Melville House Books

The Bloom County comic strip was huge in the 1980s, but weird. “Consider,” as Kathy Balog writes in this USA Today story: “The strip’s oddball cast of characters, who skipped between reality and the surreal, foreshadowed today’s mainstream mix of fiction and truth, even down to their 1989 exit. Prophetically, the original comic strip ended when Donald Trump, the future star of NBC reality show The Apprentice, buys the comic strip and tells Bloom County’s cast: ‘You’re fired.’” Now, the creator, Berke Breathed, has returned with a new strip featuring the star of Bloom County, Opus the penguin, and a retrospective book that looks back at the original strip, Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best. As Balog notes, the book “lends itself to wicked comparisons of what was then and what is now.” Says the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathed, “It’s hard to push the envelope anymore. If Bloom County were starting now, I could never get away with what I did then. I’m getting my hand slapped more than I ever was in the ’80s. It’s a genre that doesn’t want to get shook up.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.