Bloom County in Contexts

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Jason Thompson

“This sort of thing–the mocking self-consciousness–confounded the poor newspaper editors. I thought everyone did it.”
—Berkeley Breathed

“I’d never read any comic besides Doonesbury,” Berkeley Breathed wrote, whenever people asked him about his influences. Reading early Bloom County and its predecessor, Breathed’s college strip The Academia Waltz, the dominant flavor is Trudeau: the sex & dating jokes, the political humor, the first faint touches of surrealism (talking animals aside) with Zonker descending, like Snoopy into his Doghouse, into the depths of two-foot-wide Walden Puddle. Though Breathed’s squash-and-stretchy, Chuck Jones artwork was always distinct from Trudeau’s thin lines, Trudeau was Breathed’s model for a comic strip: early on, he even unconsciously reused an entire punchline with Milo Bloom in the place of Mike Doonesbury. The two cartoonists later became friends, and by the late ’80s, the tables had turned: Bloom County influenced Doonesbury. After his 1984 hiatus, Trudeau followed Breathed’s lead, introducing more spot blacks, thicker linework, wilder camera angles, and surreal pop-culture parodies like Ron Headrest and Mr. Butts. (Trudeau was heavier-handed than Breathed; Trudeau’s parodies always had a point.)

Bloom County reshaped the boundaries of American newspaper comics. Its appropriation of celebrity culture, politics and commercialism were the perfect expression of, and protest against, the booming ’80s. He used undisguised references to real people and things, real logos and real modified photographs; even Li’l Abner, the newspapers’ onetime satire king, had always hidden its pop-culture references and product titles under cheesy disguises (i.e. TIME+LIFE=LIME magazine), and when it featured celebrities (like Frank Sinatra) they were fawned-over guest stars, not subjects of mockery. In Breathed’s case his only restraint—the mellow heart of the strip—was a Shel Silverstein-like mix of whimsy and perversity, and an unwillingness to talk down to children.

But he was uninfluenced by comics apart from Trudeau; to hear Breathed tell the tale, he created Bloom County in a vacuum from the comics world, isolated after moving to Iowa City with his then-girlfriend. The over-the-top, Hunter S. Thompson-esque persona Breathed displayed on his dust-jacket bios was half true: apparently he really did prefer kayaking and flying airplanes to sitting at his desk reading comics and drawing them (though I suspect he watched a lot of daytime TV). Bloom County was not an exercise in nostalgia for comics past (like this article), or a self-conscious work of art burdened by the History of the Medium (like Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts). Nor did Breathed have any particular interest in his own fans, let alone the kind of “fan dialogue” and “community-building” that is a requirement for being an artist in the 2014 world of social media; although I’ve never heard of him being rude to a fan, he confessed in the catalog to the 2011 Cartoon Art Museum Berkeley Breathed exhibit that he didn’t really understand their enthusiasm at the time (he came to appreciate it later) and he was always nonplussed at things like book signings. Breathed’s lack of interest in comic strips allowed him to become one of their last true originals.
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As an upper-middle-class child in coastal Northern California in the ’80s, I was a Democrat by default, although not from any deep political awareness: my issues were mostly fear of nuclear war (and thus of Reagan), and a kind of Al Gore “don’t build your houses near my house” environmentalism. I started reading Bloom County sometime in elementary school, probably because my friends brought the collections to school, and soon afterwards it started in the local newspaper.

I was 10, the same age as the strip’s ostensible main characters Milo and Binkley, and Bloom County fascinated me. It had content I’d never seen in comics before: atomic mutants, plastic surgery, nuclear spills, cocaine, and scenes of the U.S. Marines invading Antarctica (“Operation Antarctic Fury”), running around chasing penguins and firing guns. It introduced me to people I’d never seen on the comics page, and some I wasn’t familiar with at all: of course I knew about Brooke Shields and Michael Jackson, but Geraldo Rivera, Mike Wallace, James Watt and Mick Jagger, to name a few, all came to my attention through Bloom County first. Lastly, it introduced me to words I’d never seen in comics: “hijackers,” “war mongers,” “imperialist pig.” In one early strip radical schoolteacher Ms. Harlow leads her students in a protest, ending with the gag of a little girl wearing a gas mask, “In case the fishes tear-gas me.” Harlow corrects her: “Fascists, dear.” I learned the words “liberal” and “left-wing” from Bloom County, although I wasn’t sure what they meant at first, since my only context were Breathed’s strips about “the vanishing American Liberal! Once they thundered across the American scene in great herds, but now they have been hunted to near extinction!”

With underdog stubbornness and absurdist self-mockery, throughout the Reagan years, Breathed kept the liberal/leftist torch burning on the comics page. My mother, who started reading the strip shortly after I did, certainly got references that I didn’t; but even to me Bloom County was, as Li’l Abner might have put it, eddycayshunal. Although it’s not annotated by IDW, I remember exactly what scandal Breathed was parodying in the December 3, 1983 strip (when lousy politician Limekiller announces proudly of his campaign team “We’ve got every kind of weird mix you can imagine…a black, a woman, two dips and a cripple!”), because our elementary school teacher had used it as an inroad to talk about prejudice and affirmative action. Even to the most politically apathetic kid or adult, Bloom County’s other hook was that it was visually unpredictable, a break from the 1960s flat aesthetic popularized by Peanuts and enforced by the size of the comics page (and later, by Flash animation). Bloom County used camera tricks, fake advertisements and newspaper articles and other meta-play with the comics medium, and starred a variety of grotesques, hallucinations, dream sequences and monsters, the latter usually but not always birthed from Binkley’s Anxiety Closet. (Calvin and Hobbes, which came later, also had cool aliens and monsters, but was sadly lacking in machine guns and chainsaw murderers.)

