Bloom County: The Complete Library Vol. I (1980-1982)

The Library of American Comics has finally given Bloom County fans what they have been requesting for years – a complete Bloom County collection assembling every daily and Sunday strip.

The first volume of the handsomely bound and illustrated text features a foreword from the author and a fawning introduction by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Camwell. The former can be read as Berke being Berke – grumpy, dismissive, and sarcastic. His potted history explains that Bloom County was created out of his former college strip The Academia Waltz. He then reluctantly gives a handful of found strips ‘barely suitable’ for publication, a few of which were tweaked and re-written for BC.

He also confesses that as a newbie comic strip artist plunged into syndication early on in his career, that he’d lifted ideas from Garry Trudeau (the source of their decades-long beef; Breathed’s acknowledgement of his cryptomnesia is welcome) and that most of the time he was tired to the point of insanity and didn’t know what he was doing. His rough sketches clearly evoke Doonesbury, and some characters are barely recognisable.

However, the plotlines concerning the early residents of the Bloom Boarding House aren’t quite as shambolic as their author seems to think. As a later reader my Bloom County was populated with sentient animals and few humans, something that evolved slowly over the eighties. By the time I began reading, Ma Bloom and the Major had disappeared, leaving Milo bafflingly in charge.

So, starting from the beginning at last, I enjoyed discovering the history of established characters like Binkley, the introduction to Garfield rival Bill the Cat, and geeky black hacker/astronomer Oliver Wendell Holmes. As in later years, strips take a weird, surreal poke at politicians and celebrities.

Cultural and political annotations are included by the Library of American Comics, and Breathed himself steps up to provide asides and comments. Some may seem superfluous but as Mullaney and Camwell note, set the comic into the context of early 1980s America.

Towards the end of the volume, characters seem more stable – both in pencil and in character – planting the Bloom County universe in firmly rooted satire and mirror-reflections of our reality. Plots such as Milo seeking out his true love, Betty Crocker to discover she’s just an adman’s design, or Binkley’s confession to his macho dad that he’d rather take ballet than football, or Cutter John’s masterful reality-dodging by daydreaming his wheelchair is the Starship Enterprise, engage in short bursts, and slowly build up the story over the week. Every strip has a joke, a gag, a smirky moment of ‘aha’!

That so many of the jokes are topical over 20 years later is slightly scary; that they are still cleverly hilarious is what makes this collection necessary.