Look upon his works, ye Mighty, and despair
One of the last times I found Doonesbury...well, you know...funny...occurred in the wake of the death fatwa issued by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie for supposed blasphemies in The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was described by Nobel literature prize awardee V.S. Naipaul as "an extreme form of literary criticism." Such a notion certainly informed Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, who launched a storyline in which the wholly-fictional "Islamic Book Critics Circle" handed out literary judgments that were harsh indeed:
To Sidney Sheldon, for The Sands of Time, a sentence of death!
The comic strip's intrepid-yet-witless TV news correspondent, Roland Hedley, offered this breathless bit of commentary to his anchor back in studio:
Ooh, a pan! That's got to hurt, Peter!
All this is to say that the sentence has finally been carried out - by God, if not by man.
Note: Feel free to pay for the privilege of digging through the voluminous archives of ancient Doonesbury strips, if you like. I elected to rely on memory: one of the greatest curses of the human race, as someone or other once said.
("New" Blogger...she blows! Er, cross-posted.)
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