Like most comic strips, Bloom County took awhile to find its voice. The first collection from Little, Brown & Company didn’t come out ’till 1983, three years after the launch, and eliminated tons of material only reprinted in the complete collection from IDW. Apart from the then-undifferentiated funny animals, the strip started as a dialogue between Milo Bloom—young, liberal, cynical, an author-insertion character—and old Major Bloom, the gun-toting, Commie-hating, Patton-imitating right-winger. Major Bloom was joined, from then till the end of the strip, by a variety of other parodies of conservatives and rotten political types: Moral Majoritarian Otis Oracle; merely drunk and corrupt Senator Bedfellow; drunk, corrupt and poor Limekiller; and Republican fratboy lawyer Steve Dallas. Gradually the early characters departed, leaving their useful qualities to be distributed among the survivors. Major Bloom faded away, and his conservative politics were absorbed by Steve Dallas and the lesser animals (Hodge-Podge the rabbit and Portnoy the gopher). Milo never entirely left, but he became more of a coldly calculating newspaperman and politico; his functions as a romantic lead were ceded to two more sensitive characters, first hapless, Linus-like Binkley—introduced as a wimpy young dreamer who’s a perpetual disappointment to his macho Archie Bunker-like father—and then even more hapless, and thus more sympathetic, Opus the penguin. In 1982 Opus began to take center stage, writing his poetry, dreaming of flight, becoming the center of innocence in a chaotic world. With the introduction (and, in 1983, first death) of Bill the Cat, the drooling, brain-dead, bulging-eyed, cocaine-addicted parody of every celebrity imaginable (including Garfield, E.T., Little Orphan Annie, etc.), Opus had his partner and the strip had its core.
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“Single, red-headed female, 23, sensual, intelligent, delicious; seeks short, flightless aquatic bird on which to lavish kisses and affection…”

Much of the later strip featured around long, tabloid-like melodramas about these characters—Opus & Bill’s 1983 presidential run, Opus switching places with Michael Jackson, Opus, Bill and Steve’s stint in the heavy metal band Deathtöngue—and this was another thing about Bloom County: it was the last of the great story strips. It wasn’t the only one of course, but for me in 1984, Doonesbury and For Better or Worse were too adult and boring (also, someone had drawn erect penises on all the characters in the Doonesbury book at the local library) and even back then, the oldtimers like Little Orphan Annie and Alley Oop were obviously preserved corpses, propped up and hideously embalmed. But my mother and I eagerly looked forward to the daily newspaper to see what was happening with Opus’ latest crush, or Oliver Wendell Jones hacking the Pentagon and going to jail, or Bill the Cat’s affair with Jeane Kirkpatrick. Other humor strips rarely kept continuity longer than a predictable week-long arc, but Bloom County had the cliffhangers and emotional tug of a soap-opera continuity (with Breathed’s typical snark: when Steve Dallas is kidnapped and then zapped back to Earth by aliens, the final caption for that day’s strip reads “To be continued! Or maybe it won’t! Ya never know, do ya?”). I had to read Bloom County every day because it always seemed like the next day Opus might wake up in bed with someone, or our heroes might be lost on their balloon flight over the Atlantic, or Bill the Cat might die (again). Towards the end of Bloom County‘s 9-year run the stories started to repeat themselves, and perhaps Breathed needed a break; but when he relaunched the comic as Outland (and later, Opus) and switched from a continuity-focused daily to Sundays-only, he removed one of the strip’s great appeals.

Bloom County bears some resemblance, apparently unintentional, to Pogo, another strip about politics and talking animals. Though more vicious in his satire, Berkeley Breathed shared Walt Kelly’s love of silliness and rhyme, as well as an innocent hero surrounded by incompetence and guile, and there is a similar charmingly rinky-dink feel to their respective storylines when the meadow/swamp animals ineptly attempt to run businesses and political campaigns. They also share another theme: love. Pogo Possum and the other male animals were always circling the star of the skunk Mam’zelle Hepzibah (the Love Goddess Ishtar of furry fandom), and Opus’ unrequited romances are the center of many plotlines; when not involved romantically, he’s pursuing another unattainable female presence, his long-lost mother, whom he first sought in 1984. Bloom County was exceptionally frank about love and sex, not to mention bestiality, as in the Greystoke parody with a half-disrobed Andie MacDowell wooing an as always half-comatose Bill the Cat (“Oo, Lord Orangestoke…it must have been so…so…terribly lonely…in that big…lush…steamy…sweaty jungle…”).

This was mind-blowing stuff to me at age 10. Unlike most newspaper strips which, if not about school or workplace, focus on families (typified today by Zits and Baby Blues—grandparents drawing comics for grandparents about their nostalgic memories of parenthood), Bloom County‘s emotional fixation was always dating and single life. Breathed was a young man. One of the early continuing characters was Bobbi Harlow, the schoolteacher whose defining traits were that she was an (attractive) leftist feminist in a hick town surrounded by chauvinist jerks; Breathed resurrected sexist fratboy Steve Dallas from his college strip as her antagonist and stalker. (Whether a difference of artists’ personalities and/or of late ’60s culture vs. late ’70s, the women in Breathed’s college strips generally come off better than in Trudeau’s, where they are more often just conquests or fanservice.) Through Dallas, Breathed mocked male machismo with a few Portlandia-ish detours to mock New Agey feminism (“There’s no need to be threatened by my womanhood…You turned your rear towards me, obviously an effort to deny a strong feminine presence nearby”). But Harlow started dating wheelchair-bound Cutter John (basically a Breathed self-insertion character) and slipped out of the comic.

