Bloom County was an
American
comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which ran from December
8, 1980 until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics
and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in
Middle America, where children
often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where animals
can talk.
It originated from a comic strip known as
The Academia Waltz,
which Breathed produced for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, while attending the
University of
Texas
.
Production
Breathed set
Bloom County in a small town, despite the
fact that, during the time, small towns in the United States became
increasingly marginalized due to cultural, economic, and political
forces.
Breathed said he made the choice because he
had followed a girlfriend to Iowa City
, Iowa
; Breathed
commented "You draw--literally--from your life if you’re going to
write anything with some juice to it. I did just
that."
Characters
Core characters
- Opus is a
large-nosed penguin (often mistaken for an
iguana) with a herring
addiction who lost track of his mother during the Falklands War. (They were later reunited in a
closing storyline at the end of the strip's series.) Initially,
Opus was only a minor player in one of the strip's gags, but his
hopeless naïveté made him a favorite, the center of the strip, and
the subject of two "sequel" strips (Outland and Opus), three children's books, and a
television special entitled A Wish for Wings That Work.
- Milo Bloom is a
10-year-old newspaper reporter and probably the most worldly-wise
of the bunch. Milo was the original protagonist of Bloom
County. Much of the action takes place at the boarding house owned by his family.
- Steve Dallas is
Bloom County's sole defense attorney and the strip's antagonist/anti-hero.
Dallas was either directly or tangentially involved in most of the
conflicts which occurred in the strip over the years. A former
"frat boy", Dallas spends most of his free
time either trying to seduce women or concocting get-rich-quick
schemes, including forming and then managing a heavy metal band Billy and the Boingers (previously
known as Deathtöngue).
- Bill the Cat is a
large orange tabby cat. Introduced originally as a parody of the
comic character Garfield, and saying little
beyond his trademark responses, "Ack" and "Pbthhh", he has become
something of a blank slate around which various plots have
revolved. Numerous strips indicated that his persistent
near-catatonic state was the result of
drug use or brain damage resulting from once being legally dead and
then revived after too long of a period. He's been a cult leader ("Bhagwan Bill"),
televangelist ("Fundamentally Oral
Bill"), perennial Presidential
candidate (for the National Radical Meadow Party), heavy metal rock
star ("Wild Bill Catt"), and, in the last months of the series, had
his brain surgically replaced with Donald
Trump's. He has been known to speak on occasion, most notably
during the Communist witch-hunt trials of
which he has been a subject, when he remarked, "Say, you don't
suppose the 'Jury Box' is anything like a litter box, do you?" Bill
has apparently had affairs with Jean
Kirkpatrick and Princess
Diana.
- Michael Binkley
originally owned Opus ("A boy and his penguin!") and is wishy-washy
and overly reflective (in the mold of Charlie Brown), when not contemplating the
lives of famous figures in pop culture.
His "anxiety closet" has been a staple of many storylines, and
appears in sequel strips without Opus.
- Oliver Wendell
Jones is a young computer
hacker and gifted scientist, having invented a miracle
hair-growth formula, among other things. He once tried to bring an
end to the Cold War by introducing onto the
front page of Pravda the headline,
"Gorbachev Urges Disarmament: Total! Unilateral!", but faulty translation caused the
headline to read, "Gorbachev Sings Tractors: Turnip! Buttocks!" He
has a fairly extensive criminal record as a result of his numerous
computer pranks.
- Cutter John is a
wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, noted for Star
Trek fantasies and anti-war
protests. He is not a womanizer like Steve Dallas, but he is more
popular with the ladies.
- Bobbi Harlow is
the feminist schoolteacher of Milo and
Binkley and the love interest of both Steve and Cutter. She was a
major character until 1983, when she disappeared. She appeared only
once in the strip's later years, when Opus learns she has joined
the crew of The Phil Donahue
Show.
- Hodge-Podge is a rabbit who
is best friends with Portnoy and Cutter John. He is politically
conservative and fanatical about various issues, despite the fact
that he is extremely ignorant about those same issues.
- Portnoy is a
groundhog, although his species was a
mystery for most of the strip's run. Before the revelation that he
was a groundhog, he was portrayed as a squirrel, woodchuck, gopher,
and possum. Portnoy was the grouchiest and most bigoted character
by far and has in a few strips been a bully to Opus.
Other characters
Notable storylines
For detailed summaries of all storylines, see the entries for
the individual books.
- Opus was originally intended to have a run of just two weeks,
but his status was cemented with a memorable Sunday strip involving
a Hare Krishna asking for money. Opus
continued to misunderstand the Krishna's request for money before
finally misinterpreting "Prayer temples for Hare Krishnas" as "Pear
pimples for hairy fishnuts!" Breathed wrote in one of the Bloom
County books that the reaction was so overwhelmingly strong he
made Opus a permanent member of the cast.
