomes-a-zombie plotline.) Thinking back on it I feel like it had a pretty interesting and gloomy take on 60s kids being sucked in by the 80s, but I didn’t keep up with it in the present and I don’t have much of a sense for where it went in the 90s and beyond, besides the stuff with BD going to Iraq. Never cared much for the new younger characters. His TV show sounded awful.

Yeah, the gloominess of the 80s to early 90s period is what really sticks in my mind about the strip as a whole... especially Mike's long slow loss of conviction. And I dig the style upgrade, with all the atmospheric inking, weird angles, Duke's chrome-dome and sinister round shades, etc. Can understand ranking the 70s higher though, it's surely more consistent, sharper on the politics.... and the lighter, shaggier, "former college paper strip" touch with the humor is what builds affection for all the characters in the first place.

My parents had the paperbacks and I read them all over and over. Covered the first strips through Watergate. I remember most acutely Phred's trip to Cambodia. I've otherwise never subscribed to a paper that has syndicated it so I've only seen glimpses of the latter day stuff.

I still read the Guardian for the reviews on a Friday and a Saturday so I read it at that point and do the crossword.
May just be a habit.

Wikipedia confirms that the big anthology paperbacks I read over and over (The Doonesbury Chronicles, Doonesbury's Greatest Hits, The People's Doonesbury, etc.) were actually massively abridged, ranging from 38% to 83% of the strips published in the periods they cover. I probably read the missing material when I got the CD-ROM, but boy, that's a lot of missing material. Maybe someday I'll get hold of the 50th anniversary volume, which apparently comes with a USB stick containing the entire run.

Uncle Duke plot lines were the best: His NFL coaching/drug supplier stint, especially.

In the 90s I had a book that was all Uncle Duke strips & came with a little Uncle Duke action figure, wish I still had that

Me too!!

I always (futilely) hoped for a mellow happy ending for Duke and Honey even though I knew damned well it would never come.

Hunter Thompson claimed to hate Uncle Duke.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

It's in the Sunday edition of my newspaper, which I overpay to have delivered, because even mediocre journalism has value in a world where journalism is inches from the conveyor belt into the crematorium. I still read it. I also read Prince Valiant and Garfield, because I am an optimist by nature.

Is it Foster or Murphy that you expect to come back from the dead?

Late 90s, I think

I probably liked it best when I was 13 or so.

Took a look at recent strips and they seem to be all in on meta self-deprecation? (Also... not that funny?)

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2022/02/02

I think the daily strips are from 20-25 years ago.

I remember that one.

I stopped reading in the late 90s, when I stopped living somewhere with a newspaper subscription (I think I probably checked it out a handful of times online in the early 00s). Had no idea it was still going until I saw this thread just now, but I guess most newspaper comic strips just keep going forever so not sure why I'm surprised.

I remember it going from the weird comic strip I didn't get to my favorite within a couple of years. Seems at least partially responsible with me keeping up with American politics up to this day.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

pleased to see this ringing endorsement of Mr Butts

I read a lot of the strips in daily newspapers, but also bought collections new and used. A few years ago, when I was doing a book purge, I parted with “Got War?” and other post 2000 Doonesbury books. (If I ever need to revisit them, they’re in abundance at used book stores.)