(Note: Blogger is all screwed up, leaving me no ability to italicize. Prepare to suffer through way too many quotation marks.)
The Washington Post reports that Berkely Breathed, creator of the almighty 80's newspaper comic strip "Bloom County" will bring Opus the penguin out of retirement for a new strip starting in November. Cringe.
The last few weeks of the Bloom County comic, all the characters had to go searching for work somewhere else in comicdom--scooping crap on the set of "Marmaduke," skinning boars in "Prince Valiant"--before the Bloom County universe disappeared. Each beloved character was stripped of their pride and then yanked ignobly stage.
It was like the end of the Winnie the Pooh, when that raincoated jerk Christopher Robin gets too old for Pooh and leaves him to wither in the woods. Even "Calvin & Hobbes," that stimulated-with-Chocolate-Frosted-Sugar-Bombs paean to Pooh, couldn't break the sad truth to readers in its last strip: Hobbes was going to get tossed aside someday.
Writing teachers have a phrase: Kill your darlings. (AKA Kill your poodles, Kill your babies.) If you write something and are just so thrilled with your turn of phrase or your enormous vocab that you just have to find a home for it, don't. Spear it. Sacrifice your cute little sentence at the altar of the grander story arc.
Give Breathed credit: he put most of his poodles to sleep so he could give "Bloom County" a decent little requiem ending.
Except for damned sweet lovable Opus. The penguin survived in the forgettable "Outland" strip that followed, and Breathed put him in a book or two afterward. Y'know how somewhere around Season 7 Simpsons writers seemed to have no idea what to do with lovable, perfect Lisa, so they made her into a grating-know-it-all? That's what happened to Opus. He never got married to the hot chicks who fell for him, he never discovered his long lost mom. He just became a whiny old character.
I dread seeing the old flightless waterfowl back in the Sunday funnies like I dread the rumors that Chewbacca will play a huge role in saving the galaxy in Episode III. It reeks of Jordan with the Wizards. Breathed's comment at a recent expo that "tt was painful to sit through the war without a public voice," is a godawful sign. There's nothing sadder than an out of shape artist jumping prematurely back on to the scene cause he's got something to say. (see Norman Mailer, Beastie Boys.)
Now see me, signing off and going to be bed.
