With the upcoming 2023 adaptation of cartoonist Berkeley Breathed's famed 80s comic strip Bloom County, old-school comic fans' anticipation is running high. The series ran from 1980 to 1989, then Breathed took a hiatus until 2015, when he resumed Sunday-only strips. Bloom County was a hallmark of its time, often examining current events of pop culture and politics through the eyes of its eclectic population, most notably through the jaded eyes of precocious ten-year-old resident Milo Bloom, lecherous and misogynistic Steve Dallas, and the idealist innocence of Opus, a talking penguin ever searching for love and existential meaning.
Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, and it's easy to see why in the best of his cutting-edge observations and wry meta-humor.
Opus And Early Innocence
When the titular penguin character first debuted, he didn't even speak yet. As Breathed's strip found its pace, Opus began taking more of a forefront role within its admittedly odd ranks, having to jockey for laughs and poignant meta-commentary among the likes of a menagerie of talking animals, young children with decidedly adult personalities and observations, a lobotomized stray cat, and plenty of adults emulating the 80s status quo of middle suburban Reagan-era America.
Opus managed to retain his amiable and persistent optimism throughout the entire series, as well as extending his primary character role into Breathed's subsequent spinoff Sunday-only strip series Outland and Opus.
Cutter John Makes The Scene
One of the many examples of Breathed's time-contingent brilliance was his penchant for inclusivity. Few and far between were white cartoonists who would choose to showcase oft-marginalized aspects of humanity as Breathed did with his character Cutter John, who originally appeared as 'Saigon John' in Breathed's debut strip, The Academia Waltz. That first strip attracted the notice of The Washington Post and ended up being the platform that evolved into Bloom County.
Cutter John was a wheelchair-using Vietnam Veteran who bore a striking resemblance to Breathed himself and was frequently used as an homage parody to Star Trek characters and plot points when Cutter John would indulge meadow animals Hodge-Podge, Portnoy, and Opus in wheelchair-Enterprise fantasies.
The Yuppie Zeitgeist Of Steve Dallas
Outside of Britain's Andy Capp, it's hard to find a more scurrilous and hedonistic comic strip character than Breathed's Steve Dallas. Chain-smoking, excessively drinking, and constantly trying to pick up women or crafting get-rich schemes, the former frat boy turned Bloom County's only defense lawyer ended up being the only adult who would remain a series regular by the mid-eighties.
His fan appeal was often attributed to Breathed's tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary on the excess, greed, and general misogyny of that era, and Dallas would often suffer natural consequences for his amoral behavior. In later years Steve would soften quite a bit and was frequently portrayed as a better version of himself - a hard-won evolution indeed.
Bill The Cat
This infamous strip first introduced Bill the Cat to the world in his most primal form. Breathed created the character as a side story parody response to the wild popularity of newspaper comic strip cat character Garfield, hawking faux Bloom County merchandise and marketing ploys, but as with Opus, the character became more popular with the fan base and evolved, eventually becoming an integral part of the central storylines.
Breathed often put Bill through his paces in regard to emulating pop-cultural events of the time, wherein Bill became a cultist, a televangelist, a frequent Presidential candidate during election years, a heavy metal rock star, and in a bizarre twist of future deja vu, ended up receiving a brain transplant from future president Donald Trump toward the end of the first series run.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Popular budding scientist Oliver Wendell Holmes was Breathed's own reflection in his personal ongoing humanistic debate between science and religion. A rare person of color in Breathed's cast of characters, Holmes' starring strips tended to find him struggling with the nature of existence, caught up between his parents' childhood expectations of him and his own proclivity for mad scientist high jinks.
Many of his storylines parodied the rise of Apple Computers in the 80s, wherein he received a 'Banana Junior 3000' desktop, clearly emulating the early Macintosh items of the time. Of course, it took on its own AI personality, and readers rejoiced in their hacking escapades, usually involving the U.S. or Russia in some manner or another.
Senator Bedfellow's Corrupt Politics
This particular controversial comic strip gained a fair amount of notoriety upon publication, and many newspapers refused to publish it due to its supposed inflammatory content. In it, Bloom County representative Senator Bedfellow greets a farmer (indicative of Breathed's commentary of the time extolling the plight of flyover state farming woes in the early 80s) who's growing weed rather than staple crops to increase his bottom line.
It was a controversial yet realistic subject for the comics page due to the hot topic war on drugs of the Reagan administration, spearheaded by First Lady Nancy and parodied in 80s movies like Fletch. Yet the strip proved incredibly popular with partakers of the time as well as academics touting the overdue need to legalize marijuana.
Binkley's Anxiety Closet
Yet another emulation of the many era-contingent foibles which Breathed incorporated into his medium, Michael Binkley was Breathed's version of Charles Schulz's Charlie Brown in the classic strip Peanuts. Wishy-washy and always contemplating what life was like for pop culture figures of the time, Binkley was most often found at his father's bedside in the middle of the night, waxing poetic or dreading some future inevitability of some sort.
The crux of his character's fear manifested from his 'anxiety closet,' a staple of Bloom County storylines, wherein a variety of assorted phobias would present themselves to Binkley, usually in some scathing meta context satirizing cultural tropes and headlines.
Sign Of The Times
If there's one singular aspect of Bloom County is fondly remembered for other than its two signature characters, Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat, it's Breathed's progressive avant-garde satire across the vast American sociopolitical landscape of the 80s. Many a Gen X'er grew up in their tweens getting a fair amount of filtered, satirized daily news from comics page auteur figures like Berkeley Breathed, Gary Trudeau, and Bill Watterson.
In this early Opus strip where the penguin is still in the throes of his beginnings, he meets a Hare Krishna pilgrim, a classic 80's movie and TV show trope, who were renowned for their robed garb as well as approaching folks in airports and public settings for donations to their cause.
The 80s Blitzkrieg Of Media
Thankfully for daily readers, Breathed managed to include a good amount of fourth-wall-breaking, and it worked wonders for the meta-evolution of both the characters and their subsequent story arcs. Another of Breathed's strengths as a cartoonist, his ability to pinpoint and encapsulate the collective fears, concerns, and general American malaise issuing from the nightly dose of bad news across the world, was nothing short of ingenious.
On many occasions, he would have one or several of the main characters take a beat, either to themselves or directly to the reader, to consider the ongoing difficulties of just being human in the world, as rendered so beautifully in this early Bloom County meadows gang strip.
Down With The Patriarchy
This strip is technically an Outland strip, the first spinoff series Pulitzer-winning Breathed penned after he ended the first run of Bloom County, but it's among his smartest and most poignant works. Breathed had no issues poking fun at many uncomfortable and undeniable truths about the nature of himself, whether it was being an American, being a news and pop culture junkie, or just being a plain old white male, of which there was plenty to satirize.
In this legendary strip, Opus makes a crass gender joke, to which a woman politely reminds them what might bring meaning to their otherwise empty lives. In response, Bill, Opus, and new character Milquetoast the Cockroach end up taking a good long look at what lies in their southern regions, rendering a terrible yet irrefutable truth about men.