Okay... what happened to the Widow Doonesbury?

[dreamshark]

Doonesbury suddenly goes into reruns for a couple of weeks, and when we come back to the present Mike's mother is dead. With no explanation a moderately important continuing character is gone and everybody is attending her funeral.

Am I the only one thinking that Gary Trudeau was not actually "on vacation" for those couple of weeks?  What on earth could have been in those strips that they were yanked from publication??

Comments

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I was also confused by this. I only read Doonesbury on the web. Do you see it in a paper? Was it in reruns there too?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I read it in the Star Tribune. In the past there have been controversial Doonesbury strips that individual newspapers declined to publish, and thought this might be one of those.

I didn't realize they had done the same thing in the web version. That probably means that whatever they decided to censor, it was at the syndication level. Dang. What on earth could Mom have done?

[quadong.livejournal.com]

Or... maybe a simplier hypothesis is that nothing got censored and the back-story will come later?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Maybe. The combination of 2 weeks of reruns followed by a story line that seems to be resuming in the middle of something is suspicious.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I read a "Widder Doonesbury is ded, ded, ded" strip in the Winnipeg Free Press, and just assumed that something had happened while I wasn't looking.

Or that they'd killed her trying to cross the border...

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

You can see all of the past strips here. I've just gone back, and the last one I can find with her in it is this one, from 11/18:

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2010/11/18

After that, there's a bunch of other storylines, and then it's her funeral in January.