Free Republic

Fans of the well-loved comic strip Bloom County are celebrating this morning, after cartoonist Berkeley Breathed issued the first panels of his satirical strip in decades. Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Bloom County back in 1987; two years later, he quit producing it. On Sunday, he posted a photo of himself to Facebook in which he sat in front of a computer screen with an empty cartoon template titled Bloom County 2015. "A return after 25 years. Feels like going home," he wrote. And on Monday, one of Breathed's central characters, Opus, awoke from his long...

A popular comic strip that poked fun at the Rev. Jerry Falwell without incident one week ago was deemed too controversial to run over the weekend because this time it took a humorous swipe at Muslim fundamentalists. The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday's installment of Berkeley Breathed's "Opus," in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamicist. The installment did not appear in the Post's print version, but it ran on WashingtonPost.com and Salon.com. The...

We're proud to host Berkeley Breathed's "Opus" every week, but especially this week and next: At least 25 of the newspapers that normally print the comic strip, and probably more, have declined these two, at least partly out of fear that Lola Granola's latest spiritual journey -- dabbling in Islam and adopting its conservative dress code for women -- could be offensive to Muslims. Sadly, one of the papers that isn't printing the strip is the Washington Post, though the Post's syndication service, Washington Post Writers Group, distributes Opus. (The Washington Post actually ran the strip online, though it was...

As a tail-end Gen-Xer, I cut my political teeth on the comic strip "Bloom County." So the recent news that creator Berkeley Breathed is bringing back the strip's star — Opus the penguin — is welcome news. Since Opus, The Far Side, and Calvin & Hobbes all retired, there hasn't been much reason at all to read the comics page. Bloom County, you may remember, featured a hodgepodge cast of prairie critters (one of them was actually named "Hodgepodge"), pre-adolescent boys (about my age when I started reading), and adults (whose role was mostly to play the fool). It began...

NEW HAVEN -- Standing at the front of an auditorium that looked like a castle dining hall, cartoonist Aaron McGruder, of "The Boondocks," leaned into the microphone and said, "All right. Yale." And the packed house applauded, just like that. Through the rest of his nearly two-hour talk on Saturday, McGruder, a 28-year old who looks no older than his college audience, drew guffaws, groans, and loud applause at Yale University's eighth annual Black Solidarity Conference.