This month, Major Spoilers is looking at the funny pages, and we’re kicking things off with a look at Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County.
Berkley Breathed’s Bloom County was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed newspaper strips of all time. Bloom County ran from December 8th, 1980 to August 6th, 1989 and was published in an astounding 1200 newspapers on a daily basis. The huge popularity of Bloom County spawned a merchandizing bonanza, as well as two spin-off strips, Outland and Opus. The Bloom County Library Volume 1 highlights the first time the entire run of the immensely popular Bloom County strip has been collected in beautifully designed hard cover books with exceptional reproduction.
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1 Comment
Bloom County is hands down my favorite comic strip. It was a little more fresh-faced than Calvin & Hobbes, had a bit more “meat” to it than The Far Side, and was my window into then-current events. (The sequel series, though, not so much.) This is an interesting volume since you can tell Breathed is still trying to find a focal point of the strip (bouncing between the boarding house, the school, Steve’s love life, etc.); the characters are starting to be sketched but still feel a bit “off” (especially Binkley being a stereotypical girly-boy instead of the bundle of anxieties he’d become). And you can tell that he was still taking a lot of influence from Doonesbury at this point, too (which he has admitted). But for anyone who enjoyed the strip’s heyday or just wants a time capsule into the early 80s, this is a must-have volume.