- A common gag in early strips was to have Opus and other
characters riding on Cutter John's wheelchair, often in parody of
Star Trek. One strip featured the gang turning and fleeing
from the AT&T globe logo of the 1980s,
calling it "the Death Star!" Bloom County
was the first major popular culture feature to suggest the
resemblance between the AT&T logo and the iconic Star Wars space station.
- Steve forms a heavy metal band
with Opus, Hodge Podge, and Bill, initially called "Deathtöngue".
Steve is forced to rename the band Billy and the Boingers after he is
brought before a congressional hearing investigating
the effect of heavy metal music on youth, similar to the Parents Music Resource Center.
The Boingers disband after their frontman, Bill the Cat, is caught
attending a Bible study
group with a woman whose character is based on Mother Teresa. Ironically, the group suffers,
but the woman ends up with a Pepsi
endorsement.
- Oliver Jones finds out about Apartheid
and builds an "electro-photo-pigmentizer" (a device that resembles
a camera's flashgun, which temporarily turns white people black)
with which he plans to start an international brouhaha by using it
on the South African ambassador to the
US. Oliver
sends the machine to Washington D.C.
with Cutter John on a balloon chair (a reference to
the story of Larry Walters), and Opus
is accidentally dragged along. While airborne,
several balloons are popped by shotguns, sending the two plummeting
into the Atlantic
Ocean
. Both are assumed dead, so Opus' money is
given to Bill the Cat, who wastes it all. Eventually, Opus turns
up at the Bloom County Boarding House with amnesia, which lasts until he is shocked by an
erroneous news report that Diane Sawyer
has married Eddie Murphy, after which
he reveals that he and Cutter John survived the splash-down and
were captured by Russians
. The
Russians kicked Opus off the submarine and took Cutter John back to
Russia. The citizens later swap Bill the Cat for Cutter John. When
Opus reads a 'catch-up' letter from him, it is revealed that Bill
was accidentally responsible for the Chernobyl disaster.
- Opus
decides to reunite with his long-lost mother for Christmas in Antarctica
, only to discover that the ship he's traveling on
is the Rainbow
Warrior
. Escaping Russian whalers with his
next-door neighbor, Mrs. Limekiller, he enters the world's least
despoiled civilization only to be attacked by American troops
invading. Opus later discovers that his mother
supposedly died saving soldiers in the Falklands
war. Her gravestone reads, 'The Falklands
Martyr: She Loved her Boy'.
- Opus discovers that his mother is alive. (He screams to Milo,
"SHE ISN'T DEAD!", to which Milo replies "Who? The Democratic Party?"). He
tries to rescue her from captivity in the Mary
Kay cosmetics testing centre. He discovers his Mother in a cage
(she vaguely resembles Opus wearing Mary
Poppins' hat) only to be caught in a firefight between Mary Kay
ladies with pink uzis and the Animal Liberation
Guerilla Front.
- In a spoof of Ayatollah
Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Opus is the subject of a
fatwa by the Mary Kay cosmetics company for writing an editorial
suggesting that women wearing too much makeup look "ungodly". A
woman in the role of Khomeini bellows for "the nose of the
infidel!"
- Donald Trump's body is damaged by
his own anchor, but his brain is successfully transplanted into the
body of Bill the Cat. Trump/Bill sees the brighter side of the
situation: "Legally, I can poop in Ed Koch's
flower bed."
- Opus receives $779 million in cash from the U.S. Government
under the mistaken belief that he is a scientist working on
missile defense research.
Opus uses
the money to buy Bolivia
, neglecting
to keep the receipt. When another boxful of money turns up
asking for a Space Weapon, he and Oliver create a plan entitled
'Net Wars'; a suggestion that $500 billion should be sewn together
and made into a ring around the earth, similar to those of Saturn. The government buys it.
- After the breakup of Billy and the Boingers, Bill the Cat
becomes a Fundamentalist
televangelist, "Fundamentally Oral
Bill" (a play on Oral Roberts). He
declares "penguin lust" to be the biggest scourge on society. As a
result, Opus is banished from Bloom County and briefly becomes a
male stripper (who refuses to remove all his clothes).
- The cast of Bloom County goes on strike. W. A. Thornhump refuses to concede to
any of their demands and attempts to have his office staff fill in.
Things get ugly when Steve Dallas crosses the picket line and
Thornhump hires strike-breaker to play Opus,
Bill, and Oliver. In the end, the strikers are defeated, although
Opus still throws eggs at Steve, saying "Here comes breakfast from
Aunt Opus!!"
