News & Notes

Getting His Licks
The comic strip Doonesbury turns 20 this year, and cartoonist Garry Trudeau is celebrating with The 1990 Doonesbury Stamp Album. The collection (''ideal as letter enhancers''), published this month by Penguin, includes George Bush stamps (''I was out of the loop! I was out of the loop!''), Dan Quayle stamps (''Am I having a good day or what?''), a series featuring Zonker (''Duty, Dude!''), several Donald Trump stamps (''bimbo limbo''), and, finally, Doonesbury package stickers (first class, third class, handle with care, and ''wing it''). The U.S. postal service is a little worried. After all, only two months ago Trudeau used his Sunday strip to protest the hike in postal rates by drawing a sheet of stamps and having Zonker encourage readers to ''affix these dandy... protest stamps to all your mail.'' Thousands did just that, prompting the postal service to alert employees to the bogus stamps. The album may have the same effect. David Stanford, the album's editor, says the book is selling well to serious stamp collectors. ''It looks like it's going to become a collectible,'' he notes. All of Trudeau's profits from the $8.95 volume — and some of Penguin's — will go to the Writers' Voices publishing program of the Literacy Volunteers of New York City. ''He wanted to use the characters in the strip for a purpose he believes in,'' Stanford says, ''and literacy was the perfect match.''

Call Him Mister J.
J. Randy Taraborelli, author of the best-selling, dirt-raking Call Her Miss Ross, has a new project: a big unauthorized biography of Michael Jackson (right, on a stamp from a set of ''Famous Black Entertainers,'' issued by the government of Tanzania). ''Taraborelli had a tremendous amount of (Jackson) material left over from the Diana Ross book,'' says Steven Schragis, the head of Carol Publishing. ''So this was a natural project for him.'' Taraborelli, who interviewed hundreds of Jackson's associates and friends for the project, has delivered about half of the manuscript, Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness is due out next May.