Bloom County Redux: Good Night, Opus

Will the last penguin to leave the building please turn out the lights?

By Fred Mills

Early on, they said that Berkeley Breathed's Opus was but a pale imitation of its legendary predecessor from the ‘80s, Bloom County. The award-winning cartoonist quickly proved the naysayers wrong, crafting an edgy, frequently rapier-sharp strip that benefited in particular from being a Sunday-only affair.

Freed from the punchline constraints of the 3- or 4-panel daily format, Breathed was able to form narratives that, true to all great literature, had lift-off, trajectory, arc and landing - and sure, sometimes that landing was rough, as no satirist can be expected to hit the mark each time out. Bur more often than not he was right on the money, skewering week after week the more ridiculous elements of our culture, with the Republican Party and conservatives in general comprising the lion's share, natch. Between Opus and of course Doonesbury, you could reliably open up the Sunday funnies each week and be guaranteed of getting some real food for thought in between the mushy sentimentality of, say, For Better or for Worse or the dumbass anthropomorphism of Sherman's Lagoon.

Like Bloom County (1980-89), Opus was pointedly political, and as befitting its namesake, had a soft, squishy middle within which beat the heart of a true romantic, a soulful cat (penguin, actually) who cared so deeply about life and the people and animals who populate our lives that he sometimes couldn't bear it all. Not for nothing did Opus have to shove everything into his anxiety closet from time to time.

However, compared to Bloom County's visual style, Opus was rendered in virtually 3-D terms, something that also put folks off initially but which came to be a genuine signature, one which leapt off the pages of the otherwise flat, 2-D Sunday comics page. (Breathed's Bloom County successor, Outland, ran from 1989-95 and shared some of the Opus visual trademarks, and of course the Opus character became a mainstay of Outland, too.)

You'll notice I'm using the past tense. Yesterday,  Nov. 2, marked the final Opus strip - it started in 2003 - and it was put together, starting a few weeks ago, as a kind of cliffhanger, with Opus sequestered in a cell at the city pound while his human foil Steve Dallas tried to track him down. I won't spoil the ending, other than to say that after you look at your newspaper you'll have to go to the following website for the final panel: www.humanesociety.org/opus. It's done in conjunction with the Humane Society, which has declared this week National Animal Shelter Appreciation Week.

For more details go to the Humane Society site HERE.

For more of Berkeley Breathed, go HERE.

Why did Breathed decide to retire his popular penguin? In one sense, doing it on the eve of this year's election couldn't be more appropriate, and with any luck, come Wednesday morning, Opus will be able to wake up wherever he is, take a look around, and say to himself, "We won." Maybe he'll get that trip to a paradise island he's dreamed about for so long after all.

Breathed himself had commented as long ago as last year how he'd like to see Opus and Bush both head off into the sunset at the same time. He elaborated this week to the Los Angeles Times, "30 years of cartooning to end. I'm destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans." In an interview with the Washington Post he added, "With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I'm suspending my comic strip to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently. ... I call on John McCain to join me."

It's telling that Bloom County, beloved of college students throughout the ‘80s, and Opus (which was set in the fictional Bloom County) both appeared during the most relentlessly conservative periods - borderline fascist, even - of recent American history, the former during the Reagan years, the latter during Bush II's reign. Those are the kinds of periods when we desperately need the voices of satire and reason, such as Breathed's, and we can only hope that when we're forced to endure the next such period that Breathed, or someone that grew up on Bloom County and Opus  and shares his particularly twisted yet poignant outlook, will create yet another memorable comic.

Good night, Opus. Sweet dreams.