Customer Reviews

Bloom County: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1: 1980-1982 (Bloom County Library)

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I haven't read most of these strips in over 20 years, and like a lot of people, I'm reading much of this for the first time. These early strips unearth a whole cast of secondary and tertiary characters that were conveniently left out of the early anthologies. Before there was Opus, there was The Major - Milo's Grandfather and landlord of the Bloom County Boarding House. Strips featuring The Major were touched upon in "Loose Tails", but it's surprising to find out here that he and his wife were actually primary characters for most of the strip's first year, with some key story lines devoted to them, such as their accidental stowaway flight on the Space Shuttle.

My major criticism of this book - CENSORED COMICS. That's right, despite what the Editorial Review above reads, some of these comics are definitely censored, and I immediately picked up on three of them (which I verified with my well-worn copy of "Loose Tails"). Bobbi Harlow's mother does not find birth control pills in her daughter's medicine cabinet, she finds just "PILLS", and it completely wrecks the joke. While hunting with his father, Binkley does not open fire on a toilet bowl, he instead decimates a "PECAN TREE", which is infinitely less funny. When one of Cutter John's street races rolls to a gentle stop, he looks up in the sky and does NOT say "Clouds play hell with solar-powered wheelchairs," he says "HECK". C'mon, what are we, 8?? I can only imagine how many of these others are censored.

Breathed even comments on one censored strip in particular, in which a man pointing a gun at Bloom County TV Station owner Ashley Dashley (another character I never knew existed, who made more than a few appearances early on) has the gun erased from the frame due to pressure from the newspapers. Okay...so why not put the unedited version back in here? Cause it does look rather silly for a character to be holding up a hand as if he's pointing a gun, without a gun there.

Beyond that, Breathed's commentary on various strips in the margin is rarely revelatory. Yes, he points out the first-ever appearances of Milo, Opus, Binkley, Bill The Cat, Cutter John, Bobbi Harlow, Steve Dallas, etc., and also occasionally comments on the characters who faded quickly (Rabies The Dog, for instance), but this space is mostly used to explain his dated references, few of which are so obscure that people can't recall them on their own ("Nancy Reagan was President Ronald Reagan's wife", "Phil Donahue was a popular daytime talk show host, the Oprah of his day", "Tip O'Neill was Speaker Of The House") Instead, we could've used a few more facts that AREN'T easy to look up on the internet. For instance, why did it take several months for the first Sunday edition of the strip to debut? How did he come up with Opus' name, which didn't even become attached to the character until he'd appeared about a dozen times?

Between the censored strips, the mediocre commentary, and the poor scans (seriously, did they just use a 80's-era office Xerox machine to run these off?), this is hardly the definitive volume it could be...but it's still the best we're going to get. What the heck, it's Bloom County, it's great...just not as good as it could be.

SUMMARY:
2/3 of book is unpublished material from the early years!
6 strips never before in print anywhere
13 samples of Academia Waltz (Berke Breathed's first strip, whilst in college)
Factoids on sidebar to keep book relevant for future generations
High Quality Construction & Paper
Only one Problem: Image quality not as good as "Loose Tails"

STORY:
I just finished reading Vol 1 today and it's incredible. It is much, much more than I expected. Because I started reading Bloom Country in about 1985, there are entire story lines that I've missed that were never published before. Binkley's mother is in this book. There are a lot more Limekiller strips, and a lot more strips of the royal family. You finally meet the landlord. Probably 2/3 of this book was not in "Loose Tails". And this book doesn't even get all the way through "Loose Tails"!

CLOSER TO AUTHOR'S INTENT
Additionally, I noticed that some of the lines changed. I think some have been restored to their original lines before an editor got to them. Case in point: when Opus calls in to Donahue, the punch line in "Loose Tails" was that the show was on Nun beating. In Vol.1 , the punch line is Husband Beating. Looking at booth, it would appear that "Loose Tails" was doctored.

PHYSCIAL BOOK CONSTRUCTION
It's nearly perfect. It's in chronological order, and the Sunday strips' color are very good.
It's not too heavy, like the The Complete Far Side 1980-1994 (2 vol set), The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3) and Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert collections. The pages are very thick and sturdy. Are they archival? I'd have to test their ph, but I think it'll last a long time. There's even a built in bookmark.

