Mike Doonesbury

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.