Bloom County As Berkeley Breathed Intended, Thanks To Social Media

by Paul Brubaker

The barbed world of comedy gave us a rare miracle this week. A sharp, satirical voice rose from the dead, that of Berkeley Breathed and his comic strip, “Bloom County.”

Just weeks after we bid farewell to David Letterman, amidst our bracing for Jon Stewart’s exit, while we are still cringing after Louis CK’s last SNL monologue, and after we pretended not to notice that Marc Maron doesn’t drop f-bombs while he’s with our military’s Commander-In-Chief, Breathed announced his comic strip’s comeback on a Facebook post on Sunday.

Only a comic strip could pull off this kind of second coming, and it couldn’t have come a better time.

This isn’t some nostalgic reunion tour, offering only an echo of the greatness that once was. This isn’t old-timers day at the ballpark allowing for players’ names to be blaring over a PA with a tip of a few caps to a reverently cheering crowd.

This has the potential to be something real.

After 25 years, Opus is still a neurotic penguin, Bill the Cat hasn’t seen a day of rehab, and Milo Bloom still looks like he could be my twin, circa 1987 — when Bloom County won the Pulitzer.

It’s a pretty good bet that attorney Steve Dallas is still shallow (but more than Saul Goodman?), Senator Bedfellow is still in office (will he run against Donald Trump?), and Lola Granola still has her figure (is she on a gluten-free diet?).

But success of Bloom County’s resurrected cast cannot hinge merely on the fact that comic strip characters never age. After all, Mr. Breathed is not re-entering a ring full of lightweights.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “South Park,” which — come to think of it — might have ripped a page or two from Breathed’s strips, has been going strong for decades. Set in a Colorado backwater town with children as main characters, each episode has taken aim at whatever and whoever is dominating news cycles as Bloom County did. Meanwhile, we still laugh at SNL, Jimmy Fallon and John Oliver, albeit not when the shows are actually broadcasted.

But here’s where Bloom County may have made the master’s play. As Breathed lay dormant for 25 years, the media world changed. Newspapers that once caused him so much consternation have withered. (Breathed has reportedly said it was an editorial dispute with a publisher made him quit cartooning in 2008.) Television has caved in on itself under the weight of unwatched cable channels and on-demand choices, and some movies have resorted to quasi-international incidents to get attention (and yet I still haven’t seen “The Interview”).

And it is in this changed media landscape that Breathed has made his move. Rather than inhabit the Sunday comics, Bloom County will lie in Facebook’s turf — a haven that is, as Mr. Breathed stated, “nicely out of reach of nervous newspaper editors, the PC humor police now rampant across the web … and ISIS.”

That means the wild-west internet medium that gave rise to countless dubious content providers would be in the hands of a true humorist — one who poked fun at Apple computer with a sneaker-wearing desktop called the “Banana” — and whose characters created the heavy-metal band, “Deathtongue.” (A plastic 45-rpm single from the band was included as part of one Bloom County anthology in the 80s.)

To be sure, success for Bloom County 2015 will be marked by its own take on the 2016 presidential race and whatever else falls into Breathed’s crosshairs.

But it may be a fair expectation that it will also be marked by Breathed’s unique sensitivity and heart, which was as present in Bloom County as Breathed’s talking animals.

Take, for example, this exchange: Opus the penguin sitting on the lap of Cutter John, a wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran. Opus asks Cutter John why he is always in the wheelchair. “It seems I have a couple of useless limbs,” Cutter John replied. Opus flaps his wings, uselessly, and then flops onto Cutter John’s chest and sighs in kinship, “Birds of a feather.”

No matter who becomes the target of Bloom County’s satire, or how unexpectedly its creator warms our hearts, this will be Bloom County as Berkeley Breathed intended. And that makes it an even better place to come home to.