Opus Dei
by Adam Finley

Always political, "Bloom County" relied on that tension to deliver Breathed's daily comment on 1980s America, and readers rarely missed the message. During the '88 election, for example, Opus frantically dealt with the public and special interest groups while Bill sat catatonic, belting out his trademark "thhppt" and occasionally gaining semi-consciousness and letting loose on the neighbors with a sub-machine gun.

Nevertheless, Bill has been largely sidelined, despite the ocassional cameo by his mangy head, bulging eyeballs, and perpetually extruded tongue, usually peering out from the left side of the first panel. And so Bill the Cat devotees are left to wonder why. And if Breathed truly plans to bring back only one half of his trademark duo and still make it a fresh, political satire, how exactly does he intend to do it?

When Breathed followed "Bloom County" with "Outland" in the early 1990s, he was quick to bring both Opus and Bill to the fold. This could be chalked up to Breathed using his two most popular characters to lure "Bloom County" fans to his new venture, but then this is a man willing to pull the plug on one of the most popular comic strips of the last two decades. As he wrote in the introduction to the "Bloom County" collection "Classics of Western Literature," trying to explain the comic's departure:

I have grown stubbornly affectionate toward my characters, and I have little desire to see Opus, Bill the Cat, and others disappear from my life. But after ten years of squeezing Bloom Countians into smudgy, postage-stamp-sized stories, I thought it might be more comfortable for all concerned if we took a powder from the daily pages. It is to be hoped that more expansive environments await.

Blame it on the "death of irony" or some other such nonsense, but the end of "Bloom County" and the exodus of its citizens was a sure sign that times were changing, and that if irony wasn't dead, it had at least been put under heavy sedation. The final "Bloom County" strip showed a few of the more familiar Bloom County haunts left abandoned, and a gradual color fade ending with Opus dragging a suitcase off into oblivion.

It was one of the medium's most heartbreaking moments, and it clearly showed how Breathed would rather have his characters exist in limbo than within the constrictive confines of a modern newspaper. Moreover, it proved just how important Breathed's two-dimensional characters were in helping him express his outrage at the world around him, an outrage that has obviously been re-ignited by the paranoia and rampant jingoism that followed Sept. 11, 2001. As he explained to Salon in November, "I left in 1995 with things properly, safely dull, and couldn't imagine why anyone would feel it necessary again to start behaving ridiculously. It would have been at least courteous of the Republicans to warn a few of us inclined to retire our ink-swords that they had King George waiting in his zoom-zoom jetsuit aching to start the Crusades again." Breathed, at least at the strip's outset, seemed to believe he could achieve this with his penguin friend alone.

Nevertheless, there's already evidence that even he understands that Opus alone is a nonstarter. Despite the relative absence of Bill the Cat, elements of "Bloom County" have already begun to seep into "Opus," most notably Breathed's knack for turning public and political figures into characters even more cartoony than his own. And Opus' recent lamenting of his "dandelions in the sun far away," a typical "Bloom County" construction, may be signaling a return to the kind of microcosm that was once "Bloom County."

If Bill's unheralded cameo on the strip's masthead is a sample of what's to come, than we certainly shouldn't make any judgments about "Opus" or its direction just yet. It could be as compelling as the reunion of Martin and Lewis, though within Breathed's limitless artistic vision, the reunion of Opus and Bill would be something much more cosmically harmonious, like a gourmet dinner of Tender Vittles and herring heads.