Doonesbury takes on another social issue: California pot farms

Doonesbury from March 19, 2012.

It does appear – after two strips this week – that Doonesbury artist, Gary Trudeau, has taken on yet another social issue.  This time it’s marijuana farms in California.  Take a look at these two strips that have run this week.

Doonesbury from March 20, 2012.

Oh, and it’s not like this is the first “social issue” that Trudeau and his characters have taken on. The “old” San Diego U-T used to ban the cartoon from the comics page on a regular and daily basis – and print it on the editorial page.  Something Jeff Light – the current editor – failed to do this time when our daily paper killed the strip for the entire week last week due to its subject matter of women’s reproductive rights.

Jeff’s excuse that he didn’t place it on the editorial page this time around was that the news from Trudeau about the content of his strip was abrupt and was not foreseen by Jeff or his editorial cronies.  Yet, he knew that it would run the entire week, so his excuse may have worked for the first day, but he and his staff did have the subsequent four days to make plans. I mean, they could have excused Roger Hedgecock one day at least from his anti-democrat rants. But nooooo….

Doonesbury characters used to routinely lambast the Vietnam war, the Establishment in general, and carry the ideas and laughs of an entire generation when it first hit national attention in the Seventies. Still read it every Sunday. (And BTW Jeff, why do you hide the Sunday “funnies” – buried in ads and other riff raff?  Do you remember the days when the Sunday paper would arrive with the comics page on the outside?)