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...