WASHINGTON — As a Republican president prepares to exit, so does Opus cartoonist Berkeley Breathed — again. (The GOP-bashing artist prefers to make his exits stage-left, thank you very much.)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the '80s super-strip Bloom County, which wrapped up shortly after President Reagan's second term, announced Monday that he will end his Sunday-only strip, Opus, on Nov. 2 — as in, two days before the presidential election.
"With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I'm suspending my comic strip to assist the nation," said Breathed, 51, through his syndicate, The Washington Post Writers Group. Even in announcing his retirement from cartooning, he couldn't resist satirizing the campaign scene: "The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently. ... I call on John McCain to join me."
Rumors had circulated for months that Breathed might end his strip just as a fellow Texan saddles up for good. Last year, the cartoonist teased in an interview with Texas Monthly: "I'd like to see Opus go out with George Bush, both headed into the sunset."
For many readers, Breathed was at his best when skewering right-leaning administrations. Opus, the beloved bow-tied penguin, and his cohorts took flight — at least creatively — during the Reagan era in "Bloom County": the Meadow Party presidential campaign, the fictional basselope deployed for Reagan's "Star Wars" defense initiative, Sean Penn punching out the strip's sleaze-attorney Steve Dallas, the fleet of Mary Kay lab-testers.
Breathed's follow-up strip, the Sunday-only "Outland," lost some of its spark during the Clinton years. The cartoonist retired from the comics pages in 1995, but returned in 2003 to sink his pen into a new wartime administration with his third strip, "Opus."
As the strip winds down, the ever-flappable Opus has been shipped to Gitmo, reminiscing about his heady decades and troubled love life. The Opus finale in newspapers will feature a contest asking readers to guess the orphaned penguin's fate. The answer, interestingly, will appear only in an online version of the strip.
What's next? Breathed has his pen poised for more children's books. But what if another Republican administration comes in next year? He swears he's leaving the game permanently this time.
Opus, on the other hand, would probably invoke a Breathed favorite: "PBTTTF!"