Mike Doonesbury

Michael James "Mike" Doonesbury is the main character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury. He started out as a nerdish freshman from Tulsa at the fictional Walden College, and shared a dorm room with B.D. Currently he is married to Kim Rosenthal, and divorced from J.J. Caucus. Mike's daughter, Alex continued to live with Mike and Kim, until she left to attend MIT. He has a younger brother, Benjamin (who during some time as a punk rocker was known as "Sal Putrid"), and a widowed mother who died in late 2010.

Mike is the everyman of the strip. He is a fairly normal, well-adjusted person who is easy for most readers to relate to, in contrast to the often surreal, crazy and extreme characters that populate the strip. Trudeau based Mike's personality on his own and for this reason it is usually Mike who speaks the creator's own viewpoints. Mike's name was taken from the word "doone", meaning a person who is not afraid to appear foolish, and Charles Pillsbury, the roommate of Trudeau's at Yale.

In the early strips (from 1970), his primary traits were his inability to hit it off with any girl, and his refusal to admit his lack of success with women. Mike was initially set as a "preppy" counterpoint to his college roommate, B.D., a stereotypical jock. The role as B.D.'s foil soon shifted to the more radical Mark Slackmeyer, and the hippie Zonker Harris. He also talked to his own reflection in the mirror (and was frequently insulted by it) and was even able to talk to plants on some occasions (although it was generally Zonker who talked to the plants). During this period he had a sister who appeared once (on February 21, 1971), but she was silently dropped from subsequent continuity. He also tutored a young African American boy named Rufus.

After a couple of years on campus, he moved to Walden Commune, along with B.D., Zonker, Mark, Nicole, Boopsie, Didi, Bernie and Joanie.

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