Welcome, to Bloom County
The Basics – from Wikipedia:
Bloom County is an American comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which originally ran from December 8, 1980, until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in Middle America, where children often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where animals can talk.
On July 12, 2015, Breathed started drawing Bloom County again. The first revived strip was published via Facebook on July 13, 2015.
Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987, making him only the second (and so far last) comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer; the other was Garry Trudeau, whose work has influenced Breathed.
What it Meant/Means to Me
By the time I discovered Bloom County in 1986 (I was 16), I had already developed a very cynical view of life. Suffering through coming out at 14 in a town of 999 people let me know fairly early that humanity, for the most part, were a bunch of under-educated sheep not really interested in learning anything new beyond age 17, and by all means they were to avoid anything that might cause even the slightest discomfort in day to day life.
Little gumption, no empathy, selfish, whiny. In a nutshell, humans sucked. For the most part I still think they do.
Bloom County was the only thing I could find that I could relate to and call my own. No one my age in my area was reading it, and I found a home as a resident (mentally anyway) of Bloom County and Milo’s Meadow.
Quite frankly, it saved me, in ways Berkley Breathed will never know.
And it continues to to this day.
Bloom County - The Complete Digital Library
Volume 1 of 9 – Parts 1 Through 4 – Complete
So where are the other 8 volumes?
well, here’s the deal …
Copyright.
Yup, good old copyright.
Though I don’t think Berkley Breathed will care too much that I’ve publicly shared an entire year of his earliest blood sweat and tears, I have a feeling he might have an opinion on the sharing of all 9 years of it.
Also, the appearance of Bloom County is meant to be an opportunity to for you to learn a little about me, while at the same time demonstrating my skill-set as a web developer.
Sorry gang, but that’s all ya get. Hopefully it will encourage you to hit that good old Amazon and spend a few of your blood sweat and tears pennies on the books by Breathed that are available there, including the Bloom County volumes.
isn’t that shelf setup the shit though!
🙂
