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Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library, Vol. 9
Specially formatted digital edition! Collecting every strip from January 1, 1989, through August 6, 1989 (the last strip), in chronological order, with a new cover insert by Breathed. 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.
232 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2012
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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 - 7 of 7 reviews
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.
June 24, 2021
Berkeley Breathed may have followed in Garry Trudeau’s footsteps in creating a funny, politically-conscious strip in Bloom County, one that pushed boundaries alongside its staid company on the newspaper pages, but he truly blazed a new trail in 20th century cartooning with what he does in this volume: he quits. Gary Larson and Bill Watterson would follow him in the following years, all three leaving behind incredibly solid works that are among the best mainstream comic strips of the late 20th century.
It’s a bit of a shame that in reading this today Breathed goes out on a bum note, through no fault of his own. Earlier volumes reveled in skewering everyone in the 80s from Reagan on down, and they can now be read either in the spirit of their times or as historical documents, and are equally valid as such. The jokes still land, and even if they don’t, you get a refresher course on some forgotten bit of politics or pop culture from years past.
But then right here at the end in 1989 comes Donald Fucking Trump. It’s Breathed’s usual madcap plotting, where Trump’s brain is implanted into Bill the Cat. But the following strips rehash the same old jokes about Trump’s wealth, vanity, and marriage that, due to the past decade, have not only been long drained of any humor, but also bring with them an added layer of exhaustion and disgust. It’s appropriate that this plot line literally brings an end to the strip. Even the fact that Trump’s crushed by an anchor in the first panel he appears in can’t quite redeem it for me.
But the transitions to Breathed’s 90s comics are in full swing here in 1989. Opus starts strutting around in white underpants. By the time the Sunday-only Outland started later in the year, the whole cast was regularly in tighty whities, which sums up the general vibe of the successor strip: less politics, more undies humor. Not as successful for a strip in my opinion, but with the coming of Marky Mark’s famous billboard and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Breathed was, as always, the cartoonist most in tune with America’s weird cultural rumblings
That said, the last few weeks, an inspired series where the cast members try to find jobs with other comics as their own comes to a close, is fantastic, generating some of its funniest strips in years. Bloom County may have lost a bit of its step towards the end, but it ends on a strong note, reaffirming its status as one of the best of its day.
It’s a bit of a shame that in reading this today Breathed goes out on a bum note, through no fault of his own. Earlier volumes reveled in skewering everyone in the 80s from Reagan on down, and they can now be read either in the spirit of their times or as historical documents, and are equally valid as such. The jokes still land, and even if they don’t, you get a refresher course on some forgotten bit of politics or pop culture from years past.
But then right here at the end in 1989 comes Donald Fucking Trump. It’s Breathed’s usual madcap plotting, where Trump’s brain is implanted into Bill the Cat. But the following strips rehash the same old jokes about Trump’s wealth, vanity, and marriage that, due to the past decade, have not only been long drained of any humor, but also bring with them an added layer of exhaustion and disgust. It’s appropriate that this plot line literally brings an end to the strip. Even the fact that Trump’s crushed by an anchor in the first panel he appears in can’t quite redeem it for me.
But the transitions to Breathed’s 90s comics are in full swing here in 1989. Opus starts strutting around in white underpants. By the time the Sunday-only Outland started later in the year, the whole cast was regularly in tighty whities, which sums up the general vibe of the successor strip: less politics, more undies humor. Not as successful for a strip in my opinion, but with the coming of Marky Mark’s famous billboard and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Breathed was, as always, the cartoonist most in tune with America’s weird cultural rumblings
That said, the last few weeks, an inspired series where the cast members try to find jobs with other comics as their own comes to a close, is fantastic, generating some of its funniest strips in years. Bloom County may have lost a bit of its step towards the end, but it ends on a strong note, reaffirming its status as one of the best of its day.
April 23, 2020
Given all that happened over the past 6 weeks, decided to go on a bit of a nostalgia kick and relived the 1980s by reviewing the old Bloom County comics. Used to love those as a kid. I remembered Opus, Bill the Cat, Binkley, Milo, Steve Dallas the rest of the cast and crew of this satirical comic of the 1980s. Reread the ones from 1982 to the end of the comic in 1989. The comic was strongest between 1984 and 1988, or so I thought. I could follow some of the political jokes at that time, but with the benefit of hindsight and more understanding of the 1980s, I saw a lot more. Interestingly enough, the characters of Bloom County made various returns in other strips, from Outland, Opus, and then the on-line return of Bloom County in 2015. Also, in the final year of the comic, Donald Trump's brain was transplanted into Bill the Cat...perhaps the jump the shark moment, but when Trump ascended to the White House in 2016, those jokes made their return. We just can't escape the 1980s. Maybe it wasn't as elite as Doonesbury or other great political cartoonists, but it had its place, and some of the jokes can still apply to this day. (Wasn't a fan of the earlier strips when I first read them, and didn't have much desire to go that far back). Worth a read, but more applicable for those who lived through that time (whatever the age).
May 16, 2017
This is the end of the run for Bloom County. In this story arc from 1989, we learn that Donald Trump's mind has been switched with that of Bill the Cat, a conceit that now seems eerily prescient.
November 23, 2021
(Humble Comics Bundle: Bloom County 2019)
The last year was the best of the best cartoon series of the 1980s. The strips where Donald Trump’s brain was implanted in the body of a dead cat are some of the funniest I’ve ever read. Did I mention this was written in 1989?
The last year was the best of the best cartoon series of the 1980s. The strips where Donald Trump’s brain was implanted in the body of a dead cat are some of the funniest I’ve ever read. Did I mention this was written in 1989?
May 18, 2015
So funny. It's awful that it ever had to end.
August 16, 2016
The End!
Now I need to wait for Outland to be digitized.
Now I need to wait for Outland to be digitized.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews