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Bloom County: The Complete Digital Library, Vol. 8
Specially formatted digital edition! Collecting every strip from January 1, 1988, through December 31, 1988, 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.
373 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2012
21 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
About the author
Berkeley Breathed
86 books416 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 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 7, 2019
I think by now I have established my personal views on Bloom County.
Simply wonderful.
I am reading these as slowly as I can because they bring me such happiness.
Simply wonderful.
I am reading these as slowly as I can because they bring me such happiness.
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.
May 4, 2021
1988 would prove to be the last full calendar year of Bloom County. Breathed, like many great modern cartoonists, realized that he had to stop the daily strip before it defeated him. He’s not near defeated in this volume, but you can see his attention start to wander as he repeats plots from years past: Bill runs for president with Opus as his VP again, Opus gets his nose surgically altered again, Opus searches for his mother again. But all the while, Breathed is winking at us, reminding us that he did all this before, almost letting the reader in on the secret that this is coming to an end and to enjoy the greatest hits reprise while we can (and in the case of the search for Opus’s mother, Breathed savages animal testing, giving the reader the kind of rough chuckles that test the limits of even Bloom County’s usually liberal boundaries of humor).
Meta-fictional stuff aside, a few plots here match Bloom County’s best, especially a multi-week story involving an outlawed hair tonic that works as a transparent but inspired metaphor for a war on drugs that appeared unwinnable even decades ago.
I probably wouldn’t want another full year of this stuff, so kudos to Breathed for quitting while he’s ahead, but it’s a pretty good home stretch for this classic.
Meta-fictional stuff aside, a few plots here match Bloom County’s best, especially a multi-week story involving an outlawed hair tonic that works as a transparent but inspired metaphor for a war on drugs that appeared unwinnable even decades ago.
I probably wouldn’t want another full year of this stuff, so kudos to Breathed for quitting while he’s ahead, but it’s a pretty good home stretch for this classic.
August 16, 2016
THIS is the batch of comics that started me on Bloom County, and gosh, what memories!
November 23, 2021
(Humble Comics Bundle: Bloom County 2019)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews