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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.