a few bugs in the system
Huh, I didn’t realize until I read today’s “Doonesbury” comic strip that I share the same hometown as Mike Doonesbury – Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to this FAQ, Garry Trudeau’s choice of the city had little conscious cultural significance, explaining, “The selection of Tulsa, mentioned in the strip’s debut, was the first of thousands of occasions on which the creator went with the first thing that popped into his head.” After I tracked down the first strip, I realized that I had almost certainly read the comic, but the fact that Mike was from Tulsa wouldn’t have registered, since at the time I would have been a teenager living in Tulsa. I doubt I would have put the computer humor in the context of 1970 America, either.
Tulsa’s a funny choice of hometowns for Mike because as long as I can remember (which, for newspaper comics, is the Reagan administration) the major daily in Tulsa, The Tulsa World has buried “Doonesbury” deep in the classifed section, while other, less political strips like “Mallard Fillmore” run on the comics page in section C. Readers presumably complained that the strip rotted the minds of Tulsa’s youth. I remember being quite an avid reader of newspaper comics as a youth, and, once I finished “Bloom County” on the comics page, digging through the classifieds to find “Doonesbury.” Berke Breathed’s tales of cats and penguins probably rotted my mind more than “Doonesbury,” but it’s still an interesting memory of resisting newspaper design.
