Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 07, 2011

Don’t do it Jeff-you’ll lose any chance you may have with the redhead.

Jeff! Wake up! This guy’s a rattlesnake without the rattles.

Here, take a bite of this shiney apple.

The stupid boy has just thrown away his lifeline.

No big surprise — it’s the same Jeff as always….

I think we all knew he HAD to mess up somehow.

He’s very smart, and creative… never thrown by abstract concepts.

But he has a very tenuous grasp on the concrete…. little stuff, you know, like “judgement”, and “reality”.

…and here’s the screw-up.

Oh dear, has Roland gone over to the Dark Side? I always thought he was too clueless to ever intentionally do harm.

So shots are fired and feet are injured – and for everyone it’s a lose-lose. Phew – we’re back to normal – I was getting uncomfortable with all this unaccostomed success.

Whatever Becca did unintentionally, you may be assured that there are two or three folks around the publishing house who are paid (by someone or other) to do the very same thing.

This won’t end well

So what juicy gossip is there going to be? The visitors list? The closed curtains? How much can you figure out by playing rear window?

Jeff is living proof that inherited talent and brains usually skip a generation.

Sarah WHO?

And then it will turn out that he works at Apple and he goes to a bar and leaves the prototype for the iPhone 5. On accident, of course.

Rick Redfern will hate Roland if this ends up ruining Jeff’s book deal. Jeff is getting so close to getting a life of his own and finally out of his home.

Maybe Sorkh will kill Roland in revenge for destroying his career.

I always figured Jeff’s demise would be a run-in with Trrf at Becca’s office. I’m sure he’s still unhappy about being “rescued” from his presidency-for-life.

This is Becca’s fault for confusing the Rogue with the Rascal, yes?

Sorkh Razil is a dim bulb!

This is pretty messed up. Jeff finally catches a break with the book deal only to have it ruined by some greedy idiot. Yes, this is the way the world works, but it still doesn’t make me happy. I was looking forward to Jeff actually doing something. Now he’s fired before it starts.

@defunctdoormat — I know! I was so excited. :(. But he’ll find a way to get out of this. The Red Rascal always does.

Jeff is a clown whose only desire is to be noticed. His character is without substance; it’s what he does to get attention that interests us.Over the last two years, he shot down a helicopter while celebrating an Afghan wedding. He got conned of $50M intended as a bribe for Karzai. To compensate Overkill for the $50M, Jeff extracted Trrf, who proved to be bankrupt and worth no more as a hostage than Jeff himself.At this point, Trudeau decided to make both characters fully “reflexive”—-that is, Jeff and (to a lesser extent) Trrf became aware of their status as fictions in the mind of GT and his readers. Both characters could now aspire to “publish” themselves, confident of a welcoming audience: us.Jeff has mentioned this reflexivity before (he called it “magic realism”) but he has never grasped—-and still does not—-the fact that he’s screwing up somebody’s plans. He’s a less intelligent, or less focused Quixote (and therefore less significant). “I would like to get off on the right foot.”Quijote has no doubt of his purpose; he knows he’s starting off on the right foot.

Does a galley proof come in bound form?

I worked as a book editor for most of my career. When I first started, in the 60’s, the “galley proofs” or “page proofs” that we mailed back to writers were never bound in any form, but always in long sheets on cheap “newsprint”. Later in my career we had “bluelines” from a computerized process, but still were not bound. I’m not sure what process is used today, but it’s conceivable that a “proof” could be bound. More likely, the “proof” would be electronic on a computer disk or flash drive. E-mailing the proofs would be the quickest and easiest, but in this case security concerns would argue against emailing and in favor of the disk or flash drive method.

This will NOT end well…

Ahhhh, Jeff was so happy! Now that’s going to end. : (

Neither one knows who they’re really dealing with. Hedley will ruin Jeff’s career, Rascal will rip Hedley’s guts out.

How many of those khaki combat reporter outfits does Roland have?

If Roland is smart {waiting for laughter to die down}, he’ll realize that as a Fox employee, it would be against his best interests to embarrass Palin.

By now viper Hedley is probably calculating how much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Team Palin will pay him for advance info from the galleys so that they can be prepared to fight it. Also, Tea Partiers might be willing to pay Hedley the big bux. He might not even be above offering the galleys back to Random House for a king’s ransom, leaving Jeff to take the hit, because Roland will tell RH that he FOUND it lost in a coffee shop. He’s probably feeling orgasmic right now, though hiding it well from poor dim-bulb Jeff.

You people take the lives ans actions of these fictional characters real seriously, don’t you,