Bloom County/Trivia

• Executive Meddling: The were several strips that were inexplicably censored and edited in the phase of going into book prints. Breathed claimed that usually after finishing making the strips, he would simply mail them off to the company and never kept any copies of them himself, so he likely didn't notice that they were altered, either. Whereas other times, he edited the strip himself upon putting it in a book. Most of the time, these were just subtle changes in dialogue; Berke has frequently expressed frustration with how wordy some of his strips get.
  • Zig-zagged with the yearly volumes. Some have the edited strips, while others have them as they originally appeared in the newspaper. The Complete Library, a definitive collection of sorts, seems to be sticking to the former, delegating the edited versions to bonus features in the back of each volume.
• Old Shame: The paperbacks are missing a lot of strips, apparently due to Berke's embarrassment of them. In particular, most of the first year-and-a-half was tucked away because Berke was flat-out embarrassed by how crude and unfocused the strip was at the start. Even now that the whole shebang has been gathered into The Complete Library, Berke's commentaries on certain strips (particularly in the 1980-82 volume) smack of "dear God, why did I ever write this?!".
  • He's not a fan of the A Wish for Wings That Work special, either.
  • The Academia Waltz, his college strip and Bloom County's direct predecessor, is so shameful to him that he even refused to release them all in the Library, instead only a small sample of the least offensively bad comics are included.
• Popularity Redo: Many, many Academia Waltz comics were redrawn as Bloom County comics as the strip found its footing. The Complete Library tends to point these out.
• Recycled Script: Berke tended to reuse a ton of gags in his comics. Of note: The "Whopper, no bun" gag, which was used in Bloom County's first comic, came from Berke's previous comic The Academia Waltz, and was later reused again in Bloom County itself.
  • He did it again with several Opus strips.