OPUS RETURNS
Berkeley Breathed is returning to the cartooning business after an eight-year hiatus with a new strip based on Opus the Penguin, of “Bloom County” (1980-89) and “Outland” (1989-1995) fame. Like “Outland,” this will be a Sunday-only strip debuting November 23rd. It will “fill half a page in the comics section,” though.
“Outland” was never that good but “Bloom County” was a classic.
“It’s one of those strips that, when it left the comic pages, the comic pages were quite a bit lesser for its absence,” says Harry Knowles, editor in chief of the Web’s Ain’t It Cool News and an avid fan of newspaper comics. “I think there’s been three great strips that have gone away over the last five, 10 years that I really miss: ‘Bloom County,’ ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ and ‘The Far Side.’ Those are the three strips that never should have ceased.”
Indeed. I’ve got the entire runs of all those strips in paperback volumes. “Bloom County” is rather dated, since a lot of the humor was based on the politics of the day rather than the timeless observations of family life and humanity that characterized “C&H” and “Far Side.”
(Hat tip: Steven Taylor)
