The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos is the seventh collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1989.
Bloom County is an American comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which originally ran from December 8, 1980, until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in Middle America, where children often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where animals can talk.
Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathed is an American cartoonist, children's book creator, director and screenwriter, best known for his comic strips Bloom County, Outland, and Opus. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987.
Tales Too Ticklish to Tell is the sixth collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1988. The cover image, of Opus sitting on the lap of George H. W. Bush, is a parody of the infamous photo of Donna Rice and Gary Hart from May 1987.
The book includes "smell-o-toons", intended to enhance the Mary Kay storyline. At a pivotal point in the story, the reader is instructed to lift a flap and smell a scented strip.
Synopses of major storylines
Opus is coerced into the role of 1988 Meadow Party vice-presidential candidate. Presidential candidate Bill the Cat is still in an alcoholic coma. The United Cocaine Smugglers, Pushers and Affiliate Scum offer a campaign contribution. (p1, 8 strips)
Binkley's father, a staunch Democrat, goes fetal with guilt for not believing that Jesse Jackson is presidential material. Oliver's father is brought in to forgive him on behalf of blacks worldwide. (p3, 5 strips)
Milquetoast the Cockroach is introduced, heckling Opus during a stump speech. The cockroach is also shown whispering subliminal messages to the characters as they sleep. (p5, 7 strips)
Steve Dallas informs his mother that his father has not been dead for fourteen years, as she assumed, but has actually been reading the sports page in the den. The whole time, in which she married and divorced six other men, she had mistaken him for the dirty laundry. (p8, 3 strips)
Bill the Cat dates Cornelia Guest, prompting former lover Jeane Kirkpatrick to send him dead roses. Upon receiving a machine gun as a campaign gift from the NRA, the distraught cat shoots up the neighborhood. (p10, 9 strips)
While intoxicated, presidential front-runner Spuds Mackenzie smashes his car into Mother Teresa's. Further Spuds scandals are revealed, such as a paternity suit involving Benji. Budweiser fires Spuds as mascot, replacing him with the Care Bears. (p15, 6 strips)
Opus starts smoking, in order to "taste the adventure". He saddles up Rosebud and heads out to "flavor country". Eventually, social disapproval leads him to quit. (p23, 9 strips)
The Supreme Court rules that "male only" clubs are unconstitutional, and thus Bloom County must introduce a female character. Portnoy and Hodge-Podge protest, while Binkley's father, Steve Dallas, Opus, and Milquetoast dream of their ideal female. Later, Spuds Mackenzie reveals that not only is he actually female, but so is some unnamed member of the Bloom County cast. After some pandemonium, including accusations and self-inspections, the mystery female is found to be Rosebud the Basselope. (p28, 29 strips)
Opus is called before the Republican Un-American Tendencies Committee as a suspected "liberal". The label sticks (literally), and Milo informs Opus that the Meadow Party has dropped him from the ticket, replacing him with an "ultraconservative right-wing nut" to compensate. (p44, 10 strips)
Ousted from politics, Opus tries farming. After studying proper chewing-tobacco protocol, he grows "one-half bushel corn, two pounds chemically fattened tomaters, one yam", for a total loss of $37 million. Disaster strikes the farm, but government subsidies come quickly. (p48, 7 strips)
The press discovers that Bill the Cat spent the Vietnam years serving in the Canadian National Moose Mounties. (p52, 4 strips)
Oliver extracts sweat from Bill the Cat in an attempt to invent a "revolutionary new underarm deodorant". He discovers that the deodorant causes rapid hair growth, and successfully markets the product as "Dr. Oliver's Cat-Sweat Scalp Tonic". But due to "ack"-ing side effects, the Surgeon General declares the tonic illegal. Formerly ten cents per bottle, the newly controlled substance is now worth $25,000, and Milo, Opus, and Oliver find themselves with a smuggling operation. Crime rates rise, prisons overflow, and gangs fight on Oliver's lawn. Finally, Congress legalizes the tonic, and crime ceases immediately. (p54, 27 strips)
Opus reads that his mother is alive, and has been taken to a cosmetics lab. Opus infiltrates the Mary Kay animal testing lab and witnesses the horrors of animal testing. Before he can reunite with his mother, he is caught in a firefight between the Mary Kay Commandos ("Even their Uzis are pink!") and the Animal Liberation Guerrilla Front. Opus is liberated to his natural habitat, a 7-Eleven ice machine. According to the author, this sequence was at least partly responsible for Mary Kay's 1989 moratorium on animal testing. (p68, 19 strips)
In the run-up to election day, Albert Goldman publishes The Lives of Bill D. Cat: Vegisexual, Nazi, Liberal. Bill's standing in the polls plummets, and the Meadow Party gets so desperate as to accept Walter Mondale's offer to join the ticket. Despite Milos's increasingly unethical campaign tactics, Bill loses to George H. W. Bush. (p78, 18 strips)
Opus the Penguin is a fictional character created by artist Berkeley Breathed. Breathed has described him as an "existentialist penguin" and the favorite of his many characters.
