Berkeley Breathed in 2011.Credit Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Generally, when a beloved comic strip disappears from the funnies page, it is gone for good, and its characters live on only in reprint collections and greeting cards, as parade balloons and insurance spokes-characters.
So it was a surprise for comics fans to wake up on Monday and discover that Berkeley Breathed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator and artist of “Bloom County,” had revived that vintage 1980s strip on his Facebook page after a hiatus of more than 25 years (depending on how one measures) and with almost no advance notice.
The first installment of Mr. Breathed’s “Bloom County” comic appeared in 1980, and, over its nine-year run, introduced readers to memorably offbeat characters such as Opus, a talking penguin, and the bug-eyed, often unintelligible Bill the Cat. The strip frequently satirized social issues and political miscreants of the era including South African apartheid and a then-ascendant real-estate tycoon named Donald Trump – and Mr. Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987, a distinction that was protested by some of his fellow artists. (Pat Oliphant, also a Pulitzer winner, said that “Bloom County” was guilty of “passing off shrill potty jokes and grade-school sight gags as social commentary.”)
But alongside fellow cartoonists like Gary Larson (“The Far Side”) and Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”), Mr. Breathed was part of a brief 1980s renaissance in comic strips. At its peak, “Bloom County” reached more than 40 million readers in more than 1,200 newspapers, until Mr. Breathed stopped illustrating new installments of it in 1989. He continued some of its characters in a Sunday-only comic, “Outland,” that ran from 1989 to 1995, and later in another Sunday-only series, “Opus,” that was published from 2003 to 2008.
Then, on Sunday, Mr. Breathed published a photo on his Facebook page that showed him working on a comic strip entitled “Bloom County 2015.” An accompanying caption said: “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.”
And a new “Bloom County” comic strip, reacquainting readers with Opus and his human friend Milo Bloom, appeared the next day.
Mr. Breathed did not immediately reply to a request for comment through his literary agent. On his Facebook page, he provided a (possibly fanciful) explanation for why he was reviving “Bloom County” now.
In response to a reader who noted that Mr. Trump was also making his return to the political stage, Mr. Breathed wrote, “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing to do with it.”