Bloom County Comics

Fun fact- the first Opus anything I ever encountered was the storybook this special was based off of. I had NO idea that it received a TV movie, and had even less knowledge of the fact that it was spunoff from Berkley Breathed’s Bloom County comic strip.

Berke Breathed (an icon to ‘80s kids like me … I traced images of Milo and Binkley out of Bloom County Babylon and made earrings out of them. No, there are no pictures) spoke to Fresh Air’s Sam Briger a few days ago about bringing back his beloved strip after 30 years – part of it, he said, was in reaction to the controversial portrayal of Atticus Finch in Go Set a Watchman. Breathed was worried that this was going to kill off the character in the imagination of readers. And, he said, it made him reconsider his own characters.

So this summer, just a couple months ago when Go Set A Watchman was causing an uproar, I went back to my files and I pulled an old fan letter from years ago. It says “Dear Mr. Breathed, this is a plea from a dotty old lady and from others not dotty at all. Please don’t shut down Opus. Can’t you at least give him a reprieve? Opus is simply the best comic strip there is and depriving him of life is murder - a hard word to describe an obliteration of your creation. But Opus is real. He lives. Harper Lee, Monroeville, Ala.”

WE HEARTILY CONCUR. Also, it is a great regret of my teenage years that I never bought this t-shirt: