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Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library, Vol. 2
Specially formatted digital edition! Collecting every strip from January 1, 1982, through December 31, 1982, in chronological order. Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County burst onto the American comic scene in December 1980 and it soon became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. The endearing and quirky denizens of the strip included Milo Bloom, Steve Dallas, Michael Binkley, Cutter John, Bill the Cat, and Opus the Penguin. Bloom County was a strip that dealt with many issues relevant to the period. Occasional “Context comments” are added throughout this collection, giving the reader a greater understanding of the time. This is the first time Bloom County has been collected in a digital library. IDW will add more volumes, one year per volume. Each newspaper strip is reproduced in chronological order from first to last. Great effort has been made to ensure the highest production values are achieved.
376 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 14, 2012
About the author
Berkeley Breathed
91 books415 followersGuy Berkeley "Berke" Breathed is an American cartoonist, children's book author/illustrator, director, and screenwriter, best known for Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip which dealt with socio-political issues as seen through the eyes of highly exaggerated characters (e.g. Bill the Cat and Opus the Penguin) and humorous analogies.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 13, 2022
A fun visit back to Bloom County.
I was a big fan in the 80s, I was a teenager and satire was new and exciting and Breathed’s take on things was exhilarating. It’s still fun, still relevant and though the times have changed some (but not that much) this is still a great comic strip.
This collects all of the comic strips from 1982. What all was going on in 1982? Reagan was the United States president, the Soviet Union was still a thing, the threat of nuclear war still hung heavily in the air, Milo Bloom was a ten-year-old muckraking journalist, Opus was a penguin finding his way, and Bill the Cat was emerging as a commercialist force of nature.
Breathed’s satire, stinging at it’s worse, is mainly playful and teasing and there are many laugh out loud moments but even more smiles and nods.
This edition was put together in 2012 and Breathed adds some editorial remarks, looking back from 30 years later, that adds to the value of this collection.
I was a big fan in the 80s, I was a teenager and satire was new and exciting and Breathed’s take on things was exhilarating. It’s still fun, still relevant and though the times have changed some (but not that much) this is still a great comic strip.
This collects all of the comic strips from 1982. What all was going on in 1982? Reagan was the United States president, the Soviet Union was still a thing, the threat of nuclear war still hung heavily in the air, Milo Bloom was a ten-year-old muckraking journalist, Opus was a penguin finding his way, and Bill the Cat was emerging as a commercialist force of nature.
Breathed’s satire, stinging at it’s worse, is mainly playful and teasing and there are many laugh out loud moments but even more smiles and nods.
This edition was put together in 2012 and Breathed adds some editorial remarks, looking back from 30 years later, that adds to the value of this collection.
October 11, 2018
Whereas the first volume of Bloom County showcased a cartoonist very much finding his footing in the strip's first year, this volume, collecting the strips from 1982, hits the ground running. Here begins classic Bloom County. The first year of the strip was often cramped, but here Berkeley Breathed has found his comic rhythm. The characters, too, are finally for the most part in their platonic forms. Opus is in place as the wide-eye'd (if not yet huge-nose'd) centerpiece, waddling through the proceedings in a hilariously blithe manner. He is slowly displacing Milo Bloom as the ostensible primary character, but Milo holds his own, striking a delightful balance as a kid and a muckracking local reporter (albeit one given to shortcuts). Even Bill the Cat makes his debut in a one-off strip meant to parody the monstrous merchandising of Garfield by offering an absurd counterpoint, a character so repulsive he could never be popular. But, as the way things go, and in the spirit of the 80s that Bloom County would embody, Bill became hugely popular despite all efforts otherwise. Bloom County was just the same an unlikely success, a perfect mirror on this bizarre, off-kilter decade.
October 23, 2021
These strips are from 1982 and remain suprisingly relevant even 40 years later. Nothing has changed about politics except the players names and not much has changed about the world. The topics may be a little different but yet they really aren't. It's why Doonesbury still resonates because even the strips written in the early 70s still show the world as it is. But Bloom County is special and watching Milo outsmart Steve Dallas and Senator Bedfellow doesn't really get old.
January 7, 2018
Its Bloom County.
We meet Opus for the first time.
Many of the characters are fleshed out in this volume and the author finds his voice.
Its a great read and I will continue to slowly go though all of the volumes slowly so as to savour every moment.
We meet Opus for the first time.
Many of the characters are fleshed out in this volume and the author finds his voice.
Its a great read and I will continue to slowly go though all of the volumes slowly so as to savour every moment.
December 17, 2021
I continue to be amazed at how timely these early-80s strips are today... time really does seem to repeat itself.
July 22, 2022
This is a composite review of Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library Vols. 01-09, by IDW.
Amid the many newspaper comic strips out there, some reach a level of success where they kind of transcend the medium and become a social phenomenon unto themselves In the 80s, there were several such strips, of which Bloom County was one of the most noticeable.
