With pleasure. We take you back to Seattle in the winter of 1996, where a Steve Forbes campaign event provides the setting for a fortuitous encounter between two employees of Bernie's Byte Shack.

Can do and have done. There's no accounting for taste. Enjoy!

Good idea. Let's start the New Year with a look back at September, 1972, when Mark and Mike were wrapping up their "Call Me When You Find America" tour. After numerous stops, including Washington, D.C., Miami, Disneyland, L.A., San Francisco, the Sierra Nevada, and Las Vegas, the duo were heading East when Joanie flagged them down. The rest is herstory.

If we didn't know better, we'd take this to be a thinly-veiled attempt (a successful one, we might add) to summon visitations by a few of our favorite ghosts of Doonesbury Christmases past. Merry Holidays!

It is our weird pleasure. Enter Roland Burton Hedley III, stage left.

It's our pleasure to cue up the 1977 series you refer to, which ends with Jimmy reprising "I Do Believe," a song which was featured in 1976's animated Doonesbury Special and on the 1977 album Jimmy Thudpucker's Greatest hits. And here's a link to Mr. Graydon's web site. In addition to his own albums and live performing Graydon has been a prolific studio player. The Thudpucker sessions with the Walden West Rhythm Section are included in his astonishingly long list of recording gigs.

Indeed, the going was almost never smooth between Slackmeyer par and Slackmeyer fil, who frequently found themselves plunging deeply into the generation crevasse. Here is a sampler.

Indeed, it’s a lot of information to keep track of, and the web of relationships gets more complicated every year. We are happy to steer you toward three visual aids, starting with the 1991 Organizational Chart strip in which Sal and Mike wrestled with this very problem, noting “Aren’t most nineteenth-century Russian novels more comprehensible?” Five years later, on 5/26/96, Mike offered an updated version, which is temporarily unavailable in our online archive but appears on page 121 of The Bundled Doonesbury. 

By far the most elaborate and up-to-date version is “Character Connections: 1970-2010,” the four-page fold-out centerfold map that appears in 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective. Over 80 characters appear in portrait circles, linked with coded dotted lines to indicate their relationships to one another – “Married,” “Dated,” “Lived on Walden Commune,” Married by Rev. Scot Sloan,” and so on. The map is so large that no clearly readable online version exists, so far as we know, but this one gives you a sense of it. Here is the epic single-sentence text that accompanies it:

In the beginning, MIKE and B.D. were roommates at Walden College, which was run by PRESIDENT KING, whose office was occupied by student radical MARK, who spent summers at home with mom MARILOU and dad PHIL arguing about his hair until he could return to argue about the war with quarterback B.D., who was tormented in huddles by ZONKER, and cheered on by girlfriend BOOPSIE, with whom he lived on Walden Commune, whose numerous denizens also included DIDI, her boyfriend BERNIE, and NICHOLE, with whom years later Mike didn’t quite have an affair, though B.D. had one with MEG during GW1 while on R&R leave on a ship where his buddy RAY recuperated from a wound, his morale not improved by Morale Officer TRIP TRIPPLER, who years before had been roommates at Walden with BENJY, Mike’s younger brother, who after college worked for a condom company, one of many dubious enterprises run by DUKE, usually with the assistance of HONEY, the translator he met while he was the ambassador to China, right after he served as governor of Samoa, where he was aided by MACARTHUR, much as he was later aided by RILEY when he coached the Washington Redskins, shortly before he shot his former caretaker ZEKE, who had burned down his house and who at one time dated J.J., who later married and divorced Mike, and whose mother, JOANIE, had left home and founded Walden Day Care where she took care of ELLIE and HOWIE, who encouraged her to go to law school in Berkeley, where she rented an apartment from MRS. POCATELLI along with GINNY, whose annoying boyfriend CLYDE helped with Ginny’s losing campaign against LACEY, who became a congresswoman and hired Joanie and moved to Washington, along with her charming husband, DICK, and there befriended street person ALICE and her crazy husband, ELMONT, who were married by REV. SLOAN and written about by Joanie’s husband, reporter RICK, who frequently clashed with his and Joanie’s son JEFF, who grew up and went to Walden and roomed with ZIPPER, nephew of Z., under the watchful eye of advisor BIG PAUL MANION, and who befriended CRICKET and tried to befriend ALEX DOONESBURY (daughter of Mike, stepdaughter of KIM, and granddaughter of DAISY, who lived with them in Seattle briefly before moving back to Oklahoma and dating SKID), an MIT student with a beautiful roommate, DREW, and an awesome boyfriend TOGGLE, who was wounded in Iraq, and whose protective mother, MRS. DELUCA, got to know B.D. when he came to Walter Reed to help care for his former soldier, who got a job in the recording studio of SHERM, a vet who returned to Nam and befriended PHRED, the former Vietcong terrorist who once captured B.D., and went into business with B.D.’s buddy GEORGE and musician JIMMY THUDPUCKER, whose agent was SID KIBBITZ, who represents almost everybody, but not MR. JAY, whose pal, spokescigarette MR. BUTTS, was made up by Mike for his ad firm, the receptionist for which was MARCIA, who returned to NYC to honor her former boss MR. BELLOWS, who was killed in 9-11, and at Ground Zero met B.D., who had not yet found help with his PTSD by going to the Vet Center, whose receptionist CELESTE introduced him to ELIAS, who was surprised when B.D. reached out to MST victim MEL, who was being counseled by CORA, and who eventually returned to Afghanistan and bumped into Jeff but not reporter ROLAND, who had previously interviewed warlord AKBARI, petroleum industry bigwig JIM ANDREWS, and Duke 2000 presidential campaign spokesperson MINI-D, who worked with EARL, who grew up in an orphanage, unlike SAM, who grew up in Malibu, parented by B.D. and Boopsie and cared for by nanny Zonker, who embodies the mellow espoused by best-selling author DR. DAN ASHER, though Zonk learned his at the knee of mentor OL’ SURFER DUDE, and from his Californian MOM and DAD, not to mention their Colonial-era ancestors NATE and AMY, who unmellowly owned a slave named SAMMY, who was understandably resentful, like AGENT HAVOC, who hates mentoring CIA intern Jeff, who annoys him the way WEINBERGER annoyed seminar-leader Henry Kissinger and Black Panther CALVIN annoyed and intimidated the young Mike, unlike the unannoying CORNELL, who calmly accepts prison time for serving pot brownies to AIDS patients, including ANDY LIPPINCOTT, who died peacefully while listening to the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

Good morning, FAQ! It's all here -- B.D. held captive, the duo MIA, the interlude with Cole Porter, a Purple Heart, a tiger cage, coming home, B.D. and Phred as pen-pals, returning as a civilian for a reunion, touring Phred's childhood haunts -- and a foreshadowing of his future career. Enjoy this 1972 recap.