Breathed introduced some other female characters, usually temporary, like shy, long-suffering teenager Yaz Pistachio (a sort of female Binkley), and Lola Granola, the free-spirited hippie artist who ends up fairly well-fleshed-out as a person who might consider marrying a penguin (over or because of her mother’s objections). But the strip mostly looks, mockingly or sympathetically, at the insecurities of men. Binkley’s Anxiety Closet, normally known for disgorging giant snakes and other monsters, surprises him one night with a beautiful woman demanding “Kiss me, Binkley! Kiss me like only a real man can kiss! I want fireworks, Binkley…I expect nothing less from the men of today!” Prepubescent Binkley ducks and hides under the covers. Though Breathed never degenerated into pin-up fanservice and “guy humor” (and even worse, “nice guy” humor) like Frank Cho’s blatant Bloom County imitation Liberty Meadows, Bloom County falls into the long cartoon tradition of a world where women are humans and men are (mostly) talking animals and monsters. And children.
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“I will probably go out on my sword one day, insisting on a particular strip running despite the furor. One day.”
—Berkeley Breathed, May 2007

Al Capp, whose Li’l Abner was considered liberal in the ’40s but which changed by the ’60s into a vehicle for Capp’s grumpy and increasingly vehement right-wing politics, claimed in the foreword to his career-retrospective anthology The Best of Li’l Abner that it was liberalism, not he, who had changed: “I turned around and let the other side have it.” Berkeley Breathed never got conservative, but he did get grumpy (or grumpier, considering his always-slightly-ornery public persona).

<"There are no sacred cows (although perhaps penguins) in Bloom County,” reads the back cover text on the 2009 IDW edition Volume 1, suggesting that it was infamous in its time as some major boat-shaker. But although its groundbreaking nature is undeniable, I don’t remember Bloom County being particularly controversial in the ’80s: not like, say, Dungeons & Dragons (ignored by Breathed), heavy metal (affectionately parodied), Stephen King novels or video games (mocked scornfully). A google search for 20th-century Bloom County controversies and censorship doesn’t turn up much, except for grumbling from frequent targets like Mary Kay Cosmetics and Donald Trump, and newspapers changing “Reagan sucks” to “Reagan stinks” in a November 1987 strip. (Breathed responded “Today’s youth have long since legitimized the word.”) Breathed never charged suicidally into the windmill like, say, Bobby London; Bloom County was, like any newspaper strip had to be, a strip a 10-year-old boy could read at breakfast with his mother. In the annotations to the IDW edition, however, Breathed repeatedly points out strips he “couldn’t get away with nowadays.” In a 1981 strip poking fun at victimization and censorship (ending with the censors’ horrified realization “My gosh…LIFE is offensive!!”) he digs in the point with the 2009 annotation “It must feel very empowering to be offended all the time.”

The rebranding, however slight, of Bloom County as a firestorm of political incorrectness presumably comes from Breathed’s own experiences at the end of his newspaper-strip career. In late summer 2007 two Opus strips jumped into the headlines when the Washington Post, Breathed’s home syndicate newspaper, refused to print them due to their satire of Islam (specifically through a white American convert, presumably an attempt to decouple religion from race). Breathed had mocked religion before, such as the Hare Krishnas in 1982, the “Bhagwan Rajneesh Cult Center” in 1984, and Christian fundamentalists, always. Although Breathed did not retire Opus until a year later, to hear him describe it in later interviews, listening to his publisher at the Washington Post relay concerns from a Muslim staffer about how much hair should stick out of Lola’s hijab convinced him that it was impossible to write the strip the way he wanted anymore. (“I thought that I saw it coming and approached it with probably more sensitivity than I am known for. I was not mocking anything about the Muslim dress—I was mocking the reaction to it,” Breathed said later.) Opus became a punching bag of the grotesquely partisan media landscape of 2007-2008, when Sony Computer Entertainment could recall the video game Little Big Planet for fear of offending Muslims with Quranic verses in the music (in a soundtrack created by an African Muslim musician), while right-wing news channels unapologetically stoked fear stories of American mosques and Obama’s “closet Muslim” religion.

To my eye, looking back over the old strips, Breathed does a good job of walking a delicate tightrope: creating a true Gonzo comedy, a broad satire of humanity, without veering into sexism, racism and stereotypes. At least not nonselfconscious ones. Throughout the strip Breathed made a strong effort to include African-American characters in a noncaricatural way, both in jokes about racism (mocking Diff’rent Strokes, the “Michael Jackson Caucasian Kit,” etc.) and race-neutral contexts. Oliver Wendell Jones, the 10-year-old genius computer scientist, was the Schroeder of the strip and one of the core cast. On December 11, 1983 Breathed reused an old daily strip joke as a Sunday strip with Oliver Wendell Jones and his grandfather in what had been Milo and the Major’s roles. Later, less successfully, Breathed introduced Ronald-Ann Smith, a poor black girl from the inner city, who was intended to be the main character of Outland; but in this case Breathed seemingly found it too difficult to make her a character rather than just a symbol, and she faded out of the strip (like all of the new Outland characters, for that matter). (The true fusion of Bloom County with African-American issues ended up being Aaron MacGruder’s The Boondocks, openly influenced by Breathed.)

Breathed wasn’t above using stereotypes to tell an essentially anti-stereotypical message, as in a late Academia Waltz strip when an Iranian-American calls his brother in Iran to beg him to stop burning American flags on TV, so he himself won’t be beaten up by bigots like Steve Dallas. (“Allah help me…it is fratboy!”) Garry Trudeau had introduced the first (openly -_- ) gay character in mainstream newspaper strips in 1976, but it was still very unusual in the early ’80s when Bloom County made fun of homophobia, in the recurring storylines in which TV preachers torment Opus with crusades against “penguin lust.” (“The biggest moral threat to the very moral fiber of our immoral society…penguin lust!!! Nothing but urges from hell!“) In elementary school I didn’t get this joke, although neither did I get the joke when the heroes go to San Francisco for a political convention and stay at a hotel run by a pair of bondage-loving leather daddies. In Bloom County one finds the occasional one-panel of a wacky Asian chef with Ginsu knives, or Milo disguised as an oil sheik to entrap a politician (“Want some dough, O fat one?”). But Breathed didn’t merely parrot the default American stereotypes, as demonstrated in a 2006 Opus strip in which he included a threatening, bazooka-wielding IDF soldier among a bevy of turbaned terrorists springing out of Opus’ Anxiety Closet of Modern Fears. Outnumbered five to one by turbans, but still enough to anger conservative bloggers, like the 2009 Doonesbury Old Testament joke that provoked a disapproving letter from the ADL.

