Why does Opus get half a page on Sunday?! Is it really that much funnier than other comics (or even funny at all) to deserve more space? No. Actually, I like half-page Sunday comics, I’m just objecting to the fact that only Opus gets half a page (at least in the San Jose Mercury News). I’d love it if other comics got that much space, especially Monty.
it’s the same way in the argus… i guess the ang newspapers are biased towards penguins or something.
Hmm… you guys are evidently too young to remember any Bloom County comics history from the 80s. ;p Berkeley Breathed was uncompromising in his desire to present his comic as aboth an art form and a political forum. It was unmatched. Nothing today comes even close to what Bloom COunty used to produce on a routine basis. Well, maybe Doonesbury. Yeah. I’d say Doonesbury is almost as good. Back then, in the 80s, was the golden age of the modern comic strip, which to my mind included Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County as the strips par excellence, defining the genre.
To clarify: Breathed truly detests the way the Sunday comics are these days, where each strip gets a very minimal amount of space. If you’ve read the comics over the last two decades or so, you’d definitely see the real estate shrinkage. You can’t do art on a strip when all you’ve got is an area 3 inches by 5, or whatever it is these days, which is definitely TINY (compared with how it used to be in the 80s, when strips like Calvin and Hobbes had full half page spreads! Can you imagine how gorgeous those Spaceman Spiff landscapes were, on the Sunday funnies?! That sort of art is entirely not possible nowadays.
…that is, until Breathed came back and revived his strip, in the form of Opus. (After Bloom County there was Outland, which was an extension and evolution of the original strip.)