Where To Find Opus On Sunday

Berkeley Breathed has a note up on his site: "Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.."

Comments

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Opus is the descendant of what was once Bloom County. If you don't know what Bloom County was then I feel sorry for you. Missing that cartoon is like never having read Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side. Great comics are few and far between. Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[kripkenstein]

Opus is the descendant of what was once Bloom County. If you don't know what Bloom County was then I feel sorry for you. Missing that cartoon is like never having read Calvin & Hobbes or The Far Side. Great comics are few and far between. Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.

I agree 100% about Bloom County - a classic. Sadly 'Opus' isn't living up to the same standard, though. So all you young whippersnappers, if you read a few Opuses and think there is no reason to check out Bloom County, I urge you to give it a shot anyhow.

As for the censorism: I am sure Slashdot will be full of "we wouldn't censor stuff like this if it was about Christianity/etc., so why should we pander to Islam?". Now, technically that is correct - far worse material appears about Christianity than Islam; there is far more sensitivity towards Islam. However, I don't think that makes it wrong to do so. As I see it, there is a solid basis for attempting to not offend Muslims (whereas what I am about to say now is extremely offensive to them): They can't take a joke. Just like if you have a sensitive neurotic kid in your neighborhood, you wouldn't call him names in jest that you would call everyone else.

Some people deserve special treatment not because they are special in a privileged way, but because they are special in the 'Special Olympics' way.

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

He's the beloved author of "Programming with Ack!" and "Configuring and using thpbbt on Unix systems". Learn your roots man.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[PopeRatzo]

Just like if you have a sensitive neurotic kid in your neighborhood, you wouldn't call him names in jest that you would call everyone else.

Brother, you didn't grow up in my neighborhood.

It's all too common now

[smallpaul]

Western publishers are self-censoring anything remotely offensive to Muslims. This is just evidence that threats, intimidation and terrorism work. Americans will go to any lengths to "fight terrorism" by invading countries basically uninvolved in terror, but given the chance to simply stand up and say: "we won't be intimidated by threats" the press folds like a three legged card table. Grow a pair!

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[Mark_in_Brazil]

Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.

I liked all three of the strips mentioned in the parent post for some time, but please don't forget the important part of the history of Bloom County where it was as "pat," as recycled, and as predictable as Garfield raised to the Cathy power. In its last few years (I'd say from about early 1987 on), Bloom County was recycling a lot of crap jokes. At that point, the quality of the strip ranged, depending on the day, from a high of maybe-a-slight-chuckle to a low of oh-my-gosh-did-they-really-waste-paper-and-ink-on- such-a-heavily-rehashed-and-thoroughly-unfunny-str ip. That was sad, because that high had previously been the strip's low range, with some true classics. I have to wonder if Bill Watterson's decision to quit doing Calvin and Hobbes when it was enormously popular has something to do with Watterson not wanting the strip to utterly suck like Bloom County did in its last years. I bought and enjoyed Bloom County books in the 1980s, but I had completely quit reading the strip by mid-to-late 1987. I think I gave Opus a chance when it appeared, but saw no reason to read it. There was another Breathed comic between those two, but it also blew goats like late Bloom County. I admit I had started to get disappointed in the strip before that. In the early parts of Bloom County, Opus was drawn with a much smaller and penguin-like beak. There were comments about his ugliness. As the years wore on, Opus was made cuter and cuter, and his beak grew to be too big for a frickin' pelican, let alone a penguin. It was, however, much more suited to making cute and lucrative Opus stuffed toys. In the early strips, like during the "Cockroach Revolution," roaches were drawn as little lines representing bodies with littler lines representing legs. Later, the character of "Milquetoast," the cute cockroach (I shit you not) came along. Ugh.
Watterson was right, you know. As great as the moments were that Calvin and Hobbes gave us, it did get to the point where I would say things like "OK, another week of violently killed snowmen" when I read the Monday strip. Some of the new versions of old jokes could get a chuckle or even possibly even a snort out of me, but it was typically one in a week or so of strips.
Of the three strips cited in the parent, only The Far Side didn't appear to lose anything over the years. When Larson quit in the mid-1990s, the strip was still as funny and as bizarre as it had been when I first saw it in the early 1980s. It also holds a special place in my heart as one of the greatest mainstream outlets of nerd humor. Futurama has taken that to much higher levels of sophistication (I have a Ph.D. in physics and completed requirements for a B.S. in math, and some of the science and math jokes on Futurama have blown right over my head), but The Far Side did it first and probably better. The Far Side's influence in academic circles was so great that a joke term from a Far Side panel in 1982 has been adapted for informal use by scientists in the field. There's something to be said for nerd "in jokes" so "in" that a trained theoretical physicist, one who happens to be known for how observant he is, can totally miss them, but there's also something to be said for a single panel on the comics page that brought nerd sensibilities to the larger public more effectively, which The Far Side did. I was a kid/adolescent for most of the 1980s, and I remember lots of non-nerd adults liking The Far Side. Larson brought "our" (nerd) culture to a wider audience in a more positive way than just about all portrayals of nerds in popular culture did before or have since.

