Bloom County Complete Library Volume 1

by Robert Greenberger

There really hadn’t been a major comic strip to capture America’s imagination in a broad spectrum way since Doonesbury debuted nearly a decade earlier, so when Bloom County arrived in December 1980, the public was pretty ready for something new and different. Evolving from The Academia Waltz , a University of Texas newspaper strip, just like Doonesbury and Liberty Meadows, Berke Breathed expanded his cast of human and animal characters, finding his “adult” voice and used his players to comment on not only the human condition but current events, making it topical.

Now we can go back and revisit the world of Bloom County when IDW adds the strip to their Library of American Comics beginning in October, 20 years after the strip ended its run at the top of its game.

Introduced in the wake of Ronald Reagan becoming president, the strip lasted until he was out of office and during that time became one of its sharpest critics although, at the time, we were too busy laughing at the strip to recognize its sharp tongue.

Breathed not only got to comment on politics and a wide range of issues, he never stopped letting his characters be entertaining. The best known player is Opus the penguin, intended to be just a character in the strip’s early weeks. Immediate positive response let Breathed keep using the penguin until he became the strip’s most recognizable figure, seen in all manner of merchandising and even his own spin-off strip which ran from about four years, ending in 2007.

You can watch the strip evolve as the focus was first on 10-year old Milo Bloom, who acted as Breathed’s conscience but fairly quickly, he recognized the ensemble demanded attention. There was the insufferable attorney Steve Dallas, who crusaded against the “establishment” and early on, as seen in volume one, Cutter John, confined in a wheelchair after serving in Vietnam, let the anthropomorphic characters ride in his lap. The wheelchair was often turned into the U.S.S. Enterprise with the characters assuming the personas of the Enterprise crew – something I mirrored in one memorable panel of DC’s Star Trek comic (with permission, of course).

The strip featured few female characters, usually the object of Dallas’ fevered libido but there was the cute Bobbi Harlow, who was the focal point of Dallas and Cutter John until Breathed summarily dismissed her from the strip in 1983. Instead, the strip’s storylines tended to mock events of the day such as the time Opus found a box of money asking for a new weapons system (yep, the Cold War was still on back then) and he in turn suggested the money be sewn together to form a ring around Earth, an idea the government approved. Racial issues, the crusade against rock music (thank you, Tipper Gore), and unchecked pharmaceuticals were all touched on, usually in hilarious ways.
While the humans were funny and in Cutter John’s case, poignant, it was the animals that took over the strip with Opus rivaling Snoopy at the time for best loved comic strip animal. Opus was funnier at that point but even he had internal competition from Bill the Cat, added to mock Garfield, but grew in popularity. Limited to saying “Ack” and “Pbthhh”, Bill suffered from various maladies including being pronounced dead and revived after his expiration date so he wandered through the storylines in a dazed state. He did manage to perform with Steve Dallas, Opus, and Hodge Podge, in Deathtöngue, which was later renamed Billy and the Boingers to avoid Congressional pressure.

While there have been numerous paperback collections, this will be the first time it’s presented in hardcover and in order. Editor Scott Dunbier says the volumes will have “Context Pages” providing perspective for the new reader, presenting a variety of real-life events and personalities that were contemporary at the time of original publication. The strip holds up in the rereading and by all means, if you’ve never visited the county, now is the time.

Purchase:

Bloom County Complete Library Vol. 1 HC