The beloved characters all appear. Milo remains well-supplied with nightmares from his anxiety clost, Steve Dallas remains un-supplied with tact or charm, and Opus displays his huge supply of innocent bafflement. Winsome Yaz Pistachios appears a few times, as does Bill the Cat (the anti-Garfield) and Oliver Wendell Jones, computer geek extraordinaire.

The humor is still there, but some of the freshness rubbed off during the quarter-century since these first appeared. Some grey heads will remember Phyllis Schlafly and all the other Reagan-era targets of the Bloom County barbs. The problem with topical humor is that topics change in the real world, but remain frozen on the printed page, becoming gradually more antiquated over time.

No matter. You'll find plenty of timeless humor and maybe a bit of nostalgia between these covers, as well as a reminder of how the early 80s looked to one cartoonist of the era.