A sweepstakes????

Lord, I don't know if I should laugh or be revolted.

It's going to have something to do with "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the election.

The one drop rule says that Obama is black. BB is out to make a change. He wants to play the role of Atticus I think.

It's about time that the USA gets over racism.

We've been told for a while now that BB is quitting because he's unable to draw anymore. Now it comes out that he's quitting Opus to go draw kids' books. Which one is it? Can he draw or can't he?

Oh and BlueAmeersol? Knock it off.

...can still draw, but not fast enough to do a cartoon every week.

I reckon that Opus will send his little canine buddy off with the Polynesian hotties; by November 2, he'll wind up in some eternal dandelion patch instead.

Bloom County debuted in December 1980, one month after the fall of the Old Republic.

Now, on the eve of the Return, he will depart.

Godspeed, ya crazy puffinguin. Your suffering is at an end.

As is ours.

I kind of hate to get all treackly and say this, but I am pretty sure the Opus is very sure of a very soft landing, in many many hearts. Not least mine own.

God I can't believe I just said that.

Breathed, I owe you, dude. Thank you so much.

By Calvin and Hobbes.

And the other characters? And yeah, is BB ending the strip, yet again? Does he have health problems?

. . .our rotund friend deserves nothing less than than to end up on the beach in Bora Bora with the lovely tropical massage ladies(along with his new furry friend). . .but for the sake of the silly contest, I predict he's back in Bloom County with Binkley, waking in a field after a session of cloud-watching turned into a mid-day nap.

Thanks Berke. Bloom County was a big part of my adolescence, and it, and Opus, will always reside in my heart. None of your strips ever needed the end you thought they did, but the world is a little bit better that any of it existed at all.

I suspect Mr. Penguin will be "put down" - while believing that everything's just fine...

After all, odds dictate that most animal shelter tenants leave through the back door, not the front.

They finally got around to putting the contest on the web site.

I see that it's going to be something about the oversupply of animals. Now what can be done about that?

And what about the oversupply of people? Our poor planet is getting overloaded.

I suppose that the little dog will go to Bora Bora. The girls said, "One."

And Opus??? Well, that's the contest. Antarctica? The Land of Oz?

Click on my name for the first step.

bet he gets killed dead by one of john mc cain, or more like sarah palin's ; crazed wolf hunting gunmen who will definitely vote for the old bastard[ no offense toward senior citizens, but that one, mc cain, needs to enjoy his retirement years and tell his grandchildren all about the [ USS forestal] ship he nearly blew up!]

What a waste of panel space and story line. What a time to run out of meaningfully creative ideas. Just kill the penguin now, and go write your kiddy books.

They could run this non-comic comic strip for another 5 years.

Opus has finally come out of-or at least away from- his anxiety closet. He is no longer haunted by his fears, because he has done what is right and good and decent and very, very kind. Instead of going to the island with the girls, he has sacrificed his own comfort, and life, for his new little friend, who has never been on the "outside". (I'm crying as I write this because I love Opus, and I will miss him dearly).

Whatever comes after, Heaven, I hope, I know Opus will be there, happy and at peace. I hope in the end, I can make the same courageous choice. Thank-you Mr. Breathed, for helping me face my anxieties and neurosis along with Opus. Please don't stay away forever.

On that famous beach near Dublin with his ashplant although he will percieve it as his dandilion patch with the origional crew.

I predict a 2015 reprise of the series.

Godspeed, Opus.

Please keep in touch.

This was one of the original Star Trek shows. Mom and I watched them all as they came out.

BB is old enough to have seem it.

So where did Apollo go?

Click on my name to begin to find out.

So far, no one has mentioned the one big catch to the prize. I hope that no one does so everyone can go find that out for themselves.

Mark Twain came in with Halley's Comet and left with it.

I grew up in the Great Depression and it looks like I will leave with another one.

Opus makes me smile every Sunday. He is the essence of innocence and vulnerability.

