Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, whose Bloom County and Opus strips mixed political humor and social commentary with funny animal slapstick, is returning to his Bloom County comic strip for the first time in 25 years.  Breathed stepped away from his Opus strip (the successor to Bloom County) in 2008 to write children’s books, saying that politics had become too bitter and polarized.

Breathed, who drew the Bloom County strip from 1980 through 1989 (a period that saw a spirited revival of the comic strip medium with Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, and The Farside making the funny pages a “must-read” for millions), announced his return to Bloom County by posting a picture on Facebook showing him at a workstation with two panels of a “Bloom County 2015” strip on the screen with the comment, “A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.”

Noting the prospect of the 2016 election “with Donald Trump returning to the political spectrum” a fan posted that the return of Bloom County was “only fitting,” to which Breathed replied, “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mentioned had something to do with it.”

IDW, which has reprinted the Bloom County strips, recently published a collection of Breathed’s pre-Bloom County work (see “Berkley Breathed’s Academia Waltz & Other Profound Transgressions”).