When Breathed quit newspaper comics in 2008, he cited frustration with things like the 2007 Islam controversy, and another incident he mentions in the IDW annotations, when the Washington Post “shut down my gentle mockery of Scientology in 2008” (apparently completely shut it down, since no mentions of Scientology appear in Opus strips in that year as far as I can tell). He blamed the partisan political climate and the timidity of newspaper editors. It’s difficult not to wonder how long Opus would have kept going in any case, since Breathed, like many aging newspaper strip artists, had long expressed frustration about the dwindling relevance of newspapers, and had twice before canceled his strips in an attempt to switch over to children’s books and other media. Like the other major comic strip artists who arose in the ’80s, Bill Watterson and Gary Larson, Breathed had a completely different attitude towards his art than the strippers of earlier generations: i.e., it’s better to stop while you’re ahead than to beat the horse ’till death and beyond.

Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion, recently said in a lecture that the changing relationship between media and audience makes it harder to use edgy humor with a mass audience: the same hyperconnected social media that makes it possible to, say, fund Kickstarter projects also makes public outrage/disapproval much faster, stronger and harder to ignore. In the 2010s, artists are assumed to be in constant communication with their fans, and the kind of outsider distance that artists like Watterson or Breathed had in the 1980s—Breathed once said he wasn’t aware when Bloom County had become popular until many months later—whether a disadvantage or an advantage, seems quaint. Similarly, the things Breathed pioneered on the comics page—the combined mockery of pop culture and politics, the intermedia visual play with altered photographs, hoax headlines and ads—are now commonplace (if not as well done as Breathed did them), easy to make with Photoshop and fast to upload into memes. (And as a result of their instancy, sadly, they’re rarely strung together into the hilarious narratives and recurring characters Breathed did so well.) Like much about Bloom County, it’s easy to look at these things and think, “ahh, how ’80s!”; but Breathed himself would probably resist casting the book as a mere piece of ’80s nostalgia. Breathed’s Bloom County was a work of genius, but it was never nostalgic; as long as it is controversial, it is current. Old comic strips, like all old comedies, have power when they are humor, not humored.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

The Truth, Steve

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Shaenon Garrity

Like most nerds, I communicate primarily in quotes from The Simpsons, but I’m old enough that Bloom County makes it into the rotation from time to time. Nary a San Diego Comic-Con can pass, for example, without a Superman comic or “My Little Pony” display triggering me to say to my husband, “The Truth, Steve, is that ‘Knight Rider’ is actually a children’s program.” (The correct response: “Can’t be! Can’t *@#!* be!!”)

When Bloom County debuted, it was criticized, often rightly so, for lifting from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Breathed’s loose, doodle-y early style was a slightly more polished version of Trudeau’s; he later developed into one of the most skilled illustrators on the comics page, more reminiscent of Chuck Jones than any newspaper cartoonist, but that would come later. Both cartoonists used an eclectic cast of slice-of-Americana characters to discuss current events. And both were unusually political for the comic strips of the era, which mostly stuck to safe sitcom material. Early on, Trudeau’s periodic hiatuses from Doonesbury allowed Breathed to replace him in some newspapers.

But in retrospect, Bloom County came from a fundamentally different perspective. Trudeau emerged from the 1970s late-counterculture tradition of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live: erudite young left-wingers, trained on Ivy League humor magazines, out to smash the system with subversive comedy as a vehicle for progressive politics. Breathed’s strip anticipated the next generation, the style that would replace Lampoon-ing: media-saturated, self-referential, political only to the degree that politics is part of pop culture, as surreal and anarchic as a two-in-the-morning flip up the TV dial. The humor of Bloom County is the humor of The Simpsons and all that came after.

In its original context, the “Knight Rider” line is spoken by Binkley, the only Bloom County character to outpace Opus in gormless naïveté, after mysteriously awakening with a revelation of The Truth in all matters. The other knowledge Binkley shares: the Monkees didn’t play their own instruments, Opus looks more like a puffin than a penguin, and Reagan will never fulfill his promise to share Star Wars missile defense secrets with the USSR. That all of these revelations are presented as equal in importance sums up the difference between Bloom County and Doonesbury.

And that was life in America in the 1980s. The political became the personal, then it became the trivial. Colors were bright, patterns disorienting, everything expensive and hideous. The president was a movie star, of course, but more to the point it seemed reasonable for the president to be a movie star, to be just a guy hired to play The President. Billions of lives depended on a missile defense system named after the movie franchise that had just introduced Ewoks. We couldn’t handle the truth about the government or our souls, but neither could we handle the truth about David Hasselhoff. In Bloom County, Bill the Cat, the strip’s Garfield-parodying symbol of half-assed commercialism, has two recurring careers: rock star and presidential candidate. The careers are close to interchangeable and often inspire near-identical storylines. In the final years of the strip, Bill switches brains with Donald Trump, the human embodiment of the peculiar mishmash of money, politics, celebrity, and tackiness that could be said to define the decade.

