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Opus the Penguin Retired

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yet-garfield-lives-on dept.

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."

19 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Never fear... by R2.0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When Breathed starts running out of money he'll resurrect Opus.

    Just like last time.

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
    1. Re:Never fear... by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I belong to a generation too young to have appreciated Bloom County. Rather, the first work of Breathed I encountered was Outland, which I thought bizarre, pointless and just downright not funny. If I hadn't come across the Bloom County collection Billy and the Boingers Bootleg at a friend's house (belonging to his cool older brother), I would have never known the comic genius that Breathed could be. Opus has generally felt even less fun than Outland, which shows a sad decline in the cartoonist's art.

      It's remarkable that Bloom County is still so hilarious, when the minutiae of life under the Reagan administration is all but forgotten by readers today, yet a topical strip like Opus is just so meh.

      I wish that he had given up the characters in 1989 at their prime like Bill Watterson was wise to do, instead of continuing them as a source of financial security. It seems like a curse of nerd culture is a flood of sequels that diminishes the impact of the original, quality material. We've seen it with Star Wars, umpteen science fiction novel universes from Dune to Ender's Game, and even the quirky strip that was Bloom County.

    2. Re:Never fear... by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, I think the difference is this. Bloom County was written by a younger, more idealistic, more hopeful man. Outland was written by man who was prone to saying things like "I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Yeah, it's funny, but not the kind of thing you look forward to reading over your morning coffee every day.

      Here's the full quote: "Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners." Again, it's funny, but it's not true. The Breathed of Bloom County -- at least the one we see in the strips -- is a fairly standard issue political liberal. The Breathed looking back is somebody who not only thinks government can't work, but thinks thinking government can't work, can't work.

      Charles Schultz's genius gradually petered out over the years, repeating the same jokes over and over. Breathed, having stared his career during the master's twilight, knew that even the great have only so much greatness in them. Certainly not enough to fill out a daily comic every day of the year for an entire lifetime.

      In the final Bloom County strip, the iconic meadow where the characters muse about life is paved over with asphalt. It was a brutally honest way of saying the creative well was running dry. And when Breathed finally did go back to the well, with Outland, and Opus, it wasn't so much that the well was dry, as it had turned bitter.

      I really wish Breathed had Bloom County in him, even if he dribbled it out as a book every couple of years. I wish that Bill Watterson had more Calvin and Hobbes in him. But evidently, they don't. These were personal works, and people change; they move on.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    3. Re:Never fear... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think that was the problem with his Opus strip. A previous comment mentioned how much more he liked the old Bloom County strips. The difference was that Berkley stripped out most of the other characters except for Steve and Bill the Cat (who doesn't talk). That left Opus alone in most of the situations with no other supporting characters. In the Bloom Country strips there was a series of regular characters who all had the focus on them at some point. That created a much more complex cartoon "universe" whereas Opus alone had no one to play off of and sounded like a single note enventually. I don't know why Berkley dropped most of the other characters, there really was no good reason for it.

      The same thing happened to the cast of Seinfeld, they were much better playing off each other. Once the show ended and they tried to make shows with themselves as the focus they seemed like they were adrift and bland.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
  2. Mod Parent Troll/Flamebait by geoffrobinson · · Score: 5, Funny

    Using "greatest penguin ever" on a site with this many Linux users is asking for trouble.

    --
    Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
    1. Re:Mod Parent Troll/Flamebait by pla · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not to mention all the Tennessee Tuxedo fans, who are not going to be happy about it either.

      Sorry, wrong site - You want AARP, not Slashdot.

      Easy mistake, no doubt you arrived here from a misspelled Google search for "ARPA". ;-)

  3. I think I'll go lie down in a field of dandelions by studpuppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sniff. -- I'm not crying. I just have something in my eye.

    --
    The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
  4. Meh. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've actually gotten annoyed with BB over the years...What's the point of getting invested in one of his strips? This is what, the third?

    As much as I appreciate a newspaper comic artist who will actually let his strip die when he feels like he's gotten stale, it's irritating when he lets it die, brings it back, lets it die, brings it back, and lets it die THIS TIME FOR REAL I PROMISE!

