Posted 7 years ago
Belltown
(206 items)
For a full week in January of 1987, as the Iran-Contra scandal was at full boil, Garry Trudeau ran a series of puzzle pieces in his daily comic strip so that readers could piece together the Iranscam puzzle themselves. Each day there'd be a new batch of puzzle pieces, and at the end of the week, if you pieced them all together, you got an image with a single puzzle piece missing. The missing piece is Reagan's reply to his special counselor, David Abshire, stating what he knew and when he knew it.
Here's a link to the full strips:
http://doonesbury.slate.com/strip/set/33
Like a lot people, I thought this was pretty cool, both for its political commentary and for the interactive aspect of it. For some reason I really wanted to try to get Garry Trudeau's signature on my "completed" puzzle, but I could not figure out how to reach him. Then I hit on the idea to send it to his wife, Jane Pauley, who was at NBC at the time. So I sent her a note, apologizing for asking her to basically take the thing home so her husband could sign it. Naturally I included a self-addressed stamped envelope. After I sent it, I figured I'd never see it again, but a few weeks later, this arrived in the mail.