Many of the most successful Bloom County strips make a social observation without making a social statement. When the characters go hunting for the endangered liberal by baiting a trap with the Village Voice (“Just let me read the Feiffer cartoon!”), it’s very funny, but it doesn’t express any particular viewpoint about liberals or conservatives or American political debate. (Which is not to say that the artist’s personal views don’t sometimes come through; Breathed seems consistently uncomfortable with women and feminism, for instance.) One of the most famous Bloom County storylines begins with boy genius Oliver responding to South African apartheid by inventing a “pigmentizer” that turns white people black. An earlier generation of political humorists would have built this into a moralistic civil-rights fantasy, or followed the premise to disturbing and challenging places. A story that starts with apartheid has the potential to get dark. Instead, the gang gets lost at sea on the way to South Africa, leading to Opus eventually returning to Bloom County with amnesia, which is ultimately cured by news of Diane Sawyer’s wedding. Race relations, soap opera parodies, celebrity gossip: they’re all potential comedy material. Bloom County’s central innovation was to reject the old-fashioned idea that they should be different kinds of comedy.

bloom-county-hunting-liberals-copy

The Simpsons played the same tune, ten years later, when it responded to Bush Sr.’s criticisms of the show’s crassness with “Two Bad Neighbors,” an episode portraying George and Barbara Bush as George and Martha Wilson from the 1950s Dennis the Menace TV show. In the DVD commentary for the episode, writers Bill Oakley and Ken Keeler comment that the older writers on staff were frustrated by the episode; they wanted a show about the President to be a sharp-edged political satire, not a pop-cult parody where the basic joke is “George Bush is old.” But the younger writers didn’t want to do satire. And George Bush was old.

To some degree Bloom County, which ran from 1980 to 1989 precisely, is of its time. In sheer volume of cultural detritus invoked, it certainly stands in stark contrast to the other great 1980s comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, which strove for a sense of children’s-book timelessness. (My friend Jason Thompson once commented that he always found himself waiting for Calvin to pick up a video game controller.) Yet Donald Trump is still with us, all these years later, and so is David Hasselhoff, and so is the Bloom County sense of humor, the comedy that comes from collapsing every cultural signifier to a single level of blind, bland confusion and romping through the ruins.

Only occasionally does Bloom County take a coherent political or social stand, most notably in its extended attack on animal testing. More often, it adopts a “both sides are just as bad” attitude, or simply seems baffled by all the fracas. When Breathed abandons his post-counterculture cynicism and reaches for a sweet and gentle note, he usually does so by having the characters abandon their pop-culture wasteland entirely for a trip to the swimming hole or the dandelion patch. In Bloom County, there’s no salvation in political action or cultural revolution; the only hope is to drop out of our oversaturated civilization and go looking for reality. And that, maybe, is the final truth.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

Most Overrated/Most Underrated Comic Strip

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

So since we’re in the middle of a Bloom County Roundtable, I thought I’d officially state that I think it’s the most underrated comic strip out there. It gets little critical appreciation and isn’t much talked about, even though it’s fantastic, and one of the all time greats as far as I’m concerned. (It was mired towards the bottom of our best comics list. I sort of regret I didn’t put it on my own top ten.)

Overrated; well, Calvin and Hobbes is the first that springs to mind, for some of the reasons I discussed earlier in the week. I think Doonesbury’s pretty mediocre as well; visually blah and often smug and flat, though occasionally funny. The enthusiasm for Nancy among comics folks also baffles me; it’s visually slick, but completely devoid of any other interest, as far as I can tell.

I actually generally agree with the enthusiasm for the most praised comic strips — Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Little Nemo. I think they’re rated about right.

So what do you think are the most overrated and underrated comic strips? Let us know in comments.

Bloom County Fan Art By My Awesome 10-Year-Old

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I didn’t think my son would like Bloom County much because of all the 80s references. But I was wrong, because he is brilliant. So here’s his fan art.

Bill the Cat

Giant Purple Snorklewacker

Opus as rock star

And here’s my fan art tribute to his fan art. Less brilliant, but what can you do.

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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

A Penguin State of Mind

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

My first encounter of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom Country was as a child, with a stuffed version of the character Opus. He was outfitted in reindeer antlers and shiny, plush Christmas ornaments. My sister and I did not know what to do with him. We were not sure what animal he was supposed to be. For the most part he looked like a penguin, but his beak, if it could be called that, was somewhat moose-like. Large, misshapen and skin-colored, this nose seemed adult– something that wasn’t meant for children to like or understand. It seemed inappropriate. All in all, the creature looked forlorn, but his holiday costuming looked jaunty, and fleshy, vaguely insidious schnoz. There were just too many layers going on at once. As conspicuous as a spy in a kid’s movie, Opus didn’t belong. He seemed to have other motivations for being there. He came from some world we didn’t recognize. He had baggage we couldn’t account for, and we found it difficult to overwrite his mysterious past for a game of ‘Life at the North Pole.’ We ignored and neglected him. Every year we unpacked him with the rest of the Christmas animals, placed him on a chair, and avoided him.

Now that I know Opus, and his attitude of beleaguered optimism, this strikes me as a little sad. Poor excluded Opus, a victim of branding. Yet there are advantages to being a cartoon icon. Comic strips are ephemeral. They are one of the few publications still discarded after reading. Perhaps due to a fluke in human brain functioning, their characters easily outlive their physical forms, or narratives. Some arcs and strips remain in the memories of certain readers, but cartoon characters become immured in a greater cultural context, with or without their original story lines. Opus made my sister and I uneasy, because while we could recognize him as a denizen of America’s collective unconscious, he demonstrated that we participated in this incompletely. On a related note, we continued to be confused as to why we saw so many urinating Calvins on a daily basis.

Opus is sort of a minor-league cultural artifact, a case of a mascot without rampant commercial licensing. It took a lot longer than I expected to discover my stuffed toy’s source material in daily life. My dad, a devotee of the strip’s original run, never purchased collections of Bloom County or its spinoffs. Neither Outland nor Opus ran in the Modesto Bee. I participated in the comics industry for years without stumbling upon them. I might have remained forever ignorant of the strip if not for earlier posts here on Hooded Utilitarian. Breathed makes his case in the Bloom County Library that he unwittingly pioneered pop-cultural references in comics, changing the landscape of the funny pages forever. Whatever influence he had, it’s not uncommon for ‘disruptive technologies’ to be forgotten in favor of more recent iterations. It’s harder to erase an iconic mascot, and their innate appeal. When done well, an icon exists in its own irreplaceable visual category. Opus looks uniquely like Opus, not like a generic cartoon penguin or moose. Opus is arguably the first visual element of Bloom County that uniquely belonged to it, and he’s a talking animal to boot. Breathed satirized mascots, and the merchandising death-spirals they inspire, in his Bill the Cat sunday strips, although he wasn’t above using them, either.

