Bloom County was a formative element of my childhood. I collected all the now-out-of-print books — from Loose Tails to the one that had a Billy and the Boingers record stapled in — and read and reread them to the point of structural failure. My bedroom closet had its own Giant Purple Snorklewacker. And at one regrettable point in my adolescence, you could open a B.C. book at random and read any line to me, and I’d recite the next line from memory like an Aspergian Vegas dinner act.

But what I didn’t realize until recently was that as many as two-thirds of the original strips were left out of the collections. As in, they appeared in newspapers for one day, and then poof. And there was certainly no online archive you could browse if you missed one. Google cache? Wayback machine? Fuck you, future boy.

However, this massive injustice is finally being put right with the publication of Bloom County: The Complete Library, the first volume of which (1980-1982) will be released October 6, 2009. By some happy accident, Amazon shipped my copy two weeks early, and it’s gorgeous. Hardcover, cloth-bound, foil-stamped, heavy stock, even a little bookmark ribbon bound in. Original publication dates listed on every page. Sunday strips are reproduced in full color, including the title pane (which was often omitted for space in newspapers). And there are marginal annotations to restore any missing cultural context (who the hell is Phyllis Schlafly, anyway?) and fond little author’s notes next to certain strips.

This collection is a long-overdue labor of love. I haven’t been so excited about a 30-year-old comic strip in… well, ever.

Available from Amazon (affiliate link supporting Team Lucy Kate)