Blowback
Blowback
A clean, well-lit place to vent
Please feel free to contribute to this frequently-updated forum, which posts selected commentary on our favorite comic strip. If you'd like your critique to be posted, please note that civility, if not approbation, counts. Click here to submit a comment.
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MARK
If only the rest of the media had handled Trump as Mark did in today's five-years-ago FLashback.
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FLASHBACK STRIP
Regarding today's five-years-ago Flashback strip, can I be the first to say: If only it was that easy to shut up he-that-shall-not-be-named right now!
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QUOTE
The line in today's Classic strip -- "I'd settle for a Porsche" -- fits in very well with the Say What? quote from Jared.
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WHEW!
Whew! I've been a fan since the earliest days (nearly a half-century), and Roland's "Source: As POTUS plans to reopen America for business" tweet was the first time I've had to say "ouch."
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GREAT JOB
Great job this morning, Leo. When did you get so fast on your feet? But what are you going to do with that Peleton you bought Alex for Mother's Day?
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OTHER DECADES
Why do you guys keep publishing only strips from the 1990s? You literally have three other decades to choose from. Enough with that era, please.
Editor's Note:
Four other decades, actually! Here's the backstory on why you are seeing what you are seeing...The fact that GBT put the daily strip on hiatus in order to write several years of Alpha House led to the decision to begin running the Classic Doonesbury series. It began on March 3, 2014 with re-publication of Doonesbury's first strip (which had originally appeared on October 26, 1970*). The plan was to select a few months of strips from each year and move chronologically through the strip's entire history, but at certain points the material was so rich that more than two months per year were used. Which is why, as the journey continues, we are only up to 1994.
Meanwhile, new strips continue to appear every Sunday.
* Heads-up -- the strip's fiftieth anniversary is nigh, and will be celebrated with a unique book. On Doonesbury's launch day in 1970, it had only 29 client newspapers. It now has around 1,400. What a long, strange, well-read strip it's been...
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SUBTLE
Nice subtle joke-within-joke on Mike and Zonk's bar chart today -- the less-than-full-scale Y-axis (7.0-9.8) makes "Sex and Violence duds" seem tiny compared to the "Academic Reform smash."
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RESONATES
Thank you for today's strip on the U.S. military. This is the old GBT we know and love! Today, you provided political commentary that resonates on so many levels. Many humorists have abandoned the field or descended into despair in the last three years. Thank you for opting in.
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BEST-LIT PLACE
Right you are, Alex. For the cleanest, best-lit place to show off, self-promote, and seek approval, why look further?
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NAILED IT
With regard to today's Classic strip: GBT certainly nailed it. "Can we get back to me?"
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THE GREAT COMIC NOVEL
Sunday’s strip got me where I live. Literally. For some time now, my wife has been telling me that I am losing my hearing, and I’ve been telling her she drops her voice and mumbles. I finally went for a hearing test to settle the issue, but the results were ambiguous: yes, significant hearing loss, but mostly at frequencies higher than the range of human voices. I’ve studied aging so knew to expect this.
What I realized on reflection was that a table discussion of hearing issues was a predictable topic for Doonesbury. For almost fifty years, Doonesbury has been the great comic novel of the Baby Boom generation — I’m a preboomer by four years — covering all the highs and lows. Now it has to deal with the joys of aging. My great hope is that newspapers and Doonesbury last longer than I do.
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PARDONED
In the 1993 Doonesbury Classic series that ran a few weeks ago, Cornell and Roland were in a class taught by Professor Mike Milken, who was pardoned by POTUS this week. How the heck did GBT know Milken was going to be in the news again? Coincidence? Or is POTUS an avid follower of the strip, too?
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ANSWERS
Re "excellent guesses" in the Walden math class. It's more probable than GBT thinks (not to mention many of us) that both answers satisfy the (unseen) equation. A second-order ("quadratic") expression always has two "roots." Higher-order expressions have even more.
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"MATH" CLASSES
You probably got lots of messages about this the first time today's Classic strip ran, but if Walden College "math" classes are about doing arithmetic, their students are in real trouble. "Yes and no" is a perfectly good summary of the situation: Problems have right and wrong answers once you've chosen your axioms, but things like non-Euclidean geometry will give different answers to the same question. (Even worse, we can prove that some questions can't be answered in any particular mathematical system.)
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MORTAL
This is indeed a sad day. GBT has warned us that Doonesbury ages and thus is mortal...
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MUMBLING
I don't need a hearing aid, you just need to stop mumbling. Also, the cataract surgery made my nearsightedness consistent because the lens never changes.
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A SIGN
"Take this as a sign from God! " : response from my daughter(s) when I shared today's Doonesbury. What?
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PRETTY DARK
Sunday’s strip was pretty dark. Stay positive, GBT; we need you.
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DUKE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
I see in the 20-years-ago-today strip on the Flashbacks page that Duke was running for president. I guess he won.
Editor's Note:The Duke2000 "Nothing Left to Lose" presidential campaign was quite an undertaking. E-campaigning from his headquarters at the E-Z Rest Motor Lodge in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, Duke set out to prove that an average citizen, with nothing more than a laptop, a few spam speeches, and a sackful of soft money, could make political history.
His campaign in the strip was supported by a stand-alone website, and by dozens of campaign videos which were created using then-state-of-the-art motion capture technology. The former ambassador is voiced (and bodied) by the remarkable Fred Newman, well known from his longtime role as sound effects man / voice actor on Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion." Fifteen of the D2K mini-masterpieces are still posted on our site and are available for your viewing pleasure in Duke's Video Vault, here.
As you'll see, Duke made live, unscripted, improvisational appearances on "Larry King Live," "The Today Show," and in other venues. Be sure to check out the epic penultimate episode, "Apocalypse 2000."
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CONSPIRACY
The current Classics series about conspiracy theorists fits really well with the quotes in Say What? today. Coincidence? "I don't think so."