Bloom County, a 1980s cartoon-comic strip that dealt with socio-political issues as seen through the eyes of highly exaggerated characters (e.g. Bill the Cat and Opus the Penguin) and humorous analogies.
Creator Berkeley Breathed's first regularly published strip, Academia Waltz, appeared in the Daily Texan in 1978. The strip attracted notice from the editors of the Washington Post who recruited him to do a nationally syndicated strip. On December 8, 1980, Bloom County made its debut and featured some of the characters from Academia Waltz, including former frat-boy Steve Dallas and the paraplegic Vietnam War veteran Cutter John.
Bloom County earned Berkeley the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987. The strip eventually appeared in over 1,200 newspapers around the world until he retired the daily strip in 1989, stating, "A good comic strip is no more eternal than a ripe melon. The ugly truth is that in most cases, comics age less gracefully than their creators". The comic continues in recirculation on GoComics!
© Berkeley Breathed - All Rights Reserved.
Bliss by Harry Bliss
Bo Nanas by John Kovaleski
Comments (30) (Please sign in to comment)
simpsonfan2 said, 3 months ago
‘Star Wars’ didn’t work, but the Soviets thought it would, so they started to make nice…..So maybe ‘Star Wars’ DID work.
thebird55 said, 3 months ago
Challenger, go at throttle up.
Roger, go at throttle up.
dukedoug said, 3 months ago
@thebird55
Nobody said it wasn’t dangerous.
Too bad about how this disaster was caused.
Sisyphos said, 3 months ago
“Pop!”
Fizzle. Oliver’s dreams and ours: how earthbound we have become!
Thirdguy said, 3 months ago
Honda now has the Honda Jet. Maybe they will build a Honda Shuttle!
Andrew_C said, 3 months ago
It was calculated early on that 2 Space Shuttles would probably be lost over the be lost over the life of the program. Unfortunately both losses were arguably avoidable. The O rings and tank insulation were known to be problematic, but the NASA bureaucracy wrote off both as too expensive to fix.
K.C. Fahel said, 3 months ago
@thebird55
I still get chills…
One of the Challenger crew was a family friend.
TheSkulker
said, 3 months ago
@Andrew_C
Worse, on the morning of the Challenger launch the engineers warned that the weather was too cold and outside of the safety margins but were over ridden by the launch command.
And an engineer wanted to use some telescopes to examine the Columbia while in orbit but again safety and caution were ignored.
SwimsWithSharks
said, 3 months ago
@simpsonfan2
I give Lech Walesa and Solidarność union strikes far more credit than anything Reagan did to bring down the USSR.
Teresa said, 3 months ago
@SwimsWithSharks
Still, Reagan’s demand to bring down that wall made the better sound-bite.
Then again, our media never tells us what the heck is going on. We have to watch BBC America, Al Jazeera, and Aztec America. And for kicks, (watching what stupid people get caught on camera doing) we watch Al Extremo.
bhinkle said, 3 months ago
@SwimsWithSharks
Of course you do. Your bias blinds you to reality; a Republican could not have done anything good. Meanwhile a small country like Poland changed all of Eastern europe.
Sad. Just so sad.
chuck.baker.home said, 3 months ago
@bhinkle
Glad we have the unbiased voice of reason to guide us.
strangeways said, 3 months ago
@simpsonfan2
Star Wars was relatively cheap to work around – and of course we never deployed anything for them to work around. A bigger factor was just that the Soviet conventional war spending was way too high for their economy.
Ralph Waldo said, 3 months ago
So grateful I lost my bid to beTeacher in Space.
jbmlaw said, 3 months ago
Leftists abhor “leadership,” preferring “dictatorship.”