- Oliver invents Dr. Oliver's Scalp Tonic using Bill the Cat's
perspiration motivated from the thought of Dan Quayle becoming US President. The tonic
miraculously will restore hair on anyone, but has the side effect
of users coughing up hairballs. The US government bans it, but the
gang decide to continue producing it illegally after discovering
that desperate customers are willing to buy it at exorbitant
prices. In a parody of the war on
drugs, the gang is extremely successful while thwarting the
ineffectual government attempts to stop the illegal trade. As
violent crime arises from the trade, the tonic operation is fatally
undermined when the government legalizes it and it is discovered
that the stimulated hair growth is extremely unstable and will fall
completely out at the slightest physical shock such as sneezing and
leave the subject completely bald.
Other notes
Breathed's hand-printed signature on his strips is usually
presented in mirror image, i.e. right to left.
Among the topical issues discussed at length in Bloom County are US
anti-drug policy (Dr. Oliver's Scalp
Tonic, Snorting Dandelions),
Christian televangelist
scandals (Fundamentally Oral Bill),
animal testing (Attack of the Mary Kay
Commandos), hard rock and
censorship
(Deathtöngue and
Billy and the
Boingers), and mass-media advertising (Opus and his weakness
for
infomercials). On a Sunday strip,
Bloom County also made fun of the controversy surrounding the
change in the formula used to make
Coca-Cola.
Berke Breathed was awarded the
Pulitzer
Prize in
editorial
cartooning in 1987 for
Bloom County.
Breathed decided to end the strip in 1989. In keeping with the
continuity of the Bill the Cat/Donald Trump storyline, Trump "buys
out" the comic strip and fires all of the cast. The strip's final
weeks were centered around the cast finding new "jobs" with other
comic strips. A "goodbye party" was held over the course of the
week where characters talked about joining new strips. Portnoy and
Hodge Podge get jobs as janitors behind the scenes at
Marmaduke; Steve Dallas joins the cast of
Cathy, but is quickly
fired; Michael Binkley becomes a wild boar skinner for
Prince Valiant.
Lola Granola says that
Playboy has offered her a job as a
bunny, which Opus dislikes. Milo Bloom is seen
with a snake swallowing him head first and informing Opus he would
be appearing Tuesdays in
The Far
Side. Oliver Wendell Jones is seen with the distinct
features of
Family Circus
characters. He informs Opus he is being "bussed in" to the strip as
part of a court order. Once Bloom County characters are scattered,
only Opus is left as part of a plot to transition to Breathed's
next strip in
Bloom County's final week.
Shortly after
Bloom County ended, Breathed started a
Sunday-only strip called
Outland with original characters and
situations introduced in
Bloom County's final days.
However, Opus, Bill, and other characters eventually reappeared and
slowly took over the strip.
Outland ran from
September 3,
1989 to
March 26,
1995. Another
Sunday-only spinoff strip called
Opus ran from
November 23,
2003, to
November 2,
2008.
Impact
Bloom County has had an influence on other cartoonists,
particularly cartoonists who have a particularly irreverent bent or
tackle political topics in their work.
For example, Scott Kurtz, creator of the
webcomic PvP,
acknowledged Breathed's contributions at one point with a strip
expressing the opinion that "so many webcomics. ..are nothing but
Bloom County ripoffs", then lampooning itself by
mimicking Breathed's art and dialogue style itself in
the final panel.
Aaron McGruder, creator of the comic
and later animated series
The
Boondocks, has paid homage to Breathed's work as well,
with a few aspects of the strip bearing more than a passing
resemblance to important
Bloom County features, and an
episode of the animated series wherein the character Uncle Ruckus
calls Breathed "Master Penguin Draw'er".
The series was adapted into the 1991 animated
Christmas special entitled
A Wish for Wings That Work,
which is now available on
DVD.
Bloom County
The fictional setting of
Bloom County served as a
recurring backdrop for the comic and its sequels, although the
nature of the setting was frequently altered.
the comics, the county is presented as a stereotypical
American midwestern small town. The
small town setting was frequently contrasted with the increasing
globalization taking place in the rest
of the world; though Bloom County contained the likes of farmers
and wilderness creatures by default, it was frequented by
Hare Krishnas,
feminists, and
rock
stars.
While the location of Bloom County is never explicitly mentioned,
there have been some clues in the strip. When Oliver Jones
identified Bloom County as the place where
Halley's Comet would crash into Earth, a sign
was seen saying that it was at 35.05 N 146.55 E.
This would place it
in the Pacific
Ocean
, about 300 miles off the coast of Japan
.
