A few years ago Garry Trudeau published a beautiful Doonesbury 40th Anniversary collection. Even though Doonesbury is one of my all-time favorite comic strips, I couldn't quite bring myself to spend a hundred bucks for it. I was in the bookstore last week, and what do you think was on the remainder table for $19.95? You know it! To make things even better, our daughter had given me a Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas! So, thanks, Nikki for the perfect late Christmas present.

The Des Moines Register was among the first newspapers to carry the strip, so I've been a Doonesbury fan since the early 1970s. I'm in sync with Trudeau's politics, but, as this massive collection makes clear, it is the expansive cast of characters that has sustained the strip for so long. Unlike other cartoonists who set up ridiculous straw men for their stand-ins to interact with (I'm looking at you, Bruce Tinsley and Chris Muir.). Conservatives like BD and his family or Megaphone Mark's dad are treated like real people whose politics might be ridiculed, but whose humanity and decency is left intact, while liberals like Mike Doonesbury and Mark Slackmeyer have their own foibles pointed out from time to time. For the most part, political theater is kept out of this collection and the focus is on the interaction and evolution of these characters over four decades.

Garry Trudeau has cut back his current workload to Sundays only, and while he has certainly earned the right to take a break from the daily grind, I hope this doesn't indicate an intention to retire any time soon.