Good stuff This is an appropriately titled tome with some of the best of Bloom County. A must for any BC fan.
Some of the funniest social commentary ever written If you remember the eighties, this book, the second collection from the "Bloom County" syndicated comic strip will be hysterically funny. If you do not remember the eighties, then it will just be funny. No one captured the moods, social movements and absurdity of their combination as well as Breathed did. His exaggerated characters and references to the anxieties of the moment were a dose of reality encased in the fiction of a cartoon strip. I never missed it and neither should you.
The times being the early 1980s The beloved characters all appear. Milo remains well-supplied with nightmares from his anxiety clost, Steve Dallas remains un-supplied with tact or charm, and Opus displays his huge supply of innocent bafflement. Winsome Yaz Pistachios appears a few times, as does Bill the Cat (the anti-Garfield) and Oliver Wendell Jones, computer geek extraordinaire.
The humor is still there, but some of the freshness rubbed off during the quarter-century since these first appeared. Some grey heads will remember Phyllis Schlafly and all the other Reagan-era targets of the Bloom County barbs. The problem with topical humor is that topics change in the real world, but remain frozen on the printed page, becoming gradually more antiquated over time.
No matter. You'll find plenty of timeless humor and maybe a bit of nostalgia between these covers, as well as a reminder of how the early 80s looked to one cartoonist of the era.
-- wiredweird
Easily the funniest comic strip ever. That's really all I can say. It's not my favorite comic strip (that honor belongs to CALVIN AND HOBBES) but it is the laugh-out-loud funniest. BILL THE CAT LIVES!
Bloom County Volume Two These strips aren't just funny. They're laugh out loud, roll on the floor, tears streaming down my face, people coming into the room to see "WHAT-are-you-laughing-at?!" funny.
Berkeley Breathed has created a perfect 'toon universe populated by funny and poignant humans, along with funny and poignant penguins, groundhogs, Bill the Cat and purple critters that hide in your closet of anxieties waiting to grab you as soon as you sleep. Breathed was an absolute genius at seeing some topical issue of the day (circa 1984 for this voume) holding it up to the light so that we could see it just the way that he did, then skewering the thing with what would be the humor equivalent of cupid's arrow.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
