Dude: The Big Book of Zonker

 

Dude: The Big Book of Zonker by G.B. Trudeau  284 pp.

Zonker Harris has been a pivotal character in the Doonesbury comic strip for 50+ years. This collection of strips featuring the beloved Zonker covers his time at Walden College and living in the Walden Commune with the other characters through to his time serving as a nanny for his college football captain, B.D. and his wife, Boopsie, and daughter, Sam. The strips follow Zonker's career gaining national acclaim as a  professional sun tanner, as the Lt. Governor of Haiti, joining the British aristocracy, periodic returns home to his parents, helping to provide medical marijuana to cancer and AIDS patients, becoming a nanny for first for former roommates Mike and J.J. and then for B.D. This collection ends when B.D. loses a leg in combat and the story of B.D. continues in further volumes. In spite of the drug using, anti-establishment antics of Zonker, the comic strip contains much social/political commentary of the years of it's publication. In spite of much that is ridiculous, like surfing with a small baby, Zonker is a loveable dude and provides a kind of social conscience no matter how quirky.