Comic Strips

Volume five of IDW’s award-winning Complete Library now available for pre-order

Best-selling chronological collection will expand to include Outland, Opus

San Diego, CA (September 12, 2011)—The wildly successful return of Opus, Binkley, Bill the Cat and the entire cast of Bloom County continues in October with BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLETE LIBRARY, VOLUME FIVE, now available for pre-order. After weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, multiple awards and nominations, and a museum retrospective, VOLUME FIVE brings readers the final chapter of Berkeley Breathed’s incredibly popular and Pulitzer Prize-winning series. And just as Breathed was drawn back to Bloom County, so will IDW finish the Complete Breathed Strip Library with the first full color, chronological reprints of both Outland and Opus, starting in 2012.

“The really funny thing about many of these past strips… is how utterly inappropriate they would be for today’s newspapers,” said Breathed. “I’m thankful there’ll be a complete record of inappropriateness now.”

BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLETE LIBRARY, VOLUME FIVE offers every daily and Sunday strip from November 30, 1987 through August 6, 1989, the day that Breathed, at the top of his game both critically and commercially, walked away from Bloom County. This ultimate volume features an introduction by Breathed and is also full of the annotations and behind-the-scenes antidotes from him, a hallmark for which the series has become known.

As with the first five volumes, OUTLAND and OPUS will also offer engaging comments and insights from Breathed about the strips. Each volume will contain the full run of Sunday-only strips, offering fans the first and only complete, full color, chronological collections, and featuring many of the characters from Bloom County.

“This is sort of a ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ moment for me,” said series editor Scott Dunbier, “While I’m happy the Bloom County Series is now collected, I’ll be sad to not be working on it anymore… but elated to have both Outland and Opus on the horizon!”

Breathed‘s Bloom County is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed newspaper strips of modern times. Premiering on December 8th, 1980 – a month after the election of Ronald Reagan as President – the strip brought a unique amalgam of contemporary politics and fantasy, all told with hilarious wit and humor. At its height, Bloom County was published in an astonishing 1200 newspapers, and the first collection, Loose Tails, sold more than one million copies.

Celebrating the cultural impact of this remarkable comic strip, IDW Publishing has teamed up with Breathed for the first complete and chronological collection of Bloom County. Each volume features the many quirky citizens of Bloom County—such as Opus, Bill the Cat, and Milo Bloom—while projecting Breathed’s uncanny ability to be both cynical and naïve, often at the same time. The first four volumes of BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLTE LIBRARY are currently available at fine bookstores everywhere, with Volume Five launching in October. The single volume of Outland will be released in April of 2012.

In addition to the print books, IDW has also released a BLOOM COUNTY application for Apple’s iPad, starting with the inaugural year, 1980-81, with more years soon to follow. BLOOM COUNTY will also launch in iBooks, shortly. Each digital edition is specially formatted, with one day’s strip per page for optimal viewing on the iPad or iPhone.

Bloom County: The Complete Library Volume Two is published by IDW under its imprint Eisner award-winning imprint, the Library of American Comics. Bloom County: The Complete Library series is edited by Dunbier and designed by Dean Mullaney.

BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLETE LIBRARY VOLUME FIVE ($39.99, 272 pages, hard cover, partial color) will be available in stores in October 2011. ISBN 978-1-61377-061-0. Diamond order code AUG11 0382.

BLOOM COUNTY: THE COMPLTE LIBRARY VOLUME ONE (iPad only, $7.99, December 8 1980 – December 31, 1981, partial color) is now available through iTunes [http://bit.ly/bloom-county-ipad].