Garry Trudeau and Amazon.com Launch New Contest

Posted on May 5, 1998

Amazon.com launched "The People's Doonesbury @ Amazon.com." The interactive contest offers Internet users a chance to team directly with Gary Trudeau to create a collaborative comic strip and to win a personally signed lithograph of the finished strip.

Ten of the 11 Doonesbury comic strip panels, drawn exclusively for the online bookseller by Trudeau, were posted on the Amazon.com Website today. Visitors to Amazon.com can compete each day to give voice to many of Doonesbury's best-loved characters by "writing the next panel" to drive the story forward. Trudeau himself, who has been creating Doonesbury for nearly 30 years, will choose the daily winner.

Dialogue from each winning entry will be added to the panel the following morning and posted on the Amazon.com website. Over the next ten weekdays, the strip will evolve, panel by panel, until the entire 11-panel strip is finished. Trudeau himself will pen the final frame, which will remain a mystery until created and posted on May 18.

On May 19 the completed "People's Doonesbury" comic strip, representing the creative results of Trudeau and his Amazon.com collaborators, will debut as a special full-page feature in USA Today and appear in its entirety on Amazon.com.

Prizes for the selected daily winners include a personally signed lithograph of the comic strip they helped create, an ultimate Doonesbury book collection from Amazon.com, and their names published alongside the completed strip in USA Today. All visitors to the contest site can enter to win a grand-prize drawing for a trip for two to Seattle and a free 10-minute "buy all you can" online shopping spree from the desk of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.

To thank and acknowledge Trudeau for his participation in the contest, Amazon.com will make a donation in his name to the children's literacy organization, Reading Is Fundamental, Inc. (RIF). Additionally, all profits from the sale of Doonesbury books at Amazon.com from May 4 to May 18, 1998, will also be donated to RIF, as will Trudeau's creator royalties from the sales of those books.