Opus, 'Bloom County' gang turning 24

It seems like only yesterday Opus was putting cucumbers in his nose and Spam on his head. But it's been nearly 24 years since he and the rest of the gang from "Bloom County" burst onto newspaper pages everywhere.

Berkeley Breathed's strip about a transplanted penguin and his motley crew debuted in December 1980, so the cartoonist figured, what the heck, let's get a jump on the 25th anniversary. Little, Brown & Co. has just published "Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best," a lavish collection of Breathed's favorite strips from the popular "Bloom County" and the two Sunday-only comics that succeeded it, "Outland" and "Opus," the latter of which now runs in 185 papers (including the Deseret Morning News; see today's Travel section, Page T6).

Breathed — who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1987 and, truth be told, has done some of the cleverest work ever to grace the funny pages — lives in Southern California with his wife and their two young children. The 47-year-old illustrator/satirist consented to a tongue-in-cheek interview via e-mail last week that covered everything from his contemporaries to last Tuesday's vote.

Boston Globe: Happy birthday, if that's appropriate. So how old is 25 in penguin years?

Berkeley Breathed: I dunno. Ask Madonna how old 46 is in Idiot Diva years.

Boston Globe: Didn't "Bloom County" start in 1980? How do you figure 25 years? Sounds like fuzzy math.

Berkeley Breathed: Buy the book Jan. 1 of next year if these things bother you, and sleep at night with a safe 25 years. Listen, Bush has raised the bar with getting comfortable with fuzzy everything. On his terms, I should have been able to call this the Centennial Opus Collection.

Boston Globe: Why a penguin? Why not a cat? I mean: Garfield, Hobbes, Felix. Cats are sure shots. Penguins, risky, no?

Berkeley Breathed: Setting aside for a moment that I wasn't stupid enough to entirely pass up on the commercial viability of cats in 1982 . . . let me answer the question of "Why a penguin?" with this: "Why Iraq?" Isn't the mystery surrounding both of those the very thing that makes them so hysterical?

Boston Globe: When Opus came along, it was basically just him and Chilly Willy. Now there's the Linux penguin, the Bud Ice penguins, Feathers McGraw, Wheezy from "Toy Story 2." . . . Any same-species rivalry?