Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984

By K. W. Schreiter (Conshohocken, PA)

This hardcover collects Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" comic strips that originally ran from September 27, 1982 to July 1, 1984. These were previously collected in trade paperback form in the last quarter of "Loose Tails", all of "Toons For Our Times" and the first half of "Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things". Strips appear in sequence, three dailies to a page, with Sunday strips each spanning one full-color page.

Breathed provides annotations throughout the book, explaining both his thoughts about the strips and pop culture references that young readers might find obscure. Ted Koppel provides the forward. The familiar cast of characters is here: Opus, Milo, Binkley, Steve Dallas, Cutter John, Bobbi Harlow, Oliver Wendell Jones, Hodge Podge, Portnoy, etc. Breathed gently satirizes both the political left and right: for example, on page 68, "Bloom Beacon" editor Milo is approached by respective caricatures of a gun zealot and misguided hippie in successive strips.

I got into "Bloom County" a couple years after these strips appeared, devouring the aforementioned trade paperback collections in junior high school. Rereading these strips two decades later revealed some previously unappreciated jokes, such as the fake "Those Darn Feminists" cartoon drawn by "Buckley n' Safire". Some charmingly dated 1980s references inspire nostalgia, but the majority of this material remains culturally relevant. I enjoyed the Volume 1 collection: this material is even better. Very strong cases can be made for both "Calvin and Hobbes" and "The Far Side", but "Bloom County" remains my favorite comic strip of the 1980s.