I've been rereading my Bloom County books. They're holding up quite well, I feel, no matter how 80s zeitgeist they are. I remember looking through Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things in my bookstore back in Oslo, never having heard of Bloom County before. The Michael Jackson glove strip clinched the deal and I bought the book. The strip peaked in the next book, Billy and The Boingers Bootleg, and then it unfortunately started going downhill in the next one, Tales Too Ticklish to Tell, with Breathed doing a lot of close-ups and changing the angle in each panel for no reason. If it aint broke, don't fix it.
That's funny--I've just been revisiting Bloom County myself. I think I probably discovered the strip when I was about 8 or 9--1983 or '84. At that time, my family would spend a few weeks each summer visiting my grandparents in upstate New York, where the strip ran in their local paper. I'm sure many of the jokes at the time went over my head, but it still hooked me (Bill the Cat! "Ack!"). Later, my grandmother would clip the strips from the paper and keep them for me. So I very much associate it with my childhood, and summers particularly, and it's become woven into the memories of that time for me. I would say it's one of my three favourite newspaper comics of all time, along with Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes.
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