Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has been no stranger to controversy in his almost 40 years of cartooning, and he's raising eyebrows once again. Trudeau completed this week's Doonesbury series several weeks ago, and those strips were sent to newspapers across the country. But this week's cartoons center on an event that may or may not take place - Barack Obama winning the presidency. The election, of course, happens on Tuesday, and despite the fact that Obama has been leading in the polls, the outcome of the race remains very much in doubt.
This article from the Houston Chronicle discusses the bind some newspaper editors are finding themselves in - should they run the possibly irrelevant Obama series or a set of August reruns submitted by Universal Press as alternatives? As for Trudeau:
"From a risk-assessment viewpoint, I felt comfortable with the odds," Trudeau said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "The way I see it, if Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on an extraordinary phenomenon. If he loses, there'll be such a national uproar that a blown call in a comic strip won't be much noticed. Besides, I'll be the one with the egg on my face — not the editors."
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