Clearly riffing off of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, Bloom County tracked the goings on of a small, fictional town by the same name somewhere in Iowa. Featuring recurring characters such as Milo Bloom, Michael Binkley, Steve Dallas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Opus the Penguin, Bill the Cat, Cutter John, Hodge-Podge, Portnoy, and a host of additional side characters, this daily ran for a full decade as a mirror of - and sometimes guide to - 1980s American politics and pop culture. By 1989, Berkeley Breathed had had enough and ended the strip, moving on to a new Sundays-only strip called Outland, which would go on to feature some of the characters from Bloom County. From there, he would do another strip called Opus, featuring Opus from the previous two strips. But Bloom County is where it all came together, and if you red newspaper comics in the 80s, it was impossible to escape. But was it any good? Or was it the kind of thing where you just accepted its presumed brilliance and didn’t ask any questions?
Thankfully, IDW’s Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library offers a comprehensive collection of the strip, which includes margin notes from Breathed on certain strips where he feels the need to clarify a dated cultural reference, or offer his own thoughts on the strip itself. Most newspaper strips are not meant to be consumed entirely in a marathon reading; they are meant to become part of your background. So when you binge them, they read differently than they do when you consume them 30 seconds at a time, once a day, over 10 years.
That said, this collection, for its thoroughness, ultimately falls short on two fronts. One of them is on IDW. The other is on Breathed.
IDW deserves credit for publishing this, but the format really could use work. Featuring only one daily strip per page, most of these volumes is empty space. Margin notes are short and infrequent, so really, the volumes themselves could have been far shorter, and the series itself packed into half the number of volumes. Given that the folks who are going to buy this are completionists, that’s shearing the sheep awfully close.
But the real problem here is the content. I know, it’s sacrilege to criticize Bloom County. I loved it back in the day but never really asked myself why I stopped reading it halfway through. Now, I know. It’s just not that good. Sure, it did innovate in some areas - like having human and talking-animal characters interacting with each other. But when it’s not ripping off Doonesbury so much it prompts pointed letters from Garry Trudeau (something Breathed seems proud of), it’s trading in a particularly wan and lazy kind of pseudo-editorial humor from the “people are stupid, everything is terrible” camp that confuses name-dropping for insight. It’s all just superficial, equal-opportunity grumpiness that requires little thought from the author and even less from the audience. More than a few times, Breathed notes he was in an altered state of mind when we wrote a particular strip - he doesn’t need to explain himself. It shows. Editorial cartoonists protested when Bloom County won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning. They were right to do so.
Eventually, the strip devolves into over-baked zaniness that feels like a perpetual first draft of something better. Much of it carries a whiff of desperation, as if it knows it’s not as funny as The Far Side, as insightful as Calvin & Hobbes, or as pointed as Doonesbury. Storylines far outstay their welcome, spinning their wheels for months. There is a recurring strain of misogyny in the humor, the stories, and the characters. And Breathed’s eye-rolling margin notes about which strip he couldn’t do today because of changing social norms makes all of this age that much more poorly. Breathed would go on to say that he retired the strip so it didn’t join the ranks of long-running zombie strips that aren’t funny, just comfortingly familiar. But despite its mammoth popularity at the time, that’s all this strip really was, too.
Breathed had a good run in the 80s. This strip was right for its time. And there are definitely diamonds in here. But if you weren’t there to experience it when it was happening, reading this now will likely leave you wondering what all the fuss was about. Some strips will be funny 100 years from now. Bloom County stopped being funny four or five years before it ended. And honestly, it was just never that hilarious in the first place. Novel, yes. Hilarious? Only if you were a high school boy who hadn’t gone through your Ayn Rand phase yet.
Amid the many newspaper comic strips out there, some reach a level of success where they kind of transcend the medium and become a social phenomenon unto themselves In the 80s, there were several such strips, of which Bloom County was one of the most noticeable.
Clearly riffing off of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, Bloom County tracked the goings on of a small, fictional town by the same name somewhere in Iowa. Featuring recurring characters such as Milo Bloom, Michael Binkley, Steve Dallas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Opus the Penguin, Bill the Cat, Cutter John, Hodge-Podge, Portnoy, and a host of additional side characters, this daily ran for a full decade as a mirror of - and sometimes guide to - 1980s American politics and pop culture. By 1989, Berkeley Breathed had had enough and ended the strip, moving on to a new Sundays-only strip called Outland, which would go on to feature some of the characters from Bloom County. From there, he would do another strip called Opus, featuring Opus from the previous two strips. But Bloom County is where it all came together, and if you red newspaper comics in the 80s, it was impossible to escape. But was it any good? Or was it the kind of thing where you just accepted its presumed brilliance and didn’t ask any questions?
Thankfully, IDW’s Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library offers a comprehensive collection of the strip, which includes margin notes from Breathed on certain strips where he feels the need to clarify a dated cultural reference, or offer his own thoughts on the strip itself. Most newspaper strips are not meant to be consumed entirely in a marathon reading; they are meant to become part of your background. So when you binge them, they read differently than they do when you consume them 30 seconds at a time, once a day, over 10 years.
