`Doonesbury,' Starbucks Team Up For Literacy

Zonker wearing the Starbucks logo? Mike Doonesbury with a steaming cup of Starbucks coffee?

These images are part of a new merchandising partnership that blends "Doonesbury" comic-strip artist Garry Trudeau and Starbucks in an effort to promote literacy.

Greeting cards go on sale today for $4.95, tumblers for $6.95, oversized coffee mugs for $9.95 and T-shirts for $17.95. There's even a signed, limited edition lithograph of Zonker with his surfboard for $59.95.

In telephone interviews yesterday, Trudeau and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said 50 percent to 70 percent of the profit will be donated to literacy programs around the United States.

They hope to raise $500,000 and plan to update the merchandise line to include items like a Zonker Hawaiian shirt.

The release of the line at 530 of the company's more than 1,900 U.S. outlets was timed for the height of the holiday-shopping rush.

It's the first series of licensed "Doonesbury" products to be sold in retail stores, a step Trudeau long resisted.

Rampant commercialism would have been "philosophically at odds with the strip," which began as a celebration of counterculture expression in 1970, he said.