Discount Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984

I'll make this brief. This book gets 3 stars for only one reason: They reproduced the artwork poorly! Again!! If you look at my 4 star review and images of Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 1: 1980-1982 (Library of American Comics) you'll see that they screwed up the scans there too. For that volume there were two levels of image quality, bad & worse. "Fortunately", this entire volume is the better of the two (just bad).

This quality is still significantly worse than the original compilations that came out when the strip was still running.

So, take a good look at the better image on that other review (the one with the black star in the panel), and compare it to the original compilation. Detail is still lost. The panel lines are fuzzy. Artwork is not as sharp.

Take a look on every page on this volume, and you'll see a line above the page number. *That* line is fuzzy! I thought that maybe the printing press was just bad, but the page numbers are sharp as a tack. There is only ONE piece of artwork that is sharp. That is on the page near the back that advertises the upcoming third volume. A picture on the lower right shows Opus reading a Penthouse magazine, with the title "Madonna Nude Yet Again" emblazoned on the cover. Ze Meadow Morals Squad (Hodge-Podge, Portnoy & Milo)looms ominously behind him with a baseball bat. Sharp & clear, just as it should be. ALL the artwork in this volume should look as good! IDW: Whatever you did for this piece of art, do it for all the strips!!

I saw the same problems with IDW's reproductions of Terry & the Pirates. I gave them a pass because the art is so old, and they probably had to scan newsprint for many. But here they have the originals!

So why 3 stars instead of 4 like in Volume 1? I was giving them a chance to correct their errors on the second volume & they blew it. I sincerely hope that they fix these problems with volume 3. Is it the editor who is screwing up, or does Berke just not care about the end result? Does he see these volumes as just a cash cow? A lot of the comments written by him in the book suggest that he cares a lot less for his work than his fans. He thinks it's too dated to have any relevance today.

Berke: You're wrong. Go read some old Doonsebury collections. They are even more topical, and they still hold up. Just like your work. When I was a kid, I didn't get your political references, but I still thought it was funny that a cat would fall in love with a woman by the name of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Come on Berke, this is the definitive set. Have IDW put some extra effort to get it right!

On the plus side, There is a lot of strips that had never before made it into a compilation, a lot more commentary by Berke, and even some sketches at the end. The paper quality & binding is as good as the first volume.

Buy it knowing that if you have the original compilations, you should not get rid of them.Get more detail about Bloom County: The Complete Library, Vol. 2: 1982-1984.