Bloom County Complete Library Volume 1

Still love Bloom County. It is like a readable time capsule, but it still makes me laugh. ( )

All the Bloom County strips from 1980 to near the end of 1982, plus some bonus strips from the pre-Bloom County Academia Waltz? Yes please. While the comic itself doesn't start to hit its stride until the second half of this collection (as Breathed himself says, it is with the arrival of Opus that the strip finds its center), this collection is well worth the purchase. Amusing most of the time, laugh-out-loud funny at times. A lot of old political and pop-culture references (with historical information added in on the side of the strips on occasion, in case you don't get a joke because you don't know who, say, Olivia Newton-John is), so I am not sure if this would appeal to those who didn't grow up with the strip. ( )

I faithfully read Berkeley Breathed's strip Bloom County, and the follow-up strips Outland and Opus, every day while it was running. I loved these characters and still do to this day. Breathed's commentary on the events of the day was always a little on the snarky side, but it was always done intelligently. It is clear in these early strips that Breathed is trying to find his voice. There are some characters that you can tell just don't mesh as well with the evolving feel of the strip, and eventually these characters just melt out of existence. It is also fun to see how the characters that did manage to make the cut evolved from their early beginnings. Towards the end of this first volume, which ends in mid 1982, Breathed has clearly found the voice of the strip and his characters and is beginning to hone the comic wit and satire that will eventually make this strip great.

When I heard that they were finally publishing a complete collection of the strips, I was ecstatic. The volume itself is very nicely presented, and the strips look great reprinted. All in all, I believe that there will be five volumes produced altogether, and I'm hoping that these will include the subsequent strips Outland and Opus, as some of these strips have never been reprinted before. ( )

As awesome and subversive as I remember them being and it was so much fun reading new ones I had never read before, and characters that never made it past the first year or so. I do so wish Limekiller had survived the cut and stayed a regular.

I enjoyed most of the side comments, though for the most part I found the ones explaining who the then famous/infamous people were unnecessary and annoying. However, I can fully understand why they were included since a lot of his humor was based on events of the time.

What I would have liked was more comments and explanations about his inspirations and reactions to the individual comments, the few he included were fun but left me wanting more. ( )