Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 08, 2022

Mike will find out later if he doesn’t know already.

Oriental chicks rule !

In the end Mike wins.

YOU were the one to walk, JJ. What do you care?

So this is the way it was in 1997

Keep fantasizing, Zeke.

I remember this strip well. Mike really turned what could have been a disaster into the best thing. Contrast this with his horrible dating attempts in the beginning of the strip.

Kim is more “woman” than Mike’s loser ex can ever hope to be!!

Zeke just so perfectly encapsulates his character.

Love and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Hope they’re banned to the here aptly named Poop Deck.

Great. Who invited the shrew and the worm. On yeah, NO ONE!

She bought her dress at SLUTS ARE US. Nice vibe for a wedding gown. She loves it because it’s totally her style. He loves it because every guy there wants to be him.

J.J. is desperate to prove that she’s better than Kim even though she’s the one who left the marriage. It tells us about her that she can’t even be happy for Mike and Alex.

P3 rocks – Love this arc!

Hey you dumped him, why do you even care? Could she be having second thoughts? Nah… she doesn’t still have the brain capacity for that.

Hey – you had your chance, J.J…. enjoy your slacker prototype.

Teenybopper is another outdated term, right up there with groovy

“Teenybopper” meaning “younger than me”.

JJ comes to the dour realization that Mike has made an upgrade.

throw them overboard again!

Think of it like this: God, Fate, Time, or Whatever brought Mike and J.J. together at the precise point in their lives when they could conceive a child and raise her together until she’s about ten years old at this point in time (because she’s destined to do great things when she turns thirty-five in exactly twenty-five years Or Something Like That; that wouldn’t have worked with Kim because when Mike and J.J. first met, Kim was a child herself). Now that Alex has reached this crucial point of precociousness (would she quite as brash, quite as spontaneous, without having had J.J. as well as Mike (and Zonker) as role models? perhaps), it was time for Alex to leave J.J.‘s influence and enter Kim’s. So by bolting, J.J. was simply doing exactly what God, Fate, Time, or Whatever wanted her to do all along.

Or don’t think of it like that at all. Either way. ;-)

Zeke, nothing but a horny old dog.

JJ, green is not a good color for you.

I love how exquisitely Trudeau drew the tenderness in Mike’s face in the third panel, not to mention Kim’s happiness.

Gee, I wonder who is more jealous – J.J., or her Stupidhead boyfriend?

A much more mature “teeny-bopper” than the ex will ever be.