Free Republic

Fans of the well-loved comic strip Bloom County are celebrating this morning, after cartoonist Berkeley Breathed issued the first panels of his satirical strip in decades. Breathed won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Bloom County back in 1987; two years later, he quit producing it. On Sunday, he posted a photo of himself to Facebook in which he sat in front of a computer screen with an empty cartoon template titled Bloom County 2015. "A return after 25 years. Feels like going home," he wrote. And on Monday, one of Breathed's central characters, Opus, awoke from his long...

Beloved cartoonist Berkeley Breathed had an unusual inspiration for his latest children's book, "Flawed Dogs." No it wasn't one of the Santa Barbaran's many rescued pit bulls, but it was one of Michael Vick's infamous dogs who was set to be put down. "The book happened because I came across both a picture and a quote at about the same time -- a picture of one of Michael Vick's fight dogs. It was set to be put down, but a shelter in Utah decided to take the dog and a few others at the same time and try to rehabilitate...

From FOX News: Washington Post, Other Newspapers Won't Run 'Opus' Cartoon Mocking Radical Islam. A popular comic strip that poked fun at the Rev. Jerry Falwell without incident one week ago was deemed too controversial to run over the weekend because this time it took a humorous swipe at Muslim fundamentalists. The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday's installment of Berkeley Breathed's "Opus," in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamist. The installment did...

A popular comic strip that poked fun at the Rev. Jerry Falwell without incident one week ago was deemed too controversial to run over the weekend because this time it took a humorous swipe at Muslim fundamentalists. The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday's installment of Berkeley Breathed's "Opus," in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamicist. The installment did not appear in the Post's print version, but it ran on WashingtonPost.com and Salon.com. The...

We're proud to host Berkeley Breathed's "Opus" every week, but especially this week and next: At least 25 of the newspapers that normally print the comic strip, and probably more, have declined these two, at least partly out of fear that Lola Granola's latest spiritual journey -- dabbling in Islam and adopting its conservative dress code for women -- could be offensive to Muslims. Sadly, one of the papers that isn't printing the strip is the Washington Post, though the Post's syndication service, Washington Post Writers Group, distributes Opus. (The Washington Post actually ran the strip online, though it was...

A week before Father's Day, cartoonist Berkeley Breathed did a very cartoonist thing and caused a controversy to be stirred over a comic strip that seemed to slight fathers while celebrating lesbian moms. More or less. Reaction has been swift and predictable: outrage on the right; smug contempt for the right on the left. In the middle is one happy cartoonist, who got a rise from a jaded nation. Though the message of the strip may be interpreted more than one way -- either as advancing an idea or exposing a cultural phenomenon -- outrage is not necessarily misplaced. For...