Comics Shelving: A Doonesbury SERIES

Along with Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, little Timmy, a twelve-minute-old embryo, is a character in a recent Doonesbury comic series. The sequence, entitled Silent Scream II: The Prequel, pokes fun at the recent antiabortion documentary Silent Scream. But readers of the 835 newspapers in which Garry Trudeau's comic strip appears will never meet little Timmy. Last week Trudeau withdrew the six strips after discussions with his distributor, Universal Press Syndicate. "We thought the sequence was done well," said Lee Salem, editorial director of Universal. "But we finally decided that the whole question of abortion was so sensitive that it would...