NOT SCANNED CORRECTLY
The ONLY thing keeping me from giving this book 5 stars, is the fact that the image quality is not as good as the original compilation, "Loose Tails" by Little, Brown (out of print). Even though they mention the quality being lower for some of the older strips, I can't give them a pass on this, because I have better copies of many of the strips myself! (again, Loose Tails)

I will attempt to upload close-up comparisons of a portion of one panel of Vol.1 & Loose Tails. Please note that these images are part of this review, and therefore are allowed according to the copyrights listed on both "Loose Tails" and this publication.

Most strips in this collection are decent, but feel a little fuzzy. This is something you'll probably only notice if you have this collection side by side with "Loose Tails". However, some strips are truly bad.

Cases in point of two of the poorer scans:
Vol 1 pg: 172 punch line "Leaving a trail of slime wherev-". Compare to "Loose Tails" on page 24.
Vol 1 pg: 198 punch line "Boo". Compare to "Loose Tails" pg 47

Other printing notes:
Straight lines above the page numbers are halftone, and therefore are also fuzzy.
Blacks are not 100% black, but a little lighter. Could be because of matte paper.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3), The Complete Far Side 1980-1994 (2 vol set) & Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert do not suffer from any of these problems.

Berke; please insist that they fix this problem in the second printing (yes, I'll buy it, too) and all further volumes!

I hate to sound like a know-it-all, but when I published an independent comic book with a friend, we were able to test different scanning techniques for comic art. So, these notes below are for the publisher. They really, really need to fix this for their second printing of the book, and certainly, ALL future editions of the complete library need to have this fixed!!

Publisher: Whatever resolution you scanned the images, triple it! For the daily strips, it looks like you scanned the original artwork with the grayscale setting, then converted it to black & white, and printed it halftone. You need to scan them in Black & White (each pixel is either black or white, and no gray scale). To make this work, the scanning resolution needs to be really, really high! For a color or gray scale image, you can usually get away with 300 dpi. This will NOT work for Black and white scans!! You should scan the original artwork (the stuff Berke drew, NOT from another compilation or newspaper) at least at 800 dpi before you reduce them! The final resolution needs to be anywhere from 800 - 1600 dpi. If you need better copies, I'll lend you my copy of "Loose Tails"! Your collection is going to be the definitive collection of Bloom County! Do it for posterity! Do it for the children!

Yes, I'm a fanboy, but I assure you, I wasn't one of the people who camped in front of Berke's house waiting for this to come out (really!)

I'm not sure what I expected from this book, having collected (over the years) every single BLOOM COUNTY book ever printed. I figured this new book wouldn't offer anything new, really, except for maybe some Berke Breathed commentary. But as I started reading, I noticed some strips that I didn't remember from the older collections, and yet they seemed vaguely familiar. Sure enough, after some back-to-back comparisons with books such as BLOOM COUNTY BABYLON, I've found that there are a great many strips here that have never been collected. We haven't seen a lot of these since they were originally in newspapers. I'm blown away by how "new" an experience this is. We'll see if that holds true for later strips, when BLOOM COUNTY really developed its personality. But these early strips are a revelation. Plus, there's a selection of Breathed's ACADEMIA WALTZ college strip. (Contrary to what he says about them in the book, I would really love a full collection of those too. They sound quite subversive.)

I do wish Breathed had offered more strip-by-strip commentary about his thoughts behind them. As they are, they're VERY sparse. The book's historical-context notes are nice to have, too, if obvious for an old guy like me.

When I moved to Dallas from semi-rural North Carolina to attend college, of course, it was a culture shock in so many ways. And our campus newspaper at SMU, much to the dismay of many, published the charmingly nihilistic and always incisive "Bloom County" in every edition. I don't remember any book or idea that would provoke so much discussion and well-meaning disagreement around lunch tables and dorm rooms. Between the almost Hamlet-esque Opus (and his hilariously unrequited love for Connie Chung), the hopelessly vapid Steve Dallas, and Darwinian throwback Bill the Cat, just to name three, you would be hard pressed to find a cartoon strip that had such a calvacade of evolving, developing characters. Does this mean that "Bloom County" is the "best" comic strip ever? No, but when you talk about it in the same breath as you might talk about "Peanuts" or "The Far Side," or even the old ones like "Prince Valiant," "The Phantom," and "Dick Tracy," the label "best" as with all such comparisons fails to work. When you are that good, comparisons simply do not matter in the best of all possible ways.