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  5. Some Children's Book... by crymeph0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From a photo caption in TFA:

    Breathed's new child's book, Pete & Pickles, features Pete, a lonely pig who vacuums his wife's grave.

    Yeah, I'm gonna run right out and buy that for my toddler. Granted, he says it's not directly mentioned in the text, it's just there in the pictures in case you want to point it out to your kids, but still.

    I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him, since it's not like he's forcing me to buy the book. I just feel like there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible, rather than just letting them be kids.

    --
    It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
    1. Re:Some Children's Book... by OriginalArlen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible

      Wha'?! By the age of eight I was walking home from school alone, getting lost in the woods behind the old orchard, and I'd seen Star Wars ANH, in which the main father-figure / advisor to the Hiro Protagonist is chopped in half with a laser (how it looked to me at the time!) Nowadays you'd be arrested for child neglect if you leave your kid alone in the house for more than half-an-hour! Come on, if anything it's the opposite way round.

      --

      Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
    2. Re:Some Children's Book... by crymeph0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As far as the freedoms we give them to act on their own, you're right, it's the other way around. I'm talking about what we put in their heads while we have them locked up in their gilded cages, though - a lot of the media we expose them to is highly sexualized and violent, and I feel like I'm just supposed to talk to my daughter until she accepts this as normal, instead of letting her go play in the flowers and be innocent for a while longer.

      --
      It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
  6. Like Groening, let it go on WAY past its prime by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bloom County was probably the best comic strip of the 80's. And, when Breathed started to lose steam, he ended it.

    But he didn't, really. He just cut it back to Sundays under a new name. And so that pattern has continued until the series had long since become stale and forgettable. The once-great Bloom County was reduced to a great big pile of who-gives-a-shit.

    Sometimes, if you love something, you have to let it go. Better that it dies a dignified death than to drag it on into mediocrity. Matt Groening and Berkley Breathed are, sadly, prime examples of guys who had something truly magical, which they then beat into the ground for decades past when they should have called it quits.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Like Groening, let it go on WAY past its prime by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      At least Matt Groening can say that he gave control of The Simpsons over to a staff of writers. Berke Breathed is responsible for the declining quality of the franchise all by himself.

  7. Bloom County doesn't hold up well by jayayeem · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I went back and read some Bloom County books recently. They are as dated as Doonesbury from the early 70s. Not that the weren't great, but they were a product of their time.

    Read your Calvin and Hobbes books instead. Those are timeless. My kids love them.

    --
    I metamoderate, therefore I am
  8. Re:two months by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agreed, big-time. It was like the 1980's and early '90s never ended in there... I loved it when it was out, but nowadays, it seems pretty irrelevant.

    In spite of its subtle politics, it was damned funny. The politicking he employed was more of a scalpel (far better than the blatant dull machete' that was Doonesbury) which is what made you read Bloom County no matter what your politics were - and even if you were a staunch neocon, you laughed your ass off at it.

    Then again, it lacks that timelessness which Calvin and Hobbes has. I have a shedload of Calvin and Hobbes books on the shelves... OTOH, I can't remember owning any Bloom County books since 1993 (I'd lost the ones I had when the apartment got flooded... never really bothered to replace them - I really should head out and get a few just to take me back).

    C&H is a never-ending fountain of laughs (in spite of the moronic and seemingly never-ending 'calvin pissing on $object' car sticker derivatives). Bloom County OTOH is (sadly) a time capsule.

    /P

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  9. The only thing I can think to say is... by Yeff · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..."Hairy Fishnuts!"

    --
    "Freedom Through Vigilance"
  10. Re:Opus retires? Dood! by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  11. We did have it good in the 80's. by Hawthorne01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bloom County. The Far Side. Calvin & Hobbes.

    And Zippy the Pinhead for those into, ah, more chemically-induced forms of humor.

    But now we have web comics. And the golden age of comic strips is with us once again.

    The comic strip is dead. Long live the comic strip.

    --
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  12. Spoiler alert by wasted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Breathed already has tentative plans to bring the penguin back in a short feature about discovering a certain country in Europe. It will be called "Mr. Opus's Holland.