Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 05, 2011

Who has the bigger ego? Jeff Redfern? Or Roland Hedley?

Trff, or Sid the agent.

Roland’s lookin’ pretty trim for a guy who covered sports at the Saigon bureau.

I would say I fear for American culture, but after The Jersey Shore, it’s already too late.

DylanThomas3.14159 said, about 6 hours ago

Who has the bigger ego? Jeff Redfern? Or Roland Hedley?or should that be imagination.

in this digital age, people still write books and not a digital copy for the ipad.

Why am I stupid enough to read bestsellers? Classics are cheap on Kindle.

Mark is still naive enough to believe that Roland’s for real. See how his face opens in the last panel? He has yet to become jaded enough to keep the kind of last panel cool face Roland affects.

Does Jeff get that most of the Red Rascal is a fantasy? It seems that he does some of the time, and other times….

What is Kindle? I still go to the public library to read. Comfortable chairs and I am left alone.

I’ve got two publishers and a cable network vying for the rights to my 300-page electronic typescript, but I can’t trust any of them to produce and market it the way it deserves to be published.Maybe I’ll just release it piecemeal to the sagacious readers of this Doonesbury blog.

Well, there goes my theory (posted last week) that this was all one of Jeff’s daydreams.

Both Jeff and Roland are characters who live their lives confident that tomorrow will take care of itself – and so far that’s been true, thanks to the almighty (a.k.a.: Garry Trudeau.)

Happy Labor Day to all of those working out there. For those not working, I hope you are retired or that a job comes along soon.

Of the two, Jeff Redfern vs. Roland Hedley (HEADly — get it?), I’d say that in today’s strip at least, Jeff is the more real and the less narcissistically self-involved: .(1) He really does have a book deal (galleys tucked under his arm), whereas Roland is just spinning about his. .(2) Jeff is interested enough in others to ASK Roland what his book is about. Roland isn’t and doesn’t..(3) Roland then attempts to one-up Jeff by spinning even further off on a tangent: " … it might be a screenplay" (i.e., implying: a movie has greater one-upsmanship value than a mere book in that it costs much more to produce, involves many more people, etc.). .(4) Roland wears the more outlandish outfit, a fantastic “war correspondent on the French-Algerian front” costume, which attracts undue attention to himself. Jeff’s attire is more modest.

Pi,How about GT himself? He signals his own narcissistic involvement by poking fun at his alter ego Mike Doonesbury (gun control, old men drawn to hot redheads, dreams of taking his cartoon empire public).With Cervantes, we get constant reference to the real world; when Quijote strays too far into fantasy, some listener loses patience and cracks the Don’s skull. Jeff and his like go unscathed, protected by the cartoonist. That’s why we feel safer reading Doonesbury than we do reading Cervantes.

Bring Back Becca Bickle!! When is Jeff’s next appointment?

Is that the Roland whose mother, I mean father, was the famous Hedley Lamarr?

hmmm, can you feel the testosterone in the air?? LOL

Is Becca Roland’s editor too?