Wednesday, February 16, 2022

40+ years after its comic strip debut, Bloom County gets the animated series treatment


I was a huge fan of Bloom County in the 1980's and had a bunch of the books, and now word comes that an animated series is in the works. If you're unfamiliar with Bloom County and its offbeat creator Berkeley Breathed, let Wikipedia explain it for you:

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.

On July 12, 2015, Breathed started drawing Bloom County again. The first revived strip was pubished via Facebook on July 13, 2015.

Bloom County was so firmly rooted in the eighties it's hard to imagine it finally getting to TV forty years later. I scrolled through a few of the current Facebook comics and couldn't really get a feel for its updated sensibilities. It will be interesting to see how the animated series handles the 2020's. Will it be sharp, smart satire? Uber-woke? It's hard to say. Breathed won a Pulitzer for Bloom County back in the 80's, so he's no lightweight in the writing department. I guess time will tell, but I'd watch the hell out of a non-PC Bloom County.

No comments: