berkeley breathed

March 23, 2022

The Bloom County Library To Be Reprinted In Paperback Form

Peter Paltridge berkeley breathed, bloom county, comic books, comics, IDW 1

In 2009, IDW did humanity a great service: it began printing the entire run of the Bloom County comic strip. Despite its pedigree as one of the 20th century’s finest strips, it had never been collected in its entirety: the original book collections were only selected strips from the previous year. To make matters stranger, even Berkeley Breathed himself didn’t have access to every strip — he didn’t hold on to all of the originals. It took a while, and a raiding of the microfilm archives from several newspapers, but IDW was able to put together a complete library. Five volumes were published over just as many years, and sold well enough to continue the line with Outland and Opus collections, plus a book full of Berke’s rare early works like his college strip The Academia Waltz. If you missed the original run, we have good news: it’s coming back (and THIS time, get them — no excuses). They’ll be in paperback form for the first time, which likely means

December 8, 2020

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County Turns 40

Peter Paltridge berkeley breathed, bloom county, comics 0

December 8, 1980 was an interesting day….the world lost one legendary recording artist, but it gained a penguin. Bloom County, cited by many comic strip aficionados (like yours truly) as one of the best strips ever made, first appeared in papers the day John Lennon was shot. Its opening gag, about an old man named Major requesting Burger King serve him a burger without a bun, barely resembles what the strip would ultimately become, but as Berke explained to the New York Times in a new interview, he was winging it as he went. “Nobody had the faintest idea what comic strip I should concoct, least of all me,” Berke confesses. “They didn’t care. All I’d ever drawn were college stereotypes, which were the only characters I was instructed NOT to use. What to do? I named it a place — Bloom County — and figured I’d decide later who should live there.” He says the Midwestern setting was chosen in the spirit of his favorite book, To Kill A