Book-A-Day 2018 #142: Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 4: 1987-1987 by Berkeley Breathed

I am reading this series all backwards and sideways, and slowly to boot: I started with Volume Two back in 2011, backed up to Volume One the next year, and took six more years to get to this one, with numbers three and five still waiting. Of course, I did read these strips the old-fashioned way the first time around, once a day in an actual printed newspaper, so maybe that's not a problem.

And any book should stand on its own at least somewhat, right?

Anyway, this is solidly in the middle of Bloom County's run, heading into the back half of the '80s and with the winds of the 1988 election beginning to stir in the background. (Bloom County was always a political strip, somewhat in the oblique Pogo vein -- changing things enough to be deniable, and not directly attacking anyone by name on-panel.)

At this point, I should probably sling in a link and the actual title of what I'm calling "this book" -- so here you go: Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume Four: 1986-1987.

Berkeley Breathed was never the most restrained or subtle comics-maker; the plotlines here skitter around like some rustic metaphor, with little lasting more than a week. It always felt like Bloom County had big plotlines, but they were smash-bam things, sometimes returning a few times over the course of a month but never sticking around for long.

So this book has the epic Wedding of Opus plot -- parceled out, a week or so at a time, over close to a year -- and, delivered similarly, the sordid history of the band known both as Deathtongue and Billy & the Boingers. Before that, Billy the Cat sent to Russia as part of a spy swap with Cutter John, and then gets back to Bloom County in some random way because he's part of the cast.

It was all very loose and random -- that was the great appeal of Bloom County. It was a strip where anything could happen on a given day, and did a lot of the time. It wasalso  pretty zeitgesit-y along the way, as evidenced by all of the annotations, by either Breathed or some overworked editor at the Library of American Comics, explaining who Edwin Meese and Fawn Hall were and what was the deal with those giant first-generation satellite dishes.

If you were around at the time, it's a fun reminder that crazy isn't limited to one generation (or Presidential administration), even if the media landscape has sped up a lot over the past thirty years. I'm not sure what Bloom County reads like for anyone under the age of about forty, though: I have a sense it might be like Smokey Stover is to all of us now, a manic dive into something that looks thrilling but doesn't correspond at all to the way we view the current world.

But nostalgia publishing projects are for old people like me, anyway, so this one certainly does the job. It's a well-designed and put-together book that showcases a unique strip, with enough context that a new reader isn't completely at sea.