Regular readers of comic strips will immediately recognize the illustration on our cover this week as the work of Cartoonist Garry Trudeau. The seven Doonesbury characters that he drew for us are the main inhabitants of Trudeau's Walden Puddle Commune: Uncle Duke, sitting smugly with an ever-present cocktail in hand, surrounded by flaky, pot-smoking Zonker Harris, Virginia, Michael J. Doonesbury himself, Joanie Caucus, football-playing B.D. and Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer, the local campus radical.

Occasionally, of course, other characters turn up in Doonesbury's world. For a while, one visitor to the commune was a fictional TIME correspondent called Roland Burton Hedley Jr., a handle Trudeau could have concocted from three of the names on our masthead: Los Angeles Correspondent Roland Flamini, Boston Bureau Chief Sandra Burton and Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan. In the strip, Correspondent Hedley arrived at the off-campus Doonesbury commune near Boston with instructions from a "Mr. Grunwald," another character possibly borrowed from TIME's masthead, to begin reporting for "our annual 'state-of-the-student' essay." Trudeau's caricature TIME reporter was equipped with camera, notebooks and binoculars. He eagerly greeted the communards ("Hi, there, children of the Seventies!") and proceeded, during several daily episodes, to be hoodwinked by the Doonesbury denizens into believing that the place was a scene of rampant drugs and sex. The results of all the tomfoolery at Walden Puddle soon appeared as a TIME cover story on campus life called "The New Hedonism" (see cut). Officials at the local college were promptly besieged by complaints from alumni, and a dean called Zonker Harris to explain. Zonker blamed the exaggerated story on TIME's reporter and editors: "They're just jealous, sir--they missed out on communal living."

Our story on Trudeau and his Doonesbury crew, written by Donald Morrison and edited by Stefan Kanfer, is by no means an attempt to get even. But the Doonesbury assignment was especially intriguing for Sandra Burton, who along with Reporter-Researcher Patricia Beckert did most of the interviewing for the story. Burton spoke to Trudeau, then talked at length with many of his friends from Yale, some of whom are models for Doonesbury characters. Because of Trudeau's oft-stated aversion to interviews, however, Burton was never able to get him to identify the real-life model, if there was one, for the TIME correspondent he created for his strip. But one thing is certain, she says: "Each of us is sure that it could not have been him--and certainly not her."

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