Berkeley Breathed recalls traveling through Johnstown “many years ago” and being struck by “the small-town feel.”

The legendary comic-strip creator says it was the same feel he wanted to instill in his strip “Bloom County.” So I guess we can take some credit for the incredible popularity of “Bloom County,” which made Breathed wealthy and earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

Breathed returns to Johnstown and the Cambria/Somerset region today – in a manner of speaking.

His current comic strip “Opus” – based on a central character from “Bloom County” – makes its debut in The Tribune-Democrat’s Sunday comics pages, along with four other great strips.

“Opus” is joined by three strips – “On a Claire Day,” “Pooch Café” and “One Big Happy” – that fared well in our recent poll of readers. We’re also adding a hot new weekly strip called “Lio.”

A journey through the microfilm here indicates that “Bloom County” was not part of The Tribune-Democrat’s comics lineup during the 1980s.

(Neither was “Calvin and Hobbes,” but it’s too late to correct those apparent oversights!)

For those of you new to Breathed’s work, let me briefly introduce you.

His strip “The Academia Waltz” began in the Daily Texan newspaper in 1978. He was then recruited by The Washington Post to do a nationally syndicated strip.

“Bloom County” was launched on Dec. 8, 1980, and Breathed brought along some of the characters from “Academia Waltz,” including would-be ladies’ man Steve Dallas and wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet Cutter John.

“Bloom County” eventually appeared in more than 1,200 newspapers around the world, and gave us the likes of Milo Bloom, Bill the Cat, Milquetoast the Cockroach and the portly penguin Opus.

In an e-mail interview, Breathed said: “A successful comic character is inevitably an accident, as Opus was. He was meant to last a week in 1982. Go figure. The only thing I can conclude is that a character with longevity has to walk lightly and be versatile enough – and nonthreatening enough – to let the readers project their own personalities onto him or her.”

Despite the popularity of “Bloom County” and Opus, Breathed retired the strip in 1989. He replaced “Bloom County” with the spaced-out Sunday-only cartoon “Outland,” which “recycled some of the Bloom County characters,” according to his Web site. He ended “Outland” in 1995.

The weekly strip “Opus” began in 2003.

It makes its way into the pages of this newspaper today – better late than never.

“Speaking for Opus ... he’s terribly thrilled about finally appearing before the good people of Johnstown,” Breathed said, “but wondering, frankly, how ‘any place that can produce so many potatoes could overlook him for all these years.’ I have no idea what this means.”

Maybe Opus was referring to Ebensburg?

Or maybe Breathed was pulling my leg.

“I’m on the record in calling for the Johnstown Inclined Plane to be made into a water slide,” Breathed wrote. “If the Arizona Indians can build a glass bridge to nowhere over the edge of the Grand Canyon, you all can certainly send the country’s children down the Slide of Terror.”

I think he was kidding.

And that’s what you might say as you read “Opus.”

Breathed is a master at walking his comic strip past critical issues of the day – today’s topic is race – and leaving his readers smiling and wondering, “Was he being serious?”

He’s always serious – in a humorous and satirical way.

And Breathed says he is still enjoying himself with comics.

But he remains a very private individual.

The only picture of him that we could get was the image on this page – of Opus the penguin drawing Breathed the cartoonist.

“I’d like to think that readers can tell if I’m still having fun doing this,” he said. “And having fun as a cartoonist, it’s painful to admit, is simply making oneself giggle at one’s own work, which is a deeply embarrassing activity.”

We hope you enjoy “Opus,” along with the other new strips. A couple of them will also appear on your daily comics page.

And we hope you’ll let us know what you think.



Chip Minemyer is the editor of The Tribune-Democrat. He can be reached at 532-5091.