Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 10, 1996
February 09, 1996
February 11, 1996
Transcript:
Mike: Bernie, I met a very cool lady at the Forbes meeting last night. She's one of your coders. Bernie: Mike, if she works for me, she's too young for you. Tell me what you like about Forbes. Mike: Um...well, you know about the flat tax. Aside from that, I guess I like his overall approach to downsizing the government. Also, he's a rich geek with glasses and bad hair. Bernie: One of us? Sign me up.
Kim was the last orphan out of Saigon, born late 1974 or early ‘75, which would make her 21 in 1996; Mike is between 35 and 45. The vagueness is due to the fact that the main characters didn’t age during the college years. Mike gave his age as 19 in 1971, so he was presumably born in 1951/2, but is in his early twenties post-hiatus. Joanie is around 16 years older than Mike (born in 1936), but in 1988 says she’s 47 and in 1993 is excited at the election of a president of “her generation”. To further muddle things, a rerun from 2002 last week re-established Joanie’s original age, but I haven’t read the whole storyline so I don’t know what comes of it.
I consider time to have passed before the hiatus. After all, we never saw the original gang’s graduation in the comic. In my opinion, Mike, Mark, and BD started at Walden in 1970 at about 18, and Zonker the following year. In my head-canon, the original 3 graduated in the mid-seventies but stuck in the commune and around Walden (tutoring, jockeying, and coaching) until the events of the musical sent them their separate ways.