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Return Of Bloom County. Sorta
Slartibartfast writes "According to mycomicspage.com, the entirety of Bloom County will be re-published on their site, starting St. Paddy's day, and at a "highly accelerated" rate of one week every two days, until the entire strip is up. In addition -- an extra-special bonus for us Berke Breathed fans -- his college predecessor, Academic Waltz, will also be run. One caveat: it's subscription-based. However, for $10, I'd call it a huge bargain. I'm signing up."
I read an article about this last week, and checked out the site. It's a really great idea. Not only can you view these online, but you can setup daily emails with as many of these comics as you'd like. There's also a "collection" feature where you can virtually clip comics to save in as many libraries as you'd like.
Not only do they have Bloom County and will soon have Outland, but they have Calvin & Hobbes as well! $10/year is a pretty good deal for all these great comics. Color me convinced!
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
Cutter John was in the wheelchair (typically playing the role of Captain Kirk), NOT Steve Dallas, who typically had little patience for that kind of play. Especially when they removed his transmission from his 'vette. . .
Now, do this with Calivn and Hobbes!
already done. Except that you can view some for free.
Number of comics = (15 Years of comics) * (365 comics / year) = 5475 comics.
Release rate = (7 Comics / 2 Days) * (365 days / year) = 1277 comics/year.
Release time = (5475 comics) / (1277 comics/year) = 4.3 years
Cost = (4.3 years) * ($10 / year) = $50 (assuming you can't pay for part of a year)
One thing I didn't put in the article -- 'cause I didn't know until today -- was that they are posting _EVERYTHING_. In other words, today is the first time I've seen a new Bloom County strip in 14 years. Phrased yet another way, in case you never noticed, the anthologies were incomplete. This re-posting -is- complete. For example, in the first book, notice that there were no Sunday strips? I'm dying to see my first new Sunday strip tomorrow...
Actually, you can view them all for free. Their image directory is not protected, you can wget the whole damned thing if you know the naming convention, and it's not difficult to figure out(it's something like CH + YYYY + MM + DD.gif). A perl script and some time you'd have the whole thing in an hour.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
In addition -- an extra-special bonus for us Berke Breathed fans -- his college predecessor, Academic Waltz, will also be run.
Pedantic correction: Breathed's original strip was called "Academia Waltz," not "Academic." It was a modest little Doonesbury ripoff that ran in THE DAILY TEXAN, the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. A few of the characters later seen in "Bloom County" debuted there, but the strip is said to be of interest for Breathed completists only.
Then again, don't trust me. I never saw much of interest in "Bloom County" itself. When it won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, that seemed to me a sad moment in the history of the Pulitzer. THE COMICS JOURNAL writer R. Fiore once commented that saying "Bloom County" was funny was like complimenting a shoplifter on her taste in clothes.
I may go for their "not completely satisfied in seven days?" bit. The image quality is pretty awful . . .
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Calvin and Hobbes is already online, it's free, but you're restricted in how far back from "today's" comic you can see. You can become a subscriber and get full access though for 10 bucks per year. This doesn't cover only Calvin and Hobbes, it covers around 1000 other comic strips.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Yes! The way it works, at least with Calvin & Hobbes, is that they picked some arbitrary date to start running it, and you can go back into the past as far as you'd like. There's a little archive icon under each comic, click on that and you'll get a little calendar, so you can browse back to view other comics. You can't go into the "future" (which is the past in this case, natch) but you can view comics that have already run.
Kind of like being forced not to skip ahead on those old Far Side off the wall calendars.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin
You should actually price the complete works before making this statement. They are very expensive used, as they have been out of print. I tried to buy them for our kids, $75 for one paperback...
Sadly, the image quality for the first week's strips is pretty bad, and the images are small. You'd think premium content would be of higher quality...
at the website you can get calvin & hobbes emailed to you everyday, including the sunday comics. i do. i think you get 1 free comic per email address. anymore you have to pay.
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I asked him how everyone would have ended up, and he said that Wendell (the nerdy computer geek that Urkel was based on) would have ended up as a Linux kernel developer.
This is not true. You can count on one hand how many interviews Berke has given in in the past 7 years. I'm a bit of a fanboy so I can vouch for that. The kid had nothing to do with Urkel, and the Linux remark only solidifies the troll.
Check out his
- Loose Tails, $9.95
- Toons for our Times, $6.95
- Penguin Dreams, $6.95
- Bloom County Babylon, $6.50
- Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, $6.95
- Tales Too Ticklish to Tell, $5.00
- Night of the Mary Kay Commandoes, $7.95
- Happy Trails, $7.95
They don't appear to have Classics of Western Literature, but that was a collection, it's not entirely clear that it had unique content. And they don't have One Last Little Peek, which definitely does have unique content. But then, you might find that one somewhere else. (like http://cagle.slate.msn.com/store/fbloom.asp which has it for $11.95, not the $65 that Amazon thinks is the best used price)Unless you're looking for "like new mint condition", I can't see why someone would be charging $75 for one paperback. And if you want them for your kids, I don't think you'd want the mint copy anyway....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If I recall correctly (and it's mentioned in his recent Onion-AV-club interview), one of the major factors that made Berke Breathed retire was that comic strips were being shrunk to unreadable sizes. (This is currently really annoying me with Boondocks, even ONLINE fer Goodness sake!).
I always wondered, though, what if Berke had followed the path blazed by Dr. Fun , who from day 1 was publishing a 640x480 color image for each panel? Keep each daily strip 480 pixels high, and stipulate that it not be shrunk ... end of problem!
o/~ Join us now and share the software
"Have his works in paper format..." Well, no, you don't: you have *some* of his works in paper format. I, for example, can quote virtually all the anthologies: I'm that much of a fan. The six strips I saw today were _NEW_ to me, and, I promise, were never in Loose Tails.
As for "I would pay the 10 bucks if it included a week of new strips, including Sunday", what do you mean? Every two days, it publishes "a week of new strips, including Sunday." Specifically, on a given day, it publishes the dailies (Mon - Sat), and on the next day, it does the Sunday.
Granted, if you Just Don't Care, that's one thing, but this is stuff that, unless you read from Day One in the Washington Post, you've likely never seen... 'cause it ain't been anywhere else. Granted, the stuff we've seen in the books will also be putting in an appearance, and I'll enjoy them, too, but DAMN, I'd been hoping for this for years.
Note that microfilm is black & white only and often of poor quality.
You can read more about it in Nicholson Baker's controversial "Double Fold", excerpts at nytimes.com or bookreporter.com.