Bloom County Returns!

It was with great joy that I read on Facebook today that Berkeley Breathed was reviving his cartoon strip, Bloom County. The comic page in the newspaper has been a wasteland of unfunny humor since Breathed decided to shelve the strip 25 years ago. The 'funnies', as we used to call the comic page as kids, have not been very funny in recent years. It use to be that you could turn from the horror of the front page of a newspaper, the failure of your local sport teams on the sports page, the dismal showing of your stock in the financial page, and the dearth of entertainment in the movie section, and find something humorous in the funnies. For the past 15 years I have not bothered to turn to the comics page because it is as humorous as the obituaries and not even as compelling a read.When "The Far Side", "Calvin and Hobbs" and "Bloom County" left the funnies, it was a dark day, indeed.

Yesterday, when I sent my weekly work schedule to the parish staff, I noted that I had been a huge fan of the comic strip POGO for as long as Walt Kelly, the cartoonist, wrote and drew it. Kelly had such a great sense of humor, at times, biting politically as he caricaturized political figures of that time as various animals that would wander in and out of the Okefenokee Swamp where his cartoon characters lived.  For example, Spiro Agnew was caricaturized as a hyena and George Wallace as a rooster, dressed in a military uniform riding a white horse backward, grabbing the tale of the horse as a rein and commanding the horse to go forward (while the horse was actually going backward), as one of the cartoon characters remarked, “strange that he (Wallace) would associate himself with that end of a horse.” One of the characters, Churchill LaFemme, a mud turtle, was notoriously superstitious and would make some remark about the 13^th of each month as it occurred throughout the year. In glancing at yesterday’s date, I declared in the grand tradition of Churchill La Femme that “Friday the 13^th comes on a Monday this month.” 

I mourned greatly the day that Walt Kelly died. I miss his humor and the little secrets he would insert into his drawings. E.g. during the 1968 political campaigns, he caricaturized LBJ as a Texas Longhorn Steer who was trying to buy new glasses from Mr. Miggle, the local corner store proprietor. Mr. Miggle has LBJ read an eye chart about which LBJ complained he couldn't make sense of what was written on it. Though the eye chart looked like a mixture of letters at first glance, if you looked at it closely you would see messages like "Go, Go GOP," or "I never really intended to run again." One of Kelly's famous quotes which I have appropriated throughout the years is one from the Vietnam War, in which Pogo says, "God is not dead. God is merely unemployed." During the Nixon/Agnew years, Kelly had Agnew caricaturized as a Hyena who was looking for subversives everywhere and J Edgar Hoover as a Bulldog in a fedora and a trench coat. In one strip, Agnew asked Hoover, "what do you think?", and Hoover replied indignantly, "I think every Tuesday whether I need to or not!" Agnew decides to rid the Okefenokee Swamp of subversives, like Pogo and company, with the local mortician, Sarcaphogus Macabre, a buzzard. As always in the Okefenokee Swamp, whether it be Joe McCarthy from the '50's or Agnew from the 60's, the bad lose and the Good win. In 1968 during that political campaign, I clipped the comic strip from the local newspaper and pasted the strips in a scrap book. Later, I bought the comics in book form from the publisher Simon and Schuster. I found it amazing how often newspaper editors banned his daily strips during that political campaign.

Berkeley Breathed, of all the cartoonists, was the only one who could match Walt Kelly in humor, and political and social commentary. Welcome back, Bloom County! You do my heart and my soul much good. Now if only Gary Hart would revive "The Far Side" life would be close to perfect.