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They tell you that you can’t go home again but don’t believe them.  Even if it has been over 20 years since the last actual Bloom County newspaper strip and cartoonist Berkeley Breathed has tried to return twice with the Outland and Opus strips, the allure of Bloom County still calls out like a hacking cat with a furball that just won’t quit.

Bloom County began on December 8th, 1980 with a kind of lame joke about Burger King’s then current ad slogan promising that you can have a burger “your way.”  A grumpy looking old man orders a Whopper but hold the bun.  After going back and forth for two panels, a Burger King clerk presents him his “Whopper sans bun.”  When asked if he wants anything else, he orders, “Milkshake, hold the cup.”  That’s how it began.  No Opus.  No Bill the Cat.  No Steve Dallas.  Just an old man and a Burger King joke that’s repeated at least once, if not twice, in this same volume.

Bloom County The Complete Library Volume One: 1980-1982 is an odd mix of looking back at the past but having to reflect on the present.  Ronald Reagan was President, the USSR still existed and still had their nukes.  There was a sharp divide between the conservatives and the liberals.  The Moral Majority tried to tell us what to watch and what to think.  And in the midst of all of this, the United States was going through one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression.  America wasn’t all that different of a country in 1980 than it is in 2009 which is a bit comforting but mostly sad.  We haven’t been able to put aside our political leanings that keep the country divided or really improve any of our foreign relationships.  It may seem like Reaganomics and Star Wars was so long ago but Breathed’s early Bloom County strips show us that they’re still relevant in the age of Obama and our current economic troubles.

The comic strips in this volume aren’t the Bloom County strips we love and remember.  That first strip is representative of a lot of the content of this book; small baby steps by a cartoonist trying to figure out what he wants to make fun of and tell us about.  Early on, he’d discover one of his main characters, Milo Bloom.  A precocious grade schooler, Milo would become Breathed’s voice of the everyman because Milo could be anyone in this strip.  He was a newspaper reporter, a fool in love with Betty Crocker, an idealist and dreamer, and, occasionally, a football player.  But mostly, Milo was a product of his times, screwed up by the previous generations into not knowing who or what he should be.  Milo doesn’t even know how screwed or mixed up he is; he just goes with the flow and becomes everything to everyone.  That’s a lot of responsibility to put on a kid who has to be a voice for his generation.

As Milo functions as the everyman, it’s amazing to see how Breathed put all of his other characters into roles that would force Milo to try to define or pidgeonhole him even more.  For his grandfather, a WWII veteran, Milo is the last chance America has at a new John Wayne or at least a new Johnny Unitas.  To new school teacher Bobbi Harlow, Milo is the uninspired student, more prone to daydreaming or starting World War III than to paying attention in school.  To Senator Bedfellow, Milo is a mudraking journalist, more concerned with getting a sensational headline than with getting the truth.  As the everyman, Milo fills all of these roles during the first two years of Bloom County.  Eventually as Breathed would discover more of his cast, those roles would be doled out to other characters but in this volume, Milo is pretty much the lead character of Bloom County.

Around the beginning of the last quarter of the book, Breathed finally discovered what Bloom County was going to be when he figured out that this pet penguin he introduced months was going to be his mouth piece to poke fun at the absurdities of life.  If Milo was the everyman that the world was trying to define and constrain, Opus was the innocent newcomer to a world trying to corrupt him.  Perhaps sensing the true nature of Opus in 1982, Breathed recreates the first joke ever told in Bloom County, this time substituting in Opus for the old man and herring for the milk shake punchline.  From that point on, Opus fills the role that Milo had, the everyman who conforms to the desires and needs of the world around him.  The only problem is that Opus is too innocent and too uncorruptable and we get to see the early hints of that in this volume.  Where Milo fully accepts the roles that the world defines for him, Opus tries them on but never feels at home in any of them.  Everyone from Hare Krishnas to Mr. Rogers in one way or another tries to indoctrinate Opus but he remains oblivious to their temptations of conformity and mass acceptance.  In later volumes, we may see Opus swayed by their words but Opus always remains the same flightless fowl, trying on the beliefs of others (Billy and the Boingers, anyone?) before realizing that his useless wings and large nose are who he is in the end.

Of course, even as Breathed tackles the lofty social and personal issues of the day, he hides those story points underneath his unique humor, creating large swathes of jokes to make sure we don’t take everything too seriously.  Even as these things were on his mind back in 1980, he undercuts the seriousness by showing us the ridiculous lengths these things could be taken to.  “Milkshake, hold the cup” may be a weak gag but it still gets a laugh because it is unthinkable and a just plain silly idea.  A 12 year old is never going to hassle a senator about where the senator buried Jimmy Hoffa but Breathed mines the joke as far as it’ll go, including having Milo intentionally misquote Senator Bedfellow.  Much like Garry Trudeau, who’s specter hangs heavy over these early strips, Breathed finds humor in practically everything that could find a home on the evening news.

Bloom County The Complete Library Volume One: 1980-1982
Written and drawn by: Berkeley Breathed

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