Dustin (comic strip)

Dustin is a daily comic strip created by Steve Kelley, and Jeff Parker, editorial cartoonist for Florida Today. It is carried by King Features Syndicate and started running on January 4, 2010.Dustin won the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip in 2010. Focusing on the present boomerang generation and post-2008 recession period, it also deals with varying topics from everyday life and social commentary.

Dustin was initially planned as a collaboration between Kelley and Steve Breen, who was Kelley's successor as the staff editorial cartoonist of the San Diego Union Tribune after Kelley was fired from that position in 2001. Breen later decided not to proceed with Dustin, leading to a 2008 lawsuit by Kelley against the owners of the Union Tribune, alleging that Breen had been improperly pressured not to collaborate with Kelley; the case was dismissed in 2009, but reinstated in 2011.

At its outset Dustin was carried in more than 100 newspapers nationwide, and by October 2010 it had expanded to 300. In several papers, Dustin was the replacement strip for Cathy, which ended its run in papers on October 3, 2010. Among the papers that carried Dustin from the beginning was the New York Daily News, but due to a recent cutback in the paper's comic section Dustin, along with several other strips, were jettisoned from the paper.

Dustin Kudlick, the titular character of the comic strip. A 23-year-old college graduate who has failed to find regular employment in the current economy after graduating and thus moved back home to live with his parents. He is constantly trapped in a cycle of dead-end temp jobs and grueling manual labor, frequently shown putting in long hours at a car wash or asking his supervisor at the temp agency for more career-enhancing assignments that might help him break out of the cycle of wage slavery, not to mention troubling in developing relationships with women and a budding inventor. Despite his dysfunctional family atmosphere, Dustin remains stoic, a heroic everyman and inspiration to the reader, as he endures and strives, trying to find true employment and happiness.

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