Opus becomes a mascot rather innocently. He doesn’t appear until six months into the run, and when he does, he looks like a standard penguin. In fact, when I asked at what point I should jump into the strip, Noah Berlatsky here at Hooded Utilitarian advised, “Few years in, maybe? When Opus starts looking like Opus is probably the way to go…” This echoes Breathed’s own commentary on the strip from January 28^th, 1982, at around this point: “Opus. Center found, the fog clearing. The strip had found its voice, its tone and its point of view. People and comic strips are alike in needing this.”

On the May 1^st, 1983 strip (below), he adds, “In case you’re interested, a line like that at the end is exactly why I needed Opus in Bloom County. An innocent amidst the insane.”

This is striking, as Bloom County is not lacking in innocent voices. There’s mild-mannered Mike Binkley—while his father conflates his femininity with perversity and cowardice, readers know better, and Binkley’s quiet honesty comes off as rather valiant. There are the forest animals, banding together to elect a presidential candidate for their Meadow Party, and easily perplexed by human kissing. There’s a handicapped doctor who role-plays science fiction fantasy games with said forest animals—his name is Cutter John, which doesn’t seem to be a malpractice joke. There’s the old lady who volunteers to disarm a nuclear warhead using her famous pie recipe. The list goes on. Even Milo Bloom, who in my opinion has become creepy yellow journalist by 1983, has his heart in the right place. And the offensive frat-boy turned lawyer Steve Dallas earns the bemused affection of the cast, mostly because he is harmless. If a certain variation of innocence exists, Berkeley Breathed has created a character to exemplify it.

Innocence and insanity are not mutually exclusive either. Innocence is described as a kind of veiled, distorted vision just as often as it is defined as clarity. In this it parallels, and approaches, the definition of madness. No Bloom County character is exempt from delusions, and being made a fool by them. These delusions go hand-in-hand with the rampant ‘fantasy play’– animals pretending to be on Starship Enterprise, children reminiscing about their pretend, exotic love affairs with dead-pan faces– which also interweave with each character’s particular wisdom. Opus is the resident ‘alien’ of Bloom County. He is not tied to the natural ecosystem, like the forest animals, nor did he grow up in the school system, like the kids. Neither was he brought in for a job. He’s a flightless bird. He starts out as Binkley’s pet, and is reinvented as his subtenant. The absurdity of his existence gives him a privileged distance in which to question reality, often because he himself doesn’t understand it. Opus’ perspective remains gentle, optimistic and non-judgmental. The joke is always on him, but life is crazy anyway.

Perhaps what Breathed was trying to say was this: In order to make Bloom County work, he needed a character who was not just innocent, but who pointed out the absurdity of the world in an innocent way, without a trace of domineering snarkiness. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this focal point arrived in the form of an iconic animal mascot. Or perhaps not. Breathed’s “existentialist penguin” talk aside, I suspect it is actually Opus’ iconicity—his status not as an alien, but as a visual alien—that gives Bloom County its center of gravity. Opus’ body — nose and all — becomes the calling card of Bloom County. Pre-Opus, Bloom County struggled to differentiate itself stylistically from other comics, particularly Doonesbury. Then: enter endearing animal mascot. It’s not the most original act of branding, but it works. Breathed’s breath-holding reverence for Opus betrays an uneasiness that has to tunnel away and re-emerge as Bill the Cat six months later.

I don’t think that Bloom County needs a mascot for exactly the same reason a sugar cereal, or the Olympics games, or even Garfield needs a mascot. Cartoon animals have nothing to do with breakfast food or professional sports, only with selling them. Garfield is almost nothing but an exercise in branding, (one reason why the experiment Garfield Minus Garfield is so brilliant.) The earliest definitions of comics theory conflate iconicity and storytelling; there is no theory today that does justice to the complex relationship of these two concepts. Opus’ iconicity gives readers a stronger elastic to stretch around and bundle Bloom County’s various parts into something coherent, a Bloom County-ness. He’s the only drawing that feels alive half the time, a slapstick break from all the talking heads. As a mascot, Opus helps Breathed brand the strip. He’s Bloom County’s voice not because his character is the comic’s keystone, but because his image is. And there is a baffling genius to his composition, his pleading eyes and tiny bow tie. As a character, he is just one strand of the large, crazy web of innocents Breathed spins.

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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

Creating Children

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes is a strip about the wonders of imagination. And, as this famous Sunday shows, the wonder there, and the imagination as well, is insistently self-referential. The opening white space of the page is a nod to the white space of the page, so that the page represents the moment before creation just as the moment before creation turns around and represents the page. The calligraphy foregrounds the artist’s hand, even in the usually ignored realm of lettering, while the close-up of the eye-of-Calvin winks at Watterson’s own eye, gazing down upon the page. Calvin’s virtuoso acts of creation, the planets he sets spinning, are, at the same time, Watterson’s virtuoso acts of creation. That hand, from which a galaxy forms, points to Watterson’s actual hand, from which the galaxy forms. “He’s creating whole worlds over there!” Calvin’s dad enthuses, by which he means Calvin, but which could also, and does also apply to Waterson himself. The mom’s response, “I’ll bet he grows up to be an architect,” is ironic because Calvin’s imagined creation/destruction of the universe is figured as gleefully asocial rather than as a career path. But it’s also ironic simply because she’s got the wrong profession. Calvin is training to be an artist/cartoonist, not an architect; his future is, literally and figuratively, Watterson’s present. The comic can be read not as a winking laugh at the distance between child/adult perceptions, but as a kind of smug moment of gloating; Watterson/Calvin is cooler than his parents and cooler than architects. He’s a gloating god who gets paid not just for the creation, but for the gloating.