But, in this volume, the fascinating thing is watching how Breathed evolved his strip from the first rough prints to the style and wit so familiar to mid to late 1980's "Bloom County" fans. I have never seen most of this work before, and it was a treat to see how the "Bloom County" universe just kind of "fell into place" over time in Breathed's almost organic trial and error approach to cartooning. That primer alone justifies the price of the book, especially, I would think, to advertising or art students, indeed anyone who deals with the graphic arts in some way or just appreciates the form. I note that the one negative reviewer (to date) in this thread found this jarring, the rough-hewn moving to the more constructed and deliberate. I can see how this would be so, and the criticism is a valid one from a certain point of view, but I think this is the wrong approach to the overall work.

I am so happy a friend of mine allowed to borrow this gem. In the reminding, it let me laugh and become reacquainted with a roster of some of the best cartoon characters yet created and some of the snappiest cartoon dialogue ever written in the long history of that great American art form, the "funny pages." For all of you old "Bloom County" fans out there, you finally have an anthology worthy of your time and money, as well as Breathed's great talent.

RECOMMEND, no reservation.

Complaining about print quality here makes no sense to me. What kind of print quality did we read these with over a quarter century ago on pulpy newspaper? In any case, I can discern absolutely no loss of quality in the reproduction; they look fine to me.

Certainly I would have preferred a larger format, but again, this represents how they were published in most papers originally, which is why Watterston held out for Calvin, imposing sizes unseen since the Thirties Golden age. See his poorly bound The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes) (v. 1, 2, 3).

I can only see one very bizarre printing, and that is the end of the bear costume episode with Limekiller, which really seems inked by an amateur with a heavy Paper Mate Flair Tip-Guard Medium Tip Felt Porous Pens, 2 Black Pens(8432452PP) on a late night flight after three martinis. The rest of the strips are delicately lined and inked. The sight of those female legs upon that wheel-chaired lap are to die for, and the work of as real a draftsmen as Rembrandt: Master of the Portrait (Discoveries).

It is the content after all we read these for. The reference to a hospital bill at eleven thousand dollars reads true today, although the bill should be multiplied by ten at least. It is this kind of biting political comment we love him for, although he admittedly in the liner notes made compromises from the beginning. See his early college strips for what lies beneath.

This is my only complaint. The first time I read this was in a dimmer light, and those several liner notes are printed in a tiny font in a light color against similarly toned background. This is not a problem as most of those liner notes are not by BB and are useless. The ones by BB himself are mildly interesting, however, as long as you realize both in these notes and in his foreword he is having us on; he is joking like Buck Mulligan in Ulysses (Gabler Edition); he is ironic and just plain lying to amuse himself. Dudes, he is a comic, and a comic strip writer. The liner notes not by BB himself are rather odd; often they identify people and events well known to everyone, in the most general and thus erroneous way, and absolutely ignore items and references and people far more obscure and unknown. We could very well have done without these intermittent liner notes so difficult to read due to the font and its color; if something unknown comes up, we can look it up on wikipedia, but most often the humor is independent of such cultural background in any case!

It is very interesting to read the few selections from his college strip which got him started. Even though he claims (jokingly?) never to have read any other comic strip than Doonesbury, the earliest of these strips resemble strongly Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966).

Worth reading again for the memories of over a quarter century ago, this bright and consoling beacon in our darkest days of doom. Worth reading for the reflections it brings upon our present zeitgeist, and reading again and again. Unlike the Watterston complete collection, it endures repeated readings, a true hardcover work, not poorly glued like Watterston. But be sure to sign up now to receive Bloom County: Complete Library Volume 2 in early 2010, as the saga continues. I love this first volume to see how the strip might have developed, with the promising interplay amongst the residents of the boarding house. The Russian disappears with much humor that might have been; the cigar smoking dog, who was to be the main figure, disappears altogether (was it the nicotine addiction?) without a trace, as if Calvin lost Hobbes and never mentioned it. Limekiller, what, gets killed? By Gary Trudeau? and then the evolution of that complex Binckley . . . the one who so concerns his poor father, who first acquires a pet penguin, svelte, with small beak and reasonable sized eyes, that early penguin who comes and reappears six months later, quietly staring out pleadingly at the reader for an explanation of the oddities all around . . .

