Answering my own question.. http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/0910opus0910.html very cool
The article says: " Since leaving the world of newspaper comics, Breathed has written children's books, including Goodnight Opus and the upcoming Flawed Dogs. He sold the rights to a movie about Opus to Dimension Films. The movie will be written and directed by Breathed." Interesting!
Thank goodness the New York Daily News is carrying it in the comics section!! Let's hope the looooooooong layoff hasn't dulled Berke Breathed's sense of humor!
So for those of us that have converted to a paper-less household, is there anywhere online to find Sir Opus?
I bought a paper today just for this reason. I usually read "Non-Sequitor" by clicking on "news" and then "comics" at yahoo. But unfortunately "Opus" isn't being carried there.
Don't see anything at BerkeleyBreathed.com and it's not on (the subscription based) MyComicsPage.com (but Bloom County is there).
Does anyone know if the rest of the Bloom County cast supposed to make cameos in this incarnation or the funny revamps that appeared in Outland?
Well I now have one half of a reason to resume reading the Sunday comics. When will Calvin and Hobbs return?
I was pleasantly surprised to find that our local paper is carrying the new Opus strip. I was interested by the much more complex drawing style Breathed used for the debut strip, and actually kind of found it a bit distracting at first. Much more cinematic and painting-like than your normal comic panel. The punchline was great, and all too true! Here's a quick article I found this morning. Looks like Breathed won't allow them to post the new strip online: http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Entertainment/ap20031124_348.html 'Opus' Comic Strip Debuts in Newspapers, Character Resurrected From 'Bloom County' The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO Nov. 24 — Opus is back waddling across the comics pages not because funnies fans need him but because his creator, Berkeley Breathed, thinks the penguin needs "finishing." "Unfinished characters make me as unsettled as a messy hallway will keep my wife from sleeping soundly," Breathed wrote in an e-mail interview with cartoonist Phil Frank published Sunday in The San Francisco Chronicle. Breathed resurrected Opus from the daily strip "Bloom County," which he stopped drawing in 1989 when it was running in nearly 1,300 papers. He began a Sunday strip, "Outland," with many of the same characters including the aquatic bird's hairball-hacking sidekick, Bill the cat but quit that in 1995. The new weekly strip, named for its character, debuted Sunday in large format. A Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning, Breathed insisted on the larger style. "I'll get bored drawing talking heads, which is pretty much all that registers in today's nano-scale strips. Boring is bad. Small is bad. Big, good." He also refused to let the newspapers see the strip weeks before it is to appear because of "the snarky little office imps especially ones around newsrooms who feel they need to upload everything they can get their sticky little digital digits on."
http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/local_paper.html Here is the list of papers that carry the new Opus. My local Poughkeepsie paper is on the list. I couldn't find the strip in last Sunday's paper. Guess I need to look again. Glad to see Opus & Bill back. 'A Wish For Wings That Work' is my favorite Christmas cartoon. Hopefully it will come out on DVD sometime.
.... "A solar-powered chariot. Yeah!" Did anybody else lean back after reading yesterday's strip and think to themselves: "How did Berkeley Breathed pull that one off"?
DAMN DAMN DAMN! Where can I find this without subscribing to a physical paper? I read everything online now days - I don't need to kill more trees just to read Opus.
Killing trees isn't bad as long as those trees are replaced with more trees... In fact, it's actually a good thing to do, if done right, since trees sequester (absorb) CO2 from the atmosphere and when we turn them into paper and stick them in a landfill we're reducing the overall CO2 in the atmosphere which reduces the greenhouse effect. Of course this does nothing to answer your question... sorry.
Apparently some of Breathed's fellow comic writers aren't so pleased with his return or the space he's demanding. Last Sunday's "Non Sequitur" was an obvious (and rather funny) slap at Opus. Wish I could find it to post here. I have it in front of me: A little girl is asking Olaf the Christmas elf about her Christmas gift, and if she got it because she was naughty. The elf tells her it's a classic and they don't make them like this ("according to the designer, anyway...") She says "Oh, I heard all of that cool hype before Christmas, but now that I finally get to see it I don't think it's better, just different from my other toys....which by the way are all squished out of sight now". A massive bit of Opus is squeezing out of her closet by now. The elf says "Well, if you hadn't been so naughty, Santa wouldn't dump his old, bloated inventory on you for a quick buck, now would he...". Ouch. Dan C
The above "Non Sequitur" is online at: http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/2003/12/28/ Can't say the same for "Opus"...it seemes Breathed wants to keep it off line completely.
