Do any of you remember or care about Opus? I truly miss him since he left the comics pages a year ago, November 2, 2008.
He first appeared in the very funny, very subversive comic strip Bloom County, by Berke Breathed. Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.
The first syndicated strip was Bloom County, but the author, just like his name, liked to take breathers, putting his 3 series of strips on extended hiatus (hiati?). When we next saw Opus, he was in a strip called Outland, which carried over some of the characters from BC. After another years-long hiatus, Opus came back stronger than ever in a Sunday-only colour strip called Opus.
While Opus and the strips were never as big as Snoopy and Peanuts (i.e. they were likely not intended for the mainstream in the way Peanuts was), there is a subversive sophistication in there, buried among the dubious life choices (and lackadaisical hygiene habits) of Bill the Cat, that even Doonesbury cannot match. Many of the strips were overtly political, in their own covert way. Like many cartoonists, sometimes Breathed used a hammer when a little nut-cracker would do... but his work really is genius in the creation of a complete, alternate reality in which a penguin wore underwear and a shower cap, dependent on whether he was in his bed or in the shower, and a mangy cat seemed either drunk, at all times, or shall we say, was mentally differently-abled. In this same universe that was definitely the United States, Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush would appear. In the later years, Dick Cheney was depicted hiding under beds as the boogie-man.
Similar to many successful strips, there was also a lot of merchandising available. One time, my friend Blair, in Vancouver, gave me the shower cap-wearing Opus doll (plush toy actually). And I have another one that a sales lady (I think it was Carlton Cards) gave me when I was at a college store convention. I admired it, sincerely, and was not trying to finangle it, and she insisted I have it. With the move from Vancouver to Nova Scotia, I've lost track of the first one, but the second one sits on top of my fridge.
These covers are from the first two collections, c. 1983 and '84.
The cartoons are from Bloom County: Loose Tails, the first collection in 1983.
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