Using us for comic effect

Mike's mom hates it here. The big trees make her claustrophobic. Everything feels clammy and gray.

So, being the good son, Mike Doonesbury tries to show his mother the bright side of living in Seattle. He points out Mercer Island and the Medina Gold Coast, "where Bill Gates has built his mansion." Mother D. stands there, homesick: "It's no Oklahoma."

"I'd keep that to yourself, Mom," Mike tells her. "People here think they have it made."

"Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau can say such things.

He visited here in the late '90s, developing "Dbury@Sbucks," a series of Doonesbury products sold at Starbucks stores to raise money for local literacy programs.

Now, he is using Seattle as the backdrop for a current series of strips that should resonate with his baby-boomer brethren: the widowed parent moving in with her adult children, and the adjustments that ripple through a family.

The strip runs in The Seattle Times, or go to www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/

Since Mike Doonesbury lives in Seattle, Trudeau told me, "the Widow D's discontent over her changed conditions plays out in the shadow of Mount Rainier."

Still, the series has helped to serve as a comical comeuppance of sorts. You have to wince at exchanges like this:

"Seattle is a HUGE disappointment," Mother D. says.

"Mom! Shush!" Mike says. "The neighbors!"

"Did you just shush your mother?"

"Home values are very sensitive here."

I'll say. A new report by Global Insight and National City Corp. found that late last year, the average Seattle home was "overvalued" by 31.7 percent.

And what is the value of our surroundings? Nothing, when you're starting over, alone, far from the place you know.

When Mike's wife asks, "Could there possibly BE a prettier sight than Mount Rainier in winter?"

"Yes," Mother D. says, "the sight of a field of milo stubble poking through the snow." She goes to her room and finds a flight back to Oklahoma.

No comeuppance intended, Trudeau said. No city can compete with the double-whammy of a broken heart and homesickness.

"Mike's mom isn't judging her new home on the merits," Trudeau said. "She hates it because it's unfamiliar and because it represents an unwelcome new dependency.

"There are quite a few places where the locals are mighty smug about where they live; I'm from one of them — Manhattan," he said. "So I wasn't singling out your community."

Trudeau couldn't recall any favorite haunts from his time here ("Very bad at that," he said), but said life in Seattle seemed "pleasant, in part because the sun showed up a lot of the time I was there."

So what should Seattle learn from its pop-culture spotlight? "Only that it's important to read 'Doonesbury' every day," Trudeau said. "Otherwise columns like this make no sense.

"Also, be proud of where you live. We don't have enough room for all of you in Manhattan."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Milo? Wasn't he in "Bloom County"?