Opus The Penguin Returns!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! -- boy, this just made my day. I'm so happy that Berk Breathed, creator of Bloom County (my absolutefavoritist comic strip as a kid) is returning with a new comic strip featuring Opus The Penguin!!

THE SUNDAY-ONLY STRIP, to be called “Opus,” begins Nov. 23, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

It will be syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group.

A 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winner for editorial cartooning, Breathed stopped drawing the daily “Bloom County” 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 penguin’s hairball-hacking sidekick, Bill the cat — but quit that in 1995.        

Partly chalking it up to artistic burnout, Breathed said at the time that cartoonists “die and go to cartoon hell for working beyond that magic intersection of art and fun.”        

He has since written children’s books and sold the rights to an Opus movie that could start filming by the end of the year. [MSNBC News.com]

• Interview with The Onion A.V. Club
• A Great Returns, by Radley Balko. National Review Sept. 25, 2003.