Uclick/uComics is re-running Berkeley Breathed’s entire BLOOM COUNTY and OUTLAND catalogues, plus his 1978-1979 college strip ACADEMIC WALTZ for subscribers. Six daily strips will be offered one day, a Sunday strip the next, alternating back and forth until the entire BLOOM COUNTY collection is digitally back in print.
Details at www.mycomicspage.com/free/comics_new.html. You might also check the www.bloomcounty.com web page.
I am a HUGE Bloom County fan.
However, let me be one of the first to ask “WHY?”
Most of these have been printed, correct? And are still on sale in most major bookstores, correct?
So other than adding some “necessary” fundage to Breathed’s Yacht Club dues, I see no actual reason for this. Now, I would DEFINITELY visit his site and pay his fee if he started presenting something unique.
“Like what” you may ask? Well, oh, I dunno, possibly NEW STRIPS? Then, and ONLY THEN, could I possibly justify it. No more charming-yet-shallow children’s books. No more re-hashing of older strips. NEW STRIPS. Creativity ceases to be creative when it stops creating.
Stale.
I disagree.
Anyone with an eBay account, an old/used book store, or the ability to click on the handy link to the Cartoon Collections page ON BREATHED’S SITE can purchase the entire run quickly and easily.
There still is no valid reason to reprint his older strips online for a fee other than vapid nostalgia.
To justify a fee-based service of this sort, he should be cranking out new strips. Otherwise it’s not worth the webspace.
Breathed’s major issue with Bloom County was due to the limitations inherent in the print medium at that time. That’s supposedly why he made the Sunday-only strip Outland, and eventually quit creating altogether.
But now, when comics are finally starting to come unto their own on-line, and can successfully support the demands he so stringently required from the print medium, he has decided he wants to re-hash his past instead of seizing the opportunity he has here by using his still-national popularity to launch a new fee-based online strip.
He could be huge once more, be a positive example of how to do an internet strip, and give a much-needed respectability to the online comics medium.
But he isn’t.
Not all of the books are easy to find, so putting them all on the web’s a good thing.