It was great to see some old favorites, yes, but it was also interesting to watch the comic flounder around on the printed page trying desperately to figure out about what and whom it wanted to be. The cast seems to go in a hundred different directions in the first months, with some characters falling off completely without a word of goodbye. The art and the humor mature with surprising rapidity but the comic clings to some of its original trappings past the point of obsolescence. The banner of the Sunday comics bears the original-cast dog character like a rust spot on a beater car long after he disappears into the narrative aether and the character of the Major slowly recedes as Binkley's father picks up the role of stereotypically machismo-choked paternal figure. That in itself - Binkley's dad's overwrought obedience to outmoded ideas of gender - is slightly shocking to see so hammered home in the early life of the comic. In the edited collections of decades past that phase of the character seemed like a much shorter prelude to his later life as the sensitive dad who's deeply and comically ashamed of his own failure to vote for Jesse Jackson in a presidential primary.

I was a little surprised at both how lame some of the early ones are and how early some of my all-time favorite Bloom County comics occurred in the course of the work overall, with oft-quoted favorites cropping up much earlier than I had expected to see them but buried amidst otherwise entirely forgettable throw-away gags. Reading this volume felt akin to washing accrued sediment away from some gem of unspecific but generous dimensions, with more of its eventual value revealed the further in that I got. Watching it go from a thin and slightly roach-obsessed stop-motion All in the Family to something that begins expressing Breathed's real interests - relationships, unmet expectations, the Noh theatre of self-important politics and the rights of animals - in one long but immanently readable volume gave me a new appreciation for his raw talent and the intelligence and adaptability required to shape that talent into skill. Every now and then the book has some side commentary by Breathed in which he chides himself for his failures but I look at it and know that given two years I could never turn out something that's as good as this comic is by the end.

The commentary deserves its own, well, comment however. Breathed's insights aren't nearly as common as I had hoped they would be, showing up fairly frequently early on and then dropping off quickly to almost total absence. They're sometimes so small and out of the way - done, I realize, to keep from detracting from the work itself - that I wouldn't even notice them until I was glancing back at the page before turning to the next and I had to learn to sweep each page two or three times before moving on.

Much more frequently, the sidebar information isn't a comment by Breathed, it's an insertion of some historical or explanatory fact that one must assume IDW thought would be necessary to get a given reference to current events or early '80s popular culture. Some of these make perfect sense - I think most people are blissfully unaware of the identity of James Watt these days so a brief note is probably helpful to them - but some of them are opaquely mysterious to me. I get that Conway Twitty might need a note of explanation for some people, but does Olivia Newton-John? If Olivia Newton-John does rank an executive summary in the sidebar, then why assume our familiarity with the Sex Pistols or with Richard Simmons? Walter Mondale needs a formal introduction to a reader who is sufficiently either familiar with or interested in late-mid-20th Century popular culture but a caricature of Henry Kissinger does not? Overall, the process by which IDW determined what subjects required some sliver of Wikipedia in the sidebar seems itself to be a puzzle over which one could fuss and fiddle for endless days. At one point I found myself trying to game out what must have been their thought process: perhaps they assumed that only liberals and progressives would ever read Bloom County in the first place as many of those who apparently needed a biography were crusty old conservatives, but really, Olivia Newton-John shoots that down singlehanded. I remain incapable of working out the formula they followed.

That's an amusing trifle, though, compared to the main work itself. The sidebar entries are a help to many, I'm sure, and at worst they're an unnecessary condiment on a table heaped with a glorious feast of good comics. I might cock an eyebrow in good humor at their apparent assumptions regarding the cultural literacy of their readers but nothing will ever distract from the timeless hilarity of "pear pimples for hairy fishnuts," a line that can make me cackle three decades after it was penned.

The book itself seems to be of excellent quality: heavy, hardbound, printed on nicely thick paper. IDW opted for pages large enough to print the art in generous dimensions rather than something that would fit neatly on a shelf and I appreciate that more than I can say. Overall, a thrilling purchase and a timely one given that volume 2 is set to hit the shelves on April 28.