Berke Breathed Gets Humble Bundle, Collection of Early Work
(Note: To get the awesome Humble Bundle with all of Bloom County for cheap for charity, click this sentence. But there’s other cool stuff happening here.)
Berkeley Breathed is one of the foundations of modern cartooning. His work has been collected in various omnibi over the years, but a large piece of his early work hasn’t seen the light of day for decades. That’s about to change.
Breathed’s first work was a comic strip called Academia Waltz, published in the University of Texas’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan, in the late 70’s. Unless your high school English teacher happened to go to UT in the 70’s and scrapbooked those strips because she knew they were something special, odds are this is a side of Breathed you’ve never seen. But IDW is collecting the strip, along with other of Breathed’s early works, into a collection called Academia Waltz & Other Profound Transgressions. In addition to the titular cartoon, the book collects political cartoons, miscellaneous comics, and a lot of the primordial ooze from which Bloom County arose.
IDW’s Library of American Comics series has been an absolute treasure trove for fans of comics history. Newspaper staples like Dick Tracy and Blondie (including her wild flapper years, before her marriage to Dagwood) have been beautifully scanned, cleaned up, bound, and annotated so as to satisfy even the most meticulous collectors. The incorporation of as new a strip as Bloom County would be a surprise, were it not for the esteem in which the strip is held. Bloom County is often cited alongside Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side as fundamental inspirations for nearly every member of the current generation of cartoonists, and more than the odd philosopher here and there.
Breathed himself is elated with the publication, saying, “Honestly, I’d like to think that the early drafts of the U.S. constitution were wordy, infantile, tasteless, embarrassing but occasionally funny. And worthy mostly as a necessary step to get to the vital polished product coming after. I really desperately want to think this. Everyone please forgive me.”
In addition to the collection of juvenalia, IDW is putting all of Breathed’s collected work on this week’s Humble Book Bundle. The first four volumes of Bloom County are pay-what-you-want. Paying more than the average (just under $17 at time of publication) gets you the last five volumes. Paying $5 over average (just shy of $21) also nets you collections of his post-Bloom County comics, Opus and Outland. The complete published works of one of the greatest living cartoonists, for $21, for charity, is not a bad deal. The charity this week is the literacy group Traveling Stories.