Tales Too Ticklish to Tell

Tales Too Ticklish to Tell is the sixth collection of Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County comic strips, published in 1988. The collection features the series' signature characters in various storylines, including Bill the Cat's rise to music stardom and Opus the penguin's romantic misadventures. The book presents multiple narrative arcs involving the main cast, from Steve Dallas's legal troubles to Opus's nearly-wedding with Lola Granola. A mock newspaper called the Bloom Picayune and an introduction attributed to Mikhail Gorbachev add supplementary content to the collection. The strips chronicle events in Bloom County through interconnected stories about fame, relationships, and career changes. Bill the Cat becomes a millionaire through a commercial jingle, while Opus explores new professional territory as a waste management worker. The collection uses humor and satire to examine themes of success, love, and personal identity in 1980s American society. Through its characters' experiences, the book presents commentary on celebrity culture, marriage, and environmental consciousness.

Readers view this as one of the stronger Bloom County collections, with strips from 1986-1988 capturing political and social satire of the Reagan era. Fans highlight Breathed's artistic growth, with more detailed and expressive illustrations compared to earlier collections. Multiple reviews note the effectiveness of storylines about the music industry, televangelism, and corporate greed. Several readers specifically praise the Bill the Cat presidential campaign sequence. Some readers mention the dated 1980s cultural references can be confusing without context. A few note the binding quality of the paperback version could be better. Ratings: Goodreads: 4.41/5 (404 ratings) Amazon: 4.8/5 (24 ratings) "The political humor holds up remarkably well" - Goodreads reviewer "Breathed at his peak creative powers" - Amazon reviewer "Some jokes require Google searches to understand nowadays" - Goodreads reviewer

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🌟 Berkeley Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987 for his work on Bloom County. 🌟 The character of Opus the penguin was inspired by a stuffed penguin toy that Breathed kept on his desk while drawing. 🌟 Bloom County ran from 1980 to 1989, reaching approximately 40 million readers in over 1,200 newspapers worldwide. 🌟 The title "Tales Too Ticklish to Tell" is a playful nod to the tradition of alliterative titles in comic collections, while also referencing the strip's tendency to tackle controversial topics. 🌟 The mock newspaper insert included in this collection was a recurring format experiment that Breathed used to expand the strip's satirical reach beyond the traditional comic panel format.