Outland (comic strip)
Outland is a Sunday-only comic strip by Berkeley Breathed that ran from September 3, 1989, to March 26, 1995. It was a spin-off from Bloom County, bringing back many of the same characters.
The first story follows Ronald-Ann Smith, a girl from Bloom County, who steps through a doorway in a dirty alley into a bright, cheerful world called Outland. At first, Outland was meant to be experimental, with new characters like Mortimer Mouse and strange backgrounds. Opus the Penguin returns in the third installment, followed by Bill the Cat. Soon the idea of a separate magical world faded, and Outland became more like Bloom County without a continuous daily storyline.
Many Bloom County characters became regulars in Outland, including Milquetoast the Cockroach, Steve Dallas, Oliver Wendell Jones, and Michael Binkley. Cutter John appeared occasionally. Some Bloom County figures, such as Milo Bloom, did not appear much, though he shows up briefly in the penultimate installment as a bus passenger.
In 1991, Breathed published a children's Christmas book, A Wish for Wings That Work, which features Opus and some Outland characters. It was made into an animated TV movie the same year.
On March 26, 1995, Breathed ended Outland and retired from cartooning. In the final stories, Steve Dallas comes out as gay and elopes with Mark Slackmeyer from Doonesbury. Opus returns to Antarctica to live with his mother, whom he had spent Bloom County trying to find.
Eight years later, Breathed revived the world with a Sunday-only reunion strip called Opus.
Not all Outland strips have been reprinted in color; many appeared in black and white in Comics Revue. Outland material was included in the 2004 book Opus: 25 Years of His Sunday Best, which reprinted Bloom County and Opus as well. The Library of American Comics later collected the entire Outland run in Bloom County: The Complete Library in 2012.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:43 (CET).