Not in newspaper syndication, but on Berke Breathed's Facebook page (an option not available twenty-five years ago). Not daily, or even necessarily weekly, but as the fancy strikes him. But it looks like the creative itch and a touch of nostalgia is returning to Double-B:
Fans of the well-loved comic strip Bloom County are celebrating this morning, after cartoonist Berkeley Breathed issued the first panels of his satirical strip in decades.
Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Bloom County back in 1987; two years later, he quit producing it. On Sunday, he posted a photo of himself to Facebook in which he sat in front of a computer screen with an empty cartoon template titled Bloom County 2015.
"A return after twenty-five years. Feels like going home," he wrote....
Breathed released the new strip via Facebook. The most popular comment on his post seems to sum up many fans' response: "And suddenly the world is back in alignment. Thank you, Sir."
Fans of Bloom County had been anticipating the strip's return — particularly after Breathed responded to a commenter's request for new material last week by writing, "Watch this space."
My two by-far favorite comic strips of the 1980s. and all time, were Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. C&H was killed off by creator Bill Watterson's "artiste" arrogance in not wanting to merchandise the strip (he was the diametric opposite of Garfield's Jim Davis in that regard) and wanting to be known for more than "just" cartooning. Not surprisingly, nobody's heard from Mr. Watterson since.
Bloom County bore a superficial resemblance to Doonesbury (from which Breathed took his original inspiration) but was a lot more bipartisan in its satire and felt more like a comic strip - its appeal was much broader and its satire had a much lighter touch. I quickly became a Bloom mark, and unlike Ed Morrissey I still have all the books, although I didn't follow the successor Outland strip and had no idea Opus existed. Kind of like if, say, the producers of Big Bang Theory tried to keep the show going without Sheldon, Howard, and Raj - or even just Sheldon. It just wouldn't be the same.
The think I find interesting - and I don't know if anybody else has ever picked up on it - is that Bloom County arose at the dawn of the Reagan era and, counting the Outland sequel, spanned the lone Bush41 term. And, evidently, the Opus strip debuted during Bush43's first term and hung around until he rode off into the Crawford sunset. It seems, based on that baseline, that Berke Breathed draws inspiration from Republican presidencies. And if he's resurrecting the antics of our friends from the Meadow Party now, that may be an indicator of the direction their creator thinks the 2016 campaign is headed.
In any case, I'm headed over to his Facebook page to "like" it and slake a thirst a quarter-century in the making. For never has a campaign slogan like that of Bill-Opus '88 - "A desperate choice for desperate times" - been more timely and relevant than it is right now.
UPDATE: And the way Breathed absolutely destroyed Donald Trump on a daily basis in Bloom County's last couple of years - including having his brain transplanted into Bill The Cat's head - is something I'm going to have to revisit in the VERY near future.
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