Daily Breakdowns 044 - The Bloom County Library Volume One

The Bloom County Library: Volume One 1980-1982
By Berkeley Breathed
Published by IDW Publishing. $39.99 USD

I wonder how my kids will look at the '80s. I mean, I like a lot of things from the '50s. There's a corny charm to black-and-white TV shoes like Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show, but also you had Kerouac and the Beats and James Dean and some edgy stuff that's still iconic and cool now. I was 10 years old when Bloom County premiered and I can't recall it making too much of an impact on me. I read newspaper comics but don't remember if ours carried it. At any rate, it wasn't until I was a freshman at college before I read one of my roommate's collections--probably Billy and the Boingers, and by then the series was probably around its peak of popularity.

This collection is, well, it's like a lot of first volumes of famous comic strips. It's not that good. In fact, it's often irritating, but with enough basic craft, a wealth of enthusiasm substituting for vision, and such a degree of care in the presentation that it's easy to keep going and feel a bit of Breathed's triumph as he starts to hit his stride.

The creative debt Breathed owes to Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury is well-known, and includes not only the basic drawing style but comedic rhythms, punchline delivery, a familiar character or two and even some specific ideas such as giving dialogue to inanimate objects like mirrors. Breathed cops to all this in the helpful sidebar commentary alongside the strips, and this rather shrewdly wets down a critic's ammunition. He's already admitted to it, so why beat him up about it? Certainly he brings a different setting and different comedic aims to his strip. Bloom County quickly acquires a wacky ensemble of characters like precocious Milo, gentle, simpleminded Billy, preppy lout Steve Dallas, cantankerous, senile Major Bloom, wheelchair-bound cool guy Cutter John and others. A good two-thirds of the first two years of strips give up to a week to let one of them have the spotlight, although by his own admission Breathed started doing the strip without having a clear idea what he wanted to do with it. So, we get Milo having a crush on the fictional advertising image of Betty Crocker and going on a quest to meet her, with dubious results. Bobbi Harlow is presented as a feminist schoolteacher, arrived to shake up the county, but she's not particularly feminist. Cockroaches talk and form a kitchen rebellion, because that's supposed to be funny, as is an out-of-control wheelchair, a local Moral Majority leader who frequently fondles women's legs, a macho dad who's not just ashamed of his son's interest in dance but also a prude, a drunk, corrupt old politician, and an insane old man who wants to nuke 'em all. We also get an inordinate amount of strips devoted to newlyweds Prince Charles and Princess Diana and their supposed home life, with Charles alternating between ninny and out-of-touch elitist and Diana basically wearing the pants. Well, at least Breathed seems to have gotten that one right. Basically, he's just casting around for funny ideas and probably figured he'd have better luck with a large cast or with inoffensive pop culture stuff of the moment.

It's not until 1982 when Breathed starts to figure out what works, i.e. what he finds amusing. This is when the talking penguin Opus enters the picture. He doesn't take over the book right away, but his confident, if totally out-of-touch, interactions with the people around him are funny and unlike anything else. This is where Breathed really starts to find his voice, and while there are still plenty of Charles & Di strips and other less interesting stuff to go in this volume, one feels Breathed is on the right track and that the success of the strip just might prove to have been deserved.

The presentation deserves some mention. The jacket design is pretty standard, but the notes from Breathed really help put in context that despite being a hit-and-miss, rural Doonesbury in its early days, the strip was notable for its many pop culture references (a lot of Star Trek), which was pretty much unheard of in comic strips of the time, as well as having animals talking to people. Both these elements have informed countless comic strips since, so clearly Bloom County has had an impact. The notes also point out some jokes that would not have been approved by today's well-meaning, overly sensitive newspaper editors, such practices probably driving away the next Breatheds and Trudeaus.