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Opus the Penguin Retired
garylian writes "Berkeley Breathed has announced that he has drawn the final comic containing the greatest penguin ever, Opus. The author is now going to write children's books. For those of you in your mid-30s and older, you remember Bloom County as a staple of the comic pages in a similar time frame as Calvin & Hobbes, and that time was probably the greatest the daily/Sunday comics have ever known. From running for the vice presidency to impersonating Michael Jackson, from gracing a ton of t-shirts to being one of the weirdest stuffed animals ever, from rocking in a heavy metal band 'Billy and the Boingers' to cleaning up Bill's hair balls, Opus was perfect for that time. And Bloom County would have been perfect during the Bush 2 years. Now, I'm going to pull out all my old Bloom County books and read them. After I dig through some boxes and find my old Opus dolls. I wonder what my kids are going to think of them."
...at http://news.yahoo.com/comics/bloomcounty.
I've been reading the old stuff day-by-day. Some of it is remarkably relevant to current events.
Of course, today's strip is conveniently missing - go figure. Anyway, I thought I'd share the link to a comic that's on my short list.
J
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
I certainly hope not.
I loved Bloom County when it was "in its prime" but as others have said it is a bit dated now.
They had Breathed on NPR last week talking about Opus' retirement and I was less than impressed. I'm a cappuccino drinkin' Subaru drivin' center-left kinda guy, and even I think he sounded like a pretentious wuss.
Actually it was the same band; they got dragged to one of those Tipper Gore congressional hearings and Steve (the manager) eventually caved to congressional pressure on censorship and decency and changed the bands name from "Deathtongue" to "Billy and the Boingers"
(That story arc is a must for people who are against censorship; throughout the whole bit Tipper Gore keeps screaming "Off with their heads" whenever anyone does anything offensive, and through out there are quoted sections of purported Deathtongue songs with such memorable names as "Love Rhino")
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I guess I'm showing my own age here, but I went to college with Berke at the University of Texas in Austin, way back in the ancient history of the 1980s. We'd often bump into each other at the College of Communication. I was a film major (Radio-TV-Film, to be exact) and he was a photojournalism major. At that time, he was drawing a strip for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, entitled "The Academia Waltz." It featured a self-centered frat boy named Steve Dallas (whom you'll all remember later moved to Bloom County), his unnamed but eloquent dog and his girlfriend, who started out as an airheaded sorority girl who awakened one day with a political conscience and became a wildly left-wing liberal arts major who decided that sleeping with her professor to pass a class was a lot easier than studying.
Berke could make a lot more money just by taking those old strips and putting together a new anthology, as the biting wit of Bloom County was in its early stages back then. But like you say, he changed and moved on, and probably doesn't even like those old strips that I recall so fondly.