Cultural Icon Finally Being Retired, For the Second Time

First off, I want you to just read this comic:


This was the sort of thing that greeted people of the United States every Sunday, and each day there was another comment about Bloom County and its assortment of wonderful creatures who were really representations of our own societies and people. No one really ever "got" it like Berke Breathed.

The story of Bloom County was of Milo Bloom, who really saw the world differently than everyone else. In the beginning, it was all about him and his thoughts, but slowly this new character took over. His name was Opus, and he was a penguin. He saw the world as an innocent creature of the wild, but in a very short time he saw the world as it was, and so many people would tune in each and every day just to see how our litle friend interpreted the very world we lived. Ronald Reagan was president at the time, but Opus was truly the king of our cultural power base. No one was more enlightened about what was happening than Opus, and he did it once a day, both examining, and exploring, the world we existed within. He saw through the ridiculousness of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), through the juxtapositions of the smoking industry, through dating and how ridiculous that could be, and through so many little nuances of common sense that you couldn't help but put a sign on your yard lawn begging others to vote for Bill/Opus for President (Bill was a later introduced cat that was suffering from katnip addiction and ended up having a controversial affair with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the United Nations (Bill the Cat was later accused of selling secrets to the Soviet Union during this affair, specifically the formula to Secret antiperspirant).

America's love affair with Opus lasted many years, and ran until 1989 when the author decided to discontinue the beloved comic strip and ran a Sunday only strip called Outland, where some of the characters jumped ship and appeared. Eventually, people made enough calls for Opus and he reappeared in the strip, and it was relaunched as Opus. But unfortunately, the beauty of the strip that was once Bloom County could never really be recaptured.

Just recently, Berke Breathed announced that Opus would be discontinued and retired. Unfortunately, a new generation of people will receive that announcement never having known the genius that was once Opus and his friends. Some of them may have been influenced by Bloom County's successor, Calvin and Hobbes, which was a much lighter presentation of what became America's comic strip. Today, we are left with such nuggets that attempt to fill this creative gap as Pearls Before Swine, but no comic has managed to ever grasp the true wonder that was Bloom County.

But Opus's demise has been needed for awhile, unfortunately. While Bloom County was wonderful, the subsequent attempts to relaunch the wonder that is Opus never worked. He was never really the center stage of Bloom County, but he always stole the show. In Outland, he was an outsider. In Opus, he was center stage, and that was a position for which he was never comfortable. He was the ultimate outsider, giving the cartoonish middle finger to whatever the power structure represented. And he will be solemnly missed.

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