An Outland-ish Flop

FROM its title, Berke Breathed's new comic strip, "Outland," promises to take readers someplace unusual and distant every Sunday. But you've seen this before. In this case, familiarity breeds contempt.

Admittedly, there is a risk in reviewing a comic strip that has run fewer than a dozen times. Usually you wait for a cartoonist to find his rhythm and his own particular voice. But Breathed has been cartooning a widely popular strip for most of this decade, so I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of time. He has shown arrogance in flushing his successful "Bloom County" to begin this "Outland" strip. One naturally expects a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist to show us his best stuff early to quiet his critics.

I haven't been quieted.

IN Breathed's inflated mind, this must have looked like a good idea. Unfortunately, it looks horrible on paper. A little Black girl from the ghetto, Ronald Ann, is transported into an avante garde land of socially-conscious weird beings. Ronald Ann, who totes a headless doll, made appearances in the last year of "Bloom County," but her character was smothered beneath her role as the Voice of Liberal Consciousness. She was never anything more than an easy way to get a point across. Ronald Ann had none of the subtlety or independence of, say, Oliver Wendell Jones, Breathed's Black computer hacker.

She has not electrified "Outland" so far. She continues to be almost a mannequin, acted upon by Breathed's bloated narration rather than acting herself.

The other two characters in the strip are Mort, a haggard Mickey Mouse imitation, and Tim, a ratty-looking rat. They may carry a few diseases, but they certainly don't carry the strip.

Evidently, these unsavory vermin are intended to represent fragments of Ronald Ann's ghetto-formed imagination. Get it? Instead of clean, Walt Disney fantasy figures, she conjures up polluted, harsh types--the tarnished ideals that a ghetto child might create.

IT easy to see the intellectualoid underpinnings of Breathed's strip. But they serve only to make "Outland" more irritating. Most of the strips so far have taken the reader through five panels of apparent meaningfulness and then dumped a Dan Quayle joke in the last panel. Either Breathed is a lazy sot or he is trying to prove that Dan Quayle is more of a travesty than even Johnny Carson imagines.

I opt for the former. Breathed complained that he was burned out on the style of comedy in "Bloom County," but now he refries the same humor in "Outland." Dan Quayle jokes are neither funny nor thought-provoking at this point. They're pathetic.

Maybe Breathed is trying to be pathetic, to prove that he can be a subtle comedian by being obvious. Maybe he is repeating Dan Quayle jokes every week to beat us so senseless that we begin to see his deep, hidden artistic motive. He may yet prove that there is humor in bad humor. If that is his aim, he is repudiating most of his last two years of "Bloom County," and he must be a very disenchanted cartoonist indeed.

NOT only is Breathed recycling the same punchline every week, he apparently intends to depict the same event over and over. The plot of every strip so far has been the passage of Ronald Ann into this Outland. The first strip showed her walking through a door, and all the episodes since have retold that event in a new way. Last Sunday the mouse and the rat kidnapped Ronald Ann in between a gang war and a rabid alleycat. Breathed's attempt to show us the variation possible in any given even is certainly an attempt to deliver modern art to the comic pages.

It's a nice idea, but it was done in the 1930s by a strip called "Krazy Kat." In "Krazy Kat" a mouse repeatedly throws a brick at a cat, who constantly forgives the mouse for his attacks, Krazy Kat loves the mouse, but a dog cop loves Krazy Kat and arrests the mouse every time he throws a brick. The strip has long been acclaimed for its avant garde landscape and subtle humor. If Breathed is trying to revive the themes of "Krazy Kat," he should stop now before he embarrasses himself.

"Outland" does not even integrate humor and surrealism as well as G.B. Trudeau's "Doonesbury." Breathed's "Bloom County," though funny in its commentary on 1980s culture, was basically "Doonesbury" with funny animals. By the looks of "Outland," Breathed is still playing in Trudeau's shadow. If you want artistic adventurism in the comic pages, look to Trudeau's talking cigarette or his personification of Old Man History. Or look to Zippy the Pinhead. Or look to Life In Hell. Or even to Calvin and Hobbes.

You get the idea. I would be more amenable to Breathed's intellectualism if he put any care into his drawing. After all, he has a whole week to form a really powerful set images. But "Outland" looks as sketchy and hurried as the worst weeks of "Bloom County." It certainly doesn't measure up to the artistry of "Calvin and Hobbes" in one of its Sunday Spaceman Spiff strips.

BREATHED promised us a lot with this strip. He said he was burned out on "Bloom County," but he has shown no signs of revival in "Outland." It is hard to believe he has made an honest attempt at a new artistic direction. Trudeau and Gary Larson took sabbaticals to save themselves from burnout, but they did not reject their characters. Breathed did. Anyone who owns an Opus T-shirt should feel betrayed.

At best, "Outland" is a very poor parlor trip. At worst, it's "Bloom County" on crack.