Get this, and prepare for volume two. It is well worth your while within this present gathering darkness . . .

Unlike the old anthologies such as "Loose Tails", this includes every Bloom County single strip ever published. It covers story lines I hadn't known existed, such as when Milo's grandparents mistake the space shuttle Columbia for a Disney World ride and end up being launched into space, or Ted Turner analogue Ashley Dashley III starting a TV network in town. It also features Pop-Up Video-style comments from Berke himself as well as cultural reference explanations on a per-strip basis, an integral ribbon bookmark, and doesn't group the Sunday strips into a massive block like the old anthologies did. There's even a sampling of the strip's predecessor "The Academia Waltz," which featured early versions of Steve Dallas and Cutter John. You'd be crazy not to get this.

I grew up on Bloom County. It's been wonderful to go back and read the strips in their original order and in such a great edition. As I've been rereading these strips it's a little sad, and a little funny to see how history is repeating itself. Most political satire becomes out dated in ten years, but not Bloom County. I'll be able to enjoy this for along time, as well as see where we are repeating some of the same mistakes, we made in the 80's. It reminds me of Bill coughing up a fur ball. I can't wait until Volume Two comes out.

Bloom County brought me into the adult world of political and broad social events. I tried reading Doonesbury (which I later grew to love, also) but it was a little too over my head at 13 years old. A buddie's brother came back from boot camp the first Bloom County book and I was hooked. Funny without being too "inside-baseball". I learned that independent thought was more important than labeling yourself or locking into either ideological spectrum.

This book is great as it let's me read all the strips I missed in the early days. Tons of stuff I(and everybody else) have(has)never seen including the college strips that started it all and "reserve" strips that never saw the light of day.

I'll be collecting every volume as they come out!!!

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.

I also liked the size of the book, since they are spreading this out over several volumes you don't end up with as overwhelming large a book as other compilations have ended up being.

December 8, 1980, is perhaps most remembered for one terrible event: The murder of John Lennon on the sidewalk in front of his home building in New York City. That singular event, the death of one of the greatest pop musicians of all time and the harbinger of the ending of a generation, coincided with something else in the newspaper that day, something that would wind up defining the new generation to come: Bloom County, a small strip with seemingly small ambitions, debuted.

That first strip probably wouldn't be too memorable if it weren't included here, in BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLETE LIBRARY, Volume One: 1980-1982, the first of five volumes that will collect the entire catalogue of the legendary comic strip. It wasn't until later --- January 28, 1982, to be exact --- that the strip would begin to fully congeal into the great source of humor, commentary, political awareness and astute observations that it became known for. Berkeley Breathed, the creator of the series, writes in the margins next to that day's strip, "Opus. Center found, the fog clearing. The strip had found its voice, its tone and its point of view."

The introduction of Opus the penguin was the glue the strip needed to hold its world together. With that, Breathed was able to embark on an ingenious journey across the decade. Along with the other stars of the strip --- Milo, the erstwhile reporter; Binkley, the celebrity-obsessed neurotic; Steve Dallas, the conservative lawyer; Cutter John, the stoic Vietnam vet; Bill the Cat, the frenzied, harried rock star; and the assorted rest --- he set out to interpret the wild world of the '80s for us all. And he succeeded. The Bloom County filter made the world make more sense somehow.

The brilliance of Bloom County shines through in so many ways, but perhaps most notable is that this collection doesn't seem dated in the slightest (oh, perhaps a strip here and there, but you'd really have to nitpick to mind, and anyway, Breathed has included several helpful spreads offering headlines from the times to help you get yourself firmly rooted back in the day).

Can you go back home to a comic strip and a time that have both signed off so very long ago? In small ways, yes. The handsome BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLETE LIBRARY makes the trip not only possible in some measures, but it also makes it a pure joy. Brilliance like Bloom County elevated the art form of the comic strip. It's wonderful to see it getting such respect.

--- Reviewed by John Hogan