Customer Reviews

Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984 (Bloom County Library)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection begins right where the last collection leaves off. It has many more strip then the first one and is has much funnier ones. Definitely recommend to any fan!

I'll make this brief. This book gets 3 stars for only one reason: They reproduced the artwork poorly! Again!! If you look at my 4 star review and images of Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 1: 1980-1982 (Library of American Comics) you'll see that they screwed up the scans there too. For that volume there were two levels of image quality, bad & worse. "Fortunately", this entire volume is the better of the two (just bad).

This quality is still significantly worse than the original compilations that came out when the strip was still running.

So, take a good look at the better image on that other review (the one with the black star in the panel), and compare it to the original compilation. Detail is still lost. The panel lines are fuzzy. Artwork is not as sharp.

Take a look on every page on this volume, and you'll see a line above the page number. *That* line is fuzzy! I thought that maybe the printing press was just bad, but the page numbers are sharp as a tack. There is only ONE piece of artwork that is sharp. That is on the page near the back that advertises the upcoming third volume. A picture on the lower right shows Opus reading a Penthouse magazine, with the title "Madonna Nude Yet Again" emblazoned on the cover. Ze Meadow Morals Squad (Hodge-Podge, Portnoy & Milo)looms ominously behind him with a baseball bat. Sharp & clear, just as it should be. ALL the artwork in this volume should look as good! IDW: Whatever you did for this piece of art, do it for all the strips!!

I saw the same problems with IDW's reproductions of Terry & the Pirates. I gave them a pass because the art is so old, and they probably had to scan newsprint for many. But here they have the originals!

So why 3 stars instead of 4 like in Volume 1? I was giving them a chance to correct their errors on the second volume & they blew it. I sincerely hope that they fix these problems with volume 3. Is it the editor who is screwing up, or does Berke just not care about the end result? Does he see these volumes as just a cash cow? A lot of the comments written by him in the book suggest that he cares a lot less for his work than his fans. He thinks it's too dated to have any relevance today.

Berke: You're wrong. Go read some old Doonsebury collections. They are even more topical, and they still hold up. Just like your work. When I was a kid, I didn't get your political references, but I still thought it was funny that a cat would fall in love with a woman by the name of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Come on Berke, this is the definitive set. Have IDW put some extra effort to get it right!

On the plus side, There is a lot of strips that had never before made it into a compilation, a lot more commentary by Berke, and even some sketches at the end. The paper quality & binding is as good as the first volume.

Buy it knowing that if you have the original compilations, you should not get rid of them.

This hardcover collects Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" comic strips that originally ran from September 27, 1982 to July 1, 1984. These were previously collected in trade paperback form in the last quarter of "Loose Tails", all of "Toons For Our Times" and the first half of "Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things". Strips appear in sequence, three dailies to a page, with Sunday strips each spanning one full-color page.
Breathed provides annotations throughout the book, explaining both his thoughts about the strips and pop culture references that young readers might find obscure. Ted Koppel provides the forward. The familiar cast of characters is here: Opus, Milo, Binkley, Steve Dallas, Cutter John, Bobbi Harlow, Oliver Wendell Jones, Hodge Podge, Portnoy, etc. Breathed gently satirizes both the political left and right: for example, on page 68, "Bloom Beacon" editor Milo is approached by respective caricatures of a gun zealot and misguided hippie in successive strips.
I got into "Bloom County" a couple years after these strips appeared, devouring the aforementioned trade paperback collections in junior high school. Rereading these strips two decades later revealed some previously unappreciated jokes, such as the fake "Those Darn Feminists" cartoon drawn by "Buckley n' Safire". Some charmingly dated 1980s references inspire nostalgia, but the majority of this material remains culturally relevant. I enjoyed the Volume 1 collection: this material is even better. Very strong cases can be made for both "Calvin and Hobbes" and "The Far Side", but "Bloom County" remains my favorite comic strip of the 1980s.

"YOU WANT IT! YOU NEED IT! THE NEW TURNIP TWIDDLER AND TOMATO SCRAMBLER BY RONCO!!!!"

No current comic strip comes close to Bloom County in my opinion in terms of humor and satire. This collection features a skewering of MTV, The Reagan Arms Race, advertising, alcohol, lawyers, movies, and much much more. There are many strips in this volume that never made it to the book collections, and the notations by Breathed are welcome additions to the comics, though I wish there were far more of Breathed's notes.

I did need this book, and I'm glad I have it.

Volume Two of the "Bloom County Complete Library" just couldn't be better. When I was young I was motivated to read the paper primarily for two things: Bloom County and The Far Side. This volume has some of the best strips from Berkeley Breathed's fevered imagination. There's lots of wacky misadventures with Opus and Bill (Ack!) There's tons of frights from Binkley's closet of anxieties (frequently with ghastly nightmares about either the cold war or women;) Steve Dallas is perpetually unable to be presentable in public, and Oliver is still the runaway brain trust that needs intensive parental guidance.

