In the six or so years since Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County came out of retirement, the cartoonist has embraced pop culture as a way of helping his jokes land with a generation of internet users so young, they didn’t actually grow up with Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat. Whether it’s cameo appearances by Garfield or Star Wars parodies, the acclaimed cartoonist has brought the Bloom County crew face to face with some of the most enduring characters in pop culture. This week, fans got a chance to see some old friends on the comics page.
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In a strip posted last night, Breathed brought Charlie Brown and Linus from the Peanuts gang to Bloom County. You can see the strip below, even if our telling that kind of spoiled the punchline a bit.
Here you go:
This comes from the same basic structure that saw a number of Bloom County strips that incorporated characters from Calvin and Hobbes, which Breathed did in 2016 after getting permission to use the characters.
Peanuts ended in 2000, after creator Charles Schulz retired, hanging up his pen after working on the adventures of the Charlie Brown gang for almost 50 years. In the time since, Apple has launched a Snoopy TV series, and The Peanuts movie hit theaters, but the gang has rarely appeared in print.
The strip, a blend of political, pop cultural and childlike humor, featured a number of characters including the penguin Opus, who became its icon even had a spinoff strip. While 2015 marked the first time in years that Bloom County had officially returned, Breathed has never completely left behind iconic characters from the world of the strip, particularly Opus the Penguin who has had spinoff strips, a long-form illustrated Christmas story and more over the years.
The original strip ran from 1980 until 1989, and was followed up by the spinoff strips Outland (1989-1995) and Opus (2003-2008). During that time, Breathed also provided art for the movie Secondhand Lions. You can follow new installments of Bloom County on Breathed’s Facebook and Instagram pages, and classic strips on the Bloom County landing page at GoComics.
