Strange. I just don't remember this whole sequence.

Question is-- did my big city East Coast paper carry B.C.? I think so. Did the paper arrive before I left for school? I think so. Did I typically have time to read the comics page? (because that was always my first impulse) I think so?

Actually I think maybe I would read the paper after getting back from school, but back in 1983 I also remember staying late at the computer lab. Like, very late. A very kind teacher would let us lock up after ourselves, until eventually some joker wound up frying one of the machines.

I do not really remember this story line either, but I think I have only read Toons for Our Times twice, with this being the 3rd.

I had one of the big compendiums that came out a couple years later, which I picked up at uni closer to the end of the decade. Come to think of it, I wasn't very familiar with the strip, and decided to take a chance. The obvious thing was to get over the Doonesbury influence before realizing that the strip was worlds different.

One thing I read earlier is that B.C. only ran in ~15 major newspapers in 1982, but jumped to ~45 in '83, much of that evidently down to Trudeau taking a hiatus that year. So actually the Doonesbury similarity greatly helped Breathed, from what I understand.

A few years later (maybe early 90's?) I remember a copycat (but still pretty good) strip which echoed B.C.'s early days. I think it was called... "X's Swamp" or "X's Marsh" or something like that. It had characters like Portnoy and ordinary-level woodland-type creatures IIRC.