The strip’s celebration of imagination is predicated on the link between Calvin and Watterson. But that link is itself created through careful separations; to make Calvin and the cartoonist parallel, certain lines can’t meet. Thus, here, as throughout Calvin & Hobbes, the barrier between imagination and reality is carefully maintained. Calvin’s imagination is rendered in a more detailed, more expressionist style, again, even the text is written in calligraphy; reality, on the other hand, is drawn in Watterson’s standard cartoony format. The child’s-eye world and the parent’s eye world are visually and conceptually distinct. The wonder of Calvin’s imagination, and of Watterson’s, is figured specifically as a wonder by making clear that it is set off from the normal and everyday. Hobbes the tiger is a marvelous creation because the purity of the creation is underlined by Hobbes the stuffed animal. In order to celebrate childhood and (Calvin or Watterson’s) creativity, you need a nothing, a blank, to stick it in and compare it to.

Bloom County’s treatment of imagination and of childhood works quite differently. This strip, for example, does not start with blank space, to be filled with creativity. Rather, it starts with Binkley being woken up by a Giant Purple Snorklewacker — you come out of dream to be in a dream. The one panel with no fantastic elements is not at the end — as ironic reassertion of the real — but in the middle, as a kind of pause or beat between absurdities. Nor is there a stylistic indication of what’s real and what isn’t. The Snorklewacker’s shock of unruly hair looks much like Binkley’s shock of unruly hair; Mrs. McGreevy looks like any other pleasantly dumpy Breathed old person except for that ax.

The imaginative content here is also less virtuoso riff than fuddy-duddy pratfall. In fact, the narrative seems designed to conflate the joy of childhood with the banal worries/fantasies of adults, so that “Green Eggs and Ham” becomes an occasion not for gleeful rhyming, but for worrying about due dates.

Nor is it just childhood fantasies that are punctured; in his notes to this cartoon in the Bloom County library reissue, Breathed notes that the strip was inspired by discovering his own out-of-date library book — a Frazetta art book. Mrs. McGreevy in Viking helmet can be seen, then, as a parody of Frazetta’s barbarians, and also as a kind of back-handed (back-axed?) comment on Breathed’s own imagination, or lack thereof. Give me a noble warrior, Breathed says, and I will turn it into a librarian and a neurosis. Breathed may be the Snorklewacker, gleefully leaping up and down in anticipation of tormenting his character, but he’s also that character, Binkley, who worries the way adults worry. The line between adult/child gets is smudged over, just like the line between fantasy and reality.

You could argue that these smudgings — the fact that the Snorklewacker occasionally escapes into the real world while Hobbes never does, or the fact that Calvin is always a six-year-old with a six-year-olds interests, while Binkley has anxious daydreams about economists — means that Calvin and Hobbes is the more true-to-life strip. I tend to agree with Bert Stabler, though, when he argues that Bloom County is in the mode of realism — especially when we use Ambrose Bierce’s definition of realism as “the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.” Calvin and Hobbes revels in creativity; Bloom County deflates it. Watterson creates a world from nothing; Berkeley Breathed insists that your flights of fancy will be fined.

Inevitably, Watterson’s self-vaunting optimism in the power of childhood and comics is the popular and critical darling, while Breathed’s dumpy skepticism is either ignored or forgotten. But for me, at least, I much prefer Breathed’s sly, exuberant pfft to Watterson’s rote magic. Certainly, I’d happily trade all of Watterson’s cosmic shenanigan’s for that single motion line Breathed uses to show the curlicue path of the ax, so you have to imagine the head flipping around before embedding itself in the wall. Or, for that matter, for that first picture of the happy Snorklewacker leaping up and down on the bed, a scrunched purple bundle filling the room almost up to the ceiling with jittery motion lines, imagination not as expansive power, but claustrophobic vibration.

Bloom County is realistic, I’d argue, not because it eschews fantasy, but because it doesn’t. In Breathed’s world, the real and the ridiculous crowd in on one another, elbowing each other for space in the same low-ceilinged room. Children are not proto-artists to be glorified, but just schlubs like the rest of us, beset in equal measure by the snorklewackers in their own brains and by the due dates in everyone else’s. The artist isn’t a god, but a horny toad, who provides, not wonder, but nagging, and an occasional ax.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

“Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!” : Bloom County as realism

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Albert Stabler

I just watched Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the recent biopic The Iron Lady on Netflix, and, as the writing was nowhere near equal to Streep’s uncanny performance, my favorite part was when the empowering patriotic-feminist flashbacks and poignant dementia hallucinations were finally over, so I could turn the sound down and play Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” over the credits. There was left-wing populism then, populism of the nostalgic anarchist variety, not just peacefully occupying parks but burning tires on the street, fighting police, and occasionally blowing something up. It seems like a long time ago, because it was in fact a long time ago.

But going back much further, satire and revolution have a curious relationship. Comic theatre and then the first novels appeared in the wake of early-modern wars and catastrophes, mocking the presumed practical piety of those who would consider a proposal, as Thatcher might have had it crossed her desk, to simply eat the Irish. Later, Art Young’s stark cartoon allegories went well with contemporaneous German Expressionist grotesquerie and Brecht’s apocalyptic operettas. And later still, matching roughly the span of the Thatcher era, Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County documented the denouement of the Cold War from the safe distance of the U.S. One book’s introduction details a Kubrick-esque fantasia when the distance of the Soviets from American soil (American soil in Alaska that is) leads to a national panic. And there is of course the prisoner swap of the re-educated Bill the Cat to the Soviets to get back Opus and Cutter John, along with the memorable inventions of a Basselope-based missile and an air defense shield composed of orbiting money.

