A Doonesbury collection featuring cartoons from the 1970s.
A nice collection, with lots of politics. Many of the cartoons concern runaway housewife Joanie's struggle to get into law school.
I was an adult back then but I don't recall most of the political stuff the cartoons are lampooning which made them not that funny for me. Might be more amusing for someone who is more familiar with the subject matter.
Here is the Joanie Caucus cartoon from the back cover of the book.
Selected cartoons from "The President Is a Lot Smarter Than You Think".
Early Doonesbury cartoons from the late 1960s and early 1970s, there abouts. A nice collection, mostly enjoyable to read, though it was probably more funny at the time. Still I did like reading it.
Here are two early Zonker cartoons starting with when he was first introduced.
Welcome to planet Bloor. Where everyone is on the take and no one does an honest day's work and every fellow is out to cut the other fellow's throat. How is a self-respecting Terran diplomat supposed to cope and bring enlightenment and succor to the distressed natives?
Maybe Magnan, accomplished, senior diplomat, is able to handle the shifting and unstable alliances that is normal everyday life on Bloor. But for Retief, his assistant, hands off isn't his style. He wades in, both fists flying, and restores order, brief though it may be, as chaos quickly resumes as soon as his back is turned.
It is a hopeless mess, not only because of the unstable and quarrelsome locals, but even the diplomatic party from Terra is on the take and, of course, the greedy, treacherous Groaci are present too, looking to fill their pockets with whatever they can get their tentacles on. But Retief is no dummy and he knows how to deal with what is basically the lost cause of planet Bloor.
This has to be one of the most boring Retief stories I have ever read. New characters pop in and out of the story, about a hundred characters, most of whom make brief appearances and then are gone. There are four main jokes in the story, puns based on the locals' names; the facial expressions schtick, how everyone is on the take and how everyone, Terrans, locals, Groaci, and other assorted aliens are ready to start a brawl over the most trifling occurrences. The last half of the book is centered around the on-again, off-again battles at the spaceport, which was just mind-numbingly boring. I skipped so many pages, I couldn't be bothered to care about who was fighting who. The title character, Retief, who is usually the hero, is quite unheroic in this story and spends more time beating on people than I can recall him ever doing in any of the other Retief stories I have read.
At one point, I began to think Laumer was in the middle of some kind of mental breakdown when he wrote this. But when I got to the end, I started to think maybe it was all quite deliberate and that he was making a rather serious point. Even so, it didn't make it worth wading through all the fights and battle scenes.
Book 5 of the World of Tiers series
Five people have become stranded on the topsy-turvy Lavalite world. The main feature of it is its instability, with the landscape prone to shift quite suddenly.
Kickaha and his partner, Anana; Urthona and his hired thug Angus McKay, a man from Earth; and Red Orc are the five people stranded on this strangely active planet. Anana, Urthona and Red Orc are all Lords, seemingly immortal humans with advanced scientific knowledge and extremely inflated opinions of their own superiority. But at least Anana has climbed down of her high horse due to her loving connection with Kickaha, who is also from Earth.
How these five ended up stranded is not detailed. But life is harsh on the Lavalite world and the locals are primitive and dangerous. All five of the main characters end up being split up and held captive by the local tribal folks.
Urthona, who designed and populated the Lavalite world with his custom animal and plant creations and who installed the human tribes on it too, has a mobile castle there that slowly travels around the world. If any of them can get to his castle, they maybe able to find a way off the world. Anana also has a device that can open gateways to other worlds, but it is necessary to find the gateways first. Urthona and Red Orc both want the device but Anana is hanging on to it as a way to control Urthona and Red Orc.
Kickaha got separated from the others during a sudden flood and manages to make a connection with a different tribe. Anana ends up with a different group of savages. Urthona and McKay get captured together and Red Orc gets taken by a different group, who treat him very harshly. All five of the stranded people have one goal, to escape their various captors and find the a gate off the planet, and failing that, find Urthona's moving castle.
It would really help to have read the first four books in the series. Besides that, though, it just wasn't that interesting. We first get to read about Kickaha's time with the tribals that captured him in the most detail. Then Anana's ordeal. But Urthona's and McKay's are not gone into in much detail and Red Orc's just in passing. All we really find out about his captivity is that he was beaten and abused, even more than the other four.
However, I just felt like a stranger at a party where I knew no one. I never really connected to any of the characters, not even to the two heroes, Kickaha and Anana. And I got bored with reading about their struggles with the tribal peoples and began skipping those parts. Ditto their struggles with the mobile terrain. In the last part of the story, Anana and Kickaha build hang gliders and hot air balloons and we are told in detail how they do so. Descriptions of that process were about as interesting as reading a math problem.
Inspector Hemmingway, Book Two
Uncle Joe has decided that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to gather a group of people to spend a few days at his brother Nathaniel's country estate. Uncle Joe is either a half-wit or a joker because the people he invites seem to be chosen to irritate his elderly brother as much as possible.
