By Berkeley Breathed (Little, Brown & Co./IDW)
ISBN: 978-1-63140-976-9 (HB/Digital editions)
This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in far less enlightened times.
Oh Joy! Oh Joy! More American elections!
This review is a blatant deception. As usual, I’ve cited a specific release you should have – especially if you’re a hedonistic sucker for the comfortingly tactile and simultaneously intoxicating buzz of a sturdy, well-bound block of processed tree, glue, stitches and inks containing wonderful stories and images – and it’s worth every penny. Actually, though, I’m really telling you to take a look at one remarkable creator’s entire output…
For most of the 1980s and half of the 1990s, Berke Breathed dominated the American newspaper comic strip scene with his astoundingly funny, edgy-yet-surreal political fantasy Bloom County (8th December 1980 to August 6th). All his stuff is fully available digitally – so don’t dawdle here with my reviews, just get them now!
At the top of his game and swamped with dazzling awards like Pulitzer prizes, Breathed retired from strip work to concentrate on a series of lavish children’s fantasy picture books – such as Red Ranger Came Calling and Mars Needs Moms! They rank among the best America has ever produced. Get them too.
His first foray into the field was 1991’s A Wish for Wings That Work: a Christmas parable featuring Breathed’s signature character, and his most charmingly human. Opus is a talking penguin, reasonably well-educated (for America), archaically erudite, genteel, emotionally vulnerable; insecure yet unfalteringly optimistic (think Alan Alda in a tux and fat-suit). His two most fervent dreams are to be reunited with his absent mother one day, and that in the fullness of time he might fly like a “real” bird…
Between 2003 and 2008, Breathed revived Opus as a Sunday strip, but eventually capitulated to a career-long antipathy to manic deadline pressures in newspaper production and the often-insane, convoluted contradictions of editorial censorship. It seemed his ludicrous yet appealing cast of misfits – all deadly exponents of irony, sarcasm and common sense residing in the heartland of American conservatism – were done and gone for good.
Ultimately, however, the internet provided a platform for the opinionated artist to resume his role as a gadfly commentator on his own terms. Since 2015, Bloom County has returned to mock, expose and shame capitalism, celebrities, consumerism, popular culture, politicians, religious leaders and people who act like idiots. He does it at his own pace (only seven strips in 2023!) and became guardian of America’s artistic soul when he began – with permission – to incorporate Bill Watterson’s immaculate clowns Calvin and Hobbes into his outings.
These post-2015 efforts, unconstrained by syndicate pressures to not offend advertisers, are also available in book collections. You’ll want those too, and be delighted to learn all that Bloom County treasure is available in digital formats – fully annotated to compensate for the history gap if you didn’t live through events such as Iran-Gate, Live-Aid, Star Wars (both cinematic and military-industrial complex versions), assorted cults and televangelists experiencing less that divine retribution and the other tea-cup storms that have made us Baby Boomers so rude and defensive…
Once more, I’m recommending an entire canon of work rather than a specific volume, but Bloom County, Outland, Opus and – oh, heaven, unbound! – the triumphant second coming of the Bloom County crew of recent years are absolute classics of comics creation: political, polemical, sardonic, surreal, groundbreaking, witty, acerbic, frequently angry and always, ALWAYS cripplingly funny.
I barely survived those years and can honestly admit it’s probably the best treatise of modern history and social criticism you will ever see.
Set firmly in The Heartland – what we’ve all accepted as Trump’s fact-resistant, rationality-immune base territory – the strip pitilessly lampoons fads, traditions and icons through the lens of youngsters and a menagerie of astute talking animals living in or around the Bloom Boarding House. Also adding to the confusions are bastions and bulwarks of American society: horny ambulance-chasing jock lawyer Steve Dallas, Vietnam survivor Cutter John, liberal feminist school teacher Bobbi Harlow, New Age hippie Quiche Lorraine, corrupt Senator Bedfellow, and many more lampoonable archetypes, like fundamentalist Christians and Donald Trump…
The true stars though are the kids and beasts who perpetually vex, perplex and test them, asking questions and taking radical action to set the old order “all higgledy-piggledy” – such as their creation of a third force in politics: The Meadow Party that has (unsuccessfully, thus far) fought every presidential election since 1980…
Hilarious, biting, wildly imaginative and crafted with a huge amount of sheer emotional guts and empathy, these strips are simply incomparable. If you love laughter, despise chicanery and crave unique characters and great art, this is a universe you simply must inhabit.
… And while you’re at it, get those other books I mentioned. It can’t be Christmas without them. When the family have almost ruined the holiday, of if you find yourself somewhere other than where you’d want or expect to be, this is what you want to restore your spirits. Kids too.
© 2017, 2020 Berkeley Breathed. All Rights Reserved.