Rejoice, America! After a 26-year hiatus, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed rebooted his world famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, "Bloom County" (Ask your parents). Appearing as "Bloom County 2015," the first strip of the new iteration appeared on July 13, 2015 and sent the Internet into an apoplectic frenzy. The strip, pictured below, brings back two of the original strip’s beloved characters, Opus and Milo, waking up from a very long nap.
(Credit: Berkeley Breathed's official Facebook)
Published on Breathed’s Facebook page, the strip immediately racked up abundant likes and even more abundant press, with outlets like The Washington Post, NPR and CNN gleefully heralding Opus' return. The over-35 set is ecstatic.
"Bloom County" launched in 1980, appearing in syndication for nine years. After the strip was laid to rest in 1989, Breathed produced two more Sunday strips, "Outland" and "Opus," before, according to NPR, a dispute with his publisher led him to give up cartooning altogether in 2008. Arguably the most famous of these three strips, "Bloom County" accrued a significant following by mercilessly lambasting the political and social climate of the 1980s. Its sense of humor was satire at its finest: subtle, clever and pointedly unafraid to question the absurd.
Because "Bloom County" had a penchant for addressing the foibles of American life, its return is perfectly timed. True, the world has changed drastically since 1989 with the advent of mobile technology, 24-hour news cycles, social media, and the demise of the newspapers that once printed "Bloom County."
In the eighties, "Bloom County" had distinguished company: the equally revered strips, "Calvin and Hobbes," "The Far Side," and "Doonesbury" all had something to say on the state of affairs. In the twenty-first century, the mantle of political satirizer-in-chief has belonged in equal parts to comedian-hosts like David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Meanwhile, Letterman has retired, "The Colbert Report" left the air in December 2014 so Colbert could replace Letterman, and Stewart will depart "The Daily Show" on Aug. 6. The return of "Bloom County" helps to fill the vacuum left behind.
At the apex of the comic's heyday, the political pendulum swung conservative, and the scandal of the day starred televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker. Now, a black Democratic president is finishing up an eight-year term, and the scandal of the day is a brand-new crisis careening uncontrollably around Facebook and Twitter feeds roughly every 24-48 hours. There has been ample fodder for Breathed to lampoon for years; though he won’t directly state his motives for resurrecting the strip at this point in time, Breathed hinted that the carpet-headed Donald Trump and his perennial foot-in-mouth syndrome brought Breathed back to cartooning. Already he has begun to crucify Trump with all the Letterman-esque zest we have sorely missed.
(Credit: Berkeley Breathed's official Facebook)
Don’t expect to catch the strip in your Sunday funnies anytime soon, though. Currently, the strip is available only on Breathed’s Facebook page—if anything, a clear indication of the times in which we live. The reason? Breathed is quoted on NPR as attributing this decision to keeping his creative process and his editorial control “nicely out of reach of nervous newspaper editors, the PC humor police now rampant across the web…and ISIS.”
Whatever it takes to suffer the screwballs, Breathed, we'll take it.
Source: Bill Chappell, "'Bloom County 2015': Berkeley Breathed Revives Comic Strip." NPR, July 13, 2015. (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/13/422545636/bloom-county-2015-berkeley-breathed-revives-comic-strip)
