Bloom County Comic Strip (1980-1989)

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Bloom County is an American comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which originally ran from December 8, 1980, until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in Middle America, where children often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where animals can talk.

This community is for Bloom County and associated media from 1980-1989, the life of the original strip.
As this is a re live the media as it was released community, do not post strips that were released after the date of the most recent strip posted (the day's date in 1982 for 2025, 1983 in 2026 etc).
Additional media posted should be limited to 3 items per day as to not spam. If you have more items to post beyond that add it to your post rather than making additional posts.

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nokturne213@sopuli.xyz

nocturne@piefed.social

nocturne@slrpnk.net

4 October 1983 (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by nocturne@slrpnk.net to c/bloomcounty@sopuli.xyz

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[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Strange. I just don't remember this whole sequence.

Question is-- did my big city East Coast paper carry B.C.? I think so. Did the paper arrive before I left for school? I think so. Did I typically have time to read the comics page? (because that was always my first impulse) I think so?

Actually I think maybe I would read the paper after getting back from school, but back in 1983 I also remember staying late at the computer lab. Like, very late. A very kind teacher would let us lock up after ourselves, until eventually some joker wound up frying one of the machines.

[–] nocturne@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I do not really remember this story line either, but I think I have only read Toons for Our Times twice, with this being the 3rd.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

I had one of the big compendiums that came out a couple years later, which I picked up at uni closer to the end of the decade. Come to think of it, I wasn't very familiar with the strip, and decided to take a chance. The obvious thing was to get over the Doonesbury influence before realizing that the strip was worlds different.

One thing I read earlier is that B.C. only ran in ~15 major newspapers in 1982, but jumped to ~45 in '83, much of that evidently down to Trudeau taking a hiatus that year. So actually the Doonesbury similarity greatly helped Breathed, from what I understand.

A few years later (maybe early 90's?) I remember a copycat (but still pretty good) strip which echoed B.C.'s early days. I think it was called... "X's Swamp" or "X's Marsh" or something like that. It had characters like Portnoy and ordinary-level woodland-type creatures IIRC.