Opus the Penguin is gone.

I remember when Berkley Breathed started Bloom County back in the 1980s. It was a breath of fresh air and left-wing perspective in a world taken over by Ronald Reagan's right-wing dementia. From the Iran-Contra affair to the myth of the welfare queens, there was nothing sacred in the Berkley Breathed canon of satirical targets.

For this Puerto Rican girl who could navigate "Anglo" culture with an inquisitive yet critical eye, Bloom County gave me the kind of political commentary I could find nowhere in the MSM exports of Time and Newsweek, needless to say in our island's papers either.

Actually, back in the 1980s, all the Anglo political irreverence I was getting through the mainstream media that reached our island, came in the guise of comedy or cartoons : Bloom County, Doonsbury, Pat Oliphant, Jules Pfeiffer and the stand up comedy of Steve Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Don Rickles, Bill Cosby. My life was never the same after watching Whoopie Goldberg's one woman show on HBO at the end of the 1980s.

ACK!

Opus and Berkley Breathed were anathema to the Reagan Era. It seems fitting the cartoonist is bidding adieu to his penguin days before the election that, no matter how it swings, will put the last nail in the coffin of the neo-cons insurrection.

It also seems fitting that Breathed is bidding adieu to newspapers in general ---and wishing them a swift yet painful death :

"Bloom County" had five times the edge of the work I do now. In 1986 I had a cockroach scream, "Reagan sucks!" in print size that took up the entire cartoon box. Nobody blinked -- 1,000 newspapers, quiet as a mouse. Now I draw a woman wearing a Muslim scarf, and the frantic publisher of the Washington Post Co. is on the phone at 9 p.m. telling me -- I am not making this up -- to adjust my character's hair so she doesn't look too unkempt.

Fear doesn't so much rule the wood pulp news industry. More like pee-on-themselves existential terror.

I will miss the crinkly mass of pressed dead tree held aloft over my Caesar salad and iced tea at the corner cafe.

Yet I find astounding is that, instead of going to the extreme of cynism, Berkley actually is leaving Opus for two reasons : So he himself can do the actual political commentary and not have to be filtered and edited through a cartoon strip (please, DOG, have him blog about politics on a daily basis). He also insists that what coming after November 4th (and which has been coming for a while) is going to be darn ugly :

...the coming days will be in extra need of sweetness, comfort, rationality and civility. I'm like Warren Buffett with a drawing hand. I see an undervalued market. As I did in 1981, actually.

Indeed.

By the way, it's not as if cartoonists will disappear. I love it that he's so unabashed on his shout out to Bill Waterson. He says the era of great newspapers started and ended with Calvin And Hobbes.

Word.

Salon.com has the pre-ending of Opus' end and I can see now the world of interpretations Steve Dallas' sunglasses will bring to the Bloom County experts out there.

Given he's shouted out Bill Watterson throughout his career, I wouldn't put it pass Breathed that Opus was always a figment of Steve Dallas' imagination, a fairy tale we were able to walk into and out with or without him. It would explain so well the final Opus cartoon in which Breathed bids his beloved penguin farewell.

Good night Opus.

I like turtles too.