Outland (comic strip)

Outland
Outland header featuring Opus the Penguin
Author(s)	Berkeley Breathed
Current status / schedule	Cancelled
Launch date	September 3, 1989
End date	March 26, 1995
Syndicate(s)	Washington Post Writers Group
Genre(s)	Humor, Politics, Satire
Preceded by	Bloom County
Followed by	Opus

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.

On September 3, 1989, a month after retiring Bloom County, Breathed began his second syndicated strip with a minor character from the previous strip. Ronald-Ann Smith, a little girl from the "wrong side of the tracks" in Bloom County, entered a magic doorway in a grimy alley that looked down into a cheery world of "cotton-candy trees" known as the Outland (the ground of her world did not align with that of Outland, so the door originally appears to be hovering in the sky above it).

In its earliest form, Outland had been intended to be an experimental strip for Breathed, featuring a channel for creativity in the forms of new characters (such as Mortimer Mouse, based on the rejected name for Disney's Mickey Mouse) and bizarre backgrounds (many of which initially resembled those seen in Krazy Kat). However, Opus the Penguin returned in the strip's third installment, and Bill the Cat appeared months after that. Before long, the premise of another world beyond a magic door had been lost completely.

Breathed wrote that the strip became "Bloom County without the continuing narrative that a daily appearance allows" in the first Outland book collection. Other characters from Bloom County, such as Milquetoast the Cockroach, Steve Dallas, Oliver Wendell Jones, and Michael Binkley, became major players in the strip. Some characters, such as Cutter John, made an occasional guest appearance. A few prominent members of Bloom County, such as Milo Bloom, did not make an active appearance at all (Milo did appear in the second-to-last installment of Outland, as a background extra on a bus).