I love that Ted Koppel (!) wrote an introduction to the volume and along the same lines Breathed has lots of comments and notes throughout, plus some things never published before to provide insight into the era and the strip. I was particularly impressed with the positive reception the book got from the Reagan White House: even though Reagan was skewered routinely, Caspar Weinberger actually wrote Breathed a poem and corresponded with him, while Reagan himself called Breathed to laugh about one of the strips where he was portrayed. If only modern Washington could laugh at themselves a bit. (I know, no chance of that, sadly....)

This is a beautiful volume, and I cannot overstate how great this book is...it's a wonderful trip back to a much better time.

I have been a fan of this strip ever since I stumbled across it when I was 15 going through the daily strips because I was bored. I came across the classic Santa strip "A Fat Luke Skywalker"...and lost it.....I showed it to my dad and immediatly it was something that bonded our humor together in an amazing way ever since.

Now it is finally getting the proper archive treatment and the results are gorgeous. I got the first book for Christmas last year and I waited in anticipation for the second book to come out in a planned 5 book series.
Now I am looking forward to book 3 in November.......The book construction is amazing, and even has a cloth bookmark. I really like the design colors too...much thought has been put into this series.

A very special thanks to Mr. Breathed for such an amazing run, the endless hilarity...and characters to love.

Just as IDW Plubishing promised, this collection is just as good as the first one if not better. While it does not have quite as many strips that you may have not seen before, it has more side notes in the margins.

If you have never read Bloom County or even lived through the 80's, you will still enjoy this collection. For the outdated jokes (one which includes Andy Gibbs name), there are side notes explaining who or what the material is. And, as Mr. Breathed notes, much of the same political issues are still here today - just different names. If nothing else, there are more Bill the Cat strips in this book than in Loose Tails, Penguin Dreams, etc.

I have to say one thing about Bloom County and Mr. Breathed. I am a diehard, red-state, Rush Limbaugh listening, Ronald Reagan admirer (he was my Commander in Chief while I was in the military). Mr. Breathed is an animal rights, environmentalist liberal. And I love his work!!! Unlike many of the liberal entertainers today (Tradeau, Matt Groening, Seth MacFarlaine), Mr. Breathed delivers his humor tastefully. He is not vicious about it (unlike those who I mentioned). Even Reagan asked for signed copies of some of the strips. Mr. Breathed even picked on his "own people" at times. I believe in equal opportunity offenders!

This collection is definitely for Bloom County fans. It is also for those who are new to it. Thank you, IDW Publishing, for putting this together.

A real walk down memory lane for those of us who came of age in the 80's, it's great to see this stuff in such great form. Included are quite a few strips which for whatever reasons were not included in earlier collections, plus a few where Breathed reworked the art for the collections, now seen as they originally were for the first time since they appeared on the comics page. A major improvement from the first volume is that the number of historical footnotes has been seriously reduced in favor of more comments from Breathed himself about what was happening as the strip developed. I've a feeling these will be of more interest to most buyers than reminders of who Princess Diana was. I knocked off a star (should be a half-star, really) for some of the "extras" near the back, many of which are barely more than almost-blank pieces of "strip paper" with a few scribbles on them (a partially-formed head of Steve Dallas, assorted bits of word balloons, etc.) which are supposed to give a hint at the creative process but which struck me as filler, not really doing much to help us see how things worked in Breathed's fevered brain. Highly recommended for old fans, 80's kids who missed this stuff first time around and people who just like good comics.

This volume is just as terrific as volume one of Breathed's classic creation. What makes this perhaps a bit better than the earlier volume is witnessing the characters' evolution and the wry humor that continues to escalate throughout the pages.

These volumes collect the topical weirdness that captivated so many hearts and minds. Part of the fun in reading these lies in the wayback-machine exercise of recalling the Reagan era. Many of the newsmakers and news headlines of the time sound unfamiliar now, so Breathed has added footnotes explaining who and what his strip lampooned (or sometimes harpooned).

The strip had matured by the period this volume covers, bringing out some its beloved themes and characters. That includes Yaz Pistachio, the winsome and Feiffer-esque gamine and personal favorite. The Anxiety Closets, with Binkley's foremost, develop nicely, as does the Starchair Enterpoop. Greenpeace, 1980s rock chicks, yellow journalism, and more mundane absurdities appear too. In fact, it's quite amazing to see how well these characters fit today's headlines despite the strip's reputation for topical humor.

Like Pogo, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side, Bloom County has a lasting place in American culture. I'm happy to see it getting the respect it so richly deserves.

- wiredweird