Bloom County Complete Library Volume 1 by Berkeley Breathed is like a memory bomb going off in my mind. Before Dilbert, before Calvin and Hobbes, before Far Side (but after Doonesbury) was Bloom County. Bloom County exploded onto the comics page in the early 1980s as a Doonesbury ripoff. And way to often for Gary Trudeau’s comfort, it was an extremely blatant Doonesbury ripoff. But Breathed brought his own manic personality and evolving artistic skills and became one of the most popular strips of the 1980s, earning Breathed a Pulizter Prize in 1987, before Breathed stopped the strip in 1989. The characters popped up in later Breathed strips Outland and Opus before ending (possibly for good) in 2008.

This book is the first of a five book series which will reprint every last Bloom County strip, many of which didn’t make it into any of the earlier collections. This book covers the beginning of the strip in 1980 through 1982. Within it you can see the start of something special. The first few months are Breathed attempts to do Doonesbury and Breathed casting around to find what will work for him. Milo Bloom is the only one of the regulars to be around at the beginning. But over time, you see others start dropping in: Steve Dallas, Opus, Bill the Cat, Binkley, etc. And the excitement, especially for those of us who remember the strip back in the 1980s, grows as each new character appears.

This book is not a good introduction to Bloom County for people who have never read it before. The drawing is too primitive and the jokes too few and far apart. But, for existing fans, it’s a chance to go back and see the beginnings over again. It’s watching a master learn his craft slowly, day by day. And for those of us who don’t remember what exactly Breathed was talking about in a particular strip, he has put annotations next to a few strips to point out who or what was being made fun of.

The book itself is wonderfully put together. A nice package with attention to detail. A nice sturdy cover, great paper stock and printing. There are some strips from Breathed’s college newspaper strip (Academia Waltz) as well as an introduction by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell. And best of all, there are four more books in the series coming out (Volume 2 will be out in April). So, even if you have all the previous Bloom County reprints, you should own this book and this series.