Doop a dupe a doop
Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock
Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2004. The Berkeley Breathed “Opus” panel for Sunday 8/8/04 looked very familiar (His syndicate does not allow open online access). So I walked from the paper on the dining table to my home office (the north side of the sunporch I have fenced off with bookshelves and a filing cabinet and nicknamed “Poet’s Corner”) to find in my framed ’80s collage o’ clips, a favorite “Bloom County,” dated 2/15/87. Yes. It’s the same penguin and almost the same set-up and punch line.
Sunday’s had the flightless bird at a bar with one woman then another asking his political leaning. When they conclude he’s undecided, they pounce amorously, while Opus tells the reader he merely wanted directions to the potty.
Back in 1987, the issue was AIDS, and he gets similarly swarmed after questioning of his sexual history by admitting to being a rather a prude, though all he wanted was directions to the men’s room. This strip seems to get to the point much more tersely, yet more clearly, than the new one. This year’s model certainly is better drawn, though.
If even terrific columnists and cartoonists end up with, oh, no more than half-a-dozen themes throughout their careers, as any surface analysis will prove, then repeating oneself is inevitable. Self-plagiarism thus is only self-contradictory, not an ethical lapse.
But the artist really ought to improve on the past. Otherwise, what’s the point? I want Breathed to succeed so this was worrisome
I e-mailed to Poynter’s Romenesko to ask, did anyone else notice? I got one response that this is an accepted practice termed a “callback,” which I’ll remember the next time Romenesko or Editor & Publisher report that a sports columnist got fired for “stealing” years’ old copy from himself, which happened earlier this year. -30-
