In October IDW Publishing will release the first of five deluxe hardcover volumes collecting the entire Bloom County comic strip by Berkeley Breathed.  Each of the five volumes will contain nearly two years worth of daily and Sunday strips presented in chronological order.  Many of these strips have never been reprinted before, though collections of selected Bloom County strips have sold over six million copies since they first appeared in the 1980s.  IDW’s Bloom County Library volumes will be published under IDW’s Library of American Comics imprint.  They will be edited by Scott Dunbier and will be designed by Eisner Award-winner Dean Mullaney.

Breathed’s Bloom County debuted in December of 1980 just a month after the election of Ronald Reagan.  In reacting to the Reagan Revolution, Breathed’s comics always had a sharp, satirical, political edge—something that he maintained through Bloom County and his subsequent newspaper comics until he decided to end his Opus strip last November on the eve of another very different election (see “Opus Ends November 2nd”).  To help younger readers (and those of us with fading memories), IDW is interspersing “Context Pages," which chronicle some of the real life events and personalities that Breathed was satirizing, throughout the five-volume collection.