Bloom County/YMMV

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• Crowning Moment of Awesome, Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, Tear Jerker: you decide. The strip dedicated to the Challenger STS-51 mission is one of the most moving tributes, and the most memorable of any of the strips.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: "I'm a Boinger".

Does Barbra wish she was a goy?
Is George really a boy?
Is Filthy ever Divine? - It's all subjective.

• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Opus, who was created for a week or two of strips but, by the time of "Pear Pimples For Hairy Fishnuts," was the star.
  • Bill the Cat, who was also intended as a deliberate subversion of Merchandise-Driven characters, but proved very popular because of his ugliness.

"Remember, kids, that's B-I-L-L, not G-A-R-F-I-E-L-D."

• Growing the Beard: Berke himself, in the 1980-1982 collection, expresses disgust with some of his early strips because the lettering was sloppy, the characters and setting were unfocused (which would explain the massive Chuck Cunningham Syndrome in the second year) and the gags derivative of Doonesbury. He went on to say that the strip became much better around January 1982, once he found a personality for Opus and shifted the strip's focus to Opus, Milo and Binkley.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One strip sets up the punchline by saying that the local newspaper reported on a "heterosexual AIDS epidemic" that turned out to be a false alarm. ...Yeah.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Three prominent examples:
  • The very first strip, in which someone tries to order a Whopper from Burger King with no bun, is much funnier to read after the rise of carbohydrate-free diets, particularly if you've ever been to a place that does serve hamburgers without buns.
  • The Return of the Jedi storyline ends with George Lucas telling Binkley that they should get to all the films by 1998; Binkley responds by decapitating him with his lightsaber and remarking "Jedi don't wait 15 years for sequels". He's right -- they wait 16 years for prequels. In the collected edition, Breathed points this out by saying "I was off by one year. The funny thing is, George really did seem to lose his head."
  • The storyline involving televangelists casting out perpetrators of the blasphemous "penguin lust" actually makes even more sense years later when two male penguins became famous across the world for choosing each other as mates.
• Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: Since Opus was more well-known than the names Bloom County or Outland, Berke's third strip was titled Opus.
• Misaimed Fandom: Steve Dallas, back when he debuted in Breathed's college newspaper strip The Academia Waltz, ended up being idolized by the obnoxious fratboys he was meant to make fun of.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The Mary Kay animal testing arc is often credited with bringing about the cessation of Mary Kay's unnecessary animal testing practices and in a larger sense sparking the 90s animal rights movements - because everything depicted in the arc was 100% true and done to animals at the time of publication.
• Tear Jerker: Pretty much everything around the end of Bloom County. Opus' dandelion gardens are destroyed and paved over, everyone has left the comic, and the final panel of the last page is Opus slowly walking away alone into a blank nothingness as his fruit hat falls apart.