One wonders why Nathaniel ever agreed to host this gathering as everyone seems to get on his nerves, including his nephew Stephen, who is a quarrelsome and angry young man and Nathaniel's heir presumptive. And there is Paula, Stephen's sister, who wants Nathaniel to fund a play she is frantic to star in, along with the play's author, Roydon. Roydon has been mislead by Paula into believing that Nathaniel is willing to back the play but when the old man sees it is a rather smutty and crude, he explodes in anger and refuses to have anything to do with it. Also included is Nathaniel's business partner, Edgar, who is on the outs with the old man due to some disagreement about the direction the business has been taking. About the only people there who don't upset Nathaniel are Maud, Uncle Joe's phlegmatic wife and young Matilda, who is a relative of some sort.
But Nathaniel's worries are soon over when he stabbed to death in his bedroom with all the ways into the room locked from the inside. So the police have quite a mystery on their hands, with lots of suspects and a puzzle to figure out a classic locked room mystery.
So this was quite an interesting mystery although the killer is quite apparent from time of the murder. The mystery is not so much who killed the old man but how it was done and why. Although the why becomes very clear once Nathaniel's will comes into the story.
I have a few quibbles with the story though. First, how very unpleasant the characters are. What a bunch of mean, nasty, rude people! So hateful and unkind they are to each other. Were people really like that in 1930s Britain? Which is when the book was written but not published until the 1940s. My second quibble is the romance story, which suddenly pops up at the very end of the story virtually out of nowhere. Especially since the female has a very good understanding of what a jerk her lover is. The third quibble I won't discuss because it would be a spoiler. But I must say it seems unlikely that the killer would have knowledge of this unusual method of murder.
Despite my quibbles, I still enjoyed the mystery a lot, mainly because I couldn't figure out how it was pulled off until the author revealed it at the end.
Side note: I'm not sure who Casca is, but I think it is one of the people who was involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar.
A Regency Romance.
Ludovic is the disgraced grandson of a wealthy lord. Ludovic is on the run from law, accused of murdering a man over the loss of his family heirloom, the talisman ring. Ludovic is assumed to be on the continent, safe from the English authorities. But one night, his teenage cousin Eustacie, who is running away from a marriage arranged for her, encounters Ludovic on the road. Ludovic is involved with the local smugglers and he and Eustacie have to escape the Excisemen. In the process, Ludovic is wounded.
Eustacie takes Ludovic to an inn that Ludovic has a good relationship with, since the innkeeper is part of the smuggling ring. The innkeeper treats Ludovic's wound and hides him from the Excisemen who show up at the inn looking for the fugitive.
Staying at the inn is Sarah Thane. Sarah quickly steps in to help Eustacie and Ludovic. Soon after Ludovic is treated and hidden, the man Eustacie was supposed to marry, Sir Tristam, shows up at the inn looking for her. He is surprised when she informs him she ran away because she didn't want to marry him. He reassures her that he has no interest in forcing her into a marriage she doesn't want. Sir Tristam also discovers that his disgraced relative Ludovic is at the inn, wounded and has been spending his time smuggling.
Ever since the murder, Ludovic, who knows he is innocent, has thought that Tristam was the murderer and that Tristam has the talisman ring because he is a collector of rare and valuable items like the talisman ring. But Tristam thinks that Ludovic is guilty and is surprised to find that he doesn't have the ring at all. It dawns upon them that the true killer is their relative, Basil, who also lives in the area and who also loves to collect valuable and rare items. All they have to do to prove it is find the talisman ring in Basil's possession.
But to do so means keeping Ludovic hidden while he heals from his wound, not only from the authorities but also from Basil. It also means gaining access to Basil's home and searching for a hidden panel that Ludovic remembers seeing in Basil's house when Ludovic was a youngster. But he can't recall exactly in which room the panel is to be found. Which isn't too helpful of him.
I have read this novel several times over the years and I enjoy it every time. It's fun and exciting and romantic and a bit silly and doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's still engaging and entertaining and it is what I call a keeper, a book I enjoyed reading so much that I know I will enjoy reading it again and again.
Here is a review by Dear Author.
According to the blurb on the cover, these cartoons are taken from Still a Few Bugs in the System. The copyright is from 1970, 1971 and 1972.
The book opens with the footballer, BD, getting a new roommate, namely Mike Doonesbury. From there it portrays the college lives of Mike, BD and Mark Slackmeyer, who is a militant student activist.
Here are the three of them together:
And here is Mark on his way to cause trouble on a campus:
Hard to believe that it has been over fifty years since these cartoons came out. Trudueau and I are both old now and those days are gone for good. But at least I can look back at that time through cartoon books like this. And younger people can laugh at our old timey antics.
