The Penguin Returns! Berke Breathed is drawing again, and Opus will return to the funnies in November! This is the first time I’ve ever seen a cartoonist make a comeback, and I am ecstatically glad to see it. Bloom County shaped my existence in innumberable ways. It is by far my favorite comic strip of all time. Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were the greatest of strips for this generation, but Bloom County was like a second family to me. I own every book and have read every strip multiple times. My friend Kevin and I can still quote lines from it – and my copy of Bloom County Babylon still has his phone number on it from when I met him in 6th grade. Just the other day I made a mix CD for a friend that featured the "Gene Simmons Never Had a Personal Computer When He Was a Kid" ad. The stuff is encoded in my DNA. I can’t praise it enough.
I always wondered if the success of Bloom County was fueled by the Republican administrations during which the comic flourished, now I suspect I was right. In any case, I hope the strip maintains its wit better than Outland, which, while more visually creative, lacked the clever writing of its parent strip.