Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 20, 2011

Yippee! Becca- the antidote to Alex- is back!

I expect Joanie would rather be with her politically engaged granddaughter in Worcester than hearing about Jeff’s fantasy world. Becca Fickle is a siren with one purpose: to destroy gullible dreamers like Jeff.

 Some random thoughts:  • I feel Becca is Doonesbury’s sexiest female character. Note I didn’t say best-looking; in my opinion that honor would go to Drew.  • My faith in Jeff has been rewarded. (C’mon, all you Jeff detractors out there, admit you’ve read and enjoyed the Sorkn Razil episodes.)  • His flakey actions are at least partially explained as those characteristic of many creative types.  • I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the hostile relationship between Jeff and Rick, who is also a writer.  • Is Joanie skipping back-and-forth through an Einsteinian spacetime wormhole?

It’s not off the table that there could be a real-world ADVENTURES OF THE RED RASCAL, though it would be authored by G.B. Trudeau. The real-world book, MY SHORTS R BUNCHING. THOUGHTS?: THE TWEETS OF ROLAND HEDLEY is authored by G. B. Trudeau, not by Roland Headley.

But we’re so thick over here these days that many believe Robin, Bond etc were real and that Winston Churchill was fictional.

“lovable rogues”. And don’t forget Horatio Hornblower, who captained a British ship-of-the-line during the British colonial period, with all of its atrocities, including the slaughter of many people of India, the slave trade, etc. He’s not presented as a rogue (by author Forrester), though, which makes him all the more insidious!

Another random thought:  • Now that he’s going to have hefty royalty checks coming in, Jeff should offer to Rick to pay rent. Or he should move out and get his own place. This could help ease the tension between him and Rick. It could also help bolster Jeff’s sense of his own self worth and self confidence. Someone said on this website that superiority/inferiority exist together in the same person, like two sides of the same coin.

A major motion picture cannot be far behind. Most of what Hollywood produces these days is literally comic book stuff. We criticize Hollywood for being leftist, but it is Hollywood that has done the best job of promoting the world view of life as a Manichean battle between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. Justice can only come from the barrel of a gun, and the law (i.e. government) is either corrupt or impotent. That may not be what is traditionally considered a right-wing message, but it resonates much more with what the right has become in the last generation. Or perhaps I should say it resonates with all immature people, right or left, when they don’t get their way.

People who think Jeffrey Archer is a good writier would buy anything. Publish and be damned, I say!

As I recall, they’re marketing it as a romance.

BellowReilly … LOVE IT !!!! Thanks Dylan.

Yes the SS will go up, but so will Medicare. Luckily? for us disabled vets our disablility will go up along with SS.

That would be interesting as a stand-alone blog entry, but what is it doing here? It’s a non sequitur…so to speak.

could pride possibly go before a fall? and why do women readers not give a flying f about the hot-ability factor of GT’s male characters? and when is John Le Carre’s latest book coming out?

My favorite lovable rogue these days is Jack Reacher in the Lee Child books.

Jeff has a new book out? I just went by my local Borders and saw nothing.

Robin Hood isn’t fictional, he’s legendary, like King Arthur. That is to say, it’s not out of the question that either was based on a real person, regardless of the thickness of narrative embellishments that have become encrusted by tradition.

As to the other question, I never would have described Boopsie as sexy. She was CUTE (still is), but in a stuffed-animal, non-arousing sort of way. And Becca, well, yeah she’s hot, but she reminds me of Faye Dunnaway in Network; every date would end up as a business meeting, even if it’s conducted in a cheap hotel room. So what about Nicole? Now THERE was a sultry vixen…

“print on demand”, e-book sales, “published” means something different today. As to O’Reilly, “Bellow” does fit, but in defense, his CO-author’s errors were relatively minor, and supposedly fixed in the next print run, and an errata sheet could have fixed. The significance, like Jeff’s is giving credit to the co-author, or perhaps editor and publisher for the real content of the work.

Almost anything coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq is fiction, going “movies” with CG, so why not “history” books as well, like anything having to do with "W"s reign.

Great. 48,000 copies. And when the bookstore returns come in January. . .

Just having your name on it, Jeff, doesn’t make you an author.

I’m surprised they went ahead with this book after the big mix-up of the draft copies. Of course, that was Becca’s fault.Maybe this is a dream.

These Sunday strips provide an amusing, fantasy break from the narrative reality of GBT’s political arcs. Jeff, Duke, and Mark are occasionally linked to historical events (e.g. Afghanistan, the BP spill, and OWS, respectively) but their main function is to make us conscious that we’re fantasizing—-on holiday from reality.With his latest redhead, however, GBT is exploiting a peculiar fantasy, that of the aging male (Mike Doonesbury? GBT himself?) I doubt his younger readers (if he has any) or his female readers are moved to the kind of pornographic response one finds in today’s comments. (Anyone who cares about Boopsie’s double chin will also be disappointed by Sarah Palin’s cellulite.)

Didn’t Jeff repay his debt to Overkill by rescuing His Excellency?

Not that he wants to toot his own horn or anything!

WHAT THE HELL!?! A month or two ago Jeff gets a copy of a book that he wasn’t supposed to get and he passes it off to someone else who posts information about it and when it is discovered what Jeff did they still publish his book. Is there no concept of punishment in here?

If I were Becca I’d have still been fuming at Jeff’s leaking the book on Palin. I don’t like Becca one little bit. A pretty silly character, all told.

Anybody who has read Zuleika Dobson will immediately recognize how derivative Becca is. GBT probably expected his readers to spot Zuleika and must be puzzled by those who take his (and Beerbohm’s) pornographic joke for a romance.

wonder if His Excellency is driving a cab yet….