When I was younger, I loved Bloom County. When it ended, I was a tad sad, but thought everything wrapped up nicely. When Breathed launched Opus, I read it of and on, but never felt it captured the crazy spirit behind Bloom County. Perhaps it was the Sunday only appearance that left me feeling all “meh” inside.
Berkeley Breathed contacted the Los Angeles Times, announcing to the world, that now Opus will be ending its five year run on November 2, 2008.
“30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.â€
Opus will end with an online contest asking readers to guess the fate of the fan fave penguin.
via Hero Complex and Berkeley Breathed
2 Comments
Back in 2000 I was on a working holiday in the UK when I found several Bloom county and Outland books. I bought them and found them hilarious. By that stage however they’d finished. Some years later I disovered Opus had started up, from what I can tell Breathed (who come off as a bit of a hippy) seemed to think the world needed him to make available his comments on recent politics. I’ve been keeping an eye on it every sunday but I definitely get the feeling he’s just lost interest. The quote you supply is interesting. I have come to very much disagree with him but I can respect him if he’s decided to drop it rather than become unbearable.
“I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days”
Nice of him to say he doesn’t think things, from his viewpoint, are going to get any better.
Some of my first awareness of politics was from ‘Bloom County’ I still have all the collected books, and pull them down once in a while for nostalgia’s sake. I was never a great fan of ‘Outland’ and felt B.C. had ended at about the right time. ‘Opus’ never really did anything for me at all…