[PW] Sunday's "Opus" Comic

[Lois Fundis]

--- Nichael Cramer <nichael at sover.net> wrote:
 
> [* Unfortunately, I can't find our copy of the
> Sunday's Globe to check the
> date of the strip, but I believe the strip was
> originally printed in 
> the '90s.  ]

I don't believe Opus as a separate, Sunday-only strip
began until 2003. The strip Bloom County ran in the
1980s and eventually became Outland, which ceased in
1995 when Breathed decided to retire. "Eight years
later, Breathed abandoned retirement and picked up
where Outland had left off. The result was the
Sunday-only reunion strip, Opus" [1] -- which would
make it 2003 for the earliest possible Opus strip
under that name.

That's still a four-year timeframe, approximately 200
strips (give or take a few), but narrows it down a
bit.

The Bloom County community blog at LiveJournal [2] has
back strips which people scan from their papers and
post (not official and possibly dicey in terms of
copyright). Since this is done once a week, it may
have the strip if anyone can find the original date of
the one that ran in the Boston Globe or other papers
that did not carry the regularly-scheduled ones for
August 25 and September 2. (The date should be in
small print near Breathed's signature.) The LJ shows
the modified strips that ran in papers that did not
censor the strips (i.e. the same ones that are at
Comics.com, not the unedited ones at Salon). You'd
have to look at each week separately; the comics are
usually behind a "cut" and don't appear unless you
click on each one individually.

[1] The Wikipedia article on Outland seems to have the
nearest thing to a chronology of Breathed's strips of
anything I could find quickly; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_%28comics%29 But
the article on Opus the Penguin also lists 2003 for
the beginning of the Opus strip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_the_Penguin

[2] http://community.livejournal.com/bloom_county/

--
Lois Fundis lfundis at weir.net or lfundis at verizon.net