Berkeley Breathed Publishes First New ‘Bloom County’ Strip Since 1989

By Dave Itzkoff
Berkeley Breathed in 2011. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Updated, 12:52 p.m. |

Generally, when a beloved comic strip disappears from the funnies page, it is gone for good, and its characters live on only in reprint collections and greeting cards, as parade balloons and insurance spokes-characters.

So it was a surprise for comics fans to wake up on Monday and discover that Berkeley Breathed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator and artist of “Bloom County,” had revived that vintage 1980s strip on his Facebook page after a hiatus of more than 25 years (depending on how one measures) and with almost no advance notice.

The first installment of Mr. Breathed’s “Bloom County” comic appeared in 1980, and, over its nine-year run, introduced readers to memorably offbeat characters such as Opus, a talking penguin, and the bug-eyed, often unintelligible Bill the Cat. The strip frequently satirized social issues and political miscreants of the era including South African apartheid and a then-ascendant real-estate tycoon named Donald Trump – and Mr. Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987, a distinction that was protested by some of his fellow artists. (Pat Oliphant, also a Pulitzer winner, said that “Bloom County” was guilty of “passing off shrill potty jokes and grade-school sight gags as social commentary.”)

But alongside fellow cartoonists like Gary Larson (“The Far Side”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Mr. Breathed was part of a brief 1980s renaissance in comic strips. At its peak, “Bloom County” reached more than 40 million readers in more than 1,200 newspapers, until Mr. Breathed stopped illustrating new installments of it in 1989. He continued some of its characters in a Sunday-only comic, “Outland,” that ran from 1989 to 1995, and later in another Sunday-only series, “Opus,” that was published from 2003 to 2008.

Then, on Sunday, Mr. Breathed published a photo on his Facebook page that showed him working on a comic strip entitled “Bloom County 2015.” An accompanying caption said: “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.”

And a new “Bloom County” comic strip, reacquainting readers with Opus and his human friend Milo Bloom, appeared the next day.

On his Facebook page, Mr. Breathed provided a fanciful reason for why he was reviving “Bloom County” now.

In response to a reader who noted that Mr. Trump was also making his return to the political stage, Mr. Breathed wrote, “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing to do with it.”

Mr. Breathed provided a fuller explanation of his decision to revive “Bloom County” in response to questions sent by email on Monday.

“Deadlines and dead-tree media took the fun out of a daily craft that was only meant to be fun,” Mr. Breathed said. “I had planned to return to Bloom County in 2001, but the sullied air sucked the oxygen from my kind of whimsy. Bush and Cheney’s fake war dropped it for a decade like a bullet to the head. But silliness suddenly seems safe now. Trump’s merely a sparkling symptom of a renewed national ridiculousness. We’re back baby.”

Mr. Breathed said he planned to continue publishing new “Bloom County” strips online rather than in print newspapers.

“I’ll publish on Facebook, as that’s where my old school readers can reach me,” he said. “I want to hear from them — hear how my characters played a role in their lives — hear how they might still. Those of us lucky enough to be granted such a role should thank our fans daily (Harrison Ford finally got that memo). The return of Opus and the old gang is my way.”

He added: “Newspapers need deadlines, alas. Like my departed friend Douglas Adams used to say, the only part of deadlines I enjoyed was the whooshing sound as they sped by.”