If you're of a certain age—too young for Doonesbury, too old for Rugrats—then chances are your first taste of satirical cartooning came from Bloom County. Berkeley Breathed's comic strip had all the trappings of a conventional strip (kids and animals), but it also had a glorious subversive streak that skewered virtually everything about the 1980s, from Reagan-era policy to the Moral Majority. It's also been gone for 25 years, having published its last installment in August 1989. So when Breathed published a photo on his Facebook page yesterday of himself drawing a new strip, people justifiably freaked out just a bit. Flightless waterfowl Opus was coming back? As it turned out, we didn't have long(er) to wait: this morning Breathed shared the first strip of Bloom County 2015.
It's just a re-introduction, featuring Opus and wise-beyond-his-years Milo, but it's enough to make us confident that Breathed hasn't missed a step—he's just been taking a Breatheder. Obviously, there's no shortage of political buffoonery out there for him to skewer, so let's all welcome the strip back with open arms, or at least uselessly flapping wings.
