Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things

"Fans have pestered me for years,” said Berkeley Breathed, “for this ultimate Bloom County collection in that polite, respectful badgering way that only fans can manage. Thank God I can now tell them something better than just 'please remove your tent from my lawn.' I can say, 'It's coming!"

With that, it was announced that IDW Publishing will publish The Bloom County Library, five volumes that will each collect nearly two years worth of daily and Sunday strips, in chronological order. But wait, you say, don't I already have all those comics? Not so. This will be the very first time that many of these strips have been collected. Cool.

I was a bit of a fan. In my final high school yearbook, listed under Future, it says Bloom County. That was the same year I wrote my English independent study (for an extremely indulgent teacher) comparing Northrop Fry's theory on satire from Anatomy of Criticism to examples from Bloom County. It was The Simpsons for me before there was The Simpsons.

And when Breathed walked away on August 6th, 1989, I was crushed. I followed Outland for awhile, but it was never the same. I didn't even realize until this year there was a recent Opus comic, now also departed, until I read my friend Nikki's heartfelt remembrance of the strip.

So we'll get one more go around with Opus, Bill the Cat, Steve Dallas, Milo Bloom and the rest. I can't wait to see them all again.

Photo above: Bloom County's Billy and the Boingers (aka Deathtöngue) and their parody of U2's Joshua Tree.

Link via Topless Robot

8 comments:

  1. This gets me excited about comics for the first time in about a decade. I used to LOVE Bloom County and never found anything to replace it when it stopped. w00t!

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  2. Ack! Uh, sorry -- hairball.

    Loved Bloom County. You're right about Outland, not so much for the content (especially since almost the entire Bloom County crew joined Opus in there anyway). Personally, I found it hard to go from a daily fix to a weekly fix, although I suppose it was even harder a couple of years later when BB pulled the plug and my weekly fix went to nothing at all.

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  3. This just made my day, thanks for letting me know. Oh, Tiffany says, "Hi!"

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  4. Run that baby!

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  5. Steve and Kevin: I truly believe that the mid-80s was a golden age for newspaper comics: Bloom Country, Clavin & Hobbes and The Far Side. We've never seen their likes since.

    Ben: Thanks for dropping by - and I see you have a blog that needs refreshing. October? Tsk. And tell my sister to get to work.

    Hugh: How could I have forgotten such a career limiting/starting phrase from Bloom County?

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  6. "We are the Boingers!!" Oh, you have no idea how happy this news has just made me!!!

    Squeeeeeeeeee

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  7. "Bloom Country, Clavin & Hobbes and The Far Side."

    You just described my bookshelf. Except properly spelled.

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  8. Would a Calvin by any other name be as funny? Whatever, I'm from the interweb. We don't need no stinkin' spellcheck!

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