Bloom County / YMMV

Anvilicious:
- Whenever Breathed wrote a comic about the newspaper comics industry, you could feel him grab your collar and yell at you.
- His agnosticism comes through a great deal. Some strips about Oliver coming to scientific blocks (with the Big Bang, the existence of God, etc.) feel very antagonistic to science.
Award Snub: A big aversion. Breathed became the second syndicated comic strip creator (after Garry Trudeau) to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987.^note
Awesome Music: "I'm a Boinger".
Does Barbra wish she was goy?
Is George really a boy?
Is Filthy ever Divine? - It's all subjective.
Comedy Ghetto: A print media example when the strip won the Pulitzer. Many editorial cartoonists were up in arms over it and voiced their criticism loudly. Pat Oliphant dismissed the strip as "shrill potty jokes and grade school sight gags" and Paul Conrad said "I don't think strip cartoons generally belong in the same category as editorial cartoons: They're entertainment, and that's about it. They aren't journalism." The fact that two other previous Pulitzer winners, Mike Peters and Jeff MacNelly, had already branched out into daily comic strips showed that this attitude was far from universal for political cartoonists, though.
Diagnosed by the Audience: Tom Binkley is wracked with anxiety about money, race, and his own mortality. His son frequently has to talk him down from crushing anxiety attacks that are Played for Laughs.
Faux Symbolism: Played for Laughs in a strip released during the 1988 election◊, which analyzes George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis, and Bill the Cat's worthiness to be President based off of how they interpret the lyrics to the legendarily incomprehensible rock song "Louie Louie". The entire thing is obviously biased in Bill's favor, over-analyzing Bush and Dukakis' lyrics to find anything incriminating (Dukakis' line "Kitty she lead me everywhere" is treated as highly suspicious) while claiming that Bill's utter nonsense lyrics ("Ee fi li curl way fra ne") reveal "a simple honesty".
Fridge Brilliance: Is Tom Binkley's fear that he's racist for not supporting Jesse Jackson misplaced guilt for an earlier series of strips where he disapproved of Binkley dating a black girl?
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:
- After Oliver's father reassures Tom Binkley that disliking Jesse Jackson doesn't necessarily mean he's a racist, Tom asks if he's allowed to hate Bill Cosby. 2014 saw sexual assault allegations against Cosby become widely publicized, and what was once an amusing punchline suddenly took on a more disturbing tone.
- One early story arc had Prince Charles and Princess Diana visit the strip's setting (America if not Bloom County itself) for their honeymoon. In one strip, Charles tells Di he wants a harem. Funny then, but in light of later revelations about Charles' infidelity, it comes off as rather darkly prophetic in retrospect. In fact, the whole sequence was grimly prophetic about the two's general incompatibility, and what a bad idea it was for them to get married in the first place.
- 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. This becomes not as lightweight once the world realized that heterosexual AIDS was AIDS itself.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Some 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."
  - It must be noted that Lucas did state at the time that a sequel would be coming in 15 years, and this was Breathed's reaction to that statement. So, it's not quite a "Hilarious In Hindsight", more of a Take That!.
- 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.
- During the "Steve forms a heavy metal band" story arc, Steve tells Rosebud that "Sounds of Silence" isn't quite metal material. Heavy-metal band Disturbed covered it in 2015.
Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: Since Opus was more well-known than the names Bloom County or Outland, Berke's fourth 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. When Steve Dallas got transplanted to Bloom County and became a lawyer, this happened again, with legal professionals generally being entertained by the depiction.
Nausea Fuel:
- Milquetoast lists his favorite foods as pickled eels, last's weeks veal, and banana peels, well congealed.
- Opus receives a loaded handgun as a gift from the NRA and accidentally fires it several times. The last panel of the comic strip shows Bill the Cat staring at a giant hole in his midsection, with "cat innards" splattered on the wall behind him.
- In an early Outland comic strip, Ronald-Ann sees a TV ad for Fashion Frank's Fur Emporium, which turns the hides of hairy men into coats.
Opus: I made an elegant New York cabbie pullover!
Parody Displacement: Otherwise largely forgotten Reagan administration figures like Jeane Kirkpatrick (who had a wild tryst with Bill The Cat) and Caspar Weinberger (given a Shout-Out by Opus in a poem) have gained immortality because of the strip.
Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
Values Dissonance:
- The storyline where Steve sues Santa for a little girl because her (equally young) brother got a ton of guns and Rambo paraphernalia on Christmas reads weirdly today now that firearms usage around children is more heavily scrutinized, especially with the downfall of traditional toy guns and BB guns for children. The panel where the boy is holding a new puppy at gunpoint is particularly unsettling.
- Steve's sexual escapades are designed to justify the slapstick retribution he gets from the women involved, but even by that standard, some just aren't funny by today's standards, the one where he's plotting to get the woman too drunk to resist being Exhibit A. And one has to wonder just what he did on that lover's lane that gave the woman involved a flashback more than ten years later...
- In his first appearance in Opus, Steve says that he went to "de-poofta" conversion therapy to undo his coming out as gay at the end of Outland and make himself straight again. Even by the mid-2000s when the strip went to press, anti-gay conversion therapy was gaining a reputation as barbaric quackery. Plus, the term "poofta" is generally used as a pejorative against gay men and wouldn't fly today.^note
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This trope was invoked in one strip, where one character is going around telling everyone "the awful truth" about, well, everything. He comes to Steve and says "The truth is, Knight Rider is a kid's show!" to which Steve replies. "Can't be. Can't &%^#ing be!"

YMMV / Bloom County

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