Being a retired person myself, I can understand Breathed's need for a break, but I will miss this bit of gentle humor every Sunday morning. Too, as we head into such complicated and difficult times, we need a gentle laugh more than ever.

I'm hoping for a miracle and that Opus' paradise will be a reprieve. He could be the Secretary of Penguin and Human Affairs in Obama's first administration.

Hatshepsut

Take me plueeze take me girls. Please Please Please.

Footsore

There was a time when everything he wrote was golden humor. For readers of his strip, he could make you laugh even on your darkest days, and make good days seem that much better.

Somewhere along the line however, he decided that in such an ugly, cruel world, he'd rather not play any part in glossing over the reality of today, and make any of us, through his work, able to deny what was happening.

Of course, without him playing the role, rather than facing truth in those few moments previously spent reading his strip, people found emptier, less relevant distractions.

In the end, the bits and pieces of wisdom he dispensed through the most effective means - humor, was just lost and never replaced for many.

In his own way as a humorist, he was a truth-teller, telling us about ourselves things we didn't want to hear, and wouldn't allow ourselves as a society to hear save through his strip.

That apparently was not enough for him. His responses to his critics when he won the pulitzer, shows he viewed being a comic strip artist as a demeaning end result for his abundant talent.

Through the years he's always shown way too much sensitivity with critics whose perspective was a base dislike for his ORIGINAL work. And he was so sensitive, because for whatever wrong-headed reason, he agreed with them from the very beginning.

His work from the beginning was partly a satire on what we find humorous.

To have it morph into the "definition" of humorous for a time was simply too much.

That killed his desire to "just be funny, at least sometimes" and made it possible for his cynicism to take over.

Cynicism doesn't have a sense of humor

Cynicism sees everything as a waste of time

Cynics abandon their unbelievable gifts of talent, because it's not 100% perfect.

Of course it is/was his excessive, inappropriate humility that made that possible.

He never accepted that for many, his was the funniest comic strip ever created.

To allow himself to feel some joy and pride in creating it, conflicted with his self-indulgent acceptance of the critics who derided his original work as vapid and a rip off of other penguins, like Oliphants Etc.

As if any person on the planet has had a truly, singular, completely disconnected original idea. Everything we do is connected, and being derivative does not equate with stealing, and does not define original as just a copy.

Because he was too humble, he was blind to how he so changed the previous paradigms, that his work became a true first, and as about as original as any strip ever had been.

He was too cynical to ever see just how great the original Bloom County run was, and ended it. In retrospect, he should have never resumed afterwards, and allowed that legendary first run to stand alone and apart from the personal angst he felt regarding his undeserved success.

You can see this as it develops in the changes in his script.

It's really pathetic more than anything else, that a man whose gift is to make so many people happy in a world so full of grief and suffering, ends up resenting that gift, because it comes without a price to his readers.

Too many never got his underlying msgs. (they were varied) and that made him feel like he was feeding the beast, rather than revealing it.

Being so cynical, he misses the point of that gift.

If he wanted to change the world for the better, he was given the tools in the money he was making, no matter how worthless he felt his "creative" output was, it made money.

That money he could have used it to make those changes. But being the cynic, doing that would be using "money" something "evil" to do good.

Too bad too, because money is not good or evil, only what you decide to do with it can be viewed in that way.

If this Opus is killed off, it will not be the Opus readers of the original strip followed. That Opus is untouchable. He was perfect.

If there is any sense of loss, it's finally accepting that Opus from the 80s is truly gone for good. Only a miracle in the guise of Breathed shedding his worthless humility could ever bring him back.

Humility is not always a good thing, especially for those with great creative gifts.

Sooner or later the notion that "I don't deserve" this sort of success becomes overwhelming and destroys their creative gift.

"Excessive" humility an be a poison that destroys a genius, a source of guilt that turns a creative mind against itself, there is no better example of how evil being "overly humble" can be than the gradual ruination of the creative genius of B Breathed.