Spaceman Spiff invades Bloom County

This news is a week old, because I don’t see the new Bloom County strips until they republished at gocomics. (I think they’re originally put on Facebook or something.) It looks like Breathed has teamed up with Watterson in Calvin County.

Hopefully this isn’t their last collaboration.

OK, I liked that. A lot. Such a blast of warm nostalgia from two of my favoritest cartoonists ever.

I just felt a disturbance in The Force.

So good.

It’s like I clicked my heels and ended up back in 1987. I hope there is more.

Apparently, this is a “tradition” for Bloom County. (Anything done twice is traditional, right?) Remember I said that gocomics gets the strips a week late, so that one was first posted on April 1. Here’s what wikipedia has to say about this and last years’ strip:

Forgot: link to the fake NY Times article

I do wonder how much Watterson contributed to this year’s comic. That Spaceman Spiff art does look authentic and I don’t think it’d be all that easy to copy his style for that.

Now Hobbs has guested in for 2 strips!
1st 2nd

You’ve just made my week! Maybe there’s hope in the world after all.

A year later and another team-up between Breathed and Watterson: Calvin County 2018. Looks like it’s going to be an annual thing.

I’ve always wondered if Spaceman Spiff wasn’t originally Spaceman Spliff. In Watterson’s original vision, he had a cigar in his mouth (I read that somewhere). I wonder if there’s an original original version with a, well, spliff in his mouth.

Sorry, this is a bit OT:

In the 1990 Bloom County collection Happy Trails there’s a ‘critics page’ right before the title page. It contains a single quote attributed to Donald Trump: “I never thought Berke Breathed had talent, so he was probably forced to quit.”

Does anybody know if Trump really said that ? I always figured it was made up, like the “quotes” from The Edge and other celebrities. Now I am not so sure.

Banksy could learn a thing or two from Watterson about limited artist exposure and leaving people wanting more.

There was an arc in Bloom County where Donald Trump’s brain was transplanted into Bill the Cat. It wasn’t really all that negative about Trump, but considering his ego, I doubt he appreciated it. So that quote could have been real, although my guess is that it was made up.