Today, we look at how Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County gave us a very 1980s version of Christmas.
It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and three Christmas-themed comics from that strip.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Now, Day 4 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
The featured strip today is Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County
WHAT WAS BLOOM COUNTY?
While he was attending the University of Texas in the late 1970s, Berkeley Breathed started a comic strip at the college newspaper called The Academia Waltz, starring a group of college students, and examining both their lives and the larger world of news and pop culture around them. It was so well-received that Breathed was approached about launching his own nationally syndicated comic strip that launched in late 1980 called Bloom County. The initial concept of the strip was a young boy named Milo Bloom living in Middle America, dealing with life and the wacky residents of the boarding house that his family ran.
That changed when Breathed brought in one of the former college students from his earlier strip, the conservative, yuppie Steve Dallas (soon after, Breathed also brought in the wheelchair-using Vietnam veteran, Cutter John, to the strip, but Steve was a bigger part of the strip). At almost the same time Steve was added, we also met Michael Binkley, a neurotic classmate of Milo. Milo was now the straight man for jokes about the conservative Steve and the neurotic Binkley. The strip then began to add anthropomorphic animals to the cast, like the conservative rabbit, Hodge-Podge, the obnoxious groundhog, Portnoy, the wacky Garfield spoof, Bill the Cat, and, most importantly, the idealistic penguin, Opus.
Opus' haplessness mixed with his hopefulness made him an endearing character and he was soon the lead of the strip. Bill the Cat's inability to speak allowed Brethed to use him as a sort of stand-in for all sorts of stories, making Bill the Cat (a satire of the popularity of Jim Davis' hit character, Garfield) a major part of the strip, as well, and also ironically making him ALSO successful as a licensed character (which was funny because he was invented to make fun of how licensed Garfield was). The last major addition to the cast was Oliver Wendell Jones, a nerdy classmate of Milo and Binkley's who was a computer genius.
The comic strip lasted basically the length of both the decade of the 1980s, as well as the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and both the culture of the decade and specifically the politics of the Reagan administration became the focus of the strip. The rampant consumerism of the decade was a particular target of satire, especially at Christmastime.
HOW WERE BLOOM COUNTY'S CHRISTMASES DISTINCTIVELY 1980s?
Like few other cartoonists of the era (although his contemporary, Bill Watterson, was another good example of a cartoonist doing the same sort of thing), Breathed dealt with metafictional narratives in his comics, as characters routinely broke the fourth wall. In this 1983 strip, Hodge-Podge decries the rank sentimentality that he sees common in the Christmas comic strips of the era (this comic literally ran on Christmas day), so he insists that this comic strip will be devoid of all color. However, he is slowly pulled into a colorful Christmas scene against his will...
There's also a clever joke about the ACLU perhaps objecting to their use of a nativity scene.
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As noted, the initial concept of Bill the Cat was to mock how commercialized Garfield had become in the 1980s, so the joke with Bill the Cat was for Breathed to act like he was HIGHLY commercial while, you know, NOT being a very commercial character. The irony, as noted before, is that he ultimately DID become very popular, and thus sort of became the very thing he was created to mock. In any event, in this 1985 gag that ran over two weeks at Christmastime, Breathed got to do a series of good catalog gags for a piece involving a Bill the Cat catalog for fans. The gun jokes in 1985 are sadly just as applicable in 2022 as they were in 1985.
Jeane Kirkpatrick was a former Democrat who became extremely conservative and part of Reagan's administration. It was Kirkpatrick who pushed the United States to support authoritarian governments if it meant that those governments would help the United States against Communism. By this point in time, she had become a conservative columnist.
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The gag continues the next week, with a nice recurring bit about how much of a loser Opus was, as well as some more jokes about how commercial Bill is.
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One of the final Christmas strips of the comic (which was later rebooted in 2015 and still appears new, on occasion) involves the three boys and Opus discussing their Christmas wishes, and Opus ptus the others to shame with his eloquent hope for more human dignity.
At the end, of course, he also referenced a true life story about how then-Secretary of the State George Shultz (who only passed away last year, at the age of 1000), had a tiger tattooed on his butt, in honor of his alma mater, the Princeton Tigers..
Click here for a larger version of the comic.
By the way, there was a 1991 Bloom County Christmas special, where Opus meets Santa Claus. That is what I used for the featured image for this piece.