Needing a dandylion break…
I read Bloom County when I was a kid, around the ages of 9 – 13, which was way too young to “get” some of the humor in each strip. When I read it now, it makes so much more sense to me.
While the strip was naturally a riot, there were some things about it I cant really explain that made it so appealing. One of them was the character Opus the Penguin.
It’s for that reason that the following makes me a little sad:
On October 6, 2008, Berkeley Breathed announced that he would end Opus on November 2. [1] He added that “I’ll be leaving Opus in a way that it should be very clear that this time there’s no going back home” and that he felt “unrealistically emotional” about drawing the final Opus strip and writing a final ending.[2]
In the November 2, 2008 strip, Opus leaves the comic world forever and sleeps happily in bed in the children’s book Goodnight Moon. The last panel could be viewed online, at http://www.humanesociety.org/opus.
While Breathed’s own site and others have skated around the term, Opus is for all intents and purposes dead. He has entered that long, eternal sleep from which, according to Breathed, he will never again wake up.
Yes, it is a just a comic strip character. However, I cant help but feel some sadness when a piece of creative genius like Opus is put to rest.
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