Oliver's
previous calculation was 39.43 N 105.01 W, which would place it
just south of Denver,
Colorado
. In an early strip, Milo gives his address as
"Box 163, Bloom County, N.I., 12460", the zip code for which would
place it about 30 miles southwest of Albany, New York
. Another strip has Opus trying to make
airline reservations to Des Moines, Iowa
. He balks at the outrageously high quoted
price for a ticket stating that "Des Moines is just 94 miles from
Bloom County".
Geographically, this would place Bloom
County in either Iowa or the far
north-central tier of counties of Missouri
, but likely referring to the distance from Iowa City, where the strip was produced, to Des
Moines. (See Real World References below). Also, in a Sunday
strip with L.H. Puttgrass, he is holding a
King Soopers bag, which would place the comic
in Colorado.
The county was home to the Bloom Boarding House, Steve Dallas' law
offices, the
Bloom Beacon and
Bloom Picayune
newspapers, at least one pond, and Milo's Meadow. In the comic's
later years, the county contained what appeared to be a big-city
ghetto ("the wrong side of the tracks", as it
was known).
The geographical profile of the county was fluid as the artistic
style of the strip evolved. During most of
Bloom County's
run, the rural meadow setting was presented realistically, while in
its later years it became increasingly more abstract.
The
Outland setting of the strip was originally set apart
from the county by way of a magical doorway. By
Outland's
end, the Outland appeared to be a part of Bloom County
itself.
The final
Outland strip listed the characters as living at
"555 Hairybutt St. Bloom County, Outland".
Opus also takes place in Bloom County.
Real world references
The
setting of Bloom County resembled Iowa City,
Iowa
in several ways; Breathed lived there during the
early years of the strip. The Bloom Boarding House, for example,
which appeared as a high contrast photo within the strip, is the
Linsay
House
located at 935 East College Street in Iowa City;
while not a boarding house, the Linsay House continues as a housing
co-op. Another Iowa City landmark, The
Prairie Lights Bookstore, was referred to in
the strip as the Prairie Lights Newsstand, original
Bloom
County artwork from Breathed hangs in the bookstore.
An
original Bloom County strip hangs in the Iowa City
Public Library
. Breathed used the
call letters KRNA to refer
to
Bloom County's rock radio station featuring
"Rockin' Charmin' Harmon". The call letters belong to an actual
Iowa City rock station which featured a disc jockey named
"Charmin'" Jeff Harmon in the 1980s. Several Iowa City local news
items also directly inspired
Bloom County storylines.
For
example, Ronald Reagan's sexist gaffe, referring to women as
"little dumplin's", was lifted from University of Iowa
football coach Hayden
Fry's comment, infuriating feminists at the
university.
The strip's fictional newspaper, "The Bloom Picayune", is named
after the real-life newspaper the
New Orleans
Times-Picayune.
Bloom County books
As with many other popular comic strips,
Bloom County has
been republished in various collections and anthologies. , the
comic strip has been officially reprinted in a total of 11 books,
the first having been published in 1983 and the last in 2004.
None of the reprints contain complete runs of the strip, although
Bloom County Babylon contained many of the strips that
preceded
Loose Tails. Many
Sunday strips have never been reprinted. All of the daily strips
have been reprinted in
Comics
Revue magazine.
IDW Publishing recently announced the
upcoming release of the
Bloom County Library, a five
volume hardback collection of all
Bloom County strips
beginning in October 2009. This series will be part of their
Library of American Comics series. It will be a complete
reprint of the strip, and will include inserts to explain the
strip's references.
Breathed said that the reason why the strips printed in
Bloom
County Library were not posted in previous anthologies was
that the publisher would not let Breathed publish 400 pages each
year, so Breathed had to reduce the content in each anthology.
Breathed said that he believes that "I just closed my eyes and
dropped a dart on the ones to be included." He felt relieved that
the publishers did not "have to ask me to do this again."
Regular collections
Anthologies featuring content from previous collections are listed
in
bold.
Other reprints of the strip
- One Last Little Peek, 1980-1995: The Final Strips, the
Special Hits, the Inside Tips (1995)
- Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best (2004)
The Complete Bloom County Library
- 1980-82 (October 6, 2009)
- 1982-84 (April 29, 2010)
- 1984-86
- 1986-88
- 1988-89
References
- " ICv2 Interview: Berkeley Breathed."
ICv2. September 17,
2009. Retrieved on September 27, 2009.
- PvPonline » Archive » Fri Oct 01
- River City Housing Collective,
http://www.river-city-housing.org/index.php
- 94.1 KRNA –
Eastern Iowa’s Real Rock
- IDW Press Release
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