Scavenger was a radical college magazine founded by Steven Keaton and Matt, as described in My Back Pages. Elyse Keaton also worked on the magazine. Scavenger aimed to change the world by ending war, poverty, injustice, and oppression. Steven's contributions included The Two-Party System: Tweedledum and Tweedledee and an article on Martin Luther King. Eventually the magazine had to shut down, possibly due to lack of funds, but Steven and Matt used to fantasize about having the money to start it up again.
Alex P. Keaton destroyed all his parents' issues of Scavenger when he was two.
Decades later, Howie "Trust Fund" Wardell, who was a fan of Scavenger in his Berkeley days, comes into his fortune after his uncle dies. He sends a $50,000 dollar check to Matt to restart Scavenger. The new version of Scavenger gets its first piece of hate mail from Alex before the first issue has even been written. Matt, Steven, Cameron Wallace, and Monica get together and rent an office to work on the magazine, for which Matt writes an article called Anarchy: The Sane Solution, but Steven soon leaves over political differences with Matt.