Trudeau Puts Doonesbury On Hiatus, Except For Sundays. Thanks For Nothing, Alpha House!

Well, the good news is that Gary Trudeau has a home run in Alpha House, the Washington Beltway comedy series he created for Amazon for on-line distribution. The bad news is, because of Alpha House‘s success, he will be putting his long running comic strip, Doonesbury, on a long term, open-ended hiatus in order to focus on his new politically satiric property, according to The Washington Post.

Say it ain’t so, Gary!

“I’ve done the strip for 43 years — 45 if you include the college edition [at Yale] — and I’m ready for an extended break,” Trudeau, 65, tells Comic Riffs.

In making the move, the New York-based cartoonist takes nothing for granted: “A hiatus comes with uncertainty, of course: I can’t assume I’ll be welcomed back a year or two from now.”

Gary, the world let you keep making that comic strip, they even gave you a Pulitzer for it, even after you thought turning the strip into a musical was a good idea (Grammy nomination for the soundtrack, aside).

If you thought I embedded that blast from the past just for the snippet of the Paul Masson ad upfront, you may be right. I will still tell you to go to hell.

Trudeau still plans to run new Doonesbury strips on Sundays. For the rest of the week, readers will get “Flashback” strips – reruns of comic strips dating back to 1970. Over 13,000 of those strips have not been seen since they ran originally.

Alpha House wrapped up its first season this past January with an appearance by Anthony Weiner because…why the hell not? Episodes can still be viewed through Amazon on-line. No release date has been set yet for the debut of season two.