Bloom County Tales Too Ticklish to Tell #[nn]

Berke Breathed's Bloom County was never shy about lampooning the powerful, and this 1988 collection makes that crystal clear right on its cover: a caricature of a recognizable political figure sits dockside in a "More Monkey Business Crew" t-shirt, cheerfully clutching a colorfully dressed penguin — almost certainly Opus — beside an open body of water. The Polaroid-snapshot presentation gives the whole thing a wonderfully absurd, candid quality, as if someone caught Washington's finest in a deeply undignified moment. Rounded out with an introduction by Mikhail Gorbachev and a copy of "The Bloom Picayune," this is Breathed at his most gleefully irreverent.