... And Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed takes a look back at his creations.

Speaking as someone who works in newspapers, Breathed's stone-cold sober assessment of why you'll never see anything like Bloom County again is depressingly dead-on accurate, and it's a loss that should sadden us all.

Breathed acknowledges the obvious influence of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury on his own work, but as I reflect on my still-vivid memories of Bloom County, I'm struck by how many of my own ideas about storytelling were influenced, at a very early age, by Breathed's work.

Bloom County and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes remain my two favorite comic strips ever, and while Watterson appealed to me by being one of the very few storytellers, to this day, ever to show me a child character with whom I could identify, even when I was a child myself, I strongly suspect, in retrospect, that Breathed set the template for how I would see the world around me, from my childhood forward.

In the world of Bloom County, pop culture parodies and political commentaries and adult satire and entertainment for children were all the same thing. Talking animals and aliens who zapped people's brains were given just as much weight as corrupt government officials and shallow, self-absorbed celebrities, and all of it was treated as equally real.

None of this stuff was segregated into its own corners of Breathed's universe, nor did switching from one subject to another require a sudden shift in tone. Bill the Cat ran for president and became the recipient of Donald Trump's brain, while Milo Bloom multi-tasked seemingly effortlessly between being a school-aged child and running a small-town newspaper, and as a kid, it all made perfect sense to me.

I was a child of the '80s. I never knew a world before the Cold War or Watergate, and Ronald Reagan loomed larger over my childhood imagination than even Santa Claus, albeit for vastly less benevolent reasons. When I opened a newspaper, all I saw were Ayatollahs and AIDS and acid rain, but when I turned to the funny pages, I knew that the characters of Bloom County would be there to make sense of it all for me.

I watched the news and saw rational-sounding grown adults talking about the Iran-Contra affair and televangelist scandals and the nuclear Doomsday Clock as if it all did make sense, as if all of this was the way the world was supposed to be, but when I saw Opus the Penguin's wide-eyed confusion and disbelief, I felt validated, because I knew that my own reactions - that my own inability to comprehend, and refusal to accept, the state of the "real world" around me - were, in fact, the right reactions to all of it.

More than any other single storytelling franchise, Bloom County came the closest to capturing the full zeitgeist of the '80s as a decade. If you want to understand the '80s, and to know what it was like to live through that period of history, read Bloom County, and treat every word of it as though it's part of an entirely historically accurate chronicle of the literal truth of that era, because from an emotional standpoint, it really was.

... And now, it's all over.

Breathed seems to have a very rose-colored view of the way he did the strip, which is understandable given the mood anniversaries create, but not backed up by the actual story content he created. Bloom County may have started as a " quiet place to go wander into and start breaking the china ", but it developed into the kind of post-modern cynicism we can see with TV and the internet ( which Breathed, requisite of creative people who hit a certain age and don't want to bother with the creative use of digital media, derides ). Opus wasn't a wide-eyed innocent when he started showing greed, lust ( for human women, no less ), and pride; Bill the Cat wasn't a character, but a visually disturbing tool for commentary on celebrity. The kids disappeared into the background over time, and the stories became very convoluted and meta-textual, often having the characters acknowledge that they're actors in a media production.

Also, Bloom County's sequels ( Outland and Opus ) offered extremely diminished returns; Outland started its own entity but eventually became Bloom County-Lite ( confined to the Sunday strips, ironically more of a constraint since Breathed tired of the black-and-whites ), and Opus never became anything more. Bloom County isn't over now, it went past its prime long ago.