But the 1980s were ending, their moments had passed, and - this is crucial - most of Breathed’s rogues were talents who in some way enhanced public life. Bloom County presented America with a fun-house mirror version of itself and wrung extra weirdness from already-weird public figures: among many others, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Gary Coleman, Sean Penn, Dan Rather, and Gregory Peck. Why give her negotiable assets?” One was hard-pressed, at that moment in time, to find a more powerful, loathsome figure in American life - or a more deserving icon for Breathed to roundly whack-a-mole as the strip marched to its end. This is the man who admitted, in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, that he’d “do nearly anything within legal bounds to win.” The man who, in 1989, asked a Time magazine reporter, “I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?” The man who said in a 1990 Vanity Fair profile that he’d “never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Then in his early 40s, the New York real estate mogul had been cast by the national media as a living, breathing personification of soulless opulence: forcibly evicting tenants to accelerate a demolition megalomaniacal, piling up failed business ventures (Trump Airlines, the New Jersey Generals, Tour de Trump) showcasing the sneering, world-baiting hauteur of a wrestling heel, a role he would later actually play. The most frightening horror lurking in Breathed’s Anxiety Closet was another eight years of daily setups and punch lines. For any longtime fan, the final collection Happy Trails! (1990) made for an excruciating read.

The title story from 1989’s The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos, in which Opus left in search of his long-lost mother and stumbled into an animal-cruelty nightmare, was Bloom County’s final premillennium peak. Mirroring the destiny of Peanuts’ Snoopy, Opus the Penguin had risen in status from diminutive, monosyllabic pet to overcommercialized avatar. The comic strip that had spent the Reagan ’80s lampooning so many aspects of period culture astutely and mercilessly - race relations, presidential politics, runaway conservatism, feminism, MTV’s rise, the Cold War, scientific progress, tabloid absurdity, general corporate fecklessness - was running on fumes in the Bush I era. In the late 1980s, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed was bored - and for Bloom County readers, his lack of inspiration was palpable.

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