That said, this collection, for its thoroughness, ultimately falls short on two fronts. One of them is on IDW. The other is on Breathed.
IDW deserves credit for publishing this, but the format really could use work. Featuring only one daily strip per page, most of these volumes is empty space. Margin notes are short and infrequent, so really, the volumes themselves could have been far shorter, and the series itself packed into half the number of volumes. Given that the folks who are going to buy this are completionists, that’s shearing the sheep awfully close.
But the real problem here is the content. I know, it’s sacrilege to criticize Bloom County. I loved it back in the day but never really asked myself why I stopped reading it halfway through. Now, I know. It’s just not that good. Sure, it did innovate in some areas - like having human and talking-animal characters interacting with each other. But when it’s not ripping off Doonesbury so much it prompts pointed letters from Garry Trudeau (something Breathed seems proud of), it’s trading in a particularly wan and lazy kind of pseudo-editorial humor from the “people are stupid, everything is terrible” camp that confuses name-dropping for insight. It’s all just superficial, equal-opportunity grumpiness that requires little thought from the author and even less from the audience. More than a few times, Breathed notes he was in an altered state of mind when we wrote a particular strip - he doesn’t need to explain himself. It shows. Editorial cartoonists protested when Bloom County won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning. They were right to do so.
Eventually, the strip devolves into over-baked zaniness that feels like a perpetual first draft of something better. Much of it carries a whiff of desperation, as if it knows it’s not as funny as The Far Side, as insightful as Calvin & Hobbes, or as pointed as Doonesbury. Storylines far outstay their welcome, spinning their wheels for months. There is a recurring strain of misogyny in the humor, the stories, and the characters. And Breathed’s eye-rolling margin notes about which strip he couldn’t do today because of changing social norms makes all of this age that much more poorly. Breathed would go on to say that he retired the strip so it didn’t join the ranks of long-running zombie strips that aren’t funny, just comfortingly familiar. But despite its mammoth popularity at the time, that’s all this strip really was, too.
Breathed had a good run in the 80s. This strip was right for its time. And there are definitely diamonds in here. But if you weren’t there to experience it when it was happening, reading this now will likely leave you wondering what all the fuss was about. Some strips will be funny 100 years from now. Bloom County stopped being funny four or five years before it ended. And honestly, it was just never that hilarious in the first place. Novel, yes. Hilarious? Only if you were a high school boy who hadn’t gone through your Ayn Rand phase yet.
Read
February 14, 2023Still gently amusing more often than it's outright hilarious, and sometimes dependent on references which, if they were ever known outside the US, certainly feel like pretty deep cuts read in Britain now (and as so often, it tends to be the ones which don't need footnotes that get them). But the 1982 story with Binkley's laid-off dad anticipates The Full Monty, and while the material with the Windsors can often feel like a baffling detour, the belligerent take on a newborn Prince William feels oddly prescient in light of his brother's recent revelations. Opus, having already become apparent as the breakout star of proceedings, is getting much more screentime, though there's also a gleeful spoofing of the whole business of breakout animal stars in comic strips with the introduction of Bill the Cat, so much closer to the real thing than most cartoon felines: he spends his first appearance looking like a gremlin, retching, and then needing medical assistance. I do feel Breathed makes too much of the idea that comic strip animals didn't talk to people before his, "Aside from Bugs Bunny (slapstick license, one supposes) and Winnie the Pooh (the imagination of Christopher Robin), it remained, with very few exceptions, an invisible wall where suspension of reality never dared to go." Well, yes, and the stablemates of Bugs and Pooh. And Paddington. And panto. And fairytales. And... Perhaps it was true of US comic strips specifically, but if so, row that back to the appropriate boundary. Still, nobody's here for the theory and history of the form; they're here for commie ducks, Steve Dallas making a fool of himself, and the anxious penguin.
July 12, 2020
Art Bushwald of comic strips
Just really enjoy the humor. He uses intelligent writing to get controversial issues out in the open. Satire at it's best.
Just really enjoy the humor. He uses intelligent writing to get controversial issues out in the open. Satire at it's best.
February 25, 2015
A penguin, a lawyer and and cat walk into a bar.....
If you remember the 80's this is a must read. If you do not find all of Bloom County funny your family and friends are right about you. You lack sophistication, common decency and hate puppies.
If you remember the 80's this is a must read. If you do not find all of Bloom County funny your family and friends are right about you. You lack sophistication, common decency and hate puppies.
June 9, 2015
Amazing how much this holds up so well so many years later. Bloom County never ceases to crack me up. This is the edition that Opus enters the scene as a major character and the series really finds its true voice. This entire series is solid! Great stories and laugh your ass off funny!
May 7, 2015
Bill the Cat has appeared, although only sporadically to spoof comic toy marketing. Opus is now a regular and his beak is slowly evolving. The humour is pretty hit-or-miss for how dated it is.
July 25, 2015
Opus becomes a major character and we start to see a bit of Bill the cat.
November 23, 2021
(Humble Comics Bundle: Bloom County 2019)
January 22, 2019
As awesome as ever!
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews