"Coal execs are people, too!" Harsh. I always thought of them as self-ingratiating worms. 

How timely can a five-year-old Flashback be?

Right you are, Alex. For the cleanest, best-lit place to show off, self-promote, and seek approval, why look further?

I'm grateful to Roland Hedley for retweeting GBT's 1994 New York Times piece "Street Calculus," a work of genius. We all carry the ancient human survival instinct to "size up" the stranger -- but we must learn to use our minds and hearts to get beyond "fight or flight." Thanks, GBT!

Re: Today's Former Guy RIP fantasy -- I imagine the kids will show up. And whoever the current wife is. I do hope I live to see it.

The January 23rd Sunday strip somehow brought home to me the huge difference between the J.J. we first met all those decades ago and who she is today. Back then she was a kind fun-loving young woman, and now she is greedy, cynical, and unfeeling. Gosh. I would never have guessed when I first met the young J.J. that she would end up as she is today....

Knowing he must be an avid reader of Doonesbury, today's Classic strip from 1997 is surely where Trump got the idea of "Fake News."

GBT, prescient as usual in today's Classic strip from 1997... Yes it's been 20+ (!) years to get to the (mostly) decriminalized cannabis phase in this country. Still more states to go! Carry on, Zonk!

Wow. If the last panel of the five-years-ago Flashback strip was flash-forwarded from 2017 to today, the pupil's response might be, "Well my parents say I'm right, so you're in BIG trouble!" As are we all. Cry, the beloved country.

Seeing Duke and Earl enjoy a K Street drink made me appreciate just how long now Duke has been relatively stable and settled. The two reunited in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – over 16 years ago! – following Duke's stint as mayor of Al-Amok. After a shaky start to his new career in lobbying, Duke awoke from his fugue state -- during which he still somehow managed to rack up billings – and really has not looked back since. He's quite the survivor!

I love Sunday’s strip for portraying Boopsie as still wide-eyed innocent, but now with crow’s feet. I truly hope she never loses that naïve wonder. B.D. needs that in his life. 

The "WAAH!" cry from Baby Jesus channeled by Boopsie is an eloquent summation of how He sees the state of the world, and particularly what His "followers" are trying to make it into.

Bravo on the baby Jesus channeling. I grew up in Canada and was a de facto agnostic or atheist, but here it just seemed strident to declare myself an atheist. The United Church does good works (it supported the Darwin Exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum), helps the poor, and so on. But after the first of nine years living and teaching in the US and encountering the pervasive quasi-fundamentalist Christianity in middle America I said to myself: "OK, I'm an atheist." The US wouldn't have had the disaster of Trump without evangelical Christians.

Fun to see when characters make their debut in the 50-years-ago-today Flashback strips. Today: the fighting young priest!

Boopsie’s channeling is less mental illness than magic realism, I suspect. Doonesbury is an alternative universe, where self-conscious meta-cartoonistic fantasy affects an otherwise believable world. Hunk is both real (witness his outfits) and imaginary at the same time, like Mr. Butts and Sorkh Razil.

Oh! The sacrilege! (Though it will be interesting to see what Baby Jesus has to say.)

Today's strip is droll indeed; I laughed out loud. Trouble is, in recent decades, one major party has claimed to routinely channel the Lord (cf. George "I trust God speaks through me" Bush, and Donald "I am the chosen one" Trump). The upshot has been far from Christmassy. Sad.

I am using this contact form to send you a message: Acts 16:31; 1 Corinthians 15:1-8; 1 Peter 1:17-21; Revelation 22: 18-19.

So B.D. is cynically exploiting his wife's mental illness (which I presume her "channeling" Hunk-Ra is) to make money. And in the last panel Boopsie is either going along with it, or is just very suggestible....

GBT misses the mark again. In the January 4, 1997 strip Zonker predicts it will take at least 20 years for marijuana to be legalized in California. He was off by almost two months, as Prop 64 passed on November 8, 2016.