Berkeley Breathed is known as the creator of the wildly popular and influential comic strip Bloom County, and, in particular, for his most iconic character Opus. Over the course of a little more than eight years Bloom County was one of the best selling comic strips ever, winning Berkeley a coveted Pulitzer Prize. The artist went on to do two more sunday-only strips, Outland and Opus, as well as producing best-selling children’s books and screenplays. But before Breathed began his storied career he was a (not so) humble college student at the University of Texas and a contributor to the Daily Texan newspaper where he wrote and drew political cartoons as well as... The Academia Waltz. Berkeley would go on to finance his college studies by self-publishing two paperback collections of AW, selling over 10,000 copies. The strip drew the attention of the Washington Post Syndicate which eventually began publishing a new creation by Berkeley... Bloom County. Many of the characters in the new strip originally appeared in Academia Waltz, most notably Steve Dallas. Now, for the first time — from the rarely seen archives of Berkeley Breathed — comes the nearly (we think) complete Academia Waltz!
