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Berkeley Breathed Back in the Funnies

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the always-room-for-genius dept.

tetrad writes "Berkeley Breathed is creating a new Sunday comic strip, according to the Washington Post. The half-page comic strip will feature Opus the penguin from Breathed's Bloom County and Outland series, and will begin Nov. 23."

10 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. A start by Salo2112 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A nice start, but I want Calvin and Hobbes back. :-)

  2. Huzzah! by Tsunamio · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now the 10 dollar question: will it have just Opus, or will it have just about all the characters? As I recall, Outland started with just Opus and the other characters found their way in until it was basically a Sunday Bloom County with weirder backgrounds.

  3. Opus is Back! Now Bring Back Calvin!!!! by ausoleil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's good to hear that a wry voice from the 80's will be back in the Sunday comics. Ever since Bill Watterson quit drawing/writing Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County disappeared, the comics haven't been the same IMO.

    Now, if only Watterson would get inspired to further the adventures of Calvin, there would be some ubiquity in the "Intellectual Section" of the daily fishwrap!

  4. I'm so happy..... by hetairoi · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm taking the rest of the day off to go romp through a dandelion patch!

    --
    you're all figments of my deranged imagination
  5. Re:Opus! by harley_frog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sardine ice cream sundaes for everyone!

    --
    It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
  6. Harry Knowles commenting... by incompetent_bitch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why, oh why, is Harry Knowles commenting on this? Are they just getting anybody who has a semi-popular POS website to comment in in the Washington Post now? Can I get in on the action too? I can create a fake news site, drum up some quotes and get quoted in the Post - woohoo.

  7. Less excited here... by Otter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As a kid I enjoyed Bloom County, and last year I snapped up a couple of the collections at a yard sale.

    From where I stand -- they just haven't held up. There are taped-up Far Side cartoons that I've passed in the hallway every day for years that I still laugh at. Far Side collections, Calvin & Hobbes, old Dilberts all still make me laugh. Bloom County turned out to be just a bunch of tossed-out references to '80's pop culture. 20 years later, it's as dated and forced as, say, brand new Doonesbury strips.

    We'll see, but I bet the best of today's strips (Zits, Foxtrot, Monty, Drabble) are going to look quite good by comparison.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  8. Re:Breathed is back? by cosmo_the_third · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ack! Thpppt!

    Yes, Opus is back. But Bill was the one who made that noise. Opus' sensitivity and trusting nature made him a great center to both Bloom County and Outland, but without the cool intellectuality of Milo Bloom and the brash, unfounded self-confidence of uberfratboy Steve Dallas, can Opus have the same soft-hearted appeal?

    I found that the strength of Bloom County was its in the way each member of its cast provided their own unique intimacy to the strip. Things like Binkley's anxeity closet and Portnoy and Hodge's satirical reiterations of contentious political issues. The diversity of characters in the strip was also unprecendented, from African-Americans (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rosalinda) who, unlike black characters in other strips, namely Peanuts, were actually of their own ethnicity, to the wheelchair-bound 'Nam vet Cutter John.

    I'm just as psyched as anyone to see Opus back in the comic pages, but what I'm really hoping to see is the return of the foils that made his world so memorable.

    --
    http://cyclocosm.com Pro cycling at its worst
  9. Re:Breathed is back? by Oliver+Wendell+Jones · · Score: 5, Informative

    The diversity of characters in the strip was also unprecendented, from African-Americans (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rosalinda) who, unlike black characters in other strips, namely Peanuts, were actually of their own ethnicity, to the wheelchair-bound 'Nam vet Cutter John.

    JONES... Oliver Wendell JONES...

    Oliver Wendell Holmes was a famous poet.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was a famous lawyer.

    Oliver Wendell Jones was a famous young hacker with a Banana Jr. computer.

    --
    A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
  10. Re:Questionable by fermion · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Bloom County was wildly popular. The switch was his decision, and we were all quite sad to see it go. If i remember correctly, Breathed was trying to do three things when he switched from Bloom County to Outland. First, he did not want the hassle of the daily strip. He told many the tale of his frantic late nights and last minute work on plane trips to deliver copy to his publisher. Second, he was protesting the fact that newspapers were shrinking comic strip to barely legible form. It was impossible to make out the text much less the artwork. Third, he wanted to concentrate more on the artwork: larger vistas, more detail.

    In the middle of this, he also wanted to leave Bloom Country behind. He focus shifted from a white male adolescent to black female pre-adolescent. The animal shifted from a flightless motherless waterfowl and drugged garfield parody to a cynical mickey mouse parody and his pal. Unfortunately Breathed could not make the strip work, so he had to reintroduce opus and bill, which then became a product line of plush animals, greeting cards, and the like.

    So the fact that the new strip concentrates on Opus and Bill is not surprising, though somewhat disappointing. Breathed drawing did become very good at the end, so I have high hopes for that. The only problem I see is that Bloom Country originated from a college paper, and the college crowd continued to be the core audience. I don't know how well his work will be received by the general audience or the current generation that grew up without exposure to his work. i hope that he will make the strip available to campus papers. Although most would not run it sunday, they could repeat it on Monday

    --
    "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black