Bill the Cat, or Bill D. Cat, is a fictional cat appearing in the works of cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, beginning with the comic strip Bloom County in the 1980s and continuing in Outland and Opus in the following decades. Bill also appeared in some of Breathed's illustrated children's books, including A Wish for Wings That Work, which was also made into an animated Christmas television special, and also on greeting cards and other sundry merchandise. Bill was originally capable of speaking English reasonably well, but storylines featuring an automobile accident, repeated periods of drug abuse, and brain surgery have since seen the character transition to a nearly mentally handicapped mute state in which the cat's most frequent spoken sentiments are "Ack!" and "Thppt!" - the former a result of his regularly choking on hairballs, the latter an approximation of "blowing a raspberry".
Michael Binkley is a fictional character in Berke Breathed's cartoon strip Bloom County.
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Related Research Articles
Milo Bloom is a fictional character in the American comic strip Bloom County. He was originally the main character, but was soon overshadowed by his best friend Michael Binkley and later on by Opus the penguin.
Steve Dallas is a fictional character in the American comic strips of Berke Breathed, most famously Bloom County in the 1980s.
Opus was a Sunday strip drawn by Berkeley Breathed for a period of five years, 2003 to 2008. It was Breathed's fourth comic strip, following The Academia Waltz, Bloom County and Outland.
Cutter John is a fictional character in the 1980s comic strip Bloom County by Berke Breathed.
Outland is a comic strip written and illustrated by Berkeley Breathed from 1989 until 1995. It was a Sunday-only spin-off of Breathed's strip Bloom County, featuring many of the same characters.
Portnoy is a character in Berke Breathed's comic strip Bloom County. Portnoy was one of the critters that could talk, and was often surly mouthed and bigoted, usually leading Hodge-Podge, his best friend, to have to cover his mouth. When Bill the Cat became a televangelist denouncing "penguin lust", Portnoy helped run Opus the penguin out of town. The character was named for Portnoy's Complaint, a novel about sexual frustration.
Oliver Wendell Jones is a fictional character in Bloom County, Outland and Opus, three comic strips by American cartoonist Berkeley Breathed.
I Haven't Got a Hat is a 1935 animated short film, directed by Isadore Freleng for Leon Schlesinger Productions as part of Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies series. Released by Warner Bros. on March 2, 1935, the short is notable for featuring the first appearance of several Warner Bros. cartoon characters, most notably future cartoon star Porky Pig. I Haven't Got a Hat was one of the earliest Technicolor Merrie Melodies, and was produced using Technicolor's two-strip process instead of its more expensive three-strip process.
The following are minor characters from Berkeley Breathed's comic strip Bloom County. Though significant enough to have appeared multiple times in the strip, they were not crucial to the strip's overall development, and disappeared without much explanation long before Breathed segued into his next comic, Outland.
Toons for Our Times is the second collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1984.
Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things is the third collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1985.
Loose Tails is the first collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1983. At least two different editions exist; the contents and front cover art are identical but later editions swapped out the serious author biography on the back cover for a parody one.
Billy and the Boingers Bootleg is the fifth collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1987.
Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness is the fourth collection of the comic strip series Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. It was published in 1986.