Anyone remember the South Park issue with this?

[DigitalSorceress]

Anyone remember the South Park episode "Cartoon Wars", where the show was making fun of the western reaction, and itself was censored? The irony for me was that they had an episode maybe a year or two before that where Mohammed was clearly shown as one of the super heroes in the "Super Best Friends" episode. There hadn't been a blip back then. What's even funnier is that if you watch South Park reruns, the "Cartoon Wars" episode still has the controversial scene censored, but the "Super Best Friends" has been shown since with no alterations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park

The Cartoon Wars episode was played uncensored in the UK, and the world failed to end - go figure.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[couchslug]

"Yes he does, and he's also the one that eventually loads up on high-caliber firearms or high explosive. Generally speaking, taunting mentally unstable people is a bad idea."

In the case of Islam, the believers are not mentally unstable, and their goal is to use Political Correctness to stop any criticism of their beliefs.
It is working.

Slashdotters rage against government or business threats to freedom, but for some reason the most oppressive and backward (which given the competitiion is saying a lot!) religion in the world often escapes attack. Careful distinction is made between supposed religious theory and practice so that one avoids attacking the ideology. Odd since religion = political belief = superstition.

The freedom we enjoy today is not the result of religion. It is the result of freethinkers and the weakening of religions stranglehold on society. Islam in practice seeks to impose such a stranglehold. I therefore advocate attacking it, relentlessly and without apology. To defend religion is to endorse it. Ridicule is the best weapon against superstition.

Re:Bizarro Slashdot

[ScrewMaster]

I'd say education is the best weapon against superstition, but failing that (or when dealing with people that refuse to be educated) ridicule is a good choice. It's more difficult to gain followers for your particular brand of religious mindgrabbing when most of the potential candidates are laughing at you.

Sarcasm is dead.

[Gary W. Longsine]

No need to have heard of this strip, nor Bloom County for it to be fairly amusing. You can tell with a name like "Lola Granola" and the fact that there are references in this strip to prior spiritual quests that this character is somewhat weak minded, always adopting some new life philosophy handed to her by people who, really, seek to control her (or people in general) for whatever their own desired gain happens to be.

• Cult leaders want money and blow jobs.
  
• Various religious nut jobs want enough bodies to win the last election, the one that votes in their particular flavor of nut job theocracy (i.e. the final one, as opposed to the prior one).
  
• Radical religious nut jobs want canon fodder, or bomb-belt fodder, or kill a doctor for Christ and spend the rest of your life behind bars fodder.
  

There are lots of different kinds of nut jobs, these are just some examples which will be familiar.

The punch line includes an element of irony. Steve's girlfriend will be submissive, and he likes that idea, until he realizes that he's also probably not going to get laid. It's a slapstick punch line to cap off what is really a more sophisticated sarcasm.

Of course, if you don't realize that this happens all the time, perhaps it's not so amusing. Stories of completely insipid "spiritual quests" like that of Lola Granola appear from time to time in the infotainment media. They always seem to be stories of weak minded people who must have a life philosophy handed to them on a platter, but somehow manage to reject one or two or three in a row before finding "the right one". The infotainment media inevitably dishes out these stories deadpan, like we're supposed to learn something from these people who clearly have demonstrated one overarching trait, which is a militant refusal to think critically.

Every time I see a story like this, I'm amazed that nobody ever points this out. Rational analysis, basic logic, and skepticism are not taught, and most people don't manage to acquire it on their own.

Here's the most recent example of a Lola Granola-style spiritual quest trumpeted as heroic in the media: Rejecting radical Islam -- one man's journey (Daveed Gartenstein-Ross ). Note the headline, then read the story. This dude didn't reject radical islam, he wandered aimlessly through major religions and dangerous philosophies, trying each on like a new shirt. Now he's apparently working for the FBI. I hope that this guy is closely and carefully supervised by somebody with stronger pro-democracy, free-thinking, free-living convictions. And for freedom's sake, don't give him a gun or access to any important secrets.

So, if you're aware that this stuff can happen in real life, the strip is really very amusing, subtle, and funny.

Re:Direct link to the first strip

[Lemmy Caution]

There have been "secular" (or at least non-theist) martyrs in the past. Ancient Rome didn't really have a doctrine of the after-life, and honor-suicides were a part of the culture. The kamikaze pilots of Japan weren't particularly motivated by promises of virgins in the next life, but rather by a sense of duty and obligation in this one.