I really like Kurt Andersen's story on the new Doonesbury book in today's Times Book Review. I too have a clear memory of Garry Trudeau's intro to John Kerry ("You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy") from my mother's copy of the book, which came out the year I was born (1971) but which became a useful meta-history text anyway. Since there was no Vietnam unit till college and I was as un-prone to watching foxhole footage as a girl child can be, good thing I had the complete set of Doonesbury volumes to teach me about hand grenades, Phred, radio journalism, university presidents, Nixon in China, weed, quarterbacks, Gay Talese, and portable typewriters. Anyway, I think Andersen's off about just one little thing:

Another significant difference between ''Doonesbury'' and all the other ''political'' strips, from ''Pogo'' to ''Shoe'' to ''Mallard Fillmore,'' is that Trudeau's characters are not talking animals but human beings. The stakes and daily writerly challenge seem inherently greater. For their first 15 years of existence, the characters in ''Doonesbury'' were like the Simpsons (and nearly every other comic-strip character in history except those in ''Gasoline Alley''): they were ageless. When Trudeau entered middle age himself, he started letting his creations grow older—and then promptly took an almost two-year hiatus. That could have turned into his shark-jumping moment, when the familiar rules of his fictional universe were overturned in a reckless bid for new juice. But instead of jumping the shark, which is born of boredom or creative bankruptcy, Trudeau actually raised his stakes some more. His characters graduated from college, got married, had children (who became characters themselves), got divorced, died. The strip became more ambitious, not less.

Leaving aside for a moment the possibility that "jumping the shark" may now be jumping the shark itself, how about "Sally Forth"? Don't those characters age? I haven't read the funny pages for a while, since I prefer my newspapers in crazy-salad form here on the information superhighway, but I have a distinct memory of that teenager as a baby. In any case, who knew the guy who writes "SF" had a witty, nicely designed blog? Well, he (Francesco Marciuliano) does, and it's called Drink at Work. Carol Hartsell contributes good stuff as well. (Greg Howard was the original creator of the strip; Craig Macintosh draws the strip now.) Read some letters by Sally-haters, and either chortle or weep, depending. And call me ill-travelled, but the site has one of the coolest link-arranging concepts I've ever seen. Marciuliano also writes sharp political commentary on, for example, a bad cartoonist's Terri Schiavo strips, and I don't know why it should amaze me that he takes strong stands; it's not as though his comic is supposed to be unbiased. Cue Intrepid Sketcher: The Garry Trudeau Story again. My God, that man ages well!

Stop the presses—I was thinking of For Better or For Worse, which I read every day in high school in the Chicago Tribune along with the honorable Dave Barry. Not only do the characters age, they have specific birthdates, years and all. Here's the family tree. While "For Better..." isn't exactly "Pogo" (nothing is), it's still a popular strip. And now you have Drink at Work to add to your bookmarks. No, you don't get to have a drink at work, because it's the weekend, remember?