Berke Breathed, beloved cartoonist of the once greatly beloved cartoon Bloom County, has returned from the dead……
Oh…..
Wait a moment……he wasn’t actually dead……..
He only stopped making his cartoon for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS!!!!!!!!!
Bloom County, once one of the most syndicated cartoons in the US back in the 1980’s, will be soon be showing its multicolored face in the funny papers again.
Wildly amusing and wildly drawn the series followed the equally wild adventures of Milo Bloom, a lost penguin named Opus and his side kick Bill the Cat.
Bill the Cat……..
If there ever was a unique cartoon character to illuminate the Sunday paper it was Bill the Cat. Combine the worst elements of every American cartoon cat there has ever been going all the way back to Krazy Kat when newspapers were born and you would produce Bill the Cat. And, yes, that includes and surpasses Garfield.
Both Otis and Bill the Cat became icons of the 1980’s. Otis’s homely and lovelorn images graced many a number of plush and plastic toys, his protuberance jutting outward into prominence (I’M TALKING ABOUT HIS NOSE!!!!!!!!). Bill the Cat brought such manginess to the Sunday funnies that you were afraid to touch the paper for fear of getting ringworm.
One wonders why Breathed would return to his long forgotten cartoon after so many decades.
He says he was inspired by Donald Trump’s running for President.
????????????????????????????????(very pregnant pause)???????????????????????????????
OK………………………..
Well, it’s nice to know that something good came out of Trump’s announcement of his running, other than it messing up the Republican platform real good. Not that they don’t deserve him.
I can very much imagine the humorous potential the great orange haired one can inspire in an artist. Like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead Breathed has risen Bloom County back from the deceased.
One has to wonder what Breathed has been up to the past 25 years.
Rumors abound:
One has it that he ran off with Brooke Shields to a desert island and had twenty five years of endless sex in paradise. Or that could have just been the plot of a movie I saw once.
Another said that he had joined a cult that lived underground in bunkers with elaborate tunnels going in all directions in preparation for any number of possible holocaustic disasters. He only quit when he found out the latest tunnel he was digging was to free Pablo Guzman.
Yet another said he joined the circus and performed as a lion taming clown trapeze artist, but gave it up because it never had the satisfying wildness that his cartoons had.
Then there is the rumor that he locked himself inside his one bedroom apartment watching endless reruns of Seinfeld, Bugs Bunny, the Twilight Zone and Ice Station Zebra while eating a steady diet of cheese puffs until he went quietly mad and realized that his only back to sanity was through his artistry.
Take your pick.
Either way, Trump barging full force upon the political scene threw some switches in his soul and brought him back to reality and to modern American civilization. Let’s just hope the 25 years of being lost will not be too much of a shock to him. We all use cell phones now Berke and Captain Kangaroo is no longer on TV.
So, welcome back Berke! Nice to see you again! Be sure to bring Bill the Cat and Opus along with you!