I had one of the big compendiums that came out a couple years later, which I picked up at uni closer to the end of the decade. Come to think of it, I wasn't very familiar with the strip, and decided to take a chance. The obvious thing was to get over the Doonesbury influence before realizing that the strip was worlds different.

One thing I read earlier is that B.C. only ran in ~15 major newspapers in 1982, but jumped to ~45 in '83, much of that evidently down to Trudeau taking a hiatus that year. So actually the Doonesbury similarity greatly helped Breathed, from what I understand.

A few years later (maybe early 90's?) I remember a copycat (but still pretty good) strip which echoed B.C.'s early days. I think it was called... "X's Swamp" or "X's Marsh" or something like that. It had characters like Portnoy and ordinary-level woodland-type creatures IIRC.