According to the following article in the Washington Post: “Opus the Penguin Back in the Funny Business” Berke Breathed will return to the Sunday Comics with a new comic strip called “Opus”. Oh please don’t let it be a disappointment, because I for one am really excited about this.
Excellent!! I too hope it doesn’t suck. And from the linked article, truer words were never spoken.
Bah. Opus, outside of Bloom County, is not funny. It was the whole cast that made “Bloom County” funny. Taking Opus out of Bloom County is like taking Jerry out of Seinfeld or Frasier out of, uh, Frasier. Without the rest of the guys (and Lola Granola) it won’t work. You need Steve Dallas and Binkley and Oliver and all the rest. And Bill, of course.
There was a series of strips where Opus was mistakenly allocated hundreds of millions of dollars by Congress for Star Wars reserch. In one strip he’s literally swimming in a box of money while Milo and Portnoy look on. They have this exchange:
MILO
What’s going on?
PORTNOY
Congress has sent Opus $700 million to the name of “Mr. Spock” to continue “Star Wars” research.
MILO
You jest.
PORTNOY
Sir, I do not.
That line still cracks me up for some reason. It was the whole feel of Bloom County and its topical humour.
“Outland,” IMHO, sucked donkey butts.
Thank you Mycroft Holmes, you have made my day! But let’s see how the strip is. Bloom County was, I believe, the finest comic ever. Outland was one of the worst. If Opus is half as good as Bloom County ever was, I will be one happy comic reader.
I agree Bloom County was the finest strip ever, but didn’t Outland just sort of become Bloom County revisited after a while? I don’t recall it being all that bad.
Happy
Bloom County started great, but then went downhill as the focus became more and more on Opus. Whatever happened to Cutter John?
The phenomenon of a strip going downhill as it focuses more and more on a single character is not unique to Bloom County, by the way…Peanuts was great up to about 1975, when Snoopy (and to a lesser extent, Pepermint Patty) just plain took over the strip.
Frasier was pretty funny on Cheers, dontcha think? And Seinfeld was pretty funny in his standup, dontcha think?
When Outland began, Opus was the only ex-Bloom County-er to regularly appear (I’m not counting Ronald-Ann and Milquetoast the Cockroach). But after a while, a lot of the old gang showed up.
So perhaps that’ll happen here.
Next you’ll tell us Calvin is coming back. Without Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes the comics are almost unbearable. I’m barely hanging on with Dilbert.
Please, let’s go back to the days when the funny pages were funny.
I miss the Bloom County of 1981 and 1982, when the characters had a great deal of energy to them. By 1987-88, they were all kinda listless. I don’t miss Bloom County’s later years one bit, nor do I miss Outland.
In retrospect, you gotta wonder whether Berke Breathed had problems with depression in the late 1980s. His characters sure seemed to.
I can’t say I have great expectations for his return. Once you’ve lost your fastball, it generally doesn’t come back. And that’s true for creative types as well as ballplayers.
Comic strips should die when they descend into suckitude. At least Breathed was decent enough to step aside when he’d lost it. (Larson had slipped a couple notches over the years, but was still better than most of the funny-pages stuff when he quit, but probably got out at the right time. Watterson, OTOH, was one of those rare sorts who retired while at the top of his game.) The comic pages are crowded with strips that used to be funny, and haven’t been funny in eons, but some old farts still want to read them, and the cartoonist isn’t gonna give up the soft racket. So there’s only very occasionally room for the next possibly great strip.
For this reason it bothers me that the Post is bringing back Opus. In doing this, they’re like a baseball team that would rather trade for some aging ballplayer than take a chance on a rookie. They’ve only got so much space on the comics page, and if Opus is there, it’s instead of something else, rather than in addition to.
But we don’t know what that something else is going to be. The Post has three pages of comics, some of them ancient.
Well Rufus aka RTFirefly, you make a hellofa argument.
Let’s hope that Breathed has had a breath of fresh air and regained his fastball.
I think RickJay has a good point too about Opus being best as part of the ensemble cast of Bloom County.
Perhaps this Opus reincarnation is subject to the First Rule of Frisbee Throwing: “Say nothing more predictive than ‘watch this’”.
I never left.
Needless to say, I’m a huge Bloom County fan and am looking forward to this eagerly.
Before or after the Russkies captured him as a spy?
**Bloom County
Calvin and Hobbes
Far Side**
nothing even comes close now
You know how the Calvin and Hobbes strip is published at ucomics.com each day, 11 years after the original appeared? I wish whoever owns the rights to Bloom County would do the same thing.
They are republishing Bloom County, and at the UCOMICs website, to boot. If you subscribe to their My Comics page, you can read it from the very beginning.
I want it so bad, and for $10/year I may just join, despite not having a job or income right now. Hell, I paid for a LJ account . . . .
I loved Bloom County back in it’s day, but it’s time has passed.
The comics business is in pretty sad shape. No new blood because old strips like Shoe, BC, Beetle Baily, Garfield, etc are either Not done by the original creator (Be he dead, retired, or just farming out the work) but the comic patrons still want to see them out of nostalgia and familiarity.
Imagine if radio only played 30 bands (not that big a leap). The only time a new band got played was when one of the 30 bands broke up or the members died. Some people got wise to this and decided that even if the band went away they could just form a cover band, retain the name, and keep making gobs of money. Other, long existing bands are in a 30+ year decline, but refuse to give up as long as the money keeps coming in. Consequently, no new bands get to be heard and we’re all stuck listening to The Romantics for another 20 years.
As for Opus, I liken Bloom C’s success to it being an ensemble performance. Paul may have been your favorite Beatle, but he wasn’t half as good without the other 3.
Who knows? Maybe Opus will feature a new cast with hilarious results. I remain skeptical, however.
I’m fairly indifferent to this news but I do have a question: if he can do an ‘Opus’ comic strip, why the hell not just bring back ‘Bloom County’ entirely?
I notice in the link that it’s a strip from 11-21. Do they update this daily like they do Calvin and Hobbes? That way I can get my daily fix without paying for the archives. (I have all of Bloom County in book form anyway).