The proud modern heritage of satire, whose flame in newspaper comics may have burned most brightly in Breathed, indeed often bases its gags on a safe distance, a safety that renders every attempt at drama absurd—perhaps never less dramatically than in the anxiety closet representing Binkley’s deepest terrors, from which springs forth the unutterable banality of debating economists. But whether it’s the presidential campaign of a catatonic cat, the hunting of a snake that turns out to be the battery cable of a ’73 Pinto, the prescient machinations of junior hacker Oliver Wendell Jones, or even the hijinks of a PMRC-baiting hair-metal band, the silence is deafening, broken up only, as in a spoof of bad stand-up, by the murmur of frogs and crickets.

Irony has become a bad word again. In spite of (or because of) the success of The Daily Show, Buzzfeed, etc., neither committed agitators nor edgy culture-makers want to have anything to do with “funny” art (Paul McCarthy and William Pope L being noteworthy exceptions). But in the 1980s, amidst a brief resurgence of politicized youthful intransigence, there were the Dead Milkmen, the Young Ones, Culturecide, the Crucifucks, Flaming Carrot, Spitting Image, David Wojnarowicz, and Mike Kelley. I had a cheap Casio keyboard and sundry found objects, and my high school friend and I had the temerity to call ourselves a band, and to call that band Nasal Plaque. We mocked the abortion debate, we mocked warmongering, we mocked protest songs, we mocked bluesy authenticity. The treacly hindsight is perhaps neck-deep at this point, but that there was a time when protest was endearingly mean and scruffy, at the same time it was bloody and destructive elsewhere, seems worth a look backward—especially now that the New Republic is claiming that the Onion is “America’s finest Marxist news source,” even while Jacobin is denouncing Adbusters’ crypto-fascist sympathies. Can punk rock, in the end, get over itself?

With full treacly apology, I claim that Bloom County may have been the last great realist comic strip, a salutary deflationary attempt to show the safety pins holding together the tattered corset hiding the hemorrhoids of society. Realists run the risk of being both dismal and arrogant in any such effort; the reluctant realist Ambrose Bierce defined realism in his 1911 Devil’s Dictionary as: “[t]he art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.” But in Bloom County of course such humble animals often have speaking roles, stripped of Disneyish innocence and cursed with the anxiety and frustration of a Philip Roth character. Case in point: Portnoy, a frequently angry and bigoted groundhog named after a Roth character, whom Binkley inadvertently clubs senseless in the pointedly unremarkable “Battle of Shady Creek.”

In realist novels, the romantic aspirations of a knight like Don Quixote or a bored housewife like Emma Bovary are revealed as self-destructive neurosis in dense, deadening, deadpan detail, ending inevitably in an arbitrary pathetic whimper rather than a decisive bang of closure, much like when Steve Dallas uses up all the hot shower water (and panel space) singing Julio Iglesias. The non-hero may uncertainly and ironically occupy a macho mise en abyme meta-narrative, as in Joseph Conrad’s mystical Heart of Darkness or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Binkley’s anxiety closet is again Exhibit A, although there’s also the series where Milo is a comics artist being overseen by a hooded executioner, or the Lost and Found counter where Milo demands the return of his lost “youthful idealism” and his “sense of optimism,” ending with the frazzled attendant asking “Hasn’t anyone lost anything tangible?!”

Jane Austen’s characters manage to deflate romance without erasing the stability of social relationships, but social relationships are sometimes the cause of the story’s grim non-resolution in Thomas Hardy, Richard Wright, or The Wire, as in Oliver Wendell Jones’ inevitable confrontation by the authorities (that he sends to Steve Dallas’ house), or by the bugs in his inventions. In Bloom County, a Senator’s blatant corruption or Bill and Opus’ doomed campaign are as humorously bleak as a Sinclair Lewis novel.

When Roland Barthes writes in S/Z about Honore de Balzac’s story “Sarrasine,” he stresses the multivalences and enigmas in this realist tale of wealth and infatuation, and Breathed should similarly get credit for creating an open-ended, unstable stable of characters. Breathed is no royalist, a la Balzac, but neither is he a Theodore-Dreiser-esque socialist realist; his stalwart defenses of “liberals” and “secular humanists” are the subject of many Bloom County strips. Indeed, the political status of a realist art is a sticky matter; the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs stated that the alienation in realism was necessary, praising the effort to depict “totality,” but also that these novels were hardly revolutionary gauntlets. Fair enough. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye say of Mulk Raj Anand that his fiction about India’s poorer castes depicts a “collective subject whose gradual transformation is delineated through pragmatic modes rather than through metanarratives of emancipation.” This reference may seem a trifle high-flown, as well as remote in terms of culture and class, but the cautious optimism of Breathed’s politics certainly dispenses with grand ideals, in favor of a reassuring possibility, once sundry ludicrous delusions are dispensed with, that community might be found among the dandelions.

There may be an attempt underway to re-assert political truths in culture, the loss of which Frederic Jameson bemoans in the postmodern replacement of illuminating parodies (like, I claim, Bloom County) by empty pastiche. Recent writings on “speculative realist” philosophy, based in part on the work of one-time French Maoist Alain Badiou, posits an indeterminate infinity of objects beyond conceivability, though this has been critiqued by Alexander Galloway as complicit with the apolitical information infrastructure of late capitalism. I, for my part, appreciate the moment when Oliver Wendell Jones introduces Opus to his “Great Unification Theory,” which explains the entire universe, albeit with the exception of flightless waterfowl. Shouting in panic and clinging to his ice-cream cone, Opus starts to disappear, piece by piece, panel by panel, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when his future parents are in danger of not falling in love. Finally in the end Oliver figures it out, explaining to the camera, “Forgot to carry the two,” as the reconstituted Opus splutters next to his collapsed dessert. The mathematical absolute itself is lampooned, illustrating that a culture that has sloughed off its illusions finds itself exposed to but perhaps intermittently redeemed by the deformations of a snarky perversity that refuses to die.

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