I'm not sure whether I should be overjoyed or skeptical: Opus Returns to the Funny Pages. (Via Wizbang, via Michele, etcetera.)
Berke Breathed is by far my favorite cryptoliberal and maintains a three-way tie with Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson (who lives forty-five minutes away from me) for the coveted honor of Favorite Cartoonist. Breathed should certainly be recognized for his ability to change mediums while delivering consistent quality over a long career. This news, however, leaves me with mixed expectations on his comic potential nowadays.
Unfortunately, Breathed committed the lamentable error of turning a silly strip about rural civics into a multimillion dollar franchise phenomenon. For an entire decade. Best of all, he ended Bloom County before he ran out of magic. So he faces a sort of Sinatra curse: if you so much as step foot onstage, you had damned well better bring down the house like old times.
Any chance of failure is not from lack of talent, either. When interviewed, Breathed always gave his artistic abilities short shrift - I never understood that. The mark of an artist's ability, second only in importance to longevity, is how well he performs in his medium. Once Bloom quickly shed that natural, initial unfamiliarity of repetitively drawn characters, Breathed's pen was free to explore his world of highly politicized podunk. Opus' nose grew over the decade, as did Mike Binkley's and Milo Bloom's hair, Oliver Wendell Jones' glasses, Portnoy's feet, and even everyone's eyes (Steve Dallas, too, after he dumped the shades following his Saul-like transformation to a rosy neolib).
By the mid-1980s Breathed had trimmed his cast; old guard characters like Bobbi Harlow and Senator Bedfellow disappeared, the latter by way of a tragically hilarious prison sentence and the former, mysteriously. Milo's grandfather went the same way as Bobbi. Even Cutter John, the disabled Vietnam vet who bore a striking resemblance to Breathed himself, receded into nothingness. For a while it was Opus, Binkley, Milo, Steve, Bill and Oliver - with supporting characters, story guests and the occasional Sunday gag with greasy corporate apparatchik W.A. Thornhump III.
We wouldn't find our pals in the schoolroom any longer, and the bar lost its plot leverage long before Dallas swore off liquor. The trees and hills and watering holes were Breathed's favorite sets, their features gradually dilating along with everything else. The Boarding House remained Bloom's standby: the fridge, the roof, Binkley's Anxiety Closet, the basement, the toilet Steve cornered Opus in while trying to kick cigarettes; and poor Mr. Binkley's bed, where less than a year's-worth of nights were spent restfully lacking in interruptions from his celebrity-gossip obsessed son.
Along came Rosebud the Basselope, Ronald-Ann, and Milquetoast the Cockroach. Opus, who began his tenure as Binkley's eccentric pet - "Two dips and a Dad," went the famous punchline - became Breathed's favorite early on, and assumed the lead and prevailing perspective for most of the strip's run. As the Eighties waned, daily drawing characters established through zany storylines left Breathed a choice between lunacy and minimalism. He often chose the latter, leaving the comic potential in headline events to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury and concentrating instead on Cheez-Wiz in Opus' shorts.
And still Bloom stayed funny. Yet Breathed knew how to get out of a strip - or at least wanted out pretty bad by the last years of the decade. Bill the Catt, once a mangy litigation magnet for Jim Davis' Mafioso entertainment lawyers, took quite a ride over the years: he became a drugged-out Hollywood superstar, played frontman for Billy and the Boingers (né Deathtongue), joined a cult, suckered millions of dollars out of 700 Clubbers, before finally ending up an unwilling physical shell for the brain of an anchor-maimed Donald Trump. Trump in a zipperless cat suit stumbled around for a few months before snapping back into a tycoon's mindset. He - Breathed and Trump - did the unthinkable. Trump bought out the strip. The last year of Bloom was comic strip seppaku, quick and honorable: the characters lampooned then accepted their fate, put a thumb in the air and hit the comic job market. Milo went to Larson, Oliver to Keane, Portnoy and Hodge-Podge took on scooping up after Marmaduke. They had a wrap party. In August of 1989, it was over.
Before Bloom's last Sunday, Opus had followed the enigmatic Ronald-Ann into a fantasy world called Outland - to become Breathed's eponymous second strip. I was disappointed with Outland; its Sunday-only schedule only emphasized the flippant treatment of subject matter. Breathed mastered stuffing politics into four frames and a punchline in Bloom, and it was a shame to see him miss the mark week after week from a lack of development room. Characters were cardboard and did little to pump life into a strip premise filled with potential - a premise which, interestingly enough, Breathed quickly abandoned. Away from the goofy landscapes and nutty characters he went and back to, well, Bloom. But on only one day a week, minus the edge. Like the vanilla Star Trek: Voyager, the shark had jumped immediately for Outland and I tuned out.
Like I said, Breathed can't be counted out. His heartwarming watercolor stories like A Wish for Wings that Work started out as faux children's books largely marketed to Bloom fans. In recent years he moved entirely to serve a younger audience, on some projects providing illustration only.
So Breathed is none the less for experience, artistically or substantively. Opus was Breathed's dearest fictional creation, and the comic strip is where he is known best, so we could very well be in for a treat with Opus.