The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Comic Strip ‘Bloom County’ Is Back

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Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County, if you’re not among the initiated, was one of the great comic strips of the 1980s—hell, of all time. Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning, it began as a small-town slice-of-life strip before becoming one of the sharpest and funniest political satires of its (fruitful) era, a kind of Doonesbury with talking penguins and dead cat rock stars. Brethed concluded the strip’s run in 1989—with a storyline in which then-burgeoning tycoon Donald Trump bought out the strip and fired its cast—though most of the characters (including star Opus the penguin) reappeared in the Sunday-only spinoffs Outland and Opus.

But a few days ago, when Breathed posted an old college strip on his very active Facebook page, he responded to a fan’s fairly typical “Need to bring back Bloom County!’ comment with a cryptic “Watch this space.” Yesterday, he posted a photo of himself at his computer, drawing Opus into a strip titled “Bloom County 2015” with the comment “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.” (A commenter noted the good timing of a Bloom County return, what with the hilarious political campaign of the strip’s old nemesis Trump, to which Breathed responded, “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing to do with it.”)

And this morning, the fruits of that labor appeared on Breathed’s page:

The first strip of “Bloom County 2015” was accompanied by no comment from Mr. Breathed, so we don’t yet know how frequently it will appear, and if he has any intention of returning Bloom County to newspapers. But let it be said: this is one return